Being Eclipsed: Unconditional Love and Free Will
“When Love beckons you, follow him
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you, yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you, believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you.”
I carry uncomfortable truth in my body, it beats beneath my heart as the rhythm I move to. It compels me, motivates me, captivates me. This truth is one that I speak of usually only in hushed tones, privately, mostly with the men who come to see me for healing in my practice. The women are generally not ready for this yet, though some are beginning to soften into it….
It is time now for the truths we hold in the body to come to light.
Right now we are undergoing an intense shift in collective consciousness and the wounds of separation are roaring to the surface, bringing those of us who carry a mandate for healing to our knees.
The truth I hold most sacred in my own body, is the one where we are not separated by Divine, from each other, from love - even for a second. We are the second coming of the Logos, the Christos, hearts on fire, devoted to Love, cracked open and crucified upon the violent altar of dualism as it battles to hold its own.
I had already been crucified by the shadow masculine (what we call the ‘Toxic Patriarchy’), and this year I was crucified by the shadow feminine (what I have begun calling the ‘Toxic Matriarchy’). That is neither here nor there really, it is part of my archetypal blueprint to step out this liturgy of graceful annihilation so I have long ago stopped being shocked or distressed by it. But what it has done, is allow me the ‘compare and contrast’ experience and I can tell you for sure that I would rather take on the Toxic Patriarchy every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The shadow of the feminine is engulfing, (rather than embracing) the void of de-creation (rather than procreation) from which there is no resurrection. She shows up in myth as ‘The Vagina Dentata’ and other nightmare spectres. She alone has the capacity to tear the mind asunder, to create psychosis, to split the soul from its own selfhood, from its mooring.
In my exploration of this collective shadow (which we all carry a small fractal of), I have begun to map its impact on humans. What I have discovered is that the wounds that the feminine energy has sustained by the shadow masculine are much easier to heal than the wounds that the masculine energy has sustained by the shadow feminine. This is a wildly unpopular truth, the one that beats underneath my heart. That the men-folk may be hurting more than the women-folk at this point in time. As a mostly-feminine-energy and bodied human, I have had to work double hard at integrating my own and this collective feminine shadow, by exposing it, working with it, loving it into wholeness. I do this work not because I want to be a better person, I’m not as noble as that. This work is too terrifying to do out of duty or nobility.
I do it because I am compelled by Love. Love calls me, it instructs me. Each and every day the question all 3 of the feminines who live in this house with me ask is ‘what will Love have me do today?’
The reason I do this work is because I have been called into service, and my service is the healing of the masculine soul. If the men who come to work with me are not utterly safe with me, they cannot heal. And they are not utterly safe while my shadow feminine remains unconscious. If my boys are not utterly safe with mama, they will never trust themselves to rise in all of their gentle strength and embody the fullness of their energy.
“You are so near that I cannot see you. Like a fool I keep looking around”
To work with this shadow, I have had to confront all the ways it shows up inside my own body, in my behaviours and my unconscious compulsions. This has been slow, painful and laborious work, but I have been beautifully supported in it by my soul-tribe, my wolf-pack whose fierce loyalty and commitment to me has blown me away. In fact, my whole soul-tribe are healers. We bring each other data points from our explorations and make maps to wholeness together.
Where this work lands for me, is the intersection of unconditional love and free will. The metaphor I find most useful here, is the one first brought to me by my Ella, who first pointed out the mechanism of the eclipse. During an eclipse, the sun (masculine) and the moon (feminine) work with the earth (the body) in an ancient dance bringing equanimity and restoring balance, even as they submit their light and space to one another freely. Bringing darkness to light, opening and closing cycles; In service to unconditional love, we freely surrender our will. Over and over and over again. In understanding we are utterly free in any given moment, we become free to choose love. Where “love” (or some form of connection masquerading as love) is coerced, forced, demanded, expected, free-will must assert itself to right the balance. There are times when our own masculine energy must be eclipsed, and we must lean more heavily into our feminine. And there are times when our own feminine energy must be eclipsed by our solar masculine, and both usher through cycles, seasonality, the ever present change cycles, death and rebirth.
“In this dance as it plays out between humans, historically, the feminine has put a ‘tap’ of conditions on love, and held it ransom from the masculine. She has withheld, manipulated, coerced, demanded and become horrifyingly entitled when it comes to the masculine and her often delusional expectations to be babied, met, fathered, partnered, loved, held, cherished and nurtured. Calling women out on their entitlement is almost impossible, because of the victim consciousness which swirls around inside the collective shadow of the feminine. She is addicted to her own victim stories, to her own powerlessness, to her narratives of projected violence.”
When men fail to meet the expectations of the feminine, in the conditions of this present day and age, she gets a huge amount of kudos for ‘kicking him to the curb’, ‘raising her standards’, ‘refusing to settle’ and all sorts of other awful euphemisms for the discarding of the masculine when he is no longer useful to her. Feminism as a movement has been a positive game changer for the planet, but this is its horrifying shadow, which almost no one is naming.
This is terrifying to the masculine, because - to him - exile from the face of the feminine is the exile from Eden. His access to Divine is through his own internal feminine energy, but most men have not been taught how to access that. So mostly they rely on the outward expression of a Sacred Other who holds the feminine polarity. Her body is a portal to the Divine, and so he craves it, needs it, because his soul is calibrated for the transcendent. For the masculine, to be exiled from the feminine is to be cast away from the presence of the Great Mother, it is to be faced with the void of de-creation without the facility to shapeshift and resurrect - as these are the province of the feminine. The feminine alone can emerge unscathed from the shadow feminine. The masculine is utterly annihilated by it, in a way he cannot recover from. This is why so many men run from connection, from love. Because their primal instinct tells them that it might kill them. And they are right, it could. So many men come to me in a state of utter soul-death. The light gone out inside, their passion gone, their connection to their sacral energy and their sexuality utterly erased, impotent, depressed, empty and alone. This is what the shadow feminine does to the masculine. She absolutely destroys him. He becomes a walking zombie. Animated, but no longer alive.
The shadow masculine - of course - routinely kills the feminine. This is quite true. However, the feminine energy holds within it (from a shamanic point of view) the capacity for the resurrection cycle. The threat of death awakens a primal power inside the feminine which is actually energising, and activates her survival mechanisms, which are as impressive as they are diverse. The feminine who has been harmed by the masculine is either dead, or resourceful + angry. The resourceful, angry feminine is in no danger of further harm, she enters into her lioness era and rises in power and dignity. The dead rest in peace, and become seeds for the revolution which is always unfolding.
In the light, the feminine is able to be an oceanic presence of divine love available for the masculine to dip in and out of, to heal. A masculine in his healed state will not want to dip in and out, but stay, plant roots, and establish order to counterbalance the feminine chaos. But it is true that while the masculine heals, he needs to be free to move toward, and away, without being punished, manipulated or withheld from. In theory this is how it can work. This is certainly the way I practice in my work, and the results from the men I have worked with in this way have been beyond my wildest dreams - miracle stuff. The practice in my personal life, as I have discovered, is infinitely harder to implement. It is a powerful thing to be able to say to someone, “I love you, stay or go. You do you. Go at your own pace. Listen to your body. Choose what is right for you, even if that is not me.” But ultimately, thats what unconditional love asks of us. Unconditional love asks us to preference the free-will of the other, over our own preferences, needs, wants or desires. It invites us to eclipse ourselves in loving service, to surrender our shadow and expose it to the light. It invites us to move with precision inside the integrity of the story arc of our lives, without faltering with fear.
It invites us to notice all the ways we are not connected to our own power, to our own capacity to choose freely.
Thats why it is not for the faint of heart.
I have tried (and failed, of course) and tried again to offer this kind of unconditional love to the masculine. Each time I fail, I discover a new facet of my shadow which needs integrating, and I bless and thank the masculine for faithfully reflecting my shadow back to me. Each time he does, I become stronger, more powerful, more loving. I am determined to succeed, because I believe that the embodied union of polarity between humans is quite literally the key to unlock the salvific and redemptive mechanism of the Divine.
Heaven on earth.
The new kingdom.
As above, so below.
As within, so without.
As the universe, so the soul.
