Redefining Masculinity, Redefining Courage

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“It’s time to redefine masculinity,” Prince Harry stated during an official Commonwealth tour made with his wife and young son to South Africa in 2019. Given the strict German and British duty-bound heritage of his Windsor family — that calls for its menfolk to be aloof, manly, and in control — Harry, the former military man and now self-proclaimed feminist, is an inspiring representative of the courage it takes to build a new archetype of being male. Brushing off the tired old sexist tropes tossed his way (especially the one that he’d been “emasculated” married to a strong, out-spoken woman), Harry seems stronger, devotedly focused, delighted with hands-on fatherhood, and thriving inside a powerful, deeply loving partnership.

Perhaps a man’s relationship with women is a key component in redefining masculinity. In their celebrated podcast series, Renegades: Born in the USA — which inspired a bestselling book in 2021 — the conversations of two old friends and brothers-of-the-heart, President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, acknowledged the rewards of being married to a spirited, forthright woman, praising the guidance received from their wise and powerful wives. “We were lucky enough,” Obama said, speaking of both men’s lives, “to find remarkable, strong, independent women to push us and challenge us and ground us — and to call us out on our BS.” I could see Prince Harry’s experience in Obama’s words. “Women who helped us,” Obama continued, “become better versions of ourselves and forced us to continually reexamine our priorities.”

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The Space Between

 

"Beyond the Human Species" by Patricia Albere

There is a “betweenness” to these consciousness-shifting times we’re living in, to borrow a phrase psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist used in his unique study of our divided brain and how each “hemisphere” shapes our perception. The author of The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) sees that the left and right hemispheres of the brain have competing visions of reality: the left hemisphere focuses on the details (good at organizing categories, not so good at seeing the whole, considered the male side of the brain); the right hemisphere focuses on the big picture (good at making connections between things, creating ideas, being empathetic, considered the female side.) Both hemispheres of the brain are essential, of course, and to be our most productive and compassionate selves we need a balance of both—the rational and the creative.

An example is McGilchrist’s scientific approach to explain music in which, simply put, the left hemisphere recognizes the notes, the right hemisphere recognizes the gaps, and it’s the gaps between the notes that make the music—the “betweenness.” It takes both sides, both hemispheres of the brain, working together to have harmony...in music and in life.

McGilchrist suggests we’re living in a world dominated by the left hemisphere—the part of us less likely to take the “humanistic view.” We see that occurring in our current angry, incendiary world. “Broadly speaking,” McGilchrist shared in an interview on Hidden Brain on National Public Radio (NPR), “the right hemisphere is more emotionally literate. It reads emotional expression, feels suffering…understanding another person’s point of view, what it feels like to be that person. However, there are some emotions that are more particularly associated with the left hemisphere. Perhaps the most striking one is anger, which happens to be the most lateralized of all emotions.” McGilchrist acknowledges this may be an over-simplification, but given the left hemisphere is always about accomplishing the immediate task in front of it, so “if it encounters any opposition, it’s dismissive, and it becomes enraged.”

We are a world out of harmony. And with no harmony, we have a compassion disconnect, empathy is lost. What will it take to bring our brains back into balance so the right hemisphere—the part more likely to take the “humanistic view”—can be a dynamic part of our world again? What will it take to create a world where we all live as though we truly believe, as Irish novelist Colum McCann once observed, that “an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment”; a world where we can live in the delicate, harmonic balance of “betweenness”—where being empathetic is as natural for human beings as breathing. How do we bring the feminine and masculine, the right brain and left brain, the entire human community back into balance? We’re all yearning for the inner peace that comes with a world in balance. Where do we find the opening? 

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...the future is love...

 

A Divine Destiny

 

Orchid named for Diana, Princess of Wales

“The people asserted their deep longing to feel at one, if only for today,” Warren Colman wrote about the days following Princess Diana’s death as crowds gathered in London parks and along city streets. “Tomorrow we will assert our differences, tomorrow we will return to the struggle to live together…. For today, just for today, we will take the opportunity to feel what it might be like to be together, to feel at one, to share an experience with everyone else.” It was the final days of summer in 1997, and the world was evolving, moving into a new millennium full of remarkable revelations. A future was emerging that would demand our attention.

For the woman who once declared that she “leads from the heart,” Diana’s death pierced our own. Perhaps this was Diana’s biggest gift to us: To give humanity a taste of feeling related and connected through the heart, to experience something tenderly shared, to have an opportunity “to feel at one” in a divided, divisive world. And to long for more.

Colman told of listening to many interviews during those days between Diana’s death and her funeral service, as people came together in public spaces simply to be together. “I think that the people who have come to be a part of it are part of it,” shared a local, fifties-something man who had congregated with thousands of others outside Westminster Abbey during Diana’s funeral. “Whereas before it always felt as though you were pure spectators to something else — it was what belonged to someone else.” The idea of being a part of something, a sense of belonging, intimately connected, was deeply present here — just as it was for me watching on television from over 4000 miles away. “Royal occasions were royal occasions,” the man in the park continued while balancing a baby on his shoulders, “and we were just subjects to stand by. But this, I think, has been different insofar as people haven’t just been spectators, they’ve been there taking part in it….”

“Diana’s death seemed to offer possibilities for reflection and perhaps even transformation,” Josephine Evetts-Secker wrote, also in When a Princess Dies, with people not feeling a need to be “exceptional or individual” but simply to be together. “‘I just had to be here, to take my place in the crowd,’” Evetts-Secker shared about one young woman interviewed amongst the peaceful, orderly masses of people assembled around central London that week. (“The mobilization of police, in anticipation of serious disturbances, proved unnecessary.”) “Some mystery had taken hold of the nation and beyond, with a palpable but inchoate sense of spiritual need,” Evetts-Secker added.

Something unfamiliar was indeed developing here. What appeared to have “taken hold” of people was the desire to go inwards, perhaps soothe an old ache stuck there and breathe in new life, then move back out into the world more open and available to connect with others. Diana’s death had shaken loose centuries of bottled-up emotions, new awarenesses were emerging.

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"...fullness of love..."

Interweaving...

 

Interweaving a New Future Together

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The weave of unity is infinite, ever flowing & creative. 

-Patricia Albere

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Words related to the ancient art of weaving are often used as metaphors, especially when expressing the deep, intricate nature of life and human awareness. My curiosity was peaked regarding that relationship of words when reading about the history of weaving — and learning that women were the first weavers. “The facts of women’s experience of life are primordial,” poet and author Barbara Mor wrote.

“The first God, Mother Earth, was the sign of a human response to an experienced fact,” Mor explained in The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. “The first arts and religions, the first crafts and social patterns, were designed in recognition and celebration of her.” From earliest times — giving birth, sustaining life, and nurturing that life — women recognized themselves in Mother Earth. And women told their stories (were women also the first storytellers?) by communicating that innate, fertile connection to life through art — creating clay vessels, weaving fabric, making paint, and painting on rocks and structures around them — linking their experiences to the Divine. And they recognized themselves in Her reflection.  

Barbara Mor shares that “religious rites were combined with industry. Women’s religions were organic, a unity of body and spirit, of daily life tasks and cosmic meaning.” All of life was sacred, interconnected, shared. “The sacred is the emotional force which connects the part to the whole,” philosopher and poet William Irwin Thompson wrote.

 “Cosmic mind and human mind are not essentially different, or separate, nor are cosmic body and human body,” Mor emphasized. “Everything is interconnected in a vast webwork of cosmic being — a universal weaving — in which each individual thing, or life-form, is a kind of energy knot, or interlock, in the overall vibrating pattern.” The intimacy in Barbara Mor’s words here conjures the essence of nature’s magic. I stare into a spider’s web and lose myself in the interrelated universe she has woven, clearly guided by a Divine source. Following their own instinctual nature, did the women who invented spinning and weaving — twisting something raw into filament-like threads, then weaving them into something whole — do the same? Beyond the practical attributes of string and cloth for early humans, was there a desire to express something ‘sensed’ within themselves?

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...whatever the question...

 

Every Day is Women's Day

If there was ever a time to champion and empower feminine values—solidarity, true relatedness, care, compassion and the unique overwhelming power arising from the intensity of love—now would be the time...to benefit all humankind. 

-Patricia Albere

Founder of Evolutionary Collective

LOVE

 

 

Falling In Love

Enjoy another excerpt from my book-in-progress,   The Spritual Mission of a Princess....

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Much has been written about how Diana Spencer fell in love with an “image” of Prince Charles and not with the man. But she would not be the first person to objectify another, falling in love with a concept, a persona, an impression “instead of discovering who is really there,” as spiritual teacher Patricia Albere shared. In her book, Evolutionary Relationships, Albere wrote about the principles (including engagement, commitment, truth, trust, openness, intimacy, sensitivity, influence, and true autonomy) required to deepen any relationship—whether friend, family member, or lover—into a mutual awakening of beloved souls…into an “evolutionary relationship.” Then, ‘falling in love’ becomes something else altogether. “When you enter into an Evolutionary Relationship with a sexual partner,” explained Albere, “you have the opportunity to discover who your partner really is and what is possible between you…and what is needed to turn your relationship into a sacred marriage, a spiritual union.” 

Perhaps Diana had some intuitive, old-soul knowing of this kind of sacred union, but like most people, she didn’t know what it would take to have it—and especially, how to prepare for it. It takes emotional maturity, the courage to be transparent, a heightened level of spiritual awakening, patience—“a sacred connection cannot be forced,” as Albere wrote. 

I was reminded of what Meghan Markle said about the day she married Diana’s son Prince Harry—her wedding a global spectacle—with millions of people watching, appreciating, judging. “H and I are really, really good at finding each other in the chaos. When we find each other, we reconnect to, like, ‘Oh it’s you. It’s you.’” She added that it wasn’t as though the rest of it didn’t matter—the royal setting, the elegantly appointed trappings of the wedding—but “it feels temporary.” In such a spiritual union as they appear to have, it’s the connection, the love that feels real, feels eternal. (And those of us watching that lovely celebration of marriage could feel it as well.) Meghan’s friend Vicky Tsai, after attending the wedding ceremony, confirmed: “It felt like a moment where the world paused and celebrated love.”

Although Diana might have yearned for this level of intimate connection with a partner, in the pretense-riddled ‘arranged marriage’ framework of her Windsor world, such depth and harmony and spiritual bonding was not possible. Even with her heart-centered sensibility, all Diana had to go on when she married was her teenage romance-novel imagination, a wounded child’s neediness, and society’s outdated notion of the ‘institution’ of marriage. Her frustration and deep disappointment lashed out toward her husband with anger and blame, privately and, stunningly (given the ‘never complain, never explain’ mantra of the royal family), publicly.

        In Diana: The Voice of Change, Stewart Pearce wrote how Princess Diana’s spot-lit marriage to the heir to the British throne put a spotlight on the archaic customs associated with marriage as well as on a woman’s autonomy—or lack of it. “Diana’s feminine force had disowned the negative masculine when she ‘outed’ Charles, calling for a new level of maturity and truth.” Feminist writers believed that when Diana found a way to speak out about the inauthentic aspects of their marriage—her bold actions condemned at the time by some as outrageous, even scandalous—other women were emboldened to find their voice. “This released the voice of millions of women, who felt that Diana had given them the right to speak,” Pearce added. He believed you could follow the thread that got unraveled in her public revelations about ‘men behaving badly’ directly to the Time’s Up and MeToo movements over two decades later.

        As human consciousness was expanding in the last two decades of the twentieth century, parallel to Diana’s time in the spotlight, the nature of relationships and structure of marriage was transforming. In The Seat of Soul, Gary Zukav saw a more enlightened future when intimate relationships would be “spiritual partnerships” where both people thrive and the focus is on each other’s spiritual growth—evolving from the old, less empowering “five-sensory relationships.”  The more consciously aware “multisensory humans,” in Zukav’s words, naturally gravitate toward “spiritual partnerships.” (Maybe Diana sought guidance here since this culture-changing book was published in the late 1980s when her marriage was a gloomy mess.) Zukav explained that “spiritual partners help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from love—such as gratitude, patience, and caring—and cultivate them by acting on them consciously.” Being conscious, awake to the subtleties of life, and emotionally courageous were key here. Zukav continued: “Spiritual partners also help one another recognize parts of their personalities that come from fear—such as anger, jealousy, and righteousness—and challenge them by acting from loving parts of their personalities (such as patience) when frightened parts (such as impatience) are active.” (Perhaps Diana wasn’t emotionally grounded enough, especially in those early years of marriage, to practice these principles, but this language, I believe, would have resonated with her.)

In addition to the cultural shifts in relationships and marriage at the time, the hard edge of masculine/feminine identity was also changing as many women were recognizing their “masculine” traits (speaking up for themselves, becoming leaders) and some men were acknowledging their “feminine” nature (being more compassionate and nurturing), shaking up an old societal template for gender. As human beings were evolving, long-accepted yet limiting ways of being and relating were dissolving—new guidelines were required for fully satisfying relationships. “The ‘Till death do us part’ paradigm within marriage,” Pearce wrote, “no longer could remain a meaningful construct for the bonds of deep relationship.”

        Looking back over the more than two decades since Diana’s death, Stewart Pearce was seeing how marriages that had been “sustained by the old ways of co-dependency” were ending and how both women and men were “releasing the obsolete stereotypes” of marriage so they could have relationships of deep connection of the heart. “At core, the patriarchy, which had flourished through a malformation of the masculine, was being transformed on the altar of the newly sacralized feminine,” Pearce continued with his usual passion. “Love, compassion, inclusivity, nurturing, and peaceful co-existence are what we yearn for, are what we seek out in our intimate relationships….” This sounds most ‘natural’ for us now, but at the time and in the environment in which Diana lived, when she declared these loving aspects missing in her marriage—indeed, in most marriages she saw in her aristocratic world—it was revolutionary. ~

[Part Two of this section from the chapter "A Woman's Inheritance" will be posted later....]