WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FEMININE TO LET GO AND FULLY FEEL WHILE BEING RECEIVED BY THE MASCULINE

Anna Margolis
6 min readSep 24, 2019

--

Note: There’s a link to the video at the bottom of this post

On Sunday morning I woke up with a noticeable feeling of uneasiness inside my body.

It wasn’t a physical kind of discomfort, and there weren’t any obvious personal thought loops that I was noticing myself experiencing; so I lay back, watching my mind flit from thought to thought, seeking a logical explanation or some kind of personal scarcity-related “problem” to land upon.

But there wasn’t one.

So after a few minutes, my mind settled into the silence of the fruitlessness of its labour.

But within my body the undeniable sense of uneasiness persisted.

So I lay there in quiet contemplation, curious what the sensations were seeking to convey.

Paul and Diana came into my room and climbed into bed for a loving morning snuggle. Diana shuffled up behind me to spoon me and I could feel the uneasiness amplify in the experience of connection.

I stared silently into space and made the choice that, rather than hopping out of bed and heading for the rowing machine to move whatever it was forcibly, I would stay with the sensation until it revealed itself.

Paul inquired how I slept and I heard myself reluctantly respond with,

“Not bad.”

Even as I said it, I could feel the distant wellspring of emotion that was nestled under the surface of those two words.

Diana picked up on my energy and sweetly and with genuine curiosity asked “So, how you doin’?”

“I can feel that there’s emotion under the surface but I don’t know what it is or what it’s about……….” I said, the first tears starting to break the surface.

“It feels like a deep and intense……….anger. Like, I need to go crazy on the punch bag in the basement or to smash a whole bunch of stuff up.”

Paul half-jokingly responded with, “It’s probably the thousands of years of suppression and patriarchy.”

In hearing those words come out of his mouth, I started to see a sequence of imagery repeatedly moving through my inner awareness and my head began to hurt.

I sat up in bed, clutching my aching head between my hands.

Paul came and sat on the bed opposite me and asked me if I wanted him to hold me.

The response out of my mouth was “Yes and no.”

“No offence, but as the masculine you’re kind of the problem. Not you personally, obviously, but the masculine.”

And I began to sob, still clutching my head.

I shared the sequence of imagery I was seeing with Paul and Diana.

It was a vertical line and a horizontal line, representing the first and second dimensions.

Swiftly followed by a flurry of videos, articles and posts on social media, each pointing to a string of cognitive frameworks and mental models of reality.

And then it was the imagery of 16 year old Greta Thunberg and the millions of people marching for climate change.

And then, in a split second, I felt myself fully surrender, letting go of any remnants of resistance born of self-judgment or self-consciousness for what was clearly cresting into my experience.

And as the emotional dam broke, a relative tsunami of feminine emotional expression poured forth in its full, unmitigated, unmodified, messy, glory.

The full force of the Feminine was present and she wanted to be HEARD!

And the message was loud and clear.

The way out of humanity’s current existential predicament is NOT merely through a meeting of minds.

While the feminine is more than capable of tip-toeing through a quagmire of cognitive dialogue, traversing a minefield of non-violent communication and squeezing herself through the scaffolding of a variety of complex mental models and frameworks to meet the masculine in the mind space, the mind isn’t the appropriate receiver for the critical signal at this time.

Right now the message needs to be received by and felt in the Heart.

If we’re to stand any chance of navigating to a higher dimension of reality together, then the mind isn’t equipped to shift out of the groove of the current timeline to move humanity into the possibility of a different existential outcome.

The mind is stuck in a linear reality, where our collective destruction is still an inevitability and the clock is ticking.

And in this current timeline of reality, Mama Gaia is livid!

She is enraged about the level of entitlement that continues to fuel the extraction economy, and of the Feminine essence being raped and pillaged for her resources.

She is furious that there’s so little receptivity and so much conditionality around her expression from the masculine and, even as millions march in protest, that her pain is not yet being felt.

And she has had ENOUGH!

So on this timeline, the clock IS ticking.

And she is taking no prisoners.

But it’s only when we can FEEL the impact that the patriarchy has had on the feminine, when we can open our hearts and empathise with her pain, in recognition of our intrinsic connectivity to her and to all of Nature, that we can hope to create the kind of new possibilities that can truly shift anything at scale.

And as I allowed myself to fully embody the macro Feminine expression this morning, I heard my mind try to rationalise that some people are going to make it and some people aren’t. That those who don’t choose it, or don’t open their hearts, aren’t my concern.

And on one level, that’s true.

But then, as you’ll see at the beginning of this video, my heart could powerfully feel my connection to those people too and revealed how much, in this moment, moving beyond the mind to a deeper level of connection to our shared humanity really matters.

I’ve never publicly released a video of a deep internal process before. Let alone one where I’m in bed naked.

And Diana has never been moved to take one.

But in her being moved to press record on this occasion, I’m trusting that it’s time to surrender to sharing with the world how it’s ok for the feminine to feel and express this depth and intensity of emotional expression, especially at this critical juncture in human history.

And I’m also trusting that it’s valuable to show what it means for the masculine, through how you see Paul show up in this video, to meet the feminine in that.

Note how Paul doesn’t collapse in the face of the emotion.

He doesn’t take it personally.

He doesn’t place any conditions on when or how it should come out.

Nor does he get defensive and argumentative.

Or seek to avoid or deny the emotion.

Nor does he try to mitigate or fix it.

He simply receives me in the fullness of it, with total unwavering masculine presence and the gratitude I feel for the consistent gift of that in my experience is evident.

And so for all those women out there who have spent their days downplaying their emotions or modifying their behaviour and expression so as not to: inconvenience, upset or scare anyone, look messy, be a burden, be judged as too much, get abandoned or rejected, look weak, or create impact, in order to fit into a patriarchal Game A world, I offer this video in service to normalising the exasperation, despair and (yes, even) rage that comes from our emotions and expression being consistently avoided, shoved down, edited out or pushed aside in a predominantly masculine structured, productivity-focussed world.

And in being this transparent and this vulnerable, I know that I risk being perceived as the kind of “overly emotional woman” that would be hard to sit down and have a rational conversation with about our existential situation.

But I invite you to consider that maybe, just maybe, that rational and generative conversation is on the other side of feeling each other fully in whatever these emotions are seeking to convey.

There’s so much more I could write about my morning, but I’ll let the video Diana took of me as the emotion poured forth speak for itself.

--

--

Anna Margolis

As a former lawyer, Anna merges material world memories, tales of transformation and embodied experience in articulating the future of collaboration