Conscious femininity is our unique feminine essence observed. In men and women, she both lies in waiting and seeks our full attention. Across language, culture, and time, she speaks to us through symbols, myth, music, parables, and the poetics of word, body, and nature. She is the source of engaged presence, relatedness, spaciousness, love, and truth.
There are points in our lives where we might feel her call us to go deeper, to know her more intimately. For most, she is easy to ignore amidst the wall of clamour or numbing in our lives. For some, she is closer to consciousness and carries an urgency to be known, to be heard, to be held in reverence. An experience of affliction, often described as “feeling stuck” or “broken,” is her signature invitation to open ourselves to a deeper dimension, to learn a method for accessing and knowing our symbolic lives and spiritual needs with intention, to coming toward realizing free will. The invitation may take the form of boredom, loss of energy, loss of a sustainable creative vision, aimlessness, indecisiveness, hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety, powerlessness, or disillusionment. The invitation calls us into knowing ourselves, our illusions, our gifts, our capacity for self-restraint and real self-direction with accountability. Every hero/heroine declines the invitation numerous times with the proclamation that he/she is not fit for the task. The call, nevertheless, persists and grows stronger. From this experience, a spiritual or contemplative practice for restoration and renewal is revealed and sustainable.
Conscious femininity pre-exists our imagination and certainly all that we believe to be free will. She lies within, in all of us, seeking to be…engaged, to enliven our being. Until we consciously seek her out through an organized practice, relate to her, and learn her language of the heart, our relationship with her and all that she reveals remains weak, unstable, and undecipherable. She maintains a subordinate position and is experienced as mysteriously and frustratingly elusive, if not unreal or foregone. Efforts to imitate or identify with her are empty and futile. She is not an identity, an achievement, or something we can possess or control.
Knowing ourselves requires knowing her — with heart, mind, and body. She is the part of us that knows what we really want, the part of us that asks deep unifying questions that unbind us from our illusions. She shows what lies beyond the mask of our ego, the habits of our conditioning. She gifts us with impressions that excite new understandings, new questions, and new trajectories. She is life itself.
