BALANCING MALE AND FEMALE ENERGY

I was outside praying the other morning, letting my mind wander, the way I do in order to access something deeper within myself.  I realized I wanted to write more about balance, particularly male and female energy.  This came out of answering one of the sets of questions I had asked about the Tishrei holidays, particularly the Hoshana Rabba ritual where we bring a phallic shaped willow branches repeatedly to the earth conceived as female. (https://earthbasedjudaism.org/tishrei/tishrei-holidays)  I then journaled my response.  Here’s the set of questions.

·        How is the balance of your female and male energies?  Where do you need to be more receptive, less receptive?  Where do you need to thrust more, and where thrust less?

Writing about male and female energy can be a fraught enterprise.  I absolutely don’t mean that there are ways men or women should be because of their gender.  We all have male and female energy within us and the ways that is expressed are infinite, the combinations of possibilities endless. Further, I absolutely believe that there are times and situations in our lives where we all need more male energy and times we all need more female energy. 

Yet it is easy to be overbalanced one way or the other. There are men and women who are too passive and suffer from it, men and women who are too aggressive and suffer from that. We have a society that absolutely suffers from patriarchy and toxic masculinity.  There is generally far too much immature male energy in our society. And that’s true of lots of men and women.

I was thinking about this particularly in the context of becoming an elder. I’m 65 years old and mostly retired.  I’ve been feeling this need to be more receptive, to listen more to the more than human world, to sink into the embrace of the world around me.  I’ve always wanted to do that—I could have written this last sentence forty years ago as easily as 40 seconds ago. 

What I think prevented me from sinking in to the embrace of the world forty years ago was at least in part that I was out of balance when it came to male and female energies. I didn’t know how to be a man.  I didn’t know who I was.  I didn’t know how to thrust myself forward.  Had I been more in touch with my male energy, I would have had more access to my female energy.

So I am tempted to think that balance and maturity go together in a cyclical, rather than a linear way. That without maturity, there is no hope of balance. And that in order to mature, we need to cultivate the parts of us that are weak and bring ourselves into balance.  We go back and forth, maturing a little that supports balancing a little, balancing a little that supports maturing.  It’s a process, not a weekend retreat.