(Concept paper presented at the conference "Making Way for the Feminine for the Benefit of the World Community" under the auspices of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, March 2008)
Not only women but men, children, the Earth, the oceans, the sky and all their inhabitants are suffering today from the lack of feminine values and women’s leadership in spirituality and society. This is because the qualities deemed feminine, qualities long associated with women and with them undervalued in our society, are in fact the very qualities that are quintessential to both the development of the highest evolutionary potential of humanity, and, at this point, the very survival of our planet: the qualities of love and compassion, interconnection, communion and Oneness with the sacredness of all life.
The Divine Feminine is a spiritual force, but also a force of unity that expresses itself at all levels of our existence. She is the spirit of the unified Whole, which each of us can access at the core of our being and bring into expression, because it is our own essential true nature. The Divine Feminine is not a particular form, an image or even a deity outside or beyond us; She is a powerful presence within the human heart, a force of unity and integration, available to us all. As the Mother of the Universe, her presence is immediate, ever-present to and through us, her children; not a distant power above us, to be worshipped or feared, but a power with and within us, to be found in our own hearts. It is there, from within our own heart, that we access and transmit her spirit into our world, bridging inner and outer, bridging all perceived divisions that have caused so much suffering.
The emergence of the Divine Feminine is essentially about bridging divides and realizing our true Oneness. Whether these are divides between genders, nations, races, classes, religions, or generations; divides between man and nature; divides between our own spiritual core and our outer social actions and structures – the spirit of the Divine Feminine is arising today to forge connections, wherever the unity of life has been violated and broken.
In making way for the Feminine, then, we are actually making way for our own Self, our own Wholeness. This is not a passive process but an active collaboration, a dynamic co-creation with the Source of our own Being as it expresses its ever-unfolding potential through us into form.
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And that is what has gathered us here today. We need to create sanctuaries, communities of support and co-creative, synergistic structures, to nurture and bring to full flowering the spirit of the Divine Feminine rising now to express itself through us. Normally when we speak of the feminine, we are speaking about the receptive side of our being, but when we speak of the Divine Feminine, the gateway to our Wholeness, we are speaking about both receptivity and action, receptivity-in-action. We need to actively make ourselves vessels through which the spirit of Wholeness can flow and heal our world.
It may seem odd to speak of the Divine Feminine when essentially what we are speaking of here are the values of Wholeness. Why, it is often asked, do we specifically invoke the Feminine when in fact what we are talking about is going beyond all divisions?
The Divine Feminine is the gateway to Wholeness because she represents the missing qualities needed to bring balance to our collective consciousness. She brings the balance needed for the union, and evolution to its highest fruition, of the masculine and feminine forces in our consciousness, which have been too long divided. The seeds of our highest consciousness cannot come to flower without an apt vessel to contain and carry them, a receptivity deep, vast and powerful enough to gestate them and deliver them to the light.
We speak then, of the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine, but ultimately the qualities we are speaking of – receptivity, interconnection, compassion and communion – are the quintessential values of the human spirit, the essential qualities of humanity’s true nature. They have been too long consigned primarily to women, and with them confined in expression; now is the time to share them with the world. The Divine Feminine, paradoxically, is that which delivers us beyond man and woman, masculine and feminine, beyond all divides – a birthing in the highest sense, into our true unity, our Oneness, with each other and with our own Source, in all its forms and beyond them, infinite and eternal.
