Balance – the Key to Wholeness
As I work with the ideas of balance and wholeness in my own life, I am more convinced than ever that spiritual wholeness comes from balance between the inner masculine and inner feminine. Our bodies and spirits, the yang and the yin, the masculine and the feminine need to be balanced and aligned in order for us to be whole. And individual balance and wholeness leads to collective balance and wholeness. As I become more balanced, so does the world.
For too long, Patriarchy has ruled the western world. As Christianity became the dominant European, and subsequently American, religion, anything that had to do with the Goddess was literally destroyed. Goddess temples were destroyed or appropriated as Christian churches. Priestesses were supplanted by priests, who even wore feminine garb (cassocks) in taking over the role of priestess. Early popes postulated that women did not have souls. Thousands, some say hundreds of thousands, of women were tortured and burned at the stake as witches. Women and women’s purviews became the property of men. Theology, medicine, midwifery, herbalism, and commerce were taken over by men and ruled by men. In short, anything feminine was regarded as dark, evil, sinful, or unclean. The masculine way of doing supplanted the feminine way of being. The yang overshadowed the yin. As a result, there is no longer a balance, and our world has been the worse for it.
In toxic patriarchy, everything is outside of ourselves. God is “out there.” Success is defined as outer achievement in the world. There is a constant emphasis on doing more, accumulating more, winning more, conquering more. Salvation comes from outside of ourselves through putting trust in Jesus or Allah, or a set of proscribed teachings. The hero’s journey consists of conquest.
The Divine Feminine, however, leads us to the inner world. Goddess resides within. There is value in lying fallow in the darkness as new life gestates. There is value in being, in receiving, in stillness, in nurturing, in collaboration. The world is not ours to conquer, but rather is a collaborative partner in co-creation. Salvation comes from claiming all the parts of ourselves – the good, the bad, the ugly, as well as the beautiful and the transcendent – and integrating them into our whole selves.
As more and more women begin to awaken spiritually, there is a growing awareness that balance needs to be restored. The answer is not to replace the masculine with the feminine. That would be just as imbalanced in the other direction. The answer is to restore balance. It is important to use the gifts of both masculine and feminine to solve the world’s problems. The yin/yang are complementary, not oppositional. There is no light without dark, joy without sorrow, creation without destruction. It is the balance that makes us whole.
As a priestess of the Goddess, it is my role to restore that balance, both in my own life and in my dealings with the world. I must balance my inner masculine and feminine and live out that balance in my dealings in the world. I must balance the relational with the rational, the dark with the light, the being with the doing, the intuitive with the cognitive, internal wisdom with external knowledge. I must model balance, using both masculine and feminine approaches. Sometimes my approach may be more masculine: sometimes it will be more feminine, depending on the circumstances in which I find myself. But ultimately, I must be balanced, I must model balance, and I must teach balance. For it is in balance that I, and the world, become whole.
