One of the fatal flaws of humans is the incredible sense that we have solved all the problems in the universe when we learn something new. We see the negative implications of this all around – in the over prescribing of anti-biotics, in the use of pesticides, in the extensive drilling for fossil fuels. Each of these additions to our society was birthed for good to solve problems of health, food supply and energy availability. But too much of a good thing can be destructive in the long haul. We don’t know in the beginning what the long term impacts of “new” ideas will be and unfortunately, humanity, like a fish in a fishbowl, keeps going around in circles forgetting that negative long term impacts take time to reveal themselves and it might be best to moderate our enthusiasm over what’s ‘new’ with a mature sense of temperance.
In the past 5 – 10 years there has been an explosion of Divine Feminine programs, pages, blogs and trainings. The long term impact of this is positive of course in the sense that it’s imperative to restore the feminine principle in our personal, community and global environments. It is also a new arc that we are exploring psychologically and spiritually. And since we’ve never been exactly here before, it’s worth exploring the themes patterns and cycles that arise over a period of time in this new world.
One of the more mundane issues pertains to self-worth and ego. Ego is a term batted around from psychology to mindfulness and everywhere in between. I propose we no longer have a collectively agreed upon definition of the word. In the modern landscape of discourse on spirituality some would argue it is the goal of spirituality to obliterate the ego. Others argue that we can only function in 3D reality with a healthy sense of ego. Some say ego is the demon which guides our self serving motivations and so needs to be quelled like a child that is always shouting ‘me, me, me’. Some say that the experience of enlightenment is the realization that that we are all one, hence proving the ego itself is either not real at all or simply the individual personality attempting deal with what we perceive as reality in a very limited material world perception. In any case, it certainly provides a topic which can create division and separation even among those involved in spiritual groups reaching for a harmonious human experience.
Since we have no written record as a species of having examined first hand the unwinding of thousands of years of oppression – we are in unchartered territory. We have some examples of cultures that have been nearly brought to extinction and the ways in which they have integrated into other nations, governments and societies and can examine what parts of those early cultures and traditions have survived. We have never seen this on the scale of gender, where literally one half of the global population is rising out of a state of oppression. Women of various cultures and traditions have been in a state of oppression for thousands of years. What happens when half of the world’s 7.7 billion people are going through an expansion in power, voice, and platforms for opinion?
Psychologically speaking in the western world, women are setting the stage for a revolution of values. In the most simplistic terms, these are usually related to cultivating a more egalitarian societal structure. Women are concerned with fairness, education, and safety starting with children. They are concerned with the care for all life from their immediate family circles to their communities, schools, townships, countries and beyond to the health of the planet. They are concerned with there being a voice for all who live here – informing care for animals, waterways, forests. This includes physical, mental and emotional health, as well as, ecological and spiritual. While all of this bodes well for the collective on a macro-cosmic level, we must also examine what happens on the individual level.
For western women who have been living in oppressed states passed on by the generations before them, they not only reap the benefits of the freedom our foremothers fought for – offering up the right to vote, the right to work, the right to own property and to manage their own finances, along with their rights to parent children or not – but they are also bearing the brunt of the new expectations that freedom engenders. We are less and less coping with our lack of freedom while having our husbands make use of our bodies at will, now we are tasked with working and paying the rent while often taking on the lion’s share of raising families. Now we are tasked with all of the same responsibilities men have managed for generations, but we are tasked with often doing them alone. We are learning to use our voices to stand up for women’s rights, children’s rights, the right of all of us to have clean air and clean water but psychologically the pressure to be free, to wield power in a new way while simultaneously managing our very survival is not without impact.
As the female psyche becomes more emboldened, she may be furiously throwing off her shackles screaming and laughing, crying and falling. She may be experiencing the height of creativity while simultaneously experiencing a push from the ‘ego’ to not only fully express herself, but to somehow find a way to control her new environment internally and externally. For someone who has been told their voice, opinion, desire or point of view is without value repeatedly over the course of their lifetime these can be strange waters. For someone whose worth has often been tangled with their sexual attractiveness as determined by men, one who’s own needs of intimacy have been pushed aside to fulfill another’s needs or desires, at threat of being deemed un-useful and tossed aside for the next sexually pleasing female who will put herself second – this is a confusing world. It is easy to do what we have been taught – to exercise our power in a way that puts down other women in order to gain a position of power and authority in our own lives.
We must not condemn one another for these acts and impulses as we seek to mutually uphold one another’s success and fulfillment, but we must also recognize the ebb and flow of these psychological patterns as they play out. The concept of decolonization of the mind or heart is one that bears truthful exploration. We must consider what kindness and compassion play into it and be self-aware enough to recognize our own battles with the fictitious and famed ‘ego’ that exists, or doesn’t, in all of us.
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