InnerSelf.com

Healing Our Masculine Selves

by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

Continued from Part I

I entered the ballroom amid the reverberation of drumbeats that began reaching into my internal organs while I was still a hundred feet down the hallway. In a daze, with tears streaming down my face, I wandered into a vacant seat.

One of the conference facilitators spoke softly and gently for awhile then asked another facilitator to join him up front. He asked one of the drummers to begin a slow, soft drum accompaniment. The two men began moving very slowly and sensuously back-to-back without words or any other sounds besides the tender, powerful drumbeat. One of the men invited others in the audience to join in similar dyads. I was unable to move or speak and shuddered to hold back sobs that were welling up from my stomach. Through my tears I saw men dancing back-to-back with men, women with women, and men with women. I had never witnessed anything like this in my life.

After the dancing ceased, one of the facilitators asked all the women to come up front and sit on the stage. I could no longer contain my sobs. For over twenty years I had been attending conferences for women only where, if a man had entered the room, he would have been at least verbally, if not physically, assaulted. I could not believe that these men wanted us to come forward and speak. 

For about half an hour, several women, some of whom had been in the women's workshop I had attended earlier, shared their feelings and experiences regarding the conference. The open microphone never came my way, nor did I reach for it. It was just as well because I couldn't talk.

Along with the other women, I returned to my seat. Several women and men came forth and recited poems and shared experiences of the conference. Finally, one of the drummers stepped to the microphone and asked that the women come to the front again. As we returned to the front, the drummer asked that all the men in the room form a circle around us so that he could lead them in an African male chant in praise of the Goddess. Some women might have felt intimidated being surrounded by men. I did not.

The thunderous roar of all the drums commenced, resonating through the floor, walls, and chandeliers of the ballroom. Twenty years of scenes of myself at feminist, separatist events flashed through my mind. Outside this ballroom in the hotel lobby, dozens of San Francisco Police Department SWAT Team members patrolled the hotel and adjacent streets in an effort to protect an Asian dignitary and his entourage. 

Outside this room, what Sam Keen calls "the war, work, and gender-role ethic" prevailed. Inside this room, some three to four hundred men and some fifty to seventy-five women danced and chanted in a tribute to each other's humanity. 

It was a roomful of recovering alcoholics and addicts, survivors of childhood abuse, single people, married people, divorced people. Some were parents, some had never had children. Some were heterosexual, some lesbian and gay. We were European-American, African-American, Asian-American, Native American. We were coming together not only in love but in fierceness -- as warriors for the sacredness of the feminine and masculine in all of us. 

Through my tears, with the drumbeat piercing my heart, I saw a vision of how it could be -- for one sweet moment we were united in heart, soul, mind, and body, women and men turning gender wars into gender peace.

In the years following this conference I have become deeply convinced that the crux of whether or not we will survive as a species, given our toxification of the planet, our bodies and minds, lies not in eliminating nuclear weapons, racism, hunger, poverty, cleaning up the environment, or finding the cure for cancer. 

As urgent as all these crises are, that which underlies, supports and feeds all of the life-threatening issues our species currently confronts is the patriarchy -- a way of life based on power, control, and the constant battle it perpetuates between women and men. The patriarchy, although primarily engineered and executed by men, dishonors men and the positive masculine as much as it dishonors women and the positive feminine.

 This article was excerpted from 

"Reclaiming the Dark Feminine"
by Carolyn Baker.
Info/Order this book

About The Author

CAROLYN BAKER, consultant, educator, and storyteller, lives in Northern California. She is an acclaimed workshop facilitator and has written and taught for many years from an archetypal, transpersonal perspective on the Dark Feminine. She holds a Ph.D. in Health and Human Services. This article is excerpted, with permission, from her book: Reclaiming the Dark Feminine -- The Price of Desire, published by New Falcon Publications, Tempe, AZ.

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