Another fundamental evolutionary theme which I've been thinking about recently is
B - A - L - A - N - C - E.

The idea of balance makes a lot of sense to us and we know it generally seems like a 'good' thing.

But what does it mean?

What are the polarities which require balance?


1) Masculine and Feminine -

The sexual polarity is perhaps the most obvious. We all embody both masculine and feminine energies. In recent decades it's become socially acceptable and even desirable for men to express greater femininity and women to express greater masculinity. But is this all there is to re-balancing male and female energies within us?
Last week I discovered what femininity was. I am a woman and I have lived on this planet in this form for nearly twenty eight years and last week I realised that I still didn't know what femininity truly was. What I knew about femininity was what had been taught to me by society, the education system and most of all, the media. Because most of these were controlled by men as I was growing up (and still are pretty much today) the image and flavour of femininity presented to me was femininity from the perspective of the male. Why else did feminine equate with sexual whenever I encountered this concept presented in the world? What happened the other week was that I entered a building in Glastonbury known as the Goddess Temple and was utterly struck by how the energy, feeling, and vibrations inside were truly feminine but in such a different way to that which I had experienced before. The experience was overwhelming and I was almost reduced to tears. It felt so natural and beautiful but it was so refreshingly different to anything I had come across before. I am not saying that femininity has nothing to do with sex - of course it is sexual. The images in this goddess temple were of naked women baring their breasts in their full glory and beauty. But what was presented here was the feminine perspective of femininity. Not femininity in relation to masculinity. Women's true _expression of womanhood, rather than the presentation of the woman from a man's world which is inevitably going to have something to do with his sexual interest and power in relation to it.
This revelation has been so refreshing and since completing a sweat lodge which also I think helps to balance masculine and feminine energies by connecting the being (mind - heart -body) back with nature and the elements in a very primal way - I have really felt much more comfortable with this balance of energies in my being.
What I am saying is that it's easy to take for granted that you already know what these different energies are. It's easy to think 'I already know that. I know what masculinity is, I know what femininity is.' But I challenge you to ask this 'How do you know? Where have these ideas come from? Is there more to learn? Do you sense any gaps in your knowledge?' If so, and if you are open and willing to explore and discover more, have this intention and the opportunities to do so will come your way, naturally.
I hope both men and women will be able to express increasingly what it means to be masculine and to be feminine from both perspectives because I feel we still have a great deal to learn and explore in this respect.


2) Light and Dark/Positive and Negative -

Having explored various spiritual philosophies I have sometimes found an imbalance or bias towards 'light' or 'positivity' in which so called 'negative' energies are seen as 'bad' and to be avoided or strictly controlled. Whilst this technique can be interesting and useful to study and practise, in my experience it fails to adequately acknowledge and make use of the more dynamic, creative and deep-rooted energies such as anger, fear, pain, shame, guilt and their associated expressions and patterns within behaviour. Exploring and having the space and safety to express these often deep and intense energies can be immensely liberating and in my own experience can aid (re)connectivity within the mind-heart-body complex. There is also a fascinating creative potential contained in these shadows of our being. If we in tune with ourselves and are balanced between the light and the dark, we can safely explore the darkness for the purposes of self-insight, tool-making and creative excavation. There's a reason why we're fascinated with the dark side - it's energies excite us and this excitement does not need to reflect social malaise or lack of morality. It reflects, I believe, the energy it contains which can be used, if we so chose, for our growth and evolution.


3) Mind - Heart - Body -

We are so very good at being logical in the West. So knowledgeable and rational. We can even rationalise away our own neuroses. The mind is very clever and we now have so much information at our disposal about just about anything imaginable that it's hard to know what knowledge to pursue and what to ignore. Not only is this choice difficult, but we are continually being bombarded with data which gets unwittingly impregnated into our neurons day in, day out without even realising it. Science has become the new religion, logic the new path, 'sanity' the safety box and the measuring stick with which to draw lines between what makes sense to us and what doesn't in an ever more scary world.
When you're running naked through the trees and dancing round a tribal fire, it's odd how all this is completely forgotten. Funnily enough, the mind suddenly turns off and something else kicks in - something which feels great and so so liberating. The heart and the body. We have become so individualistic, so crowded, so crammed full of data and so pre-occupied that something has happened to the large majority of us living and working in the modern western world. We have forgotten how to feel. We have forgotten our connection with nature, with the earth and to see how this connection leads to the realisation that we are actually the same thing. We ARE nature. Literally. We don't own the earth, we ARE the earth. This might make some kind of logical sense to you as you are reading these words but this sense means almost nothing if you don't E X P E R I E N C E this to be so. Experience is the password into your true being. Experience is the passport into evolution. But you cannot experience fully if you're still holding on to past pain, trauma, stress, anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, and defence mechanisms. We can go to counselling and talk about all these things and this can certainly help, but until we FEEL these parts of ourselves fully, until we feel them truly and deeply within our hearts and deep down into the cells of our bodies, we cannot move past them into liberation. Liberation is not a mental phenomenon. It is a total, whole, complete experience which resonates through every inch of your body. We came from the mud and the trees and the caves and then reasoned ourselves away into separation. This process is now moving full circle and the inevitable way forward is back the way we came - except this time nature is fully aware of herself.


These are of course just a few ideas. Please feel free to add your own comments and perspectives about them or any other principles of balance you find important.


Flames of peace and black-holes of light,

shAntikaT

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