Consciously Reclaiming the Feminine & Masculine Within Each of Us | Sarah Poet, M.Ed | TEDxAsheville

six years ago I was a school principal and I identified as a hard-working professional I was not using the words Sacred Feminine in my vocabulary and I thought that they might be words reserved for women who danced naked around fire circles at the full moon okay though at this time I had two masters degrees I was generally very driven I was not doing a lot of dancing if I wanted to go after something and accomplish it usually I did I helped run a school by day and I was bossy at home by night I knew how to maintain order my son's father and my therapist encouraged me to relax to rest but I didn't actually know how and I was getting sick at this point from how hard I had been pushing myself for so long I was secretly laying on the floor in my office with my feet elevated on a chair three times a day to help regulate my adrenals I was 32 years old I had a toddler son I was just getting started I had a coveted position at work and I was utterly depleted around this time I remember being in a leadership team meeting and we were making an important decision about a student with special needs I offered up what I thought and one of my colleagues dismissed what I said and said Sarah you take intuitive leaps we didn't yet have the data to back up what I was saying and data was the driver of the decision so I walked away and I was thinking intuitive leaps well if I'm a woman is an intuition a part of me and what is the role of this feminine quality and leadership and if I'm repressing this aspect of me then what else about the feminine am i repressing the discord was increasingly rising in me the pressure to perform and succeed was just less and less fulfilling all the time and my career though it was heart-centered really seemed to demand that I repressed part of me what I innately knew and I sensed that something had long ago been forgotten something to do with Sacred Feminine and so I went on a quest first to reclaim the Sacred Feminine within me and then to reclaim the sacred masculine in me as well because what I discovered is both are needed for wholeness today I want to challenge assumptions of what we think we know about the sacred feminine and masculine in the modern world and I'm going to share some of my story and I want to invite you on a journey of self exploration as to how you incorporate these two archetypes in your life work and relationships so first of all what do I mean by masculine and feminine I see these two as the foundational archetypes and our entire collective psychologist Carl Jung said that the archetypes are the patterns in the collective subconscious he called them inherited potentials that we actualize when we bring them into consciousness masculine and feminine are not gendered masculine does not equal male and feminine does not equal female rather they're archetypes potentials energies and I have to tell you some people say to me Sarah please do not use these words for fear that there will be more divisive nessa if we do but I actually think that the opposite is true and that we can really bring connection if we understand the beauty in the polarities of these archetypes and that they all exist within us I also want to take a moment to say that I'm going to use the words man and woman a lot in this talk today and there are a lot of our friends who do not identify on that binary and I want to say that every beautiful human is welcome here in this conversation we're all in this together so the archetypes the masculine and feminine their compliments their energies and potentials and they all exist within us so if you look at this slide you can see that you have all of these within you and that you might call on them at different times so masculine logic balances feminine intuition feminine emotion balances masculine cognition they really want to work together and so we can balance them we can polarize them and we can dance in between within one human these two would one would never dominate the other in nature but about 10,000 years ago at the inception of the patriarchy which is a social system that defaults power and authority to men the Sacred Feminine the archetype was systematically suppressed it wasn't valued and it was even seen as a threat and what happened is you and I have all been defaulting to the masculine first ever since I'm sure that you can think of a time in your life where you chose cognition over emotion or logic over intuition right so in my life I've been looking at this for about eight years really looking at how and why my own feminine became so repressed and the significant turning point for me was a significant trauma at the age of 18 you see I got pregnant my very first semester of college it was accidental and it was out of the expected order of operations I intuitively knew that this child was meant to be in the world I also knew that to my family school remained a priority and so I spent that first trimester of pregnancy with a plain bagel in one hand and a now jean full of orange juice and the other to settle my stomach while I kept going to classes and I finished the semester with high grades of course and I packed up and drove the ten hours back home to my disappointed Christian conservative parents and small town and we were going to decide how to proceed and it was decided that because I was doing things in the wrong order my child would be adopted at birth so I put my head down I did what needed to be done I went to classes during the day I waited tables at night and then as if I was carrying this little stowaway I would sneak away and all of the quiet moments that I had with her and just cherish the time that I had and in that time and space I found books written by midwives with wisdom about the body that my mother and grandmother had not taught me I don't think that they knew it it was a house of something ancient was calling to me and I was seeking it out I birthed my daughter all nine pounds three ounces of her naturally as if wanting this primal process of the body I named her based on a sacred vision that I had and I chose her parents based on a gut knowing and all of this was evidence of the Sacred Feminine and I see that looking back I wasn't aware of that then but there was a wisdom there and I was touching it and immediately after her birth I shut it all down there was one formula for success before me go make something of yourself so I went back to school within three weeks and the shame sounded in my head like you are not enough you are not old enough wise enough wealthy enough educated enough married enough to be worthy of your own beautiful baby and so go prove your worth shame and vulnerability expert brené Brown says that when we live with shame we are more likely to attempt to control the variables and to prove our worth outside of ourselves after the loss of my daughter I no longer knew if I had ever known my internal sense of wholeness and I certainly hustled for my self-worth for a good long time if we don't operate with a conscious awareness of masculine and feminine then we operate in the subconscious as my story shows I remained in that driven masculine orientation of achievement Drive cognition go back to school make something of yourself for over ten years until I find myself physically emotionally spiritually and mentally exhausted laying on my office floor a decade later I had played by the rules of the patriarchy and I wasn't winning so when we repress the feminine the masculine automatically goes into a subconscious orientation you can't have one existing healthily without another by the way this is what we call toxic masculinity these days the repression of the feminine and the masculine goes into more of a domination control and separation orientation and we're all experiencing this as a collective we're all experiencing what I call a collective trauma of separation domination and control because you simply can't repress half of the energy that comprises the entire universe for so many thousands of years without massive consequence and we're feeling it inside of ourselves individually and then we're also feeling it within our collective think about problems of domination and separation racism sexism environmental destruction at the core this chasm between the feminine and masculine that want to be united is the cause so later on my journey of reclaiming the Sacred Feminine this by this time recognizing some of what had been sort of suppressed I began to identify as a resilient feminine badass and I began claiming my story and using my voice and I made a man box and I put into that man box my understanding of masculinity as well as every man who had hurt me as well as every man that I knew and then I began asking them to prove to me that they didn't deserve to be in my man box I was essentially asking for men to hustle and prove their self worth which is not exactly the Sacred Feminine in action the me2 movement was so powerful because what we see is women together raising up their voices in spite of fear and I want to be clear that what's happening is actually a rising up of the Sacred Feminine under these women's movements right it's exciting it won't be stopped and it's a little uncomfortable right now because we're in this pivot of such a long history when I see one woman at a time reclaim her voice and her right to her own body I know within my entire being that this courageous choice of hers ripples change into the world I get to support women doing this in my business it's amazing we saw with me too just how much trauma against women and violence has been silenced and as a woman I can say me too I have and I believe in the movement and I later realized that as a human I can't stop at me too because every man who's ever hurt me by taking advantage of my body or attempting to silence me or repressing my equality in the workplace has really done so because of his own repression of the feminine it's this collective wound of separation and I can't continue to point my own fingers in anger when I recognize that I too have participated in this unconscious programming suppressing my feminine over time as well so if I can't point my fingers I have to do other things like give TEDx talks and devote my life to it last year the American Psychological Association published guidelines for working with men and boys and a paper that was published at the same time said that what they called traditional masculinity was marked by stoicism competitiveness dominance and aggression and is on the whole harmful and then they give recommendations for treating masculinity and I think that this is really dangerous because if we put all of masculinity into this subconscious or toxic box then we don't have another map we don't need to treat masculinity we need to reclaim the sacred masculine in this country approximately seven out of ten suicides are committed by white middle-aged men the same group of people that we call the most privileged in the last three years consecutively the lifespan of men in this country has decreased because the suicide rates have gone up so high so with these statistics I think it's clear that men aren't actually winning in the patriarchy either I've worked with hundreds of male students I now work with adult men in my practice I'm the mother of a beautiful son and I love the masculine within me and I can say that the true nature of masculinity is not harmful or toxic it's beautiful it's powerful in just the right ways and it's necessary at this time the Sacred Feminine rising doesn't want a world without men so men at the root of these statistics is really a lot of shame and what we need you to do is stop trying to control the variables and do the courageous and vulnerable thing of reclaiming the sacred masculine and then the sacred feminine within you so eventually I got out of all of those classrooms and I started the practice of heart and soul embodied breath and in this practice I helped individuals couples and organizations to consciously relay to themselves and to one another there's just so much gender related trauma playing out in our primary partnerships but one of our primary partnerships we're actually the place where we could actually heal some of this separation that I'm talking about they can be because when we come together in primary unions of course that's going to be the place that our wounds show the most right so it also goes to show that that is the place of the most potential in healing and I'm seeing it in the couples that I'm working with now each claiming their wholeness each understanding these archetypes and rebalancing and coming into greater intimacy and connection and what if we reincorporated feminine differently in our workplaces I think that we would see far less of those crunchy human resource problems involving gender if we incorporated things like collaboration and intuition and creativity more consciously the patriarchy historically gave positions of power to men and women have thankfully been fighting for equality in the workplace for a really long time but I personally found that when I did climb that ladder and I achieved those positions I didn't want what we called equality in the workplace if it meant that I had to force down what I innately knew which it ultimately did it's wonderful to have women and leadership what we need is the feminine in leadership which requires some conscious reprogramming and restructuring as you've heard I'm no longer afraid as I was in those days of being a school principal to use the words Sacred Feminine or patriarchy and maybe just maybe I too have now danced naked around that sacred fire which you may or may not decide to do on your path this path is mysterious and beautiful it's lifelong and it's sometimes difficult earlier I asked you to consider how you use or how you have the archetypes both within you and now I'll ask you how do you consciously integrate them and how will you there's one more thing that I noticed on my path when these two danced within me in union wholeness was restored and love was the result living from the heart was the result and from there I believe that there's nothing that we cannot do or be heal or create as a conscious collective of people thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 7,749

Rating: 4.8271604 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Gender, Leadership, Personal growth, Relationships, Spirituality, Women in business

Id: H0vU4RiD_Yo

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020