Feminine Principle
Embodying the Sacred Feminine: Leaving Room To Be
Awakening is the process of contacting the feminine principle, the sacred feminine, the spaciousness.
Most people think ‘I’ve got to work on unfoldment’, ‘I’ve got to meditate more’. Or ‘I’ve got to do yoga for unfoldment’. Maybe we think, ‘I’ve got to work out all my family, social and cultural conditioning in order to awaken’.
These things are all true, but awakening pertains to being, in addition to doing.
The Empty Room, Doing Nothing
Put it this way: the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, ‘All suffering stems from the inability to sit in an empty room doing nothing’.
It means that no matter what you are doing, whether it is the cops breaking down your door, or the dogs barking at you on the street, you are still in an empty room doing nothing. It is that feminine aspect – that no matter what is going on there is an empty me, in an empty room nothing doing.
And then from there the fullness and the interaction of the male, the Rama, or Shiva, can go to work. But without that spaciousness it’s rape, it’s aggression, it’s the destruction of the sacred feminine, which is why the sacred feminine has been kicking her heels up louder and louder every generation.
Now she is doing it environmentally, with extreme weather events and natural disasters. This is part of the sacred feminine too, in the destructive form of the goddess Kali or Phalden Lhamo.
In our disregard for the environment, we can see that we’ve been so busy ‘doing’ that we don’t have much time for ‘being’.
Leaving Room to ‘Be’
So the question is not ‘to be or not to be’. You already ‘be’ – the question is where do things go wrong? It is mostly because we do not leave room ‘to be’. So all of our ‘doing’ gets driven by object-clinging–trying to do or get something–rather than a more natural unfoldment.
Desire can’t always be solved by attacking the problem, or by trying to possess, or controlling the object. Sometimes we need an entirely different mode, one in which the self is relinquished instead of indulged. We may find a feeling of wholeness through subtraction rather than addition. This is why the word ‘Islam’ means ‘surrender’.
You can’t always get what you want by getting it. Sometimes you have to get what you want by letting go of it, or relinquishing it–not necessarily renouncing it but just letting it be. And then often when you give more space to manifest, and more space to work, you will find that there is a natural rhythm, or a natural timing.
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Doug Duncan & Catherine Pawasarat are modern day teachers of transcendence. Their work with students draws upon Buddhist, Western Mysteries, modern psychology and other traditions.
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