Moving Past our Individual and Collective Projections on "the Feminine"...

...and making space for what's real

"Embracing the Feminine” seems to be slipping out of everyone’s lips. At least in my online bubbles.

What people mean when they say that, however, tends to be a mixed bag.

Some people are talking about the feminine principle (yin), and others are referring to what they imagine the feminine to be. A caricature that blends, with no rhyme or reason, qualities often displayed by women either appreciated or vilified by the wider culture, such as beauty, nurturing, receptivity, surrender, care, openness, chaos, rage, darkness, death, etc.

I am not saying that I disagree with the meanings. What I find hard is to understand each group’s criteria when they meet under the broad banner of “The Feminine”.

How do they collectively define “the Feminine” that they see missing in the current culture and, most importantly, have they agreed upon such meaning when forming the group?

My experience says no.

When we speak we often use language as if there is shared meaning. Much of the time, this is not true.

But, is there a shared some-thingness that we are all attempting to touch on when speaking of “the feminine”?

I believe so.

We are all touching on something that we are noticing is missing from either our lives or the culture at large. Or both.

Think of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The blind men are all touching different parts of the elephant trying to figure out what the elephant is. The one that touches the trunk thinks it’s long and soft, the one that touches the leg thinks it’s strong and thick, you know the drill. The point is that none of them, in isolation, has got the correct answer.

The elephant is the whole of their experiences.

Some people making a stand for the feminine might have been highly successful in their careers and now are ready for something different, others might have played by the rules their entire lives and now desire to be freer. Many of us are tired of our hyper-individualist culture and know that we could learn one or two things from the relational capacities modeled by women with these strong feminine attributes.

Most groups that I have been a part of vary dramatically in the way they use the words “the feminine” not only from group to group but between participants in one single group. The confusing part is that most of the time, there seems to also be a shared assumption that the participants in the group are speaking of the same thing.

To me, clarity is important. So when people tell me in very simple words that “we need to embrace the feminine”, my first question is: what do you mean by that?

As you can imagine, due to what I am interested in (this substack being an expression of it), which most people would see as being an advocate for “embracing the feminine” I am constantly invited to be part of groups or conversations that involve the topic.

The problem, I have noticed, after joining many of these groups and having numerous conversations with people that, from afar, seem to be moving in the same direction is that what some groups mean by “the feminine” is not homogeneous at all.

It is exactly because of such confusion that I prefer grounding the conversation on the cycle.

I will attempt to explain, below, how grounding the conversation on the cycle can start to offer a shared meaning so we can - individually and collectively - look at our blindspots and course-correct.

“Embracing the Feminine” is too vague to offer any useful guidance. But don’t get me wrong. I have used this title way too many times and am learning from my mistakes!

So let’s start by looking at projections.

When most of us look at a pregnant woman we think: oh how beautiful. We might have experienced pregnancy ourselves and it might have been difficult but still, the collective view of a pregnant woman is full of characteristics often created by people who have never been pregnant and therefore describes how they see it from the outside. We all do it. All of the time.

In the book: This is Your Brain on Birth Control, Sarah. E Hill has a passage that illustrates exactly what I am trying to point to. She says:

“let me tell you that everything you think you know about pregnancy is probably wrong…in particular your beliefs about pregnancy as being a beautiful, loving, altruistic exchange between a mother and her developing embryo. That part is all wrong. Although pregnancy looks sweet, blissful, altruistic, and loving on the outside, a mother’s womb is a battleground where wars are waged between a mother’s best evolutionary interests and those of a fertilized egg. Mothers, because they are twice as related to themselves as they are to any fertilized egg that tries to implant, don’t always see eye to eye with that fertilized egg about whether he or she is worth the requisite nine-month investment that follows implantation.”

Pregnancy is beautiful. So is a tornado.

Beauty doesn’t necessarily equate to bliss or tranquility. These are projections we make.

Most women who have experienced pregnancy will understand when I say that yes, pregnancy is beautiful and also difficult and complex and multi-layered. It is exhausting, draining, and profound.

This, to me, is a great example of what I mean when I say “the feminine”. It is never a simple attribute. It is never just beautiful, or just receptive, or just gentle and holding. The battleground that is a woman’s womb during pregnancy is still the embryo’s nurturing home. It is not just its cozy home and not just a battleground. It is both.

The menstrual cycle offers, in my view, a way to ground our projections of the “feminine” on something tangible, real.

I understand that many won’t relate to the experiences of the cycle that I have shared here and that I hope to explore in later posts, but this is more due to our culture’s complete disconnection from the body, and not to do with what is happening.

If you resonate more with some of the “life-affirming” qualities of the feminine such as beauty, magnetism, sex appeal, femininity, charm, and wit, you are speaking for the follicular phase of the cycle, the phase when women are filled with estrogen, a hormone that makes itself visible through such attributes.

This phase is more appreciated by the wider culture and can have a puppy dog quality to it. No wonder estrogen has the nickname “the accommodating hormone” in some of my inner circles. Many of us equate “the feminine” with the follicular phase.

If you, on the other hand, are making a case for the “dark” side of the feminine then you are talking luteal phase. But then, again, we need to contextualize.

Progesterone, the hormone that rules the luteal phase, is not necessarily a “feisty hormone”. It is, in fact, pretty calming. But because most women in the modern world can’t afford to “relax into it” their bodies end up full of stress hormones that will affect the making of progesterone and they blame it on the cycle.

Some people might be integrating and healing their relationship with letting go, relaxation, and receptivity. If this is the case they are integrating the luteal phase of the cycle. Either metaphorically or in real terms.

Many people these days talk about the need to surrender, to “embrace death” but they fail to connect that with the bleeding phase, which is subtly experienced as a microdeath.

Without the connection to the cycles, these feminine attributes float in the minds of the ones that speak them as if coming from thin air and are not deeply embodied experiences, richer than most archetypes.

For women who still cycle, connecting her “integration of the feminine” to her cycle will ground her in what is happening. For her partner, family, and friends it will do the same.

For women who are passed the fertile season of their lives, “embracing the feminine” or “feminine power” will most likely come with the flavor of post-menopause, which is more self-assured. The fact that they don’t have the oscillating hormones anymore (which offer a type of vantage point and intelligence that is still completely misunderstood and underutilized by her and culture), makes them more linear and therefore more able to display the type of intelligence valued by modernity. No wonder some of these women feel extremely powerful for the very first time in their lives!

Books that talk about how “life starts at 50” point to exactly that. The world can more readily hear the unapologetic wisdom of women who are not “had” by their wavering cyclical creativity. This is beautiful and extremely necessary. The archetype of the grandmother's wisdom is very needed at this time and I am happy to see it coming forth with gusto!

This is, as you can see, also a type of “feminine energy”, but it is very different from the “feminine energy” available to women still cycling and again very different from the “feminine energy” available to all humans in a more energetic sense.

If you are a man, your relationship with “the feminine” will also be different. You might notice having a preference for women or people who display certain qualities and a disregard or even some judgment towards people who display the qualities you don’t value. Make sure when you talk about “embracing the feminine” that you include the qualities that you might not like.

The fertile cycle holds all the attributes mentioned above and more. They are complex and multi-layered. Light and dark, building and destroying, yin and yang are both contained in the menstrual cycle.

PMS is only PMS in the context of modernity. There is something much more interesting happening inside that woman’s body and psyche and our culture has no time for it.

I’ll end this article by inviting you to ask yourself the following question.

Can you hold on to your yearning for something new, for something you don’t yet know, for something you might call “the Feminine” and simultaneously know that it is, most likely, not what you think?

If this article moves energy in you in any way, notice that. Lean into it. At times moving energy feels like reassurance, other times it might feel like provocation.

Let us know what comes up. This is a lab!

We’ll start having monthly calls to explore this and other topics that might help us develop a shared language. What does it mean, to you, to have a “cyclically informed culture”?