Don’t forget: Part VII: The Toxic and the Divine Masculine and Feminine (with Transitions)
Chapter 26 (version 2): Healing the Patriarch Within: A Personal Account of Spiritual Rebirth, the Divine Feminine, and Freedom from Toxic Masculinity
I sometimes say that I have lived two complete lives.
The first life began long before I had words for it. In many ways, it began in inherited pain: family patterns, emotional confusion, cultural conditioning, and the quiet but relentless shaping force of patriarchy. That first life lasted from my earliest beginnings through May 24, 1987. It was a life marked by confusion, restlessness, addiction, spiritual hunger, emotional injury, and a deeply embedded form of masculinity that I had absorbed without truly seeing it. It was the kind of masculinity our culture rewards in men while pretending it does not wound them: hard, defended, emotionally narrowed, spiritually undernourished, and trained to mistrust tenderness unless it appears under male authority.
My second life began when something broke open inside me.
On May 24, 1987, I had an experience that I can only describe as a visitation of the Spirit through an infinite motherly presence. It did not arrive as doctrine. It did not come through theology, institutional approval, or the permission of any religious authority. It came directly, intimately, and unmistakably. It was love, but not love as sentiment. It was a love older than fear, wiser than ideology, and more restorative than anything I had ever encountered. It held me as though I were being reborn. In that embrace, I began to understand that much of what I had been taught about God, power, manhood, suffering, and truth was radically incomplete.
What follows is my attempt to tell that story as honestly and as fully as I can: the story of how I began to heal from toxic masculinity and patriarchal values through an encounter with what I came to know as the Divine Feminine; how organized religion both helped and hindered that process; how my personal metamorphosis revealed to me the deeper sickness of patriarchal culture; and why I now believe that the healing of men, women, institutions, and even our relationship with the Earth depends upon restoring a sacred balance between the masculine and feminine dimensions of life.
This is not merely a spiritual memoir. It is also an examination of a cultural disease.
Life Number One: Inheritance, Injury, and the Making of a Patriarchal Self
When I look back on the first part of my life, I see a person trying to survive forces he did not understand. I do not say that to excuse my failures, only to place them in their proper context. No one emerges into life untouched by family history. We are shaped by what we are shown, by what is withheld, by what is spoken, and by what is never allowed to be said.
My father Beryl and mother Corinne
My father was himself shaped by dysfunction. I came to understand, over time, that some of what he gave me was not chosen. He had been abused by an alcoholic father and suffered from unacknowledged wounding and distress, and in the tragic economy of unhealed family systems, distress is often passed down like a cursed heirloom. My grandfather may also have suffered under a harsh paternal inheritance. The line of injury likely extended farther back than I could trace. Men wounded by men, then teaching boys that domination, emotional distance, and force are normal. Thus, history becomes psychology, and psychology becomes family culture.
My mother, by contrast, was a loving and reliable presence in my life. Corinne Beatrice Henry Paullin represented something quiet, enduring, and humanly faithful. She loved me. I knew that. Yet even love, when constrained by fear and powerlessness, can be forced into silence. There were moments when she could not protect me from the harsher energies in our home. I still remember one particular scene in which my father punished me with a belt while my mother stood by, unable to intervene. It was not only the physical event that mattered. It was the emotional lesson embedded within it: power decides, tenderness yields, and the child learns that love may exist but not always prevail.
That is one way patriarchy reproduces itself.
It does not only operate through laws, churches, governments, armies, and economies. It also lives in the body. It enters the nervous system. It shapes expectations. It teaches sons to identify strength with hardness and daughters to associate love with helpless endurance. It creates conditions in which boys are deprived of nurturing depth, then later praised for emotional limitations that are actually defensive adaptations.
I carried a chronic insecurity around love even though I knew my mother loved me. That is how deep early contradictions can go. A child may know he is loved and still feel existentially unsafe. Something in me longed for stable, unconditional holding, but the culture around me did not value such needs in boys or men. To need too much tenderness was to risk humiliation. To seek maternal depth beyond childhood was to be seen as weak, dependent, or unmanly. So, like many men, I learned to adapt outwardly while starving inwardly.
Looking back, I can also see how indifference entered me. Not because indifference was my essence, but because it was part of the emotional atmosphere I had absorbed. There was a period in my life when babies stirred little in me. In fifth grade I teased shy girls and hurt their feelings. I did not consciously recognize the significance of those attitudes and actions, but now I do. Patriarchal culture often severs men from sensitivity and receptivity, care, and wonder. It normalizes detachment. It converts vulnerability into embarrassment and tenderness into an optional accessory. In that state, even innocence can fail to awaken us.
This is one of the quieter tragedies of toxic masculinity. The phrase is often used superficially, as though it refers only to aggression, domination, or abuse. But its reach is broader. Toxic masculinity is also the deadening of reverence. It is the inability to receive beauty without controlling it. It is the reflex to rank, define, possess, or dismiss. It is the training that teaches men to live above the heart, outside the body, and at war with the feminine both within and around them.
By “the feminine,” I do not mean women reduced to stereotype. I mean those life qualities long associated with the maternal, relational, intuitive, receptive, nurturing, cyclic, embodied, and integrative dimensions of being. These qualities belong to all human beings, but patriarchy has gendered and devalued them. In doing so, it has damaged men as surely as it has oppressed women.
My first life unfolded within that damage.
It included addiction and chaos. It included searching for truth while carrying distortions I could not yet name. It included trying to become “a man” according to standards that left little room for the soul. It included participation in systems that had formed me, even when I inwardly suffered under them. I was not merely a victim of patriarchal culture. I was also one of its products.
That recognition matters. Healing begins not when we assign blame outward, but when we become honest about the forces we have embodied.
The Culture of Patriarchy: More Than Individual Behavior
Patriarchy is often misunderstood as a complaint about men. It is not. Patriarchy is a civilizational pattern of imbalance. It is a worldview, a distribution of power, and a deep symbolic ordering of reality that privileges control over relationship, conquest over communion, hierarchy over reciprocity, abstraction over embodiment, and sanctioned authority over lived wisdom.
It is old. It is adaptive. It hides in plain sight.
Historically, patriarchal cultures have organized themselves around male control of lineage, property, warfare, law, doctrine, and public meaning. Women’s bodies become regulated. Children become shaped into roles. Spiritual authority becomes masculinized. God becomes imagined primarily as king, lord, father, judge, and ruler. Nature becomes an object, not a relation. The Earth becomes a possession rather than a living matrix of life. Economic systems then build upon these assumptions, rewarding extraction, scale, competition, and control.
This is not to say that every expression of masculine energy is harmful. Far from it. The sacred masculine has noble qualities: steadiness, discernment, protection, courage, moral clarity, devotion, structure in service of life. But patriarchy is not the sacred masculine. It is masculinity deformed by fear, separated from the heart, and enthroned above the feminine.
Once that distortion takes hold, nearly every institution begins to mirror it.
Religion can become authoritarian rather than liberating. Economics can become exploitative rather than generative. Politics can become cynical management of domination. Even science, for all its brilliance, can be interpreted through frameworks that reduce life to mechanism and dismiss forms of knowing that are relational, intuitive, and holistic.
I believe our culture’s ongoing resistance to practices that enhance intelligence, deepen empathy, and restore inner balance is not accidental. A truly integrated human being is harder to control. A person who has reconciled the masculine and feminine within is less vulnerable to manipulation by fear-based systems. A person who knows direct spiritual reality is less dependent on institutional gatekeepers. A person who recognizes the sacredness of life cannot so easily participate in economies of dehumanization.
For that reason, patriarchal culture has always had a strained relationship with awakening.
May 24, 1987: The Beginning of My Second Life
Randy with my parents and me, during Thanksgiving of 1993
On May 24, 1987, my life changed.
I was driving to visit my lifelong friend Randy Olson when I had an experience that interrupted the ordinary structure of perception. Into my normal awareness came an image and a presence that I can only describe as the Mona Lisa holding a baby, though the symbolism grew richer over time. What mattered most was not the image alone, but the energy accompanying it. I felt the love of the universe for the first time. Not as an idea. Not as a belief. As a reality.
I was flooded with the sense of an infinite motherly presence.
There are moments in life when language reveals its limits. This was one of them. I felt held, embraced, known, and reborn. Tears came. Awe came. Gratitude came. I had to stop and give thanks to whatever creative force had broken through to me. The experience did not flatter the ego. It dissolved it. It did not make me feel important. It made me feel profoundly loved. That is very different.
For several days, the image and the energy intermixed with my ordinary field of awareness. My body responded with what I can only call divine horripilations, waves of sacred intensity moving through me. I was not merely thinking differently. I was being changed at the level of consciousness itself.
Only later did I understand the deeper symbolic meaning. The mother holding the child was not merely an external image. It was a revelation of my own rebirth. The child was, in some sense, myself. The motherly presence was healing an ancient split within me, restoring something patriarchy had driven underground. The Divine Feminine was not coming to decorate my spirituality. She was coming to save my life.
That experience changed how I saw babies. It changed how I felt about innocence. It changed how I understood love. Suddenly, what had once been met with relative indifference was now met with curiosity, wonder, and appreciation. This may seem like a small detail, but it was not. It signaled that something foundational had shifted. A defended region of the heart had opened.
Between May 24 and July 21, 1987, I had three spiritual events that continue to guide me to this day. But the first was decisive. It introduced me to a truth I had not known how to seek: that the healing of a wounded masculine self may require not more discipline, not more theology, not more obedience, but an encounter with unconditional motherly love.
Christianity, Baptism, and the Failure of Institutional Religion
At the time, I had recently returned to sobriety, just in the absolute nick of time. I had finally emerged from the darkest underworlds of my addiction, a shattered man who had narrowly escaped the total eclipse of his own soul. During those agonizing first years of recovery, while I was both jobless and homeless, my mother and father extended a profound and meaning-filled support that anchored me for two and a half years. I also resumed attendance at Hinson Baptist Church. In my earnestness to follow the right path, I accepted baptism, which was scheduled for May 28, 1987. I was trying, sincerely, to orient myself toward spiritual life. Yet what happened next revealed to me the difference between living religion and institutional religion.
When I described my experience to the minister, he did not recognize it as a direct spiritual awakening. He did not respond with wonder, humility, or curiosity. Instead, he requested that I attend training so that my “beliefs” could be brought into alignment with what the American Baptist Church accepted.
That moment was clarifying.
I had undergone a direct experience of the sacred, one that brought peace, love, and rebirth. Yet the institutional response was concern for doctrinal conformity. The minister did not understand that what had touched me lay deeper than his framework. He interpreted my experience through the needs of the institution, not through the reality of the Spirit. What he served, whether he realized it or not, was not primarily truth but structure.
This is one of the great dangers of organized religion. Once institutional preservation becomes primary, living revelation becomes threatening unless it fits approved categories. Direct spiritual experience, especially when it carries feminine symbolism or bypasses male religious authority, is often treated as suspect. Patriarchal religion cannot easily tolerate a God who arrives without permission.
My disillusionment deepened during that same period because I also needed to be tested for AIDS. In those years, the threat of dying from AIDS was terrifyingly real. I had been involved in risky relationships during darker times in my life, including with women connected to extremely promiscuous bisexual men and intravenous drug activity. I was frightened and needed support.
I found none in the Baptist Church.
Instead, I encountered moral exclusion. Those with the potential for AIDS were regarded as outcasts from God, undeserving of support or respect from the “good Christian” community. Whatever compassion Christianity proclaimed from the pulpit, it was not manifesting where it was most needed. Fear, judgment, and spiritual arrogance had overtaken mercy.
That, too, is patriarchy.
Not all cruelty looks masculine in the obvious sense. Sometimes it appears as moral certainty. Sometimes it speaks the language of purity. Sometimes it hides behind doctrine while abandoning the suffering. A religion that claims to mediate divine love but cannot stand with the vulnerable is not spiritually merely incomplete. It is spiritually compromised.
The final rupture came when the lead minister claimed that only human beings have souls and that the rest of Earth’s creatures possess no basic spiritual essence. I was aghast. To elevate humanity by denying spirit to animals is a stunning expression of self-centeredness. It places man at the center of the cosmos and reduces the rest of life to spiritually inferior matter. It is, in essence, a theological justification for domination.
No wonder the Earth is under assault.
If nature is not alive with sacred value, then it becomes raw material. If animals are spiritually empty, then exploitation becomes easier. If the world exists merely for human use, then extraction can masquerade as progress. Patriarchal religion has often supported this mentality by sanctifying male hierarchy and human exceptionalism at the same time.
I began to see organized religion, at least in many of its forms, as a vehicle not only for spiritual aspiration but also for ignorance, control, and the marketing of certainty. Truth was too often treated not as a living mystery but as a proprietary asset. The result was philosophical obedience rather than awakening.
“The Father Within” and the Missing Half of the Sacred
Jesus referred to God as “the Father.” I understand the historical and symbolic context of that language, but I also believe that this single emphasis contributed, over centuries, to a severe spiritual imbalance. Whether the distortion originated in Jesus, later interpretation, translation, institutional power, or some combination of all three, the outcome is undeniable: Christianity became intensely patriarchal.
For many people, the image of God as Father may be meaningful and healing. I do not deny that. But when the divine is overwhelmingly masculinized, the feminine dimensions of sacred reality are marginalized. The maternal, nurturing, relational, and immanent aspects of divine life are pushed to the edges or replaced with sanitized substitutes. Men are encouraged to identify God with authority more than tenderness. Women are often spiritually included but symbolically subordinated.
My own healing required the opposite movement.
The God who came to me was not first a fatherly authority but an unconditional motherly love. That love supplanted the imbalance within me. It corrected not only the vestiges of my own father’s distortions, but also the larger spiritual inheritance of a culture over-identified with paternal imagery. What I encountered was not anti-masculine. It was balancing. It restored wholeness where hierarchy had ruled.
And then came the startling recognition: I was not merely loved by that presence. In some profound sense, I was that love, and so is everyone else beneath the noise of conditioning.
That realization was not an inflation of self. It was the collapse of alienation.
Marie Schmidt and the Practice of Healing
The divine feminine women, Marie (left), my wife Sharon, and a balanced, healed me
In August of 1987, I met Marie Schmidt, a practitioner of Joel Goldsmith’s The Infinite Way, a movement rooted in mysticism and spiritual healing. She was around eighty-seven years old and taught every Sunday at the old YWCA on 10th Avenue in downtown Portland. I had seen a simple advertisement for her tape group while attending the International New Thought Alliance conference in Portland.
Marie became important in my life not because she offered spectacle, but because she embodied quiet spiritual depth.
Her group combined meditation with the taped teachings of Joel Goldsmith, a spiritual healer and mystic whose work began in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Marie had been holding these gatherings since 1962. She would sit at the front of the room, lead a fifteen-minute meditation, then play one of Joel’s hour-long cassette teachings. She had hundreds of tapes, eventually more than a thousand hours of recorded material, much of which I copied and studied intensely. I later converted many of them to digital format.
At first, I kept my distance. The group was mostly older people, and I was likely the youngest person there during the years I attended from 1987 to 1991. I was curious but cautious. Yet something in that environment felt different from the church. There was less insistence, less performance, less doctrinal enclosure. There was space.
Over time, I drew others into the orbit of that group, including friends from the International New Thought Alliance, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Living Enrichment Center. I was hungry for truth, and I recognized that Marie possessed a kind of grounded spiritual clarity.
Then, in February of 1989, after I had broken off an engagement to Laurie H. and felt devastated, Marie offered me a healing session. It was also around this deeply transformative time in 1989 that I met the woman I had been searching for my entire life. Sharon emerged as my true soul mate, a grounding feminine force who was destined to help shape the second half of my life, allowing me to engage with my own parents from a place of profound, renewed love. But before that unfolding could fully bloom, I had to confront my immediate devastation.
I was skeptical of the healing. I had little to lose and only some curiosity about this “healing business.” I went to her apartment in distress. We meditated together for fifteen minutes. At the end, she spoke what she heard from Spirit regarding me:
“More perfect than you are, you could never be.”
And also:
“All that is human is illusion.”
At first, those words seemed difficult to apply. How could such a statement meet the concrete pain I was carrying? Yet as I stood to leave and thanked her, I noticed something extraordinary: the emotional disturbance had vanished. I was at peace. The heartbreak that had consumed me had been lifted as though a great inner wind had blown through and carried away everything except peace and joy.
I do not claim that this made life easy or solved every difficulty thereafter. But it was real. I had been healed of that emotional wound in a way I could not explain by ordinary means.
Marie and myself at an Eileen Bowden weekend lecture and meditation experience in 1990.
Marie always insisted that God heals, not the individual practitioner. I respect that. She was not presenting herself as a magician. She was making herself transparent to a deeper current. And the message she gave me remained with me ever after:
More perfect than you are, you could never be.
That sentence cuts against patriarchy at its root. Patriarchal culture thrives on deficiency, comparison, performance, and control. It tells us we must earn worth through dominance, achievement, conformity, or approval. But if the deepest truth is that our essence is already held in perfection, then the entire economy of domination begins to wobble.
Marie Schmidt was an incarnation of the divine Feminine. And I was vastly blessed through my six-year relationship with her.
Eileen Bowden, Retreat, and the Experience of Presence
Eileen Bowden Retreat
In the summer of 1993, I attended a five-day retreat in Federal Way, Washington, at the Pacific Palisades retreat center overlooking Puget Sound. The retreat was led by Eileen Bowden, a student of Joel Goldsmith who had been chosen to continue teaching The Infinite Way because she “had the message,” meaning she had attained what was understood as divine Presence.
The retreat consisted largely of silent contemplation and meditation, with several group talks given by Eileen. She spoke extemporaneously for long stretches, not from intellectual preparation alone but from attunement to a sacred current. Our role as listeners was not merely to absorb content, but to enter a meditative state that contributed to the field of the experience.
What happened there deepened what had begun years earlier.
I became fully involved in the sacred energy of Spirit. My mind entered a stillness beyond ordinary thought. Peace and joy became total, immediate, and unmistakable. Some would call this samadhi, bliss, enlightenment, or heaven. Names matter less than the state itself. It was beyond verbal intoxication. I carried that energy for a full week afterward.
And yet, when I returned to work as an electrician, I faced a difficult question: what is the value of enlightenment in the workplace? My co-workers were so out of touch with what I considered sacred that I could not imagine speaking openly about any of it. I felt pressure to blend in, to hide what had happened, to re-enter a world governed by rough masculinity and unspoken rules.
There again was patriarchy in one of its most mundane forms: the workplace as a theater of emotional suppression while men perform toughness, practicality, and narrowness. Anything too tender, mystical, or inward left unspoken. I had to play by some of those rules, though inwardly I had changed. I returned with a more loving attitude and a much less aggressive perspective. Still, the split between inner truth and outer culture remained painful.
That split taught me something essential: private spiritual experience alone is not enough. If the surrounding culture remains patriarchal, then the awakened individual is pressured to conceal transformation, translate it into acceptable masculine terms, or leave potentially lucrative employment opportunities in male dominated industries. True healing must become cultural, not merely personal.
Patriarchal Religion, Economic Agendas, and Historical Continuity
The sickness I am describing is not confined to private relationships or churches. Patriarchy persists because it is historically reinforced through economic and political structures.
A society built around control, ownership, competition, and hierarchy will naturally favor masculinized values severed from compassion. Established economic agendas often depend on people remaining fragmented: consumers instead of citizens, workers instead of whole beings, achievers instead of contemplatives. Exhausted people do not ask deeper questions. Spiritually disconnected people are more easily managed.
Patriarchal values support such economies because they normalize domination. If men are trained to suppress vulnerability and pursue status, they become easier to mobilize into systems of production, war, and competition. If women’s labor, both emotional and domestic, is undervalued, the system extracts even more while pretending that care is a private obligation rather than a public foundation. If nature is treated as inert resource, then environmental destruction becomes economically rational.
Historically, many pre-modern cultures held more visible reverence for feminine divinity and the cyclical, nurturing mysteries of existence. Matrilineal societies, goddess traditions, and earth-based spiritualities offered a counterpoint—sometimes an antidote—to the distortions of patriarchal order. Here the sacred was not only transcendent and paternal but also immanent, embodied, and maternal: the Earth as Mother, the cosmos as womb, the Divine as a dance of generative opposites.
But as civilizations centralized power—through monarchy, empire, institutional religions—the feminine was driven underground, burnt at the stake, or bound in myth as either seductress or saint, seldom sovereign. The passage into “progress” often came at the price of a silenced Mother, both literal and symbolic. Colonialism exported this rupture, imposing not only foreign rule but also foreign gods, foreign gender roles, and a model of spirit that privileged conquest, rationality, and hierarchy over rootedness, community, and communion.
The modern world, with its technological marvels and industrial appetites, has inherited these imbalances as a kind of spiritual amnesia. We diagnose the symptoms—climate crisis, addiction, loneliness, alienation—but seldom trace them back to the ancient wound: the exile of the Sacred Feminine, the repression of our receptive, connective birthright.
The Return to the Father: Caregiving and the Final Healing
Real healing, however, must eventually be grounded in the very relationships where our deepest wounds were initially forged. For me, this meant returning to the origin of my patriarchal conditioning: my father.
In 1993, knowing that my aging parents would soon need us, Sharon and I intentionally moved within two miles of their home. This proximity blossomed into a renaissance of family connection. We grew deeply bonded with my father’s brother, Uncle Ed, and Aunt Susie. Observing Uncle Ed masterfully deflect my father’s controlling energies with storytelling and grace allowed me to see my father finally accept his brother for who he was, rather than who my father demanded him to be. Even from his deathbed, Uncle Ed honored me by remembering my birthday—a testament to the enduring power of gentle, attentive love.
Sharon and I, though avid outdoors people, learned the art of yielding our physical expectations to match the energy of my aging parents on shared vacations. The rewards of this compromise were immeasurable. In 2000, our entire family traveled to Hawaii to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was a trip of a lifetime, marking the moment my sister committed to her university degrees, an achievement that brought our parents unparalleled pride. We explored the Yucatan, climbed Mayan ruins, and cruised the Caribbean. In these joyous, expansive moments, the rigidity of patriarchal structure dissolved into the pure, fluid communion of family connection.
Yet, the true test of integrating the Divine Feminine into my relationship with my patriarch came in the twilight of his life. As my father’s cognition deteriorated into Alzheimer’s, and following my mother’s tragic death from a fatal infection, the once-unshakeable patriarch began to crumble. He found a sudden, desperate strength to help decide to remove my mother from life support, but in the chaotic aftermath, he threatened his own demise with firearms. I was forced to quietly unload and hide his ammunition. In disarming one of his rifles, the weapon discharged, nearly taking my own foot. It was a stark, violent metaphor for the inherited danger of a patriarch’s unhealed pain.
When it became clear my father could no longer drive or manage his life safely, I retired four years early from my career as an electrician. Sharon and I became his absolute world—his drivers, cooks, cleaners, and spiritual advisors. The man who had once ruled our home with a belt was now entirely dependent on the nurturing, maternal care I had spent my life seeking to cultivate within myself.
Watching the architect of my first life’s pain slowly deteriorate was agonizing. Yet, in that crucible of caregiving, I found a way to love him on profound, unprecedented levels. I actively released my lingering expectations of how he should be. He became unteachable in his final five years, losing his short-term memory, yet maintaining a quiet dignity, a love for his dog Rocky, and a deep appreciation for us.
Six hours before he died, I spoke with him in his room. It was a beautiful afternoon. He asked who was caring for him that evening, and when I told him it was Madison, he expressed a sweet, displaced pity for her. I reminded him that I would be with him again on Sunday, planning another trip to Hawaii.
“Oh son, I am happy just staying at home. I have everything that I need here,” he replied.
As I prepared to leave to attend a friend’s funeral, our final words were an exchange of mutual surrender.
“Please take care of yourself,” he said, acknowledging his dependence on me.
“Oh, dad, you know that I am dependent on you, too,” I answered. “You be careful too.”
“I love you, son.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
The next morning, as I stood as a pallbearer at my friend Marty’s funeral, preparing to receive the body into the hearse, the call came. My father had passed. He had placed his final, unique stamp on my life in the most dramatic of ways.
In the long view of the soul’s journey, my father only appeared to cast a shadow over my life. In truth, it was up to me to find my unique voice within that darkness, to rise from self-imposed shadows, and to eventually stand with him as a partner on love’s endless journey. The work of healing my father, and the patriarch within myself, was a sacred dismantling. Yes, that healing will die with me, as I have no heirs. Yet, the love we ultimately shared, cultivated through the painstaking alchemy of forgiveness and care, will live forever in the mind and heart of God.
Real healing, I believe, must move beyond mere critique. It requires a return, a remembrance—a fierce honesty with us about what we have lost in the rush to dominate and the courage to seek integration over victory. Healing the patriarch within is not an exercise in collective self-loathing, nor a romanticization of matriarchy. It is the slow, subtle, radical labor of rebalancing, dissolving false binaries, and learning to live with the humility that spirit does not fit our categories.
We need more than personal enlightenment. Mystical experience can eventually dissolve much of the membrane of ego, but unless the insights that arise in stillness ripple out into the world—into politics, economics, family, education, and relationship—the structures of our culture will continue to propagate the old wound.
The journey is not linear. I fail often. I am drawn back, again and again, into the undertow of conditioning: the urge to prove, defend, possess, win. Yet I also return, again and again, to that deeper current, that motherly presence, which does not compete or compare but simply holds, blesses, and renews.
When I listen deeply, I hear the whisper of that presence—not only in prayer and meditation, but in the laughter of friends, the hush of forests, the gaze of a child, the oceanic silence beneath thought. I begin to sense that healing is less about fixing and more about remembering; not the acquisition of perfection, but the recovery of forgotten wholeness; not escape from the world, but a radical re-entry, bearing the gift of a heart restored to balance.
In the end, perhaps this is what the world asks of us: not allegiance to old hierarchies, but participation in a living mystery—one in which the masculine and the feminine meet, not as adversaries, but as partners in the sacred work of becoming fully, generously, and courageously human.
