The Passage Into Womanhood

We have our own key; we have the grappling hook of our own power and our own sentinel. As women, we must meet ourselves in the depths, in the mystical, the soul realms.

Is it our own fallacy that agency is seen as a masculine concept? Are we weighted down because we would otherwise buoy to the surface for lack of internal gravity or ballast? Are we to travel interiority’s terrain and reclaim the weight of power we have shed—the desire, the hunger, the erotic—in perpetual service to others? What do we have to do to descend to bedrock, take our seats, and claim our reign? Why don’t we know, incontrovertibly, who we are, so that in the face of others, even the most compelling, we don’t lose our moorings—we do not need to impress, convince, or accommodate?

The rite of passage from girl to woman is from illusion to performance, to self-abandonment, to disillusionment, to influence, to the essential self, which is one’s true nature. We have enacted performative women’s revolutionary actions as girls. But what we speak of is girls’ liberation, not women’s liberation: we have no concept of what being a real woman is, which would be to surge with such non-referential power that we define the world rather than conforming to pre-existing definitions. What we have called women’s liberation is marked by defiance, and make no mistake, defiance is permission’s shadow, and both exist under the delineation of adolescence.

The world we are here to make cannot be constructed from within these confines. We are here to weave in a whole and complete, complementary system that, by its very inclusion, unalterably changes reality.

The passage into womanhood is the inverse of the passage into manhood. His grail is located at the mountain’s top, and so he sheds any excess, any over-identity, and too-intense identification. His attachment is to the material, to excess hungers, carnality, and passions. He goes to his antithesis, to meet himself in the absolute realms, so that he may stand on top of a watchtower as a sentinel of honor and carry out the vision below. To grow spiritually from boy to man is a matter of shifting what he does “for,” which shifts from doing for oneself to doing for others.

We need to learn that we rest in the depths, where our treasure is located, in the “what” that makes the world go round—what the masculine would provide for, peacock for, serve in honor of, and become greatness for. But he will only develop into greatness if we recognize our own value because greatness is evoked, not compelled.

We should, if we are to create—and make no mistake, we are creators—great women, become the source that draws greatness from others, that emanates radiance, that generates the elixir of life, drawing in the genius of others so that all might have access. This is why our recognition and guardianship of our value interlocks with the greatness of men. It is by remaining in the center of our value that we can infuse the world to such an extent that man and material will be drawn organically into a brilliant order beyond what he could have ever imagined himself to be.

From the masculine perspective, the cause of suffering is some form of greed, hatred, or delusion. This rests in attachment to a notion of self. The dissolution of self, or the abandoning of self to God, is a skillful endeavor should he aim high.

Our suffering’s cause is an absence of self that creates a lack of understanding. Our true understanding is to step into our flow, our dynamic and symphonic nature of reality. It rests in knowing our impact, in being moved by others, in developing equally the capacity to send and receive. Our understanding also means to exist as carrier signals in white noise confusion, in the distraction cycles that mark a reality of discontent. We are the hold, the sense signals, and the connections that can stabilize ourselves and others.

The feminine, rather than rising above the mass confusion, enters, engages, and connects in such a way that she not only experiences clarity but becomes an agent that clarifies. The masculine light can shine on the issues we all experience. Feminine love can heal everyone through it. Together, as interpenetrating forces, the world is illuminated with love. This is a literal, not a figurative, world that is in the perpetual process of making love, where the masculine sentinel can see the causes, and the feminine ballast can carry the cures. Together, we can move into the next state of global consciousness; we can, as a people, ascend Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the top tier, to peak consciousness.

This is our potential, but I would suggest that now we are all children, both men and women, swimming in a world that lacks the feminine aspect. It’s time for us to pick up our big girl tools and learn to wield the forces that would surge through us, bringing us to a maturity that could then draw out maturity from the masculine.

Just as the physical analog of hormones moving through our biology matures our bodies and shapes our identity, so we develop in consciousness when we infuse the catalyst of Eros, embracing our primal forces. Women shun and avoid these forces at the expense of our spiritual adulthood and, consequently, the complementary adulthood of men. There is no way for him to develop into an adult capable of full mutuality if there is not a counter-pole. He will remain an entitled spiritual boy pretending to be a father, and women will remain a possession to be cared for. We will live at the lowest common denominator, honor and duty our default settings.

Yet none of us seem genuinely okay with this situation. Unnecessary suffering, needless pain, wasted potential, and envy—none of this is really digestible when there is a solution.

We have probably all fallen into moments where we could play the role, where we could pretend sweetness and conventionality while the rivers create whitewater inside of us. At several points in my life, I fell into default settings of womanhood, towing the line of what I thought I should do. I was even in a two-year relationship with a sweet Midwestern guy who would have stayed with me no matter what. Yet throughout these moments, I felt as if I was too much for this—I felt this in a shameful way at first—that I needed too much love and that my love itself was too much for anyone to handle. There was this well inside of me, a backup of wants and needs that I knew this type of life could not satiate. I did not know how to be who I was in the world. I felt like a monster because I could not be who others wanted me to be, and I could not be who he wanted me to be. I was lucky to have guides in my life appear at these key moments—these guides helped me see the force inside of me that could rise up, that demanded to be free, that saw the edge of another life that I could press open.

Our suffering can be solved. Let’s rewrite the feelings of invisibility, powerlessness, not having a voice, being overworked, drained, and not seeing meaning in life. Let’s rewrite hating men, yet being privately desperate for their approval, love, and attention. Let’s rewrite wanting to be a liberated woman while feeling conflicted about living conventionally. Let’s rewrite living in a state where the primary source of arousal is anger and outrage, where we’re perpetually irritated and triggered. We’re sick of being nice; we’re sick of wanting to be nicer. Let’s rewrite the narrative where we’re sick of treating our bodies like show animals and forcing them to align with our agendas until they are undernourished, rebellious, overly sensitive, and hyper-aroused.

Let’s rewrite the story where we’re met by men who are oblivious, insensitive, cannot “hear” us; who are under-responsive and perpetually avoidant of intimacy on our terms and run from commitment; who are narcissistic and entitled.

These twin polarizations, rather than the interpenetration birth we are capable of embracing, pull us apart, ripping us from what we need. We need osmosis, the process by which molecules of one form pass to another through a semi-permeable membrane, equalizing both. Yet now, the membranes are so defended they’re impermeable. Excess and deficit cannot equalize.

We need a living, dynamic equality where both sides share full capacity rather than amputating down to the lowest common denominator of our unrealized potential. What we will not cultivate, we demand gets cut off, but this is too dangerous a price.

A world devoid of life and Eros circles around an absence of power, congested with assertion, swimming in aggression, and surrounded by the human qualities of jealousy, greed, and obsession. This is what grows in absence. This life lacks plot and animation; this life is one no one wants. Imagine a nanny state where the force that exists within each human to break through mediocrity toward human greatness is deactivated. We are left to fantasize about a violence that will break this Pleasantville spell. You will then understand the violence in the media, in the world, the overstimulation and drama in film; it is an attempt to get us to feel something—anything—as we habituate to greater and greater sensationalism. Sensationalism is what occurs in the lack of sensation. And a lack of sensation is what occurs when there is a lack of Eros.

Let’s stand up, in our true genius—a genius never before imagined in the blue ocean of women far beyond the red, shark-infested waters of our own minds. We do not need to avoid the water altogether. We need to swim out further, together, going into the depths that scare us but which will yield our power. This is our gift: the pre-existing waters we have needed to return to, which we can harness to ride higher into our own capabilities, into taking full ownership of our erotic powers.

As women, we feel a collective disgust and disdain for the erotic, which is our natural spiritual plane. Our immune response to sex is so great, and the misinformed connotative understanding of it so laden, that one can scarcely speak of it without an automatic shutting down, with defense systems rising up.

What was intended to draw us into deeper perceptions of union—to “see” unmediated by religion or dogma the nature of reality—has been twisted into something we cannot recognize. We respond to its mutated form rather than the original. It’s like taking the deeply spiritual food maize and approaching it with fear and loathing because we only know corn syrup’s industrialized form.

When we speak of Eros or the erotic, rather than the commodity of sex that we associate it with—the reduction, the corn syrup—we speak of light, power, energy flow that regenerates, cures, and creates more energy.

Inside, we know the light of Eros, which is us. We’ve tried to reclaim our divine driving rod from a harmful and damaging form, to stop it from being twisted into something that hurts us. But there is so much more available; we can recover the source of feminine illumination. This is why we recover Eros for ourselves. This is why we must delve deep into the wreck, to unearth the part of ourselves that has turned away from us.

Eros is what consummates, what joins him, her, and us into one, what mediates and impels one’s actions toward destiny—an intelligence or sentience within that draws together human with sacred, human with human, and human with nature, including our own. This power of joining draws together and can’t be collapsed or fixed, yet it demands that we live in a consciousness of perpetual, dynamic micro-adjustments in order to keep it charged and alive. We must keep it charged and snapping with energy because our reward is a location outside of time, outside of self-consciousness, a situation in our here and now. All the fixing and self-work that mark growth are proved entirely unnecessary as this expansion and welcoming in is what we have been seeking and can now bring forth.

The power of now, allowed to steep in the depths of the erotic, is what we, as women, can embody.

The erotic is what catalyzes our inborn and immortal talents and natural abilities, activating who we are. Eros lies between mystery and inspiration; it makes contact and creates a reaction. The reaction is creativity, imbued with sentience and vision, that knows the possible—the numinous beyond what the everyday mind can recognize. With rapture, passion, desire, and enchantment as its purview, it is restless and cannot settle for anything less than exquisite beauty, excellence, quality, and transcendence.

Only through Eros can we live in the delight of life as an eternal paradox and not sloppily collapse on one side or the other, caught in perpetual conflict. Only through Eros can we live in a third consciousness—not as dominant nor submissive but as co-creators. Eros forges the dynamic bridge between all; this bridge can be traveled beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, good and bad, us and them, to a place full enough to hold all. Eros is our agent of transcendence.

To be women in this time is to pride ourselves on our anorexia—our capacity to deprive ourselves of what would transport us. We congratulate each other on our capacity to resist, to demonstrate a visible disgust at the erotic. This symptom of our self-loathing runs deep. The real internalized misogyny rests in our disdain for Eros as our feminine spiritual plane. We scoff and smirk at any expression of our erotic power. We attach our own shackles and throw away the key. The snide jokes we make about men’s body parts or the fact that men want “just one thing” signify how deeply we have projected our desire’s shadow into the world. With every judgment of Eros in the world, we erode and corrode our own power; we disempower ourselves, we throw acid at our angels.

Now we must do the long, slow work of reclaiming and integrating—starting with reclaiming our shadow. Rather than condemning masculine expressions of the erotic, we need to move forward and say, “I want my erotic back,” “I want the power to assert and perpetuate myself in the world back,” “I want the unassailable nature that facility with desire brings back,” “I want my conviction and deserving back,” “I want my bottom half back,” “I want my body back,” “I want my hunger back,” “I want my voice back.” This reclamation and integration of what we have cast out begins with drawing back the discarded power of Eros.

Our congested symptoms show Eros’ absence. Our inward-facing collapse in consciousness perpetually grips and obsesses because we lack the currency of energy flow to keep us open. The electricity of Eros moves through like a purr, a hum in the line, ordering all disorder to align in a single direction.

And yet, we women are thieves, stealing our own power. Every woman who feels numb, half-dead, musty, unattractive, or who winces at the thought of oral sex and visibly displays disdain when a man reveals his lust fangs—feels this power collapse within her. She feels her body mold from lack of light, her mind mold into passive aggression, into perpetual low-grade criticism and negativity. We dehumanize and devalue what we progressively die without. Our insides grow bitter, and we cannot stand our own smell. We check out. We numb. We send in a placater to represent our absent souls.

At those times, many of us pillage what sex could bring, so lost that we believe we are doing sex a favor or simply pleasing our partners. We tell ourselves that sex is an object, that we can take what we want from it without protecting, cleaning, or keeping it beautiful.

We believe in shells, not love, and cannot offer ourselves to the soul where forces thrash about with Eros—with power and rage, with our smell and his smell, with our own messiness. It is like saying we love nature while always using an umbrella, air conditioning, and closed windows.

Yet, nature is the elements. Nature is our relationship with these elements. Human relationships spin and are fueled by these elements. If we lack contact with the elements, we become tourists on temperature-controlled buses through rainforests that could bring us back to life.

How women relate to sex is how men relate to women. Our relationship with men will change when our relationship to Eros changes. It really is that simple: we all pay lip service but miss out on the earth-shaking erotic that we’re all capable of.

Do we give Eros equal rights of expression in our bodies? Do we honor and tend to it—not because if we don’t, we will lose something, but because we recognize its value? Do we use it, violate it, harm it? Do we steal from it through masturbation—using it as a form of escape rather than for its intended purpose of connection? Are we unwilling to do what it requires, so we steal some aspect of it for our “pleasure”?

Eros is power. Those who identify as victims will never have power. A victim consciousness perceives itself as being “done to” by evil. The mind cannot perceive and engage with something it sees as evil, and thus, we lose our power through Eros.

True power is always elemental, and the elemental always risks losing control. It takes focus and attention to plug into it. Control is the coping mechanism of victim consciousness—it is the catch-all solution. We put ourselves in a state of learned helplessness when we see ourselves as victims, losing the regenerative power that contact with what we cannot control can bring us.

To be women who can progressively open in the face of power surges should be the work of our lives. To make ourselves capable of facing arousal, unpredictable surges, and inflations without blowing a fuse—but instead allowing it all to fuel our ascent toward power—requires difficult, slow work, rife with discomfort. So much discomfort and the risk of becoming one of “them”—the abusers of power—that most opt for a dim existence with dramatic performative expressions that ultimately drain us. This is why we see many displays of power with no actual change.

Without changing, at a fundamental level, our capacity for power—the load we can handle in a progressive way—we will end up essentially shut down and cut off. We need to reframe the narrative so that our power surges are not just something happening to us but choices we make. When we assume victim diagnoses, even though in the short term they might comfort us, they render us passively incapable. If we accept these diagnoses and their connotations in today’s environment, we face internal death sentences.

Victim consciousness, like resentment, poisons and disempowers us. We may even “exact” justice, but at the expense of having access to personal power until we undo the story. If we do not rewrite it, there is no way for the mind to bypass this knot.

We need to activate the power that can flood through the stuck energy caught in our bodies; this puts the “problem” and its solution in our hands. To prepare our minds for power, we must deem power as positive and ourselves as having agency—not just now, but in our pasts as well. Otherwise, we will always code lack of power as virtue and power as vice.

Our prescription is inside our pain, but if we live in interminable discomfort, suffering, and low-grade negativity, we will not allow ourselves to hit bottom and go to where we can pick up that prescription.

We have growing pains coded as suffering worthy of trigger warnings. What can call us to face the realities in our world, we call dangerous. What really is the original trauma? How can we harness the power to build our creative and loving strength? The medical definition of trauma is “unexpressed energy.” What gets stuck, what could make a nervous system have to re-route itself and dysregulate the flow that occurs as health on both psychic and physical levels, gets moved out in the moment of stimulation bigger than what consciousness can fully receive.

To be animal is to face trauma. It’s a normal aspect of every being’s existence. We have reified trauma in such a way that we have removed ourselves from nature, where this is just the way of life and we learn effective methods for living with the uncertain, the unpredictable, the impactful—that which makes us healthy, resilient, alive. We have continued to draw further up into the tower and throw dictates down to nature, down to our own possible wild life, commanding it to tone itself down. We have toned down the interconnection we share with the whole of life, and this has weakened us more than anything.

Rather than turning the world and ourselves down, we need to turn up our capacity to flow inside of it. Nature always trumps form. Gravity always draws down. We can ride hurt and heal our scars, pulling them in toward our strength.

A world without soft places makes hardened and insensitive people pretending virtue and locking everyone out. We need soft places inside where we can recognize pain as not the final emotion, but a pathway to another—one that makes us more whole, more rounded, more capable of handling ourselves in this world.

Our true path is a broken heart. It is our fracture, our deep wound. Let the heart break open further, again and again, until it’s unshielded, big enough to hold the whole of humanity. Through digging into our hurt, through recognizing that we aren’t diminished but emboldened by it, we can move past our control and feel the power of our sex, feel Eros’ constant pull—and not be afraid, but dive into the wreck to find the unfaded signals we all need to listen to.