Plants

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/05/physical-energetic-spiritual-lessons-plants.html

John Lash - Sophia's Correction -part ten - YouTube

John Lash - Sophia's Correction -part ten - YouTube

It's All Collapsing, Right On Schedule! | In5D.com

It's All Collapsing, Right On Schedule! | In5D.com: �

�


by Gregg Prescott, M.S.
www.in5d.com

Several HUGE stories surfaced that show a definite change in the direction of society, despite the mainstream media's perpetual monopoly on fear campaigns.

In McKee, Kentucky, two corrupt officials were arrested for abuse of public trust, engaging in organized crime including extortion or coercion, tampering with public records, forgery in the second degree, falsifying business records and criminal facilitation.

W

Are You Feeling The New Energies? | In5D.com

Are You Feeling The New Energies? | In5D.com: Have you been feeling an energetic burst of energy lately for no apparent reason?� If so, you're not alone!

Many people have been experiencing an energetic burst of energy and are unsure of what it is attributed to.� It could be from solar flares and coronal mass ejections or it might be the energy being sent from the galactic center of our galaxy.

Another possibility is the energy is being s

Massive Outflows Pouring Out Of Milky Way’s Center

Massive Outflows Pouring Out Of Milky Way’s Center: Astronomers using CSIRO’s 210-feet Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia have found monstrous outflows of charged particles coming from the center of our galaxy.

The researchers said that the outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy, reaching about a million times the energy of an exploding star.

2006 Excerpts from Cold Fusion: Fire from Water | FreeEnergyTV

2006 Excerpts from Cold Fusion: Fire from Water | FreeEnergyTV: New Energy Institute (www.newenergytimes.com) is pleased to announce a recent collaboration with the New Energy Foundation (www.infinite-energy.com). New Energy Institute has released an edited version of the phenomenal 1999 documentary Cold Fusion: Fire from Water, produced by Eugene Mallove and Christopher Toussaint.

The Torus - Dynamic Flow Process | Cosmometry

The Torus - Dynamic Flow Process | Cosmometry: Whereas the Vector Equilibrium represents the ultimate stillness of energy, the Torus shows us how energy moves in its most balanced dynamic flow process. The important thing to understand about the torus is that it represents a process, not just a particular form.

What is Energized Water 2

What is Energized Water 2: "DIY Methods of Purifying

Human bodies are the final filter! But there are many simple ways to help your body out.

· Volatile organic compounds including THMs and chloroform, can be removed by boiling, agitation (stirring), or just letting it stand long enough with good ventilation.
· Boiling removes 95% of organic compounds, and some bacteria and microbes - but the water tastes a little flat, and boiling concentrates nitrates and other minerals."

Rudolf Steiner Press

Rudolf Steiner Press: "The poor quality of water, as well as its restricted supply and availability, is one of the biggest challenges of our time, with presently two-fifth's of the world's population unable to find adequate fresh water for essential usage.
Over 40 years' research has been carried out on the positive effects that rhythms and specific water flow has on water's capacity to support life. Energizing Water presents this cutting-edge research to the general and professional reader at a time when interest in finding solutions to water's huge worldwide problems�is growing rapidly."

The Oil Drum | Clean and Green Investment Forum — Summary

The Oil Drum | Clean and Green Investment Forum — Summary: "Clean and Green Investment Forum — Summary
Posted by JoulesBurn on June 20, 2011 - 6:53pm
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: biomass, electricity, grids, policy, solar power, wind. [list all tags]
The following guest post is from Jonathan Callahan, a PhD chemist currently working as a data management / information access consultant. Jonathan writes on energy issues and data management at Mazamascience.com."

Activist Post: Sea salt and baking soda, best all natural remedy for curing radiation exposure and cancer

Activist Post: Sea salt and baking soda, best all natural remedy for curing radiation exposure and cancer: "According to Michio and Aveline Kushi, in his book Macrobiotic Diet, Michio Kushi states: ‘At the time of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D., was director of the Department of Internal Medicine at St. Francis Hospital in Nagasaki. Most patients in the hospital, located one mile from the center of the blast, survived the initial effects of the bomb, but soon after came down with symptoms of radiation sickness from the radioactivity that had been released. Dr. Akizuki fed his staff and patients a strict macrobiotic diet of brown rice, miso* and tamari soy sauce soup, wakame and other sea vegetables, Hokkaido pumpkin, and sea salt and prohibited the consumption of sugar and sweets. As a result, he saved everyone in his hospital, while many other survivors in the city perished from radiation sickness.’”"

Energy [R]evolution | Greenpeace International

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Fracking Up Our Water Supply - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fracking Up Our Water Supply - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Anybody reading this post ever seen Gasland, Josh Fox’s movie about a kind of drilling called high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF)—frequently shortened to “fracking”? Hydraulic fracking produces what energy giants like Halliburton will tell you is the answer to all our energy problems—clean natural gas."

Magnetism's subatomic roots: Study of high-tech materials helps explain everyday phenomenon

Magnetism's subatomic roots: Study of high-tech materials helps explain everyday phenomenon: "ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2010) — The modern world -- with its ubiquitous electronic devices and electrical power -- can trace its lineage directly to the discovery, less than two centuries ago, of the link between electricity and magnetism. But while engineers have harnessed electromagnetic forces on a global scale, physicists still struggle to describe the dance between electrons that creates magnetic fields."

Electricity collected from the air could become the newest alternative energy source

Electricity collected from the air could become the newest alternative energy source: "ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) — Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ― much like solar cells capture sunlight ― and using them to light a house or recharge an electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may sound, scientists already are in the early stages of developing such devices, according to a report presented at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS)."

Solar Power Breaking New Boundaries in China�|�ChinesePublicCompanies.com

Solar Power Breaking New Boundaries in China�|�ChinesePublicCompanies.com: "Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd. (ADR) (Public, NYSE:STP), Yingli Green Energy Hold. Co. Ltd. (ADR) (Public, NYSE:YGE) and First Solar, Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:FSLR) are all Chinese companies that are involved in the solar power energy market. First Solar demonstrates that they have broken the $1 per watt manufacturing barrier. Suntech powers homes, and Yingli watches its carbon footprint."

Sophia Returns: World Water Day 2020

“What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home” Alanis Morissette

“The Various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman World, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosophers to be equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Edward Gibbon, Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire

 Worldwide celebrations are being held on this day in recognition of the sacred nature of water and its central importance to our survival. There is a world wide costume party planned--come as your favorite "water" god or goddess. We've also just learned that Sophia will be joining us. She has long been absent from our planet having been ousted long ago. We must prepare for her arrival by looking back and understanding what led to her departure.

We have for far too long taken water for granted and as a result we’d not honored our Earth, the water planet, nor our emotions, our individual source of wisdom. Life as we would generally define it exists nowhere else in our social system and that is specifically due to the absence of this oh so sacred and essential substance of water.

Ancient wisdom recognized a four or five elemental system to explain the world (depending on either a Western or Eastern perspective). This system was based on an understanding of energy which we have long since lost: yin/yang, magnetic/electro, feminine/masculine, right brain/left brain. Using the Western approach, the elements were water, air, earth and fire. These energies were not just physical representations of energy on our earth but related to modalities within each of us as well. Water represented our emotions, air our intellectual or mental nature, earth our physical body, and fire our spiritual nature. Water and air energies were feminine while earth and fire were masculine. These powers represented the means from which we interact in our world. Within these energies the ancients recognized that wisdom originated, not from the intellect as one might assume, but from the emotions or water element and thus from the internal being. 

Taoist philosophy illustrates the superiority of this internal power over the external variety which has so tried to dominate and control our world: “if you wished to change the world, you must first change yourself, and then you will find that is all that is necessary.” We might all realistically see that as difficult as it is to identify and change our own entrenched patterns of behavior, it would be impossible to change others.  Therefore, this understanding that the only viable power capable of transforming our world is found within each of us becomes the fulcrum from whichh we must act.  We are literally like magnets interacting in an electromagnetic energy field. When one magnet shifts, all shift. This is a practical understanding of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.  As yin which is an expansive energy contracts to midpoint, yang, a contractive energy will expand.   Such requires a conscious act as the nature of those energies have been psychologically distorted though history with men wearing a mantle of superiority and women one of inferiority.

The beginning of history witnessed the rise of religious traditions that reestablished a monotheistic, patriarchal world view which reordered the ancient’s pantheistic classification. The great clash of the sky gods and the Earth goddess at the dawn of history resulted in monotheism replacing the existing pantheism, which was a belief system that recognized the sacred or divinity inherit within all of life rather the exclusionary masculine model which replaced it. That new structure to which we have been so engrossed throughout history focused worth in one God who resided outside or above the Earth, when in actuality the divine was then and always has been accessible to each of us though our universal, right brain.

The ‘new’ religious traditions of the patriarchs elevated the masculine polarities; specifically the spiritual to the supreme place of prominence only to be accessed by an elite cadre of men who then co-opted humanities connection to the numinous for their own personal ends. So began a fire which now has evolved to such a level that it threatens our very continued existence here on our planet home. The new order generally viewed the physical as base. Intellectual development was strictly controlled by denying or controlling access to education, and the emotions were totally repressed. Thus began centuries of disparity. The schism resulted in an elevation of the masculine and a denigration of the feminine. Misogyny was born and deformed history and each of us. Women, being more closely in touch with their emotions, were systematically excluded from participation in affairs of the world. Their place was defined as being only the helpmate of man. Generally, throughout history, women lived out of their right universal brains (martyring themselves for husband and family) and men lived out of their left rational brains (justifying just about anything in the pursuit of ego—a consequence of an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres of the brain). This created a type of balance, but meant that individually each were out of balance. As we are the building blocks of our world, our individual one-sidedness then permeates everything that has evolved for thousands of years. This inequity as it evolved proliferated into the environmental, social, political, economic, educational, etc., challenges which we must now cope with on a global scale.

We have come today to recognize that the disappearance of and pollution of the potable water on our planet is but a physical manifestation of the symbolic loss of wisdom which occurred millennium ago through he suppression of the messages of our emotions which when healthy and heeded, act as canaries in a coal mine warning us of dangerous developments in our environment and beyond.  To mix the metaphor; we have mistakenly disengaged the batteries of our fire alarms in order to stop the annoying alarm from sounding, rather than check to see that the house is burning down and put out the fire.

In an acknowledging the importance of water to moderate the extremes of  fire (as is represented in the first hexagram of the I Ching, we the people of Earth recognize this International Water Day as the day Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, returned to our Earth. We will never again allow anyone or anything to jeopardize our water; neither internally nor external again.

“Back to the Garden.”

“…we are responsible for following our original instructions—those given by the creator. Every component of the universe, in an indigenous conception, has a set of original instructions to follow so that a balance can be kept…The people lived in accordance with their original instructions tempered and ordered by the natural world around them.” Gabrielle Tayac

“We are human beings not human doings. We must know who we be, before we will know what we do.” Paraphrasing Goethe“

“All things are hidden in their opposites—gain in loss, gift in refusal, honor in humiliation, wealth in poverty, strength in weakness…life in death, victory in defeat, power in powerlessness, and so on. Therefore, if a (wo)man wish to find, let (her)him be content to lose…” Mulay al’Arabi Al-Darqawi

“I awakened to the cry
That the people / have the power
To redeem / the world from fools
Upon the meek / the graces shower
It’s decreed / the people rule

                                                                     The people have the power 
                                                                     The people have the power 
                                                                     The people have the power 
                                                                    The people have the power”  Patti Smith

During the Christmas holidays of 2004, we were all stunned by the news of the tsunami which killed over 280,000 thousand people throughout the countries adjoining the Indian Ocean. What we were unaware of at the time was that the catastrophe claimed the lives of very few animals compared to the enormous loss of human life. The animals, relying on their instincts, sensed danger and had run uphill to safety.   We might wonder, what were these senses that the animals had that the people so tragically seemed to have lacked? Upon reading about how the animals had escaped death, I realized that our instincts are accessed through our emotions and as is seen in the case of the tsunami, are literally essential to our survival. The problem is that our instincts as humans have been sacrificed by adhering to the “rules” of our societies and to having learned to defer to authorities outside of ourselves. There are so many constraints and obligations to the marketplace, to the law, to religion, to employers, etc. We are, all too often, totally cut off from our own inner wisdom, and so have learned to discount our own feelings in our attempts to fulfill our duties as parents, employees, citizens, consumers, etc. If you don’t feel like this relates to you consider a simple test: Do you begin your day according to your own biorhythms, rising at whatever time that your mind and body awakens naturally, or rather at some artificial scheduled hour in order to accommodate someone else via a job or school, etc.? If you’re not even aware of such an option then you have learned early on, like most of us, to surrender your inner impulses without complaint.

Our instincts are often inconvenient in the world as it has evolved throughout history. We’ve each developed various strategies to dull them—as any attempts to validate those impulses would place us in social and economic exclusion and jeopardy. We mute those objectionable inner stirrings through our various addictions to cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, antidepressants, food, sex, obsessions with money and power, adrenaline junkets, media, drama, and the list goes on. There are so many people sedating themselves from the daily, often brutal, demands of life that we might begin to acknowledge by the sheer numbers, not personal failures, but rather signs that something is hideously amiss with our world.

We are effected by the dire news about the economy and the ecological disasters that we’ve created on our planet through by our unconscious  behaviors. We are witnessing increasing numbers of major, extreme weather patterns which cause substantial loss of life and property damages costing billions of dollars. The news is filled with diseases, death, murder, and mayhem. These events all form a subtle hum in the back of our minds, drowned out daily by our inability to claim any space and time to just be without interruption and responsibility. We look to government to solve our problems, but the “system” which created the mess cannot magically transform itself and save us from our collective planetary nightmare. This monotheistic/capitalistic/civil law system is like a locomotive that once it has reached maximum speed, cannot quickly stop or turn to avert disaster. We’re not the conductor of this train, and those who would control the engine have little vision or imagination to prevent catastrophe. Besides, do we really want the governmental bureaucracy’s to solve our problems? Weren’t they quite complicit in creating the troubles as the puppets of big business, lawyers, and bankers? The draconian means by which government would wield one size fits all legislations will only serve to hinder our abilities to act individually should we finally choose to do something proactively. We must find our own solutions to our dilemmas. The answers can only come from deep within each of us. In order to find solutions, we must jump off the machine that is swiftly speeding toward an abyss, so that we might find the time and the tools to literally rebalance our personal elements in order to reconnect with nature and restabilize our world.

Certainly, we cannot do what is necessary to save ourselves and our future on our planet by continuing to participate in the status quo. As one who has been a passionate researcher of economics and history, I have, for over 25 years. been aware of massive imbalances building within our now global, economic system which have the ability to devastate and destroy the world as we know it.  I have long sensed the death rattle.  All of our ill conceived institutions are dying. We are witnessing the gathering clouds of an earth changing “Perfect Storm.” We might stare agape, mesmerized by the waves of extraordinary collapses of our civilization around us or we may begin to act to secure a new, more humane, equitable, and harmonious future.  Are we here to become embroiled in and concentrate of the death of the old world which is occurring around us or to participate in a rebirth? As journalist Joshua Cooper Ramos says on the webpage advertising his new book: The Age of the Unthinkable, the “obligation of this historic moment is not to just sit and wait while history collides with our lives, but to step forward and use our lives to change history.” In order to know what it is that must be done, one must muster the courage to step outside of their comfort zones.  Individually we must once more get in touch with our instincts and access our “original instructions.” 

I ran headlong into the limitations of our system of living, over the past 14 years, as I felt compelled by some unfamiliar inner stirrings, which I could not identify, to make difficult personal choices which conflicted with those deemed acceptable by the status quo. What I have finally come to realize was that these choices, albeit hard, especially as they have cut me off from the people that I most care about and left me in a state of literal poverty and at times homelessness, have been preparing me for the changes which are now increasingly disrupting our world.  By learning to cut off the constant fear-based chatter of my left brain and learn to “go with the flow,” following my instincts and intuition, I have become aware of a place of deep inner security from which I have learned to rely. I have acquired a resiliency and flexibility that has allowed me to confront an unsure future without being overcome.  The key has been learning to stay in the ‘now,’ and allow life to unfold naturally. The trust I learned from this process allowed me the time and space to pursue my own sense of purpose, research and work; generally without freaking out and worrying about how I might secure food and shelter. Somehow my real necessities were always met, even as I may, at times, have been frustrated by my wishes being denied or delayed. I learned to be content with delaying gratification.

As I connected with my emotions and my instincts, I found it unbearable  living with the constrictions of our society. I considered the use of drugs to continue functioning within society, but because I had always been quite hypersensitive to medication, being unable to even take an aspirin for a headache, this course of action absolutely was not an option. I could no longer be content with “just the way things are” or as recommended by a friend to “just suck it up.” I am reminded how a healthy, wild animal will chew off a limb rather than remain in a trap. As I reconnected with my true nature, I understood how I had been ensnared as well. My retreat from the world was a natural response of my new awareness of how sensitive I was and had always been. I became conscious of how I had armored myself since childhood in order to cope. The armor, while protecting me, had come at a severe cost by restricting my options in life. I came to identify myself as a hypersensitive woman with a soft marshmallow core and not the toughie I had always thought. I recognized that since childhood, I had used bravado to hide behind—even hiding from myself.

As I became more aware of the needs of my authentic self, I also began to connect my passions with my purpose.  Fifteen years ago, I attended a conference related to constructing more sustainable transportation systems through the development of light rail. At that conference, one speaker forever inspired me with quite a simple idea; “the places we live and work should be as beautiful as the places we go for vacation.” I soon refined the idea to one of living within exquisitely pristine beauty all of the time. In a burst of enthusiasm accompanied by extreme naiveté, I returned to my city with intentions of committing my life to helping return it into such a place.  Very soon, I realized the impossibility of that dream; not because the aspiration was inherently unattainable—nature is always a willing partner in a return to balance—but rather that my community did not share my vision. 

I have since come to realize that I am not unique in my desire to live on a pristine earth—having become instinctually whole again, nothing else will suffice. That is the prerequisite; becoming whole. To do so means reconnecting with a different source of power. Instead of equating power as something one uses to bend others to their will, this power is instead used over oneself by exerting self control when challenged by the unfamiliar.  It is an inner power.  This power derives from ones instincts and intuition. Recently in defining the differences between these two terms, I realized, as stated earlier, the importance of the instincts as indispensable for survival. Intuition, I learned related more to thriving (or thrival—smile). What I have come to call my soul’s work has been led entirely by my intuition. I plan on flourishing  in the new world ahead and have been preparing these past 14 difficult years for that eventuality. I long ago realized that I was here for the rebirth. You may all choose your future as well. Do you wish to wander like a Mad Max in an earth Wasteland, or as expressed in the song written by Joni Mitchell 40 years ago after the conclusion of “Woodstock,” to make your way “…back to the garden.” We have the power to choose to recreate our lives and heal our planet; it’s been hidden within us all along.

 

NOTE: The tool I used most to assist me in getting in touch with my instincts, working though my frenetic emotions, and rebalancing myself was Carol K. Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching. When first consulting the hexagrams, I was mystified as to how I was receiving relevant information from seemingly random readings. I later learned about the nature of energy which makes up our universe. The Ching taught me about balance and flow. I understand that Anthony has a new book I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way, co-authored with Hanna Moog which has revised the earlier addition based on their continuing study and observations.

a

The Upside of Anger

“Never go to bed angry. Stay up and fight.” Phyllis Diller

“Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.” Lyman Abbott.

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” Chinese Proverb

I’ve been making some profound connections of late. Recently I had begun doing some research on anger’s effect on the brain. I had a theory that as we all have been repressing our emotions since the beginning of history that we literally have suffered brain damage from the suppression of such emotions and as a result have not been “whole.” I had read about such in my meanderings into brain science in the past few years. But now, having become so aware of deep feelings of intense rage which exacerbate my headaches and witnessing a nascent creativity to which I’d never known might reside within me, I began to understand that perhaps a result of my getting in touch with my long dormant emotions was in actuality lighting up new areas of my brain as I became more comfortable in feeling and processing all of my emotions.

In the truly mysterious ways in which our lives unfold, soon after beginning my inquiry, I began reading a sequel to a book that I read several years ago, The Eight.  Katherine Neville’s latest novel The Fire is an astounding romp through occult history. My attention was grabbed early on as I realized that this was not just a pleasure read. There were references to the Phoenix and the Firebird, the Swan, symbols related to numbers, Chess, ancient wisdom, hidden agendas, etc. Almost each new page was pregnant with new meaning for me as I tested what I’ve learned over the my lifetime as a student of economics, history and religion.  Neville’s novels are complex stories of historical interconnections which only someone with a larger view of history might provide. 

I learned in her book an explanation of the Firebird which I had previously mistakenly assumed was the Phoenix. I’ve been anxiously awaiting a personal Phoenix rising out of the ashes of my former life.  “The Firebird is nothing like the Phoenix, which bursts into flame each 500 years and rises from its own ashes. The tale of the Phoenix is one of self sacrifice and rebirth. The Firebird gives up its golden feather…to bring Prince Ivan back to life. When the Firebird appears, the message to be understood is “Recalled to Life.” Always watching intently for omens, I wondered, was I finally being called back to life? I have spent the last 14 plus years hunkered down in abject poverty, doing what I’ve been calling my soul’s work.  I had consciously taken up a personal quest to get in touch with a whole, healthy feminine energy to balance out the extreme masculine energy which defines and distorts our world.  My path, as I came to call my spiritual journey  has taken me far afield into, of all things, astrology and ancient medicines—thus really ancient studies of electromagnetic energy.  Both disciplines taught me important lessons, long forgotten through history, about balancing energy.  This knowledge was known throughout antiquity in both the East and West and forms the basis of our sciences and mathematics.

Lately my long endured research into energy led me to conclude that my personal planetary ruler as recently ascertained is Pluto. Pluto is the ruler of Aries—a fiery planet ruling a fire sign. Over the past 13-14 years, Pluto was transiting through Capricorn an earth sign which relates to how individual insecurity’s manifest. Capricorn is contractive: certainly my life contracted accordingly—I  have been almost singly focused on my personal work. Now Pluto is in Sagittarius another fire sign, but one of societal reform and expansion. So you might say that I have a passion for societal reform.

All of this is definitely personally significant but more importantly globally significant. The quote above indicated that the Phoenix rises every 500 years—I had long, as a student of history, been aware of such important historical cycles, the last of which culminating after the European Renaissance into the Age of Discovery which seemed to portend at the next passage of Pluto through Sagittarius the birth of the United States. At first I thought that perhaps these major societal transitions occurred at each passage of Pluto into Sagittarius, but as the orbit takes approximately 248 years,  it must relate to every second completed orbit--but as can be seen in the example just sited the next transit may complete the promise of the first. Thus it is time for another huge societal leap which is to be punctuated with a Pluto/Uranus square which will be exact in 2012. (This connection revolutionizes the 500 year major transitional cycle.) The last time Uranus and Pluto formed a major aspect in the sky was in 1966. The 60’s were a time of major societal upheavals. We witnessed the women’s movement, civil rights and massive demonstrations over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, etc.

As a small child in the 1960’s, I witnessed and became a P.O.W. in the war between the sexes through my parents struggle’s with their own personal imbalances.  The time had not yet arrived for those struggles to be dealt with consciously, either personally and societally,  but  those issues that the new Uranus/Pluto cycle stirred up certainly formed the basis for my personal ‘internal’ work and, I believe, our work now as a planet.

As I progressed through reading  The Fire. I found this quote: “Yeats Aengus…had the fire in the head that shamans everywhere believe is the source of enlightenment, illuminating visions of other realities. The shamanic journey begins and ends in the mind.” Tom Cowan, Fire in the Head

This seemed to represent an answer to my recent inquiries into the emotional impact of anger on the brain. As fire has a purifying effect, so then might repressed anger have such an effect on us. I am reminded of how the output of volcanic eruptions remineralize the depleted dead soils thus allowing new life to arise from an enriched new earth. 

So there is an upside to anger. Our willingness to get in touch with the fire within and finally see clearly what is illuminated about our ailing world, can ultimately purify our lives and restore the fecundity of our planet.  I was reminded of this while perusing YouTube to hear selected music videos. I listened anew to the Dixie Chick’s “Not ready to make nice.” This song was the group’s response to the extreme backlash, which included death threats, after lead singer Natalie Maines’ offhand comment on a London stage as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq. When Maines impishly smiles at the line in the song, “It turned my whole world around, and I kind of like it,” I understood her trial by fire. There is no turning back, but then there is no desire to turn back. Our work is before us—in the words of The Trammps, “Burn baby burn.”

Women and Values, Women and Money: Toward a More Equitable Economic System and a More Humane World

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it into question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the Patriarchy and Monotheism hath undertaken in their OWN RIGHTS, to support this SYSTEM in what they call THEIRS, and as the good WOMEN and Men of this world are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.” Thomas Payne, Common Sense, (Revised to reflect current concerns between Patriarchy, monotheism, women and men rather than King and men as were addressed in the original treatise in 1776.)

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Napoleon

“In our larger societal lives, as in our individual lives, we continue repeating what we do not understand, what we have not resolved.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size.” Virginia Woolf

“Morality represents the way people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.” Anonymous

“No chivalry prevents men from getting women at the very lowest possible wages.” Elizabeth Robins

“A woman picking at a thread of discontent can unravel the world.” Author unknown

The economy is spiraling to its death. The government is bailing out the financial institutions and corporations whose greed and lust for power and prestige has brought about and perpetuated the collapse. The new president promises jobs and economic stimulus. The Federal Reserve, since its inception, has constantly injected more and more debt masked as money into the system. Will the new jobs be constructive outlets for our creative power? Will the stimulus packages undo decades and centuries of unsustainability inherent in our economic and financial systems? Will the ever expanding debt loads by the ever escalating proliferation of fiat money continue to destroy all value and thus ultimately result in a total collapse of life as we know it? It’s all happened before with cyclical regularity and at times with punctuated finality. This being the case, is the system worth preserving? Women especially must ponder these questions. We live in a world not of our making and because of such our feminine egalitarian values of fairness, nurturing, and cooperation, have neither been reflected in nor replicated in the current economic system.

It is a matter of historical fact that all of the institutions on our planet have been created by men for the benefit of men. Their principles of hierarchy, dominance, competition, aggression, and control have characterized the basis from which our world and world view has long been established. Our economics, laws, politics, religions, educational systems, family structures, architecture, philosophy, sexuality, etc.: all have been defined and constructed by men. Our histories and cultures have been recorded and society’s assembled by the winners: the most brutal of conquerors, the men with the biggest egos, the largest armies, the best scientists, the most creative financiers and bankers, the most destructive and efficient technologies, and the most organized religions that philosophically exploit our spiritual proclivities in order to assure our continued passive obedience. These creators of our old and new world orders have been men of power and personal ambition creating the social institutions which insure their continued authority while having learned to manipulate the populace by paying lip service to ideals such as democracy and freedom. Generally women (and sensitive, astute men) know, maybe not intellectually and spiritually, but rather we know emotionally and physically that these ideals are in theory only.

Our world is not a friendly and safe place—how can we be truly free if we do not feel safe? How can we be free when daily we are confronted with widespread violence, “entertainment” that perpetuates more violence physically as well as psychologically, crime, murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, pornography, prostitution, poverty, malnutrition, disease, economic wars masking as religious wars, destruction of our ecosystem, pollution, irradiated chemically laden food, and financial machinations which periodically coalesce to destroy our lives—all under the auspices of freedom and democracy. Even our so longed for and proclaimed mantras of democracy and freedom are idealized values which are most often absent even within our very homes—our most cherished archetype.

Women have lived or continue to live within the realm of the monarchy, either with father, husband, or lover; we’ve lived within the castle of the king: “A man’s home is his castle.” Unfortunately the role of Queen, while rather exalted in myth, in fact, in the home is more akin to that of a chamber maid then equal cohort to the King.

There has been little democracy in childcare, cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, decision making, or in taking care of the most basic daily needs of existence. These needs have primarily been defined to be the responsibility of women. We have historically been prescribed these duties. These fundamental needs as important as they are have been afforded NO VALUE in the masculine contrived market economy. Women have been given much responsibility but have had few rights—and little money and wealth. Rights have, constitutionally and practically, been the soul property of men, and especially of elite men. Their right to classify and craft every nuance of our social domain in their own image has been and remains virtually unchallenged and unacknowledged. Even with all the inroads into the public arena women have made over the past 40 years, we’re still just participating in a male defined construct and have yet to create another more humane model of existence.

Scholarship, especially from the past 50 years, much of it attributable to women who benefited educationally from the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 70’s, has ushered in a revolution in knowledge and understanding. As these researcher’s and writer’s have investigated and reported on issues close to their own hearts, they have used their own perspective as women and challenged over and over the status quo. This change in point of view from earlier scholarship opens up the vista of human experience 180 degrees. From the liberal arts, to medicine, mathematics, and the sciences, women have contributed their significant perspectives heretofore having been ignored

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson in her book Composing a Life suggests that the subversion of the female was “accomplished by taking advantage of 2 kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. First, is a quality of self-sacrifice—a learned willingness to set aside their own interests and be used and even used up by the community. The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation.”

Historian Rosalind Miles in her excellent, witty overview of women’s history, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women’s History of the World recognized, “women are an oppressed class. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants and cheap labor…our prescribed behavior is enforced with threats of physical violence. Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition.”

Author Marilyn French points out how the androcentric or patriarchal system of control “distorts interdependency. By placing all rights in the male, granting males most of all of a society’s economic and political power, it transforms productive adult women into dependent minors. By devaluing women’s contributions…patriarchy disguises interdependency, giving it the appearance of dependency…The Personal is Political.”

In the early 20^th century writings of economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman she analyzed how the “economic dependence of women made women the slaves of men and thereby hindered social evolution.” Thus subjected to men’s control women have historically “largely been limited to domestic servitude in exchange for food and shelter, an arrangement sanctioned by an androcentric church and state.” The limited role afforded women elevated the importance of marriage as nearly the sole respectable means of livelihood and status, so that “she must exaggerate sexual and maternal habits.” “So excessive was the sex distinctions between women and men that two divergent worldviews evolved. Two such individuals can hardly function as equal partners in marriage (much less in the public sphere); hence, a double standard exists.” Perkins then suggested that women seek economic independence though specialized work. Education would thus “diversify women’s capacities, and enable them to perform public service and lead to general social progress.”

Women have in many respects accomplished what Perkins had suggested. But still our labors can remain unpaid, underpaid, and under valued even by ourselves who after all have been brought up culturally to see ourselves as less important and significant then men. Surely we might deny this, however, we know and are reminded of our lesser position at every joke, putdown, lack of equal pay, lack of opportunities for advancement and leadership, and general lack of respect for the feminine.

How many compromises do we make daily in our interactions with our significant others be they the spouses, lovers, employers, teachers, political leaders, etc.? How often do we watch each other become quiet when a man is listening or speaking? How often do we watch our friends change before our eyes from strong and self-sufficient women into sycophants when a man enters the room or demands preferential treatment? How often have we seen or heard ourselves devalued and objectified in the media, in films, on television, in the streets, in our homes, and on our computers? How often do we stifle our needs, our opinions, our plans, our desires, and our goals in order to just get along and not be seen as bitches or shrews? How long will we allow ourselves to be controlled by such concerns? How many of our daily frustrations and slights are repressed, our anger turned inward toward depression and self-negation? And perhaps more significantly how long do we think we can continue to collaborate in this system which is undermining our very existence and all life on our planet?

In his most reasoned book, The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy, sociologist Allan G. Johnson succinctly summarizes our dilemma in addressing the excesses of the world which we take for granted: “social systems often seem stable because they limit our lives and imaginations so much that we cannot see beyond them. This is especially true when a social system has existed for so long that its past extends beyond collective memory of anything different. As a result, it lays down laws of social life—involving various forms of privilege—that can easily be mistaken for some kind of normal and inevitable human condition. It then masks a fundamental long-term instability caused by the dynamic of privilege and oppression.” Johnson concludes, we are so “male dominant and male identified, along with not seeing women as oppressed we resist seeing men as the privileged oppressors group.”

As the new knowledge and observations gleaned from it, percolates down into society, perhaps there is a growing conviction that men and women have not merely distinct but opposed political needs and imperatives. We have begun to witness such in the political arena as women are choosing the lesser of two evils and are principally supporting Democratic candidates and policies. (I refer to Democrats as the lesser of the evils as both parties are corporate entities—and I believe it is “corporatism” which looks a lot like a renovated Middle Ages feudalism that enslaved the peasants—which must eventually be addressed by our society. The peasants were attached to the land, so that they physically understood their inslavement; we think that because we can move about we are free, but it is the "system" which enslaves us.)

The division of needs has been reflected in my study of Ancient Chinese Medicine, and Taoism. I have become convinced of the polar opposite needs of women and men as are reflected in the roles that have historically been assigned to each. Taoism, the philosophical basis of Chinese Medicine, long before it became a religion, was simply a study of balance and energy. The Taoist called the energies yin and yang and divided them into 5 elements: fire, earth (the masculine polarities); air, and water (the feminine polarities) and ether—in effect representing, Einstein’s Unified Field in which energy exists in balance. We might think of yang as electro- and yin as magnetic energies; thus defining the electromagnetic energy field in which all life exists.

As I came to understand the polar nature of these energies and how they interacted, 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 (literally the metaphysical and natural world) 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. We are the only animal on the planet that is able to ignore natural law. As a consequence of our philosophies and religions we have been taught that we hold dominion over nature and might do with it as we please. Our chaotic world is a direct result of this manner of thinking and interacting with life on our planet.

Averting our spiral into catastrophe, from its trajectory into an abyss toward which we have been advancing for centuries, is made difficult to detect by our relatively short lives. We often confuse cause and effect and neglect to understand the root origins of our circumstances; as individuals as well as societies.

We must once more familiarize ourselves with natural law and learn to live accordingly. My personal education of such was facilitated by studying the I Ching (originally using Carol K. Anthony’s A Guide to the I Ching), Chinese Medicine, and astrology. The I Ching has been known as an ancient divination guide. I used it as such, but as I consulted the guide over time, I realized, more importantly, that it is rather a valuable resource for learning how to live more naturally and harmoniously. It was almost magical. As I was confronted by various difficult situations which triggered off my fears and emotional anxieties and would apply the advice from my readings these situations were favorably and easily resolved. I once read that the I Ching was not a religion but rather served as a lantern that we might hold over our paths to keep us from falling into every pit hole. Chinese Medicine, a 3,000 year old system of proactive health, and the I Ching both trace their origins to Taoist teachings on balance.

Astrology, although it has been much maligned in our time, is simply an ancient encrypted mathematical system, which measures the energy of the electromagnetic field. This system has been used from civilizations as diverse as the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Mayans, Indians, Celts, etc. Astrology was taught in the universities in Europe at the time of the Renaissance. Ancient documents and knowledge, including the study of astrology, were brought back from the Middle East by the European Crusaders. This information was being disseminated into European society (and may be responsible for the exquisite Renaissance art as the occult knowledge—hidden-as in energy—was used to create beauty) until the Church eventually vilified the practice. The knowledge, however, continued to be used in medicine at least through the reign of Elizabeth I. Astrology had been championed by the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates who stated, “A physician without knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician.”

Here is a very rudimentary and concise explanation of energy as I understand it in order to summarize the general characteristics of energy as pertains to this article.

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. Each type of energy can be subdivided into their elements: Yin into air and water (intellectual and emotional), yang into fire and earth (spiritual and physical). An integration of all the energies must occur in order to balance.

I hypothesize that since the beginning of the patriarchy, the masculine polarity has been elevated in importance as the feminine characteristics of intellect and emotions have been denigrated. The masculine polarities of spirit and body are more easily controlled separated as they became from the feminine polarities of emotions and intellect. We have all been restricted ever since the origins of monotheism into a segmented reality. What came to be the "official" cosmology justified an elevated status for men, made in God’s image, and relegated women to a lesser position having little value other than as might be utilized by men. Pantheism, which was replaced by the monotheistic order, can be seen as being a philosophy of acknowledging the sacredness inherent within all of life rather than the exclusionary monotheism which puts worth in one God who resides outside or above the Earth, and then by proxy predominantly in men who were made in “his” image. As that God can only be accessed by an elite, male, organization which serves as intermediary, a priestly and kingly order was violently and brutally established over the peoples of Earth, wave by wave, first by killing off all opposition and then by co-opting the remaining indigenous peoples spiritual proclivities, as well as, by instituting legal and economic systems of control. We now all live under this repressive system. What begin in the Middle East with the enslavement of the Israelites as recorded in the Bible, eventually spread into Africa, Europe and Asia, and finally encompassing the Americas and the Islands.

It is only in light of our understanding how much we have been elementally divided can we begin to rebalance ourselves and our Earth home which is experiencing ecological chaos due to centuries of our imbalance.

We’ve advanced a long way intellectually since the beginning of “history.” Our intellectual pursuits were managed throughout the past thousands of years by controlling education and limiting those who had access to such—especially by the exclusion of women and minorities. But in order to truly become whole and reclaim our freedom we must embody our emotional self. This is probably the most difficult piece of ourselves which we must integrate in order to become whole. We have been well taught to repress our emotions. Instead of seeing our unruly emotions as messages from our soul to make changes in our out of balance lives we have learned to bottle them up and ostracize those who may live closer to their emotions—particularly women. We might ask what purpose such control serves. Even in our world today in much of alternative medicines and philosophies to which people are turning more and more, the concern has been limited to an integration of mind, body, and spirit.

Why would the water element (or emotions) be neglected? In my study of energy, I found that the ancients recognized wisdom as being a product of the water element. Wisdom does not originate from the intellect but rather from the emotions. Certainly this is true for we have often seen many things justified intellectually which we know are wrong because we FEEL (the emotions corresponding with the body) them to be dishonest and often immoral. I surmise that in our repressing of emotions we have been led far astray. Rather then feel our emotions and understand them as messages from our core for change, we have for generations, repressed them and been denigrated for our feelings by being labeled as “too sensitive.” Men have been characterized historically as the rational ones and thus the natural leaders while women, as the irrational emotional gender, have not been generally allowed to rule or participate in the public affairs of society. This has been used as justification to limit women from having any real active and vital roles in shaping our world.

An understanding of the energies led me to realize that in order to balance, yin must “consciously” contract by putting herself first so that yang will “expand.” This does not happen unconsciously normally until the mid-life crises of women, when having given too much, our own needs rarely having been adequately met, we contract with a vengeance—all of our repressed anger erupting often into misdirected and misunderstood rage.(Yin turns into yang, yang into yin.) (In my own experience, the feelings come long before the understanding from whence such extreme emotions arise.)

In his book, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, historian Robert S. McElvaine quotes the administrator of the U.N. Development Program speaking at a 1995 worldwide survey on the status of women: “life is dramatically unfair to women.” McElvaine then goes on to discuss how “history was shaped in fundamental ways by the belief in female inferiority.” It is “men who have defined the battle lines in the punitive war between the sexes—those who have, in truth, been the ones who declared the war—have drawn those battle grounds so sharply that the middle ground is a minefield.” Given such constrictions, it is little wonder women’s anger finally erupts—despite having been trained since childhood of the inappropriateness of such a passion in women. We have been raised on the ideals of social equality and it takes many years to finally discern that the “emperor has no clothes.” Anger is an appropriate response and a necessary one if we are ever to have justice. Without consciously connecting with our anger, we would simply continue to suffer our abuse. When women are totally in touch with, and claim their anger, we are on our way to healing—what a paradox! Giving ourselves the right to feel our emotions—whatever they might be, understand their messages, and incorporating this new information into our lives and choices is essential to our path to wholeness. This is a healthy understanding of natural law. If one pulls the tale of a tiger, one is going to suffer the consequences and get bitten or worse.

Consciousness is key. We have been so brainwashed since birth about how the world should be, that we unconsciously have learned to accommodate the systemic abuses. As we consciously feel our emotions, we can choose different options to address the offenses we suffer; otherwise we act out of our imbalanced gender stereotypes. The good news is that, as the Taoist say, “if you wish to change the world, you need only change yourself. That is all that is required.” How could this be? Upon reflection I have realized that as we rebalance, the world around us begins to rebalance. I used to use the analogy of a child’s game of magnets to understand how energy might move. If you had a board of magnets of various sizes and moved one magnet, all of the magnets on the board would shift. We are like magnets, as we shift our energy we affect the entire world; and the more of us involved in learning to shift our energies, the greater the momentum toward systemic change.

During the past 5,000 +/- years since the time when the sky gods—Greeks and Hebrews pantheons—arose and over threw the existing earth goddess civilizations, a rupture was introduced into, and spread throughout, our planetary history. Energy, always in balance has been maintained with the masculine energy or yang dominating in the public sphere and yin or feminine energy limited to the private sphere. The problem with this division of energy from a systemic perspective is that although the arrangement has ostensibly worked; individually we all have been out of balance. This individual imbalance has led to our current economic, political, cultural, and ecological crises—as we are the building blocks from on all else is dependent. It is as if humanity made a wrong turn since the time of Plato (the beginning of misogyny, wars without end, abuse of the natural world, etc., traces to this time) and our trajectory as a planet has been off course ever since..

We have not understood the psychological impact of the events which led to the beginnings of history as witnessed by the rise of the Greeks, Hebrew patriarchs and monotheism. Stories preserved in written form from the Bible (Noah’s flood), Plato’s Timaeus and Critias and those legends passed orally by indigenous peoples all over the planet, tell of a world wide catastrophe which disrupted the previous world order. Most probably these stories of global cataclysm refer to our planet being hit by asteroids; geologically, there is evidence of two such events over the past 10,000 years—the last occurring approximately 5,000 year ago—paralleling exactly the rise of the patriarchs. Such a global disaster was beyond our collective imagination until witnessing; at least 21 discernable pieces of Comet Shoemaker-Levy collide into the planet Jupiter from July 16 through July 22, 1994. This was the first collision of two solar system bodies observed in “history.”

An understanding of the devastation and personal trauma experienced by those who survived such a planetary disaster might go far in explaining the reactive schizophrenic split of the masculine and feminine spheres of influence. A psychological rejection of nature and of the feminine does not seem like a far fetched explanation for what followed as humans sought to control their environment. McElvaine suggests also that such a catastrophe is most likely to “kill off the most educated and sophisticated people” who are usually clustered in cities. Those left, mostly the uneducated, being caught up in the chaos, became “invaders, claiming god status” and rising up to displace the old ways by using the pandemonium as a means of securing their own survival needs. “History” thus begins from chaos and trauma.

Trauma, both personal and collective, is difficult to process; our tendency is to shut down emotionally rather than experience the pain. Only if we process our trauma consciously might we understand from where it is derived and ultimately heal it. The time to do so is now. Those calamities from our geological past may have been beyond our ability to change, but the problems we have created from that time forward are not.

In her excellent book, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives, Anna Fels describes how “throughout their lives women are subtly discouraged from pursuing their goals by a pervasive lack of recognition for their accomplishments. Parents, peers, teachers, professors, bosses, and institutions all understate work by females and therefore unwittingly withhold appropriate praise and support. All too often girls and young women incrementally lose their early convictions about their abilities and talents. A belief in the likelihood of achieving their goals slowly fades and is supplanted by aspirations for more socially available types of attention, particularly attention for sexual attractiveness.” In order to encourage each other to throw off the shackles of our mind which has been our legacy from the past, we must begin to build the support networks with other women who can provide the recognition that we need so that we may succeed in our personal endeavors and help rebalance the world. Each of us has a vital role to play and a personal destiny to fulfill.

Women have much to contribute to our ailing world—we are the most attuned to the water element and therefore to wisdom. Our brains, being more interconnected then men’s brains, allow us to excel in understanding the big picture. If women were truly partners in society, we would innately inject balance into the extremes of our androcentric world. My own spiritual journey began with the reading of Philosopher Ken Wilbur’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality as he called for a dose of the healthy, whole, feminine energy to rebalance the out-of-balance masculine world. I understood and acknowledged the validity of his work and being convinced have consciously striven these past 13 years to contribute my share. It’s not been particularly pleasant or easy but I have remained true to this vision throughout; regardless of the consequences.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde

Our path to wholeness begins as we tune into and decipher our physical and emotional responses as guides to transforming ourselves and ultimately our society. Our spirit, body, and intellect have a role but as we have learned: wisdom is not a product of the intellect but rather of the emotions. When we ignore or repress our feelings in favor of accommodating an unbalanced world, we actively participate in prolonging its volatility and instability. Our raw emotions can be quite frightening and don’t feel particularly good to experience. It is often much easier to masks our emotional wounds through addictions like drugs, alcohol, sex, food, shopping, smoking, etc. Our work involves learning to allow the emotions to rise and to feel them. Try not to use your emotions to confront others, but rather find a private space where you might safely vent. Emotions are energy in motion. Move and let the emotion move through you. They are like the weather, sometimes stormy; but calm, nice conditions always return. Once the storm has passed, usually within a day or two, expect and look for having a personal epiphany. (Comfort with crying is a personal must. Although we have often been ashamed of our tears, as they have not been respected in the male ideology and seen as a sign of weakness, crying is how a woman releases her stress—and we’ve all been quite stressed. An artist friend, having studied transcendental meditation, once told me, “We’ve mountains of stress trapped in our bodies.”)

It is difficult, and often quite inconvenient, learning to be true to oneself in all things; we have spent much of our lives serving many other masters. One should not underestimate the degree in which such a shift from one’s willingness to accommodate the status quo will disrupt those around you who are vested in the current world view. The toil ahead will not be effortless; there is much internal work to be done to bolster the diminished self. As women begin to get in touch with their core values, which will rise to consciousness as the inner work progresses, we will then be able to constructively balance the out-of-control masculine energy which continues to dominate and destroy our world.

The inner work will yield many nuggets of gold. Many early folklores and myths tell of the riches to be gained in confronting ones shadow and reincorporating the split-off portions of oneself. New ways of seeing and interacting with the world will result from this internal work. The feminine energy you are questing for is not passive but rather magnetic; it draws what it needs. You need not actively pursue your destiny (this is the manifestation of the masculine energy.) You need only allow your life and purpose to unfold. Trust that you will receive what you require and rise every day doing only what is before you. Understand that sometimes what you need to experience or understand is not always what you’d necessarily choose, but that all serves a bigger purpose on the path to wholeness. Learn to live in the now and not to worry about the future. Go with the flow. Go downstream; everything you need is downstream. Be gentle with yourself. Learn to clear your mind, get in touch with your body and most importantly breathe: especially when life shakes you up: breathe—long, deep, slow breaths from the abdomen.

The best allies that women have on our paths to wholeness are each other—the patriarchy sustained itself primarily by keeping us ignorant and separate. We have been deprived of each other and have primarily looked to men for validation, love and support both physically and emotionally. We have learned the hard way that this reliance comes at a price which often includes our remaining energetically unbalanced, submissive, weak, and dependent. Most importantly, we are learning that our emotional needs can never be fulfilled by men. Men generally have neither the emotional capacity nor any real interests in fulfilling women’s emotional needs.

In his latest book, Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress, John Gray suggests that men can only fulfill 10% of the necessary levels of oxytocin (the love and cuddle hormone of support and well being) in women. The rest (or 90%) of the necessary levels of oxytocin are women’s own responsibility. Means of increasing a woman’s levels of oxytocin are most easily produced by pampering oneself and through quality time spent with friends. If this is the case, then we might easily see that the priorities of women throughout the patriarchy have been to our own physical and emotional detriment by putting husband and family first. Ideally women must put themselves and their relationships with friends first—only then might we receive the support which literally and hormonally, will nourish our health and well-being, thus allowing us to succeed on our terms.

We are poised at an auspicious moment. We are just beginning to experience a global, protracted, economic collapse—which seems to be currently intentionally delayed as the fiat system continues to create money out of thin air, thus exaserbating a “dollar bubble” which the rest of the world is becoming most eager to pop—they’ve suffered the American hegemony of the dollar long enough. Cycles of economic depressions generally last from 15-18 years. This would seem depressing if one sees it from the view point of the status quo, but seen from a balanced perspective, is rather an opportunity for a planetary healing crisis. Alternative and ancient medicines have long recognized that a true healing is often instigated by a shocking event. Only when dreams, that have held us mesmerized for so long, are exposed as having no value can we awaken to create something new. We can only then begin to reevaluate our needs from a balanced perspective and fabricate new types of social, political and economic enterprises which support our new stability. Our whole world is up for reevaluation and revision.

There is a choice to be made: either one might heed the economic breakdown as a wakeup call and adapt one’s behavior toward a journey to wholeness, or one might shut down emotionally to withstand the coming disruptions and accompanying trauma and once the danger passes, resume life as if nothing had happened thus sowing the seeds for the next crisis and repeating the 5,000 year old patterns of disharmony.

The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
- Honore de Balzac

If it’s any consolation, I have had my own personal, economic, healing crises the past 17 years. I will relate my journey in my memoir Izzy’s Daring Digression which I will post in serial installments on this blog. My wish is that it might serve as a joyfully resolved illustration of what is possibly ahead for all of us. As historian Gerda Lerner highlights in her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, “The system of patriarchy is a historical construct, it had a beginning; it will have an end.” I would remind you that everything that we know was created by someone and that we are all creators. We can, we must, and we will recreate a better world. Lerner once more, in regards to women and our role in revolutionizing our world: “To be women centered…means developing the intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the thinking woman is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most “unfeminine” quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world, the hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male, system builders.” We must “free our minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly humane.” The only way to do such is by rebalancing our own energies by reclaiming our water element. In many ways, we will be healing not just our current reality and our future prospects, but bridging the original rift opened so long ago. Won’t you join me on the path to healing and wholeness? It won’t be easy but together we can persevere and ultimately thrive.