The Merging of the Worlds, collage 2010 by Licia Berry, copyright Licia Berry 2010
I know summer’s not over yet, but I’m already seeing a pattern and giving it a theme; for me, this is the summer of the masculine.
What do I mean by that? I experience that I have both feminine and masculine energy within me; I believe this is true for everyone. I am not talking about male/female when I say feminine/masculine. I’m talking about feminine and masculine principles, the yin/yang or qualities of energy that serve equal and opposite functions and create and sustain physical reality.
I am aware through my own 45 years of being a keen observer of human behavior (as well as working my own inner process like a scientist in a laboratory) that these two energies, when in harmony and balance, are the foundation and the key to living a physical life in beauty. I am also aware that when these two energies are not in harmony or balance that they reveal how we make choices that are imbalanced and unsupportive of the Whole.
If you’ve been reading my work for the last several years, you know that I have been working very intensively with the Sacred Feminine and Great Mother to find Her, feel Her, experience Her and embody Her in my life, all in the name of informing my inner feminine about how to live in balance. She has been very present and anchored within my consciousness and my physical existence, so it was time to do the same for my inner masculine as well… after all, I’m the one who is constantly taking about balance, right?
So I started bringing my inner eye to my masculine energy a couple of years ago, and it has been astonishing to discover who my inner masculine is. I have found many faces of my earthly father, grandfathers, uncles, other father figures and cultural faces of the masculine. These faces exhibit qualities that I would consider helpful and supportive of my life and the Whole, and others that are not. It’s been my intention to heal the places in me that exhibit behaviors that are not.
My 24-year relationship with my Beloved has been a laboratory for this work as well; while everything starts at the Source, meaning inside us, the next level out is the intimate relationship we have. Peter and I have been learning about Sacred Union with each other all of these years, but it has taken an interesting turn for the better since I initiated my quest for internal M/F balance. His own process has been deeply impacted as well as our relationship. This is the way it works in any system; when a change is introduced, the system must them adjust and re-balance to accommodate the change.
I am in the midst of (eyeball deep as a matter of fact) a writing project that was initiated by the art that came through me in May and June of this year. These art pieces, while at first seemingly a pictorial history of the feminine and masculine energies, are now revealing a deeper story to me each day as I go to the studio. They whisper of how the feminine and masculine energies originally emerged to play in this universe, how they moved apart to imbalance, and how to bring them back together in Sacred Union. It has been shown to me why we must embody the feminine first in order to bring the masculine into balance. I’m told that the amazing era that we are entering (albeit bumpily, with some turbulence), is an era of Balance, a return to the equal partnership of the feminine and masculine principles. My summer has been devoted to recording what these pieces are telling me.
But, like everything else I do, this project is intimately tied with how I work with my inner process. As I am recording this fantastic story, it is changing me. My consciousness is expanding to include the new information, and as a result, my inner masculine and inner feminine are moving together; this movement is creating some interesting dynamics! And none so interesting as the movement this summer.
And so I will be reporting in periodically about how it’s going with my “inner lovers”. As I write for my Sacred Union project, I’ll be sharing some of my discoveries about what imbalanced masculine or feminine energy looks like, how they look when they are balanced, and how to bring them to that place within. Because when we are balanced within, we bring more balance to the world, yes?
