3. Navigating The Masculine & Feminine in All of Us

every human being has a masculine and a feminine essence, right? Where I see trouble, "Brew" is when people start to weaponize these terms against each other in relationship. And it should be noted, most people get this, that we all have a masculine and a feminine. Every human being has one. And it's important to understand how to navigate this, especially in the realm of, you know, modern relationship. You're listening to the embodied relationship experience, plumbing the depths of the human heart at the intersection of desire, spiritual practice, and sexual clarity. I'm your host, John Wyland. Welcome back to the embodied relationship experience podcast. My name is John Wyland. Today, I want to dive into the topic of the masculine and feminine within all of us. And it should go without saying, I think most people get the concept that every human being has a masculine and a feminine essence, right? For example, I will often hear from women saying, you know, how do I get him to be more masculine or in his masculine? And I will hear men saying, you know, I really want her to be in her feminine more. And, you know, what they're asking for is they're asking for the attributes of an individual's masculine and feminine, that they're attracted to, that they're drawn to, but it becomes troublesome when it starts to be a situation where we're using this as sort of a faux critique or faux complaint about how our partners are showing up. And it should be noted, most people get this, that we all have a masculine and a feminine, every human being has one. Over the last 50 years or so, men have been cultivating their feminine, their capacity to feel, their capacity to intuit, their capacity to flow, their capacity to express, you know, all of these beautiful feminine attributes that, you know, often come more naturally to a human being that is more identified with their feminine. And women or, however, one identifies themselves. And at the same time, over the last 50, 60 years or so, women have been cultivating their own masculine in a certain way. They've been, you know, they've been entering into the workforce since the feminism of the 1970s. They've been, you know, more into drive, more into meditation, more into goal setting, more, you know, there's more women in personal development. There's more women in certain kinds of yoga, like Kundalini yoga, for example, which is a more masculine, traditional yoga. And so, you know, there have been, we've been cultivating men and women, you know, coming out of the 50s, you know, where there was the kind of standard household setup where the man made the money and went to work and the woman, you know, stayed at home and took care of the kids. And, you know, that, after the 60s and the 70s, that got turned on its head. And in a very healthy way, men started to say, "No, I don't want to just, you know, work all day in an office and, you know, die at 70 from a heart attack. I want to, I want to be in the world. I want to, I want to flow more. I want to express more." You know, men started, you know, playing drums and growing their hair long and becoming more in touch with flow. And, you know, even more recently, men have been experimenting with more, you know, quote unquote, feminine medicines, feminine rituals like ayahuasca. And so, you know, over the last 50 years, men have expanded their capacity to express their feminine traits, their feminine essences. And this is, this is healthy, right? Women have entered the workplace and are, you know, continuing to drive towards equality in the workplace, although they still have, you know, a long way to go, depending on who you talk to. However, under 30, for example, women make more money than men, right? And that's probably going to continue to trend in the other way. Pretty soon it'll be under 40. Women make more money than men, at least in the United States. So, you know, there's been this kind of rebalancing of our internal capacities and our, and our internal traits that has been incredibly healthy. The problem has come up in the relational space where oftentimes the feminine attributes that a man cultivates are antithetical to what a feminine partner is attracted to and vice versa. And the masculine attributes that a woman, for example, cultivates are often less attractive to a masculine identified man. And so we have these relationships where there's, there's more kind of equality than polarity. And it often causes resentment and often causes infidelity. It often causes this kind of quiet desire for something more from our partners. And I hear this all the time in the workshops spaces that I lead, but I think there's a much more what I really want to get in today is that there's a much more nuanced approach to understanding and navigating our internal masculine and our internal feminine. And then navigating the internal masculine and the internal feminine of our partners. And as I think, you know, we're at the stage of evolution where we're getting much more balanced internally, right? Jung would call this, you know, we're we're owning our anima and our animus in a more healthy way. But it's still very vague. And one of the questions I get a lot is how to navigate these things in relationship and in relationship with our partners. So I really want to dive into that today unpack as much of it as I can in the 45 minutes that I have with you and hopefully give you some tools that will help you understand. You know how your internal masculine operates and what it craves and how it expresses and how it rests and how it gets nourished and how your internal feminine creates expresses gets nourished and expresses itself. So I think that the best place to start is to kind of outline, you know, what is the feminine within us? What is the masculine within us? And what are the various levels or David data would call these stages and much of my model for this has come from David data. And a really beautiful job of outlining, you know, what he called the first stage masculine, a second stage masculine and a third stage masculine and what he called a first stage feminine, second stage feminine and a third stage feminine. And each of these stages has different traits and different attributes. And you know, but what he didn't get into a lot that I think is really crucial now is what's happening within. You know, if we take out the heteronormative gender, you know, cisgender framework and we start to look at what's really going on in relationships, you have a lot of men who have very highly developed and highly attuned feminine bodies. Some of them have very highly attuned feminine emotional bodies. And so you can imagine what will happen in a relationship is you have a man, for example. And this could be in same sex relationships. This could be in, you know, heterosexual relationship. It really doesn't matter. You have one partner, the masculine identified partner, who has a very strong feminine emotional component, a feminine emotional body we would say. I happen to be one of those men. I was raised by all women for whatever reason, you know, my emotional body is more feminine. And I'll explain what all this means, but you can imagine that when my partner also has a feminine emotional body, there can be conflict, right? There's less polarity and there's more conflict or there's more resonance that happens, which will oftentimes affect the level of attraction, let's say, in the relationship or the level of understanding. Because when my partner is in her feminine emotional body, she generally wants me to be in my masculine holding space, right? With being witness to her feminine emotional body. But if we're in a conflict and her feminine emotional bodies lit up, and I'm also in my feminine emotional body, then I'm not able to hold space for her. I want to express and flow and identify with the emotions and identify with the sensations. And so now you have these sort of two people wanting to both both be witnessed, both be held, but who are both wanting to express, both wanting to a moat, both wanting to feel deeply, and it creates a lot of conflict. So I'll unpack this a little bit more, but let's just start with this idea that each of us has David calls it a first, second, and third stage masculine and feminine. I like to think of it in this way. There's a self centered part of us, right? The first stage of us is the one that's concerned with self, right? What we want, right? And then the second stage or the healthy, I would call it part of us that's concerned with the collective, and that collective could be a relationship that collective. could be a community, it also concerned with health, right? Healthy, you know, emotional maturity, capacity to express ourselves, to communicate what we're feeling, what we need, what we desire. Those are all really healthy traits of our individual masculine and feminins. Then there is what I would call a sacred masculine and a sacred feminine. And each of these levels or stages as David would call them have different traits and different attributes. You know, I've added my own sort of special sauce to this based on, you know, David wrote about this 20-some-odd years ago. And what I've seen in relationship since then is that they're much more fluid. Both partners are living in a very fluid masculine and feminine experience. And it's not rigid where one person is always in there, you know, always wants to be in their feminine or always wants to be in their masculine. And so what you have is this kind of fluid dance going on rather than sort of a static, you know, the man is always in his masculine and the woman's always in her feminine, etc., etc. Okay. So let's start with the masculine. Let's start with breaking down the three levels or traits of the masculine. In the first level, the masculine in all of us, now this is true for all humans, right? The masculine in all of us is really concerned with getting more freedom. Now that freedom could look like financial freedom, making a lot of money, that freedom could look like, you know, freedom to live a certain purpose or dharma in the world, or mission in the world, freedom to, you know, freedom of schedule, you know, freedom from demand. That's a big one for the masculine in all of us, right? And just ask a mother of three, you know, if her masculine is craving, you know, time with no demand, and I can guarantee she will say, yes. So, you know, we all have these traits and the masculine in all of us, when we're concerned with self, when we're concerned with self, and that's all I mean by self-centered, I'm not putting any judgment to that term. When we're concerned with self, our masculine is generally concerned with freedom and how we get freedom and how we feel more free and how we're less encumbered by life's burdens and demands. In the healthy masculine, the healthy masculine is about creating spaces of healing containers, I would call them, for the collective, let's say for the relationship, for example. So a healthy masculine example would be, you know, if there's trouble in my relationship, my healthy masculine wants to seek support, finding a therapist, for example, or finding a workshop for us to attend to, or helping to lead us in a process to clear resentments, or, you know, talk about our desires or talk about our needs, right? That is a healthy masculine expression. I am wanting to free that impulse to free is being used in a healthy way, because what I'm trying to do, if I'm in a healthy masculine, is I am trying to free love from the constraints of either conflict or limitations by creating some process or some container that helps to support that. So my my desire for freedom, my innate masculine desire for freedom rather than it being about freedom for myself, less demand, more freedom to do what I want, etc., etc., my desire for freedom is now focused on us. How do I free us from this dynamic, for example, that's not working, or how do I free us from some sort of sexual limitations, or, you know, glass ceiling that we're hitting, some upper limit, you know, that we're hitting. And so the masculine call for freedom is focusing on what helps us be more free, right? In the sacred stage of masculinity, that masculine in me is free in and of itself, and is a yes to what is happening in front of me, right? So the sacred masculine in me, when I'm in a sacred masculine space, I don't need anything to be different. My partner's expression is beautiful for me to witness, even if it's directed at me, for example, and I'm not needing anything to be different in this moment in order to be freedom, right? The sacred masculine is about literally being freedom, embodying freedom, transmitting freedom, liberating love from a moment where love might be trapped, right? And so my, I'm not seeking freedom now when I'm in the, when I'm in the sacred stage of my masculinity or what David Dada would call the third stage, I'm not seeking freedom by way of something needing to change in my environment. I don't need more money to be free. I don't need our relationship to be different in that moment to be free. I don't need anything to be free because I am connected to the innate freedom within me, the inherent freedom within me, right? And the masculine in all of us, the sacred masculine in all of us, is tethered to and tapped into and an expression of consciousness itself, which is by its very nature free and infinitely expansive. So in my sacred masculine, I am tapped into consciousness. I am aware of awareness. I am wider in my capacity to be with what's happening in the environment, what's happening with me. So there's not a need for anything to change. All right, I hope that makes sense. So turning to the feminine now, the first stage of the feminine is also concerned with self, right? And the first stage of feminine is also a self-centered stage. Again, not self-centered in a bad way, but just self-focused, right? What do I want? Right? And normally, if I'm in my feminine, if any human is in their feminine, is more identified with their feminine in that moment, that's what it means to be in my feminine. It means I'm more identified with my feminine in that moment. I'm concerned about love. I'm concerned about love, how I experience love, how love gets experienced in my body. I will often be looking for something to change in my relationships or my romantic relationship, or I will want something to be different. Likely, that shows up like I would want something from you. I'd want you to feel different. I want you to treat me different. I want you to give me more of what I want so that I feel more loved. And it's nothing, there's nothing wrong with it, right? There's nothing absolutely wrong with it, but it is a self-focused state. It is a self-focused stage in the healthy feminine, the healthy feminine. I am, or any human is, focused now on love, on the flow of love, right? So it might be about hearing each other's desires, or it might be about sharing feelings with each other, or it might be, you know, it's a reciprocal space of love, right? It's the healthy feminine in me is concerned with the space of love in the collective, in the relationship. And so I'm going to try to do what I can in that state to allow the flow of love more space and to return to the flow of love. And, you know, oftentimes this again takes the space of, you know, couples therapy, for example, or relationship workshops, or certain kinds of expressions of desire for there to be more of a flow of love. And it's often, you know, it often is expressed through words, through dialogues, through expressing one's feelings. There's a very, let's call it healthy and kind and light and polite oftentimes, exchange of information for the sake of love, right? For the sake of love. As a human being in my sacred feminine, meaning I've kind of transcended what I want and what we want, right? What we might want as individuals or as a couple. And I'm really now feeling what love wants in the moment. I'm really focused on what love wants. Love might want me to weep so that my partner feels my true heart. Love might want me to express my frustration in a certain way. Love might want me to express desire in a certain way. And we're really focused in this sacred feminine with the elevation of love, with the liberation of love, right? And so in the sacred feminine, love is really what decides. Not my preferences, not your preferences, not even really our patterns or habits in the relationship, but something greater. Love. And when I'm in a sacred feminine space, I am a stand for that. I am an expression of that. So, you know, it's important to understand that we're moving up and down in and out of all three of these states all the time. You know, we're constantly moving from the space of what I want and need to, especially for in relationship, what we need, you know, for there to be more love. And then, you know, in a sacred space we're really concerned with what love is demanding from us. And oftentimes what love is demanding from us will be a little more of a stretch or a little more uncomfortable than how we're used to being in the world. So let me take a step back and really define, you know, the masculine and feminine, you know, as I use it and as I was taught it and how I teach it. And so the masculine in all of us is consciousness itself, is consciousness the infinite and unchanging space within the essence of being that needs nothing, that never changes, that is the space through which this experience of living emerges. Like, I wouldn't know that I'm here making a podcast where I'm not conscious. And if I was not conscious, none of my experience would have any reference point. But because I am consciousness, we all are consciousness, we're aware that we're in experience all the time. We're aware that we're having experience. And so one of the, you know, classic masculine practices of meditation is to turn my awareness to the part of me that's aware, to turn my awareness to consciousness itself, itself, which lives and resides in me. Any good meditator will know that it's a very blissful meditative practice, you know, for all humans, but something that men have done, you know, and created, you know, 5,000, 10,000, thousands of years now, right? Okay. So, if a feminine in all of us is everything that is changing, everything that is being experienced, so if consciousness is this field of awareness that we all have, that is, let's call it the witness to experience, right? Or the field of consciousness that experiences kind of emerging out of, right? Let's call consciousness the witness to experience, right? And experience is the feminine, always changing, moment to moment, never the same, you know, trillions of processes happening in our body all the time. Life moving, air moving, chemical changes, atmospheric changes, magnetic changes, people moving, people, people living, right? Life itself is the feminine, right? And the experience of life in its moving, changing, always being different, always being felt, always being expressed, always being in some form of experience, that is the feminine. So, when we are more identified with the experience of our life, we're more identified with the sensations in our body, we're more identified with the thoughts in our head, we're more identified with the emotions in our heart, right? We're more identified with what's happening in our environment in any moment. We're more in our feminine, we're more in our feminine, we're more connected to the feminine, experience itself. When we are able to be witness to, when we're able to be directive of, right? When we're able to hold space for experience, we are more identified in our masculine. So, a couple examples of this could be a very simple one, could be when somebody is having a heightened emotional state, right? And they're feeling something, their feelings are hurt or they're angry or they're frustrated or they're in grief or they're in joy. They're in the experience of emotional being, they're in life, right? And they're having that experience, they're identified with that experience, they're expressing it fully, they're practicing their own feminine. So for example, it's a good way to look at this. So, let's say I'm having an emotional experience, but I'm clamped up around it. I'm clamped up around it. I'm having an emotional experience, so I'm having this kind of feminine experience, but I'm not fully expressed in it, right? Even though I'm having emotions, we're all having emotions, feelings and sensations all the time, that's going on in me all the time. But the more I'm actually expressing it, feeling it, you know, living it, allowing it to flow, the more I'm in my feminine. And you'll feel this because I'll be more animated and I'll be more expressive and I'll be more emotional and I'll be more just in the experience of life, of energy, right? The feminine is expressed through energy. Consciousness needs no energy, right? So if I am practicing identifying with my masculine more, then I might be having emotions, I might be having feelings, I might be having sensations. My partner might have done something that just heard my feelings, but I'm actually more identified with in that moment, the witness space, the space that is feeling my own emotions. I'm kind of watching them. I'm aware of them. I'm seeing them. I might even be feeling them. I'm feeling them to some degree, but there's a large part of me that is being witness to my experience. In that state, I am more identified with my masculine. I'm more in my masculine. Now the moment I step out of that witness space and then step into the expressive space of being in the experience of having emotions or having feelings or having energy or moving energy, I've now stepped into the feminine. Then I might remember like, "Oh, okay. Let me. There's a lot going on in me right now. Let me witness it. Let me be aware of it. Let me just take a beat and step back and be a witness to the thing that my body, my mind, my heart is experiencing. Now I've stepped back into my masculine." Our capacity to be fluid back and forth between in the experience and being the space from which experience is emerging, this is the quintessential dance of the masculine and feminine within all of us. Of course, there's so much nuance and I'll try to get into it. I'll pick some of the questions that people ask me about these things all the time, but I think that's a really good framework. The thing I need to say about that particularly is that it's gender neutral. It is gender neutral. Now it is often true and I think this is shifting. It's often true that men more often are identified more with their masculine, right? But this is shifting a lot. Men more often are at home and more relaxed and more at ease, at peace in being the witness to experience versus being the experience. But there's still plenty of men who really want to be in the experience, experience life, the experience of feeling, the experience and it's great. Ultimately, what we're looking for is an integration of both. We're looking for an integration of full feeling and full awareness. So when we bring awareness and feeling together, we are integrating our internal masculine and our internal feminine. What that could look like is, wow, I'm aware that I'm hurt. My heart's really aching or I'm very angry and I'm aware that there's these feelings happening but I'm also bringing awareness to those feelings. Now, if I'm in a self-centered state, I might try to manipulate or control you or get you to do something that I believe will free me from this state. I will tell you to act a certain way. Shut up and get in the car, Johnny, for a child, right? That's a classic first stage, right? I'm having this feeling of frustration and so rather than, you know, if I'm in a first stage, I'm kind of, I just want you to do what I want you to do, right? If I'm in a healthy state, I'm aware I'm frustrated and I'm seeking some kind of resolution to the experience, right? I'm seeking some kind of end to the experience or piece of the experience. So I might talk to little Johnny and say, "Hey, Johnny, you know, if you don't get in the car, we're not going to make it to grandma's on time and we're going to be late, you're not going to be able to get cake and we're going to try to communicate. We're going to try to dialogue. We're going to try to reconcile, right? And we're going to try to bring things to an end that way. If I'm in a sacred state, I'm aware I'm feeling frustrated because little Johnny will get in the car, right? But I'm also aware, I'm not so attached to it that I lose a tether to consciousness. So I'm feeling both my experience and I'm feeling something greater than my experience, consciousness greater than my experience. And from that, I'm going to try to make it happen. at some new expression that might be a little more artful or a little more sacred, I might pick Johnny up and throw him over my shoulder and jostle him around and say, "You're getting the car, little man, and I'll put him in the car as I'm playing with him and loving him." That is a sacred, and all this could be, that's a sacred expression of masculinity. All this could be happening in split seconds. We're often not aware of how these things are constantly, how we're moving in and out of these stages, but we can get more aware, but we can craft more awareness. Navigating the masculine and feminine within us is really the first step of learning how to navigate the masculine and feminine within our relationship. Me learning to become, as a man who's masculine, identified, and who knows he has a highly expressive, fiery, feminine emotional body. I have spent a lot of time practicing being witness to my sensations and my emotional bodies and not being reactive to them. When I am in my first stage, I'm reactive to my emotional experience. I'm so identified with experience. I'm so identified with my emotions. They are what's true. They are what's real in my feminine. I do not have the capacity to take a beat. When I'm in a more sacred masculine experience, I'm aware I'm having emotions. I'm actually now practicing doing things like breathing. I might be like, "Woo, starting to get hot." Let me take a breath. In taking a breath, I become less attached to the experience and just a little more detached as a witness to the experience. I'm aware I'm having this experience. It could go wrong or I could really take a beat, take a couple more breaths, feel into what consciousness and love would ask of me in this experience and then move from there. Let's take a look at this from the vista of a feminine identified woman. A feminine identified woman, actually a feminine identified human, is more identified with the experience that they're having. If they're having emotions, then those emotions are the truth. If they're having emotions, their experience and sensations around those emotions are the truth. If they're having emotions, then there are thoughts connected to those emotions. He's an asshole, he's always been an asshole, he does this all the time. Then those thoughts are the truth. The more feminine identified we are, and I see this a lot of women, the more the experience we're having is the truth. One of the challenges that I see and I often will teach women to work with is what happens if you step back from that experience, just like I was talking about with myself and little Johnny, you step back from that experience and you tap into your internal masculine, your awareness. It doesn't mean you don't express the truth or feel the truth. You're just stepping back to look at it. A classic example of this is Byron Katie's The Work. Byron Katie will ask us to look at beliefs for those of you who know the work, a beautiful book, a beautiful process. It's incredibly masculine from the perspective that I'm stating here now. Here's a thought. She's asking us to step back from this thought and examine it from it is it true. Just asking that question gives you distance from the thought and oftentimes the feelings that you're having. One of the challenges that I see with highly feminine identified women, for example, is that their experience is the truth. In many ways it is. It is the truth. The problem will happen when their masculine partner, for example, sees is witnessing and considers it a different truth. Consideres a different truth. We've all had this experience where our truths and our realities are different. Let me return to the internal experience. Another way to think about the internal masculine in a feminine identified woman, for example, is the part of her that can hold space for her experience. Her sacred masculine, this feminine identified woman, has a sacred masculine. That sacred masculine within her is the part of her that can detach from experience enough to literally create space around it, to take a beat and to hold it and to witness it, and to from a space of conscious awareness, examine it. That is a, that's oftentimes a difficult thing. The more feminine identified any human is because the more feminine identified they are, the more the truth is what I'm experiencing. Part of what we need to work with here, as we start to understand our internal masculine and feminine, no matter how we identify sexual ear, gender wise, is to understand the part of us that is attached to experience, and the part of us that is able to detach from experience and be witness to experience. So, how might this work internally? One of the things I see with women that come to my workshops and that I've taught over the years, is that as they identify more and more with their feminine, they're more and more expressed in the truth of their emotional bodies. It might be grief, it might be long-held resentments, it might be trauma or fear. In practicing honoring their feminine more, they will step more and more into the expression, because the feminine is the expression, the energy of being that experience. Expression is just energy of being an experience. And so, the more they step into their feminine, the more they will be that experience. So, they will emote or they will cry or they will wail or they will really own and honor, which is beautiful, their experience. And what's happening in their body and all the sensations and all of the things that need to be expressed. And that's beautiful. But what will often happen when they're not in a held workshop space, is doing that at home will be very difficult and very destabilizing. Why? Because they haven't cultivated their own internal sacred masculine or healthy masculine, in that way, to hold this very deep emotional experience that they're having. So, for example, after a breakup, this isn't an experience I see a lot. After a breakup, I will often encourage women to really feel the feelings, really create a space, create a space. Remember the healthy masculine and all of us creates a space, creates a container where feelings can be expressed, love can be liberated, the feminine in all of us can be honored. And so, I will often encourage women to go home, create a space, take 10 minutes in the morning, put on a song, light some candles, get on the sheep's skin, express, give yourself permission, let your healthy masculine create a container for your own feminine to express fully. And that's often a really helpful and beautiful experience. Also, very true for men, right? Men who have feelings and emotions that they need. But the sacred masculine in her is the internal experience of being able to ground and hold internally her experience, right? To be able to ground and hold internally her experience. It is the consciousness itself within her that is wider than the experience that isn't changed. That's the thing about the sacred masculine is that the sacred masculine is not changed by anything happening. Internally, externally, it's always just there. It's an absolute consciousness is an absolute, just is, right? Life is an absolute, but it's an absolute that is constantly inflow and constantly influx. So learning to understand these parts of ourselves and create tools and rituals that kind of give space for our, you know, feminine expression, for example, all expression is feminine, by the way, for our expression. And give space for what we're feeling. Give space for this kind of emotional experience of having a life and having a heart. Right? These are all really important ways that we can work with our internal masculine and feminine. So let's consider what integration looks like in all of these ways for every human, right? Given we all have a masculine, we all have a feminine, right? So integration is going to look like the, like I said previously, the intersection of feeling and awareness. So if I am having a desire, for example, a full, if I'm having a desire to have awareness, a desire to make love or to be close to you or any of those things. I'm also bringing with that desire an awareness of time and space, of where we are, of where you are, of how you're feeling right now, of how, you know, of where the kids are, for example, of what time of day it is, of how hard you're working, right? I'm bringing awareness with my desire. And I'm also bringing awareness to myself. So rather than pretending I don't have a desire and just kind of locking it down, I'm bringing consciousness itself to the desire I'm having to be close to you. I'm literally meeting my desire with my own awareness and consciousness. I know that sounds so simple, but it's a form of self-love that most people do not practice. Most people, when faced with needs or desires or difficult emotions, will either, you know, kind of just blast them out. I see this in men and women right? Or they will clamp down on them rather than having the experience of bringing their conscious awareness to the sensations that they're having, to the feelings that they're having. And this doesn't take long. This doesn't take long. It could be 30 seconds to a minute of just feeling in your heart like, "Ooh, wow, I'm really longing to be close to my partner. Do I have to do anything about it right now? Maybe, maybe not. You just, maybe you share it, maybe you don't, right? But the integration happens when we moment to moment, and again, this is moment to moment, bring consciousness to the sensation. Most often, that's internal. And so it's a way that we are bringing our innate masculine and our innate feminine together within our unique human bodies in this unique present moment, in this unique experience of being alive. So by making that the first step, we've now got an integrated experience in the moment. So we aren't abandoning ourselves. We aren't pretending we're not having feelings. We're bringing awareness to feelings. We're a yes to whatever those feelings are. We're bringing loving consciousness and awareness to those feelings. Now we get to feel into, we get to feel into from an integrated space. What do we want to do with those feelings? So if I'm in a first stage or self-centered space state, I'm going to feel that integration. I'm just going to do what I want. I'm just going to tell you, like, stop work right now and, you know, come home, right? Might be the right call. Might not be, right? If my orientation is more towards a healthy expression of that feeling desire, then I'm going to communicate it to you. Like, you know, baby, I would, maybe I text you a word. Maybe I'd really love for you to come home at for lunch and, you know, and let's, you know, how do you feel about that? With that work, can you do that, right? You're communicating your desire in a healthy, healthy way, right? In a sacred moment of expression. Again, this is all coming from the place of integration first, from the place of integration first, right? In that healthy moment, you might feel there's some artful and beautiful way for you to express the truth, right? In a way that liberates love in the moment, you might send your partner rather than asking him to come home from work, which you know might be really difficult, right? Or almost impossible or let's say your partner is out of town. You can send them something, right? From this place of fully owning your desire, right? And when I say owning your desire, it just means you're aware, you're not running from the desire, you're aware of the desire, you're feeling the desire, you're bringing awareness and feeling together, then you're expressing it. So it might take the form of sending a sexy picture or sending some, you know, kind of erotic text or some form of I miss you, right? And so that is a more artful, more sacred, I would argue. I use those terms often interchangeably artful and sacred way of expressing the truth of what's happening, right? And what I notice, especially in women, but often in men too, is that there's the tendency to either leap into the expression of what we're feeling or to clamp down on it, you know, like to, you know, to stuff it, to stuff it. Neither of those work. So this capacity to be with our experience in the moment and then decide what love or consciousness, love and consciousness want to do with it. That is the key to integrated and embodied loving and living and not just loving your partner, but also loving yourself. I'll give you an example of how this works for me in my life, in my work, right? So I will often lead workshops of people, you know, having very deep and emotional experiences. And so I'm leading them through practices, some of them are an hour long where, you know, there's all kinds of emotional energy and sexual energy flowing and there's just experience is happening in the workshop. And so having my feminine online so that I can feel what's happening in the workshop, I can feel what's happening in me, I can feel I'm fully tapped into this field of experience that's happening all around me, you know, often 100 plus people. I'm feeling that now if I get to caught up in the feeling of it, I lose my ground, I lose my tether to something greater than the experience. And I'm often kind of swept up by just the energy of the moment. So what I've learned to do over the years is as I'm moving into practices and we're going deeper and deeper into, you know, very expressive and, you know, energetic experiences in the room, I will stop, I will feel the experience of the room, I will often close my eyes and I will feel consciousness literally wrapping itself around the experience in the room. And I will wait, I will wait for an impulse to come through me of where to take them next, of where to go next. Do I slow it down? Do I keep going and ramp it up? Do I just kind of add a little piece here or a little piece there? Those of you that have been in my workshops, kind of know what I'm talking about, right? What do I do? But I don't have, I don't make that decision from a place that's not integrated. I stop, I feel the experience happening all around me and I bring my conscious awareness to it. And then I wait. It's usually not that long, a few seconds. Another example of this, how to work with our own masculine and feminine would be, you know, I come into the house after, you know, after working or after being away. And I feel I can sense in the house, you know, what's happening in this field that I call my home or my family, right? Maybe my partners, you know, stressed out. Maybe my kids are having a rough day. I'm aware I'm feeling my feeling capacity. Maybe I'm having a feeling about what's happening in the house, right? Maybe I don't. Maybe I have an immediate like, my own reaction. So here I am. I'm having a sensation around or an emotion or some sort of reaction, some sort of experience about what's happening in the field of experience called my home. I step into my home. I feel what's happening. I kind of feel where everybody's at. I maybe look at them. I maybe just kind of take it in for a few seconds. I'll stop and I'll allow my conscious awareness to just be there with the experience. So I'm, let's call it 50% of me is feeling the experience. 50% of me is witnessing the experience. And I just wait for some, might just be a few seconds. I'm not saying I stay on there for an hour in the middle of, you know, the middle of doorway, but I just wait and wait for an impulse of what to do. Again, if I'm in a self-centered orientation, that impulse will take the, you know, usually take the shape of something that makes me feel better, something that gives me freedom from demand. If I'm in a healthy space, it'll be something that helps the family feel good and feel, you know, more free and at ease. Right? If I'm in a sacred space, a sacred moment, there will likely be something artful or something that's love directed and be what would, what does love want me to do as I walk into the house? And so this kind of meditative approach to working with our internal masculine and feminine is something that we can work on our entire life. It is like a meditative practice. But if I'm unintegrated, if I'm too detached from experience, so I'll give you another example. So let's say I come home and there's obviously stuff going on in the house. I don't want anything to do with it. I'm going to my man-den to watch baseball. That is me being in a selfish masculine wanting to detach from experience so that I feel more free. Usually that's not going to go over too well with my partner, right? So this is important, right? Or if the other other direction, I'm too attached to experience. I walk in the house, kids are having a hard time, house is a little messy, my partner stressed out. I would then be if I was too attached to experience, I might get reactive. I might get angry. I might get frustrated. I might, you know, I might just kind of get a mood on because I'm so attached to the experience. So watching ourselves as we go through our days and we go through our relationships and we go through our lives to really understand, like, whoa, am I getting so attached to experience that I've lost my capacity to create space around it? Or am I so seeking my own freedom that I detach too much from it? Or am I kind of creating some nice, healthy way to work with it? Which is great. That's great. That's healthy. Or am I, am I tapping into something greater than myself by entering a state of integration and then allowing the question, what would liberate more love? What would create more freedom? Drive my next move. So this is a big chewy topic. And of course, you know, when we come to workshops, there's a lot of time to kind of dissect exactly what I mean in each individual instance. But I wanted to give you a pretty good take on how this works internally, right? How this works internally. Now let's take a look at how this would work in a relational space. Let's take a look at that. And I want to take a look at it just to flip the gender roles for a second. And let's talk about his feminine and her masculine. Because this is often a, you know, a complaint or a question that I get all the time. So let's say you're a masculine identified man, your partner is feminine identified, but she has a very strong masculine. She's got a career. She's driven. She's, you know, she's like supergold oriented. She's in this kind of typical masculine stereotype of, you know, driving, succeeding, getting shit done, building stuff. You know what I mean? Like she's in that. So how might you work with that? How might you? Because I see this all the time. And men often struggle with it. Because in that state of driven, if I'm masculine and she's in her masculine, there's not a lot of sexual juice there. Right? There's not a lot of sexual juice there. So how do I work with that? How would I work with that? Right? Okay. So in my self-centered masculine, I'm probably going to try to control or complain or have some kind of reactive closure to not liking her in that state for too long. Right? I'm going to want her to soften up. I'm going to want her to be more in her feeling body. I'm going to want her to be more juicy. I'm going to want, you know what I mean? If I'm being self-centered, I'm going to want what I want from her. Okay? If I'm in a healthy space, right? Where I'm, you know, she walks in. I can feel her very kind of linear and directed and, you know, in a pretty, you know, strong masculine state. If I'm in a healthy space, I could ask something like you know, I could kind of try to help create a container that will help her transition from that to, you know, to partner and maybe mother and, you know, and mean and just kind of transition out of what she's been holding and driving in her masculine all day into something that's softer and more feminine that is more who I know she is. But so I could run her a bath. I could, you know, give her a glass of wine. I could, you know, sit down and just kind of like be a space for her to share whatever her day was like, let her empty, whatever her day was like. And in doing so, I'm creating sort of a healthy environment, a healthy container for her to transition from her, you know, masculine into her feminine. So let's say I'm in a more sacred spot or more artful spot. I'm integrated in the moment, meaning I'm feeling what I'm feeling, whatever that is, frustration, you know, maybe a little, you know, yeah, maybe a little frustration, maybe a little anxiety. But I'm also conscious, I'm also conscious of what I'm feeling. I'm not attached to it. So I'm not going to be when we're attached to something we react, when we're not attached to something, we take a beat, we take some space to it and we give ourselves space to make a different choice. Right. I think most of us understand that. So let's say my partner walks in from work. She's super, you know, just, you know, whatever linear directed like really in her masculine very much in a space that, you know, is kind of harder, right? So what could I do with my body, with my heart, with my practice, let's call it, that would artfully help her transition from that state into a more feminine state. Now this is assuming, of course, that this would serve her and serve the relationship, or say, I mean, so for example, if she's coming home from work like that, but I know she's got three more hours of work that she's got to do, me transitioning around of that state into another state is not going to be helpful for her. But assuming that, you know, her transition is good for her and her body and for her, you know, heart and what she would probably appreciate anyway, then my artful approach is usually spot on. You know, sometimes you'll make mistakes and sometimes, you know, sometimes it won't be, but more often than not, you know, your intuitive hit is right. So she walks in the house, I'm feeling, feeling experience, right? I'm feeling experience. So if I am connected to consciousness, again, that field of awareness that's witnessing experience, I am in a sacred masculine integrated sacred masculine space. She's coming in, she's in a different sort of masculine, one that I would consider as a little more, you know, in the self-directed state. So I'm actually out-masculining her by being more aware and more spacious internally. I hope that makes sense. This is all very energetic and I've just seen it enough times to know that it's true, right? And in that space, I wait, I feel her, you know, say I feel her, I feel the experience, I feel where she's at, I feel where I'm at, I'm kind of a yes to wherever this moment is. And then I get to allow for some kind of inspiration of what would make this moment even, what would liberate more love in this moment, what would liberate more freedom in this moment, what would elevate consciousness in this moment? Hell, I don't know what that would look like. Maybe it looks like me, you know, taking the books or the briefcase off of her, setting it down, you know, giving her a glass of wine. Maybe it looks like me, you know, kind of calling her over, it comes it down, comes it down, right? Tell me about your day, maybe it's touch, maybe I come up to her and I press my belly into her and I give her a hug and I just take a few breaths with her and I help kind of use my body to help down-regulate her nervous system. You know, maybe I'm playful with her, maybe I do something that's playful or funny or, you know, maybe I tussle with her a little bit. But the idea is that I'm coming from a place of trying to make art, right? I'm not coming from a place of reactivity. I'm not coming from a place of, I want my partner to be different in this moment. I'm saying, here's where my partner is. Let me feel this moment in me and in her in this space fully and just allow for something that liberates love, celebrates love, elevates consciousness to emerge as an inspiration in me. That is practicing the sacred masculine with my feminine partner's mask. If this makes sense, right? And it does for most people, I get it. Let's flip it. Let's flip it. So let's say your masculine partner is in a highly emotional state. Just really hurt, really hurt. Maybe something you did, maybe something somebody else did, who knows? But he's in a highly emotional state. He's more identified with his feminine. He doesn't have the capacity in that moment to take space and create feel consciousness holding his emotions because he's so fucking in them that he is them. That's a good way to look at when we're highly in our feminine. We are our experience. We are our emotion. So he's in a highly emotional state. You as his feminine partner could do a couple things, right? In that state, in this instance, maybe it's better for you to activate your spacious, conscious masculine or your healthy masculine and create a container for him to be fully expressed, right? Because the feminine in all of us just wants to be expressed and seen. And so if you're in your masculine, helping him be expressed and seen and held in his deep emotion, his feminine, his deep emotional experience, you are now activating your own healthy and sacred masculine. So that might look like something like that. like, wow, my love, I can see you're super, I can see you're really, really upset. Do you wanna take just two or three minutes and just tell me, just like dump it out, just narrate what's going on? I'm just gonna sit here and hold space for you and you just get it out. What have you done? What are you doing in that moment? As that is your healthy masculine, creating a container for his feminine might be wild feminine, right? He might be super emotional, but you're creating a container. Wow, take a couple, three minutes and just dump it out. What are you upset about? Is it upset about me? Is it upset about life? Is it upset about whatever? And you're holding space for that. You've now entered the realm of a healthy masculine partner, even though you are a woman who's primarily feminine identified, you following me on this, right? You're activating that tool. My partner's really good at this. So I'll give an example of it in a second. But so let's say you are, you know, you are feeling more, you're coming from this place of what would make art? How could we make this moment sacred, this experience? He's upset. I'm integrated, I'm feeling my feelings and I'm also bringing awareness, conscious awareness to this moment through my body, right? I'm integrated. How do I make this moment sacred? And you sit with that. Who knows what's going to come to you? That's the thing. There's no formula for this stuff. This is about you dropping into a state and allowing something greater, a deeper form of inspiration to come through you. So that might look like my love. I'm going to get a pillow and you are going to beat that pillow and get all of this out until you collapse on the floor. And you are now helping him fully express, maybe he expresses all the things, maybe he just pounds on the pillow and then drops into tears and expresses, you know, some deep ache or pain in his heart. A lot of men really need this to be totally honest with you. You've just now made, you've taken a moment and made it more sacred, meaning you've freed love, you've freed expression, you've freed consciousness, you've freed what was sort of trapped in him by helping to guide him to the space of fully expressing and owning what he was feeling while witnessing it, while holding space for it, while not needing it to be different. Your sacred masculine created a container for him where nothing needed to be different, it only needed to be fully expressed and met with your conscious love. That is a way that you can support your masculine partner in a deeply feminine moment by entering into your healthy and sacred masculine. Now, the iterations of this are endless. Could this, there's lots of interesting sexual iterations to this as well. But for now, let's just really start to get connected to the infinite amount of possibilities that we have to support each other in this relational fluidity, in this energetic fluidity. We are all attached to experience, identified with experience at times. And we all have the capacity to be the witness, to be detached from experience enough to know what would liberate more love and consciousness, whoever is in that state, whichever partner, right? And again, this works the same for same sex partners, whichever partner is in the space of, let's take a beat, let's feel what's going on, let's just take a moment and really feel what needs to happen for there to be more love, for there to be elevated consciousness, for there to be full expression. That person is in the more sacred masculine. Whoever is in the state of full expression, of expressing the truth of their heart, of letting their body be fully, let's call taken by experience, right? That person is in the sacred feminine. The sacred feminine is about full expression of what's true. The sacred masculine is about being in full reverence to what's true, not just acceptance, not just tolerance, but reverence of it, right? And then from that place of reverence, the sacred masculine helps to kind of guide and nudge and direct, you know, to love's liberation, consciousness's elevation, et cetera, et cetera. And there's so much more to this, right? I mean, it's not just that any, you know, the more we're inexperienced, the less capable of directing, we are. All of us, all of us. I mean, think of yourself in a highly emotional state. How well are you able to make decisions, right? The person who's detached from the emotional state is likely in that moment, little better to guide. Even if that guiding is, hey, come sit down, let me make your cup of tea, you know, come sit down and tell me what's bothering you. Beat this pillow and I'm just gonna cheer you on and love you while you do this, right? So these are just a few examples of A, how we can, you know, summarize what I've gone through today because this is a lot, right? We're getting into, like I said, pretty meaty topics here. But there's so much misconception around our masculine and feminine and how it exists in each of us and how we can use it and should use it to support each other. I really felt it important to at least, and again, this is about this much. It's about this much on this topic. You could go, we could go so much deeper with it. And if you do wanna go deeper with it, the embodied relationship experience is a great way to do that. There are thousands of hours of content on things like this and other topics like this. There are many, many practices about cultivating your own sacred masculine and sacred feminine that I suggest all humans do, not just men and women, doing their own masculine and feminine practices. So the embodied relationship experience, which is a real easy subscription service that we have, it's a lot of great stuff in there. And there's a seven day trial for free, so you can go in there, gorge on what you like, get what you like, and then piece out. So I wanted to touch on this and I do think, please send me any questions that come up around this. Please send me any topics of brownness that you want me to dive deeper into, because I feel like this is one of those things as we evolve, relationally, as we evolve relationally, we are learning how to become more integrated as whole human beings with masculine and with feminine, with sacred masculine, with sacred feminine, with healthy masculine, with healthy feminine. Even the part of us that are, you know, even the self-centered masculine and self-centered feminin, is like these are all beautiful parts of ourselves. It all just really depends on where we're coming from, right? So, you know, to start with a place of internal integration, what am I feeling? How aware am I of the feeling? And can I just be a yes to this experience without being taken over by the experience? And then from there, kind of deciding which part of you you want to bring online. Do I want to bring the part of me that's more emotive and expressive? Is that what the moment's calling for? Do I want to bring the part of me that's, you know, a little more, you know, this capable of holding space and kind of guiding? Do I want to bring that part? Do I need more conscious awareness in this moment? Or do I need to feel more? And these are all questions that we can ask ourselves as we go through our lives, we go through our days in ways that really honor, you know, our masculine and feminine. I like this framework because it really simplifies it, right? It takes away any value judgment from it. And of course, you know, every moment has different experiences. I think a really beautiful example, I'll give an example from my life. You know, I came home the other day and my partner who was in her feminine, who literally like had made Rose T and laid out a bunch of tarot cards by the fireplace and was there on the sheepskin drinking Rose T and just like really in a beautiful kind of feminine, her feminine practice of making tea and reading tarot, right? And I came home and I was grouchy as fuck. I was just, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I told her, so let me break this down. So I sat down and I said, wow, I am really grouchy. And I asked her permission, I said, hey, can I just vent? So men, if you're with a partner who's in their feminine, don't just dump your feminine on them. Don't just dump your emotional, don't just dump your experience on them. Ask permission. So I asked permission, I sat down and said, can I just vent for a few minutes? What did I do in that moment? I asked her permission, basically I'm asking her permission to come out of her feminine, which she just spent, you know, 30, 40 minutes dropping into and hold space for me, be in her masculine for a moment while I went into my feminine. I then vented, which she said yes, which she often does, almost always does. And so she just kind of held space for me and watched me lovingly while I just vented, what was bothering me and what was hurting me and what I was upset about. And it went on for two or three or four minutes and she held space. So because she also is well versed in this and has a tremendous amount of experience. this amount of feeling awareness and has integrated her masculine and feminine in many ways, she felt there was something more that I needed in order to really liberate love in order to be fully expressed in order to be unbound from these feelings that were kind of chaining me. So she said after I vented for a few minutes, she said, "Why don't you just take a couple minutes and just fully express what you're feeling." And my original response was like, "I don't want it, I don't want it." But she kind of held her ground, like any good masculine partner. She held her ground and she's like, "No, no, no, I think you really do need to express this." And so I got on my knees and I just started to pound on my chest and I just started to express. Like, she gave me permission to go deeper into my feminine, deeper into my experience, deeper into what I was feeling. She gave me permission to let go of my own masculine and let her hold it. And then I could just go into my feminine and that, and I just did two or three minutes of pounding on my chest and primal screaming and I got all of what I needed to get out, out. Right? And that is a really beautiful example of how this kind of fluidity can work between cisgendered heterosexual couples, same sex couples, it doesn't fucking matter. What matters is that we are becoming aware and we're becoming skilled in understanding what the masculine and the feminine in each of us brings. Brings to a moment, brings to love, brings to each other, brings to ourselves. So I hope this has been a useful topic for you. I again invite you to come to the embodied relationship experience if you want to get more of this or you want to dive into some of the practices that I talk about here. But until then, thank you very much. I also think, you know, if you want to get deeper into this topic, I write about it a lot. The book I published last year by Sounds True is called From the Corn. I go a lot into the masculine, the feminine, integrated masculine, integrated feminine. And so if you want more on that, you can check out that book as well. Otherwise, I'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.