Letter to The Oprah Show: Women’s History and Learning to Balance Our Own Personal Energy

Dear Oprah Show and Staff,

I have been much impressed with your show and particularly your concern and care for women and women’s issues. For that reason I am writing today. I would like to recommend a couple of topics for you to consider for inclusion on your show and book club.

Each of these issues: women’s history and learning how to balance our personal energy excesses, I would encourage you to explore on your show. I feel that each of these issues must be generally understood in order to help bring about the awareness that makes the transformation of our world a reality. As I read in an article just this past weekend: “Attempts at political solutions are futile—the primary problems are philosophical.”

I would like to make a personal case for why I feel your endorsement would be greatly beneficial. I have been on what I began calling 13 years ago: my “spiritual” journey. I put spiritual in quotation marks because what unfolded was less of my then current understanding of spiritual as otherworldly, mystical, etc., to more of a journey to “consciousness.” I now equate spirituality as simply coming to consciousness. This consciousness involves the subtle, nuances of values, norms, and inherited attitudes which make up the reality of our world. These attitudes are the given assumptions which are the foundation of our everyday experiences which we do not question or scrutinize. At a basic level we are often “unconscious.” Here is a personal example: I was a rough, tough, and tumble tom-boy as a child. I played sports and avoided all things feminine from a very early age. It is how I had always known myself, and how my family always saw me. My failure to exhibit traditional feminine qualities was often remarked upon by my mother throughout my life as she had “always wished for a Polly Flinders dress girl,” who she would dress up and primp.

Well, though examining my life over the past 13 years, I suddenly and quite amazingly realized that I am such a girl (woman). I am a hypersensitive woman with a soft marshmallow core and not the toughie I had always assumed. Wow! I was stunned to realize this and it has been extremely hard for me to integrate; being soft and womanly is not only scary but often dangerous on this patriarchal planet that venerates the masculine and denigrates the feminine

Evidently as a small, sensitive child, I had realized (not intellectually or rationally, but emotionally and physically) the low esteem that is relegated to “girls” and had opted to not be associated with girl behavior. Phrases like “don’t be a sissy like a girl,” “don’t cry like a girl,” “I always wondered how a girl’s (woman’s) brain works,” etc., while seemingly innocent (we’ve heard them so often) are really quite detrimental to girls self-esteem and teach boys as well as girls a disrespect of all things associated with being feminine from a very early age. These attitudes then form the basis of our life values which we carry into adulthood and remain hidden until much later in life.

Over the past years, I have been conducting personal research into: Traditional Chinese Medicine, economics (my passion, along with history and religious studies, since college), investments, cycles, law, health, physics, genetics, brain science, and astrology. This research I have called my due diligence, covering various topics of personal interest for the “new life” I am creating based on my authentic self and my values as a woman which differs greatly from the long established patriarchal values which largely define our world.

This search for the authentic self has uncovered layers and layers of hidden assumptions regarding men and especially women planet wide. Assumptions I had rebelled against my entire life, even as I couldn’t have defined them. I learned some very difficult truths of our world. I realized that the difficulties I had embracing the feminine were not confined to me but to other women (and men) as well. Based on a desire to share what I have learned, I would encourage you to review Roselind Miles’ Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women’s History of the World. She does an amazing overview of women’s history the past 6,000 +/- years ago since the creation of patriarchy, and analyses what she terms, “centuries of sexual apartheid.” Hers is an important book to be so little known. (The writer is British.) Perhaps you might review her book and add it to your book list. I feel it is important for women to know and internalize our history should we ever truly change the patriarchal bias of our planet. Or as I learned as student of history, “those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.”

The focus of my research during my spiritual quest these past 13 years has been in the study of energy: yin/yang, the elements: fire, earth (the masculine polarities); air, and water (the feminine polarities). My exposure to these concepts began as I studied the 3,000 year old system of health currently known as Traditional Chinese Medicine, Taoism, and in my study of astrology. Astrology, I realized after researching every ancient tradition I could put my hands on (Western, Chinese, Mayan, Vedic, Greek, Babylonian, German School, etc.) is merely an ancient, encrypted mathematical system, which measures the electro(yang)-magnetic(yin) field in which we live, i.e. the universe and more specifically for those of us on earth; our solar system.

As I came to understand the polar nature of these energies and how they worked, I was reminded of a phrase I had encountered early in my spiritual journey, “that which is inside of you can destroy you or set you free.” I now believe that it is our ignorance of these energies which is behind the war between the sexes, the war with nature, and the very destruction of our ecosystem and our inability to do much about it.

Yin energy generally represents the feminine; expansive and giving. Yang, the masculine energy is contractive and can be selfish. We all consist of both yin and yang, but generally women are more yin and men are more yang. An understanding of the energies led me to realize that in order to balance, yin must “consciously” contract so that yang will “expand.” This does not happen unconsciously normally until around the mid-life crises of women, when they’ve given enough and then contract with a vengeance. (Yin turns into yang, yang into yin.) This contraction can be especially toxic to the children of a stay at home mom. (I speak from experience—much of my early damage occurred at this time. My mother was 32 years old when I was born so her mid-life crises took place when I was 5-10 years old.) If we but understood how our energies worked we might teach our children early on how to moderate the extremes the female and male are drawn to unconsciously.

Although never referring to these energies or to yin/yang specifically such information on balancing is subtlety available in the works of John Gray. I am most familiar with: Mars and Venus on a Date, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, and Children are from Heaven.

Gray’s work is interesting as he clearly shows how the energy needs are different between men and women. What he does not make clear is that these needs are in many ways polar opposites. During the past 5,000 +/- years, with the elevation of the masculine, society’s focus has been more on fulfilling the needs of men at the expense of those of women. Although Gray’s books are important steps to understanding the energy differences of men and women, there is much more to the story. An understanding on the nature of energy can result in more realistic models of what types of relationships are more likely to create healthy, balanced relationships that fulfill our individual needs.

I am aware of no other resources which present how one might consciously learn to balance one’s own energy; particularly within intimate relationships. What I came to realize as I contemplated my personal wounds as a woman on this planet, was that although we have had a type of balance though history, with men dominating the public sphere and women limited to the home or private domain; individually we have all been out of balance. As we are the building blocks of our society—all of our institutions—defined and created by an excessive masculine energy, exhibit this imbalance. This is a major lapse and much to our individual as well as societal, and planetary detriment. The topic of energy and how to balance one’s own would make an excellent topic for your show and I would love to assist you in putting such together. It is vital and valuable information which must be better understood.

Early on in my spiritual path as I consumed every relevant book I could to understand what was happening to me, I read that women would be leading our planetary transformation. Due to having been the primary victims of the philosophical system which we’ve inherited; the patriarchy, this made sense to me. Men have been in some ways, at least superficially and arrogantly, been the beneficiaries.

As women’s historian Gerda Lerner points out in her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, “the system of patriarchy is a historical construct; it has a beginning, it will have an end.” She goes on to add that when we “free or minds from the patriarchal thought and practice…at last (we will) build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.” It is only with an understanding of what has transpired over the past centuries of “his-story” that we might create a new epic, perhaps an epic of “our-story.”

Thank you for your consideration.