What I Talk About When I Talk About Feminine Consciousness

Roughly eight hours into labor on the Australian Surf Coast

Feminine consciousness is an unfamiliar concept within the mainstream and even on the fringes of modern culture. Its obscurity and lack of agreed definition make it a difficult idea to grasp or discuss. Even though it is fairly new to me, feminine consciousness has become central to my mission. I didn’t set out looking for it. It came to me after I had a massively transformative childbirth experience – one in which I teetered over a hazy in-between of life and death. Since then, feminine consciousness is something I’ve spent quite a bit of time with in earnest exploration, discernment, and embodiment.

In this essay I attempt to describe feminine consciousness, how to find it, and why it is important. Because I’ve come to understand feminine consciousness as something that must be experienced rather that explained, I’ve decided to share my personal discovery of it through my birth story. I tell this story through the five distinct phases of my metamorphosis.

I believe feminine consciousness to be a missing and integral piece of the puzzle in finding our collective way out of domination and into the era of regeneration. The central challenge of our time is to transition into a regenerative culture that learns to live in a healing and ecologically restorative way. Our current tactics of manipulating technologies, capital, and policy alone toward regeneration are not sufficient to instigate the necessary sea change. I propose that feminine consciousness is the cohesive undercurrent vitally needed to claim our new way.

An Unexpected Metamorphosis

In complete metamorphosis there are huge differences between larval and adult forms. This transformation requires significant energy, and is split into a sequence of changes at different stages of the insect lifecycle. The process requires so much energy, it is simply not possible to go through a complete morphological and anatomical change in one sitting. Each stage is therefore succinctly different from the stage that precedes or follows it. – Biology Dictionary  

There were two sides of my psyche that were constantly competing for the driver’s seat: the left-brained achiever molded from twenty years of linear-thinking, type-A organization, and business acumen; and the right-brained romantic adventurer who would dive head-first into wild abandon and truth-seeking. The latter is what took over when I met Brad.

I guess it was love at first sight. At the end of the first night that we met he said he didn’t want to go home, that he wanted to go on an adventure with me. I assured him we’d go on many adventures together, oblivious to the prophesy in my promise. He sent me a text before bed saying that I blew his mind. I had stars in my eyes and fairy dust in my hair! As happenstance would have it, he only had two months left in the States before moving to Australia for a job. Maybe that’s why we packed so much into those two months, or maybe we just knew that our souls were meant to journey together. Regardless, we weren’t going to be separated.

My body welcomed conception, I suspect, because my spirit was already jet-streaming across the Atlantic along with Brad’s. I became pregnant the day before he left for Australia. Unbeknownst to the invisible link that would connect us forever, we both sobbed before he boarded his flight. The whirlwind of romance sucked me off my feet and whisked me out of the life I knew like a tornado. Little did I know that I would never return to it.

So there I was, 41-weeks pregnant on the Surf Coast of Ocean Grove, Australia. Life had moved fast. Between falling in love and growing a baby in my womb, I had been flushed with hormones since the day I met Brad.  Nothing was normal. I was in complete awe of the miracle growing inside of me, and something told me to stay the course. For the first time in my life, I harnessed confidence in a future unwritten. I opted for natural childbirth – a non-hospitalized and unmedicated birth – partially because my travelers’ insurance in Australia was junk and partially because I was tantalized by the pursuit the ultimate human experience.

I was both exhilarated and nervous when mild contractions woke me at 3 AM . Later that morning the midwife came to our townhouse to watch my contractions and assess my progress. I casually worked through an uncomfortable contraction on my yoga mat. She smiled and told us to prepare for a long night. Brad and I spent the day walking up and down the beach in early labor. On the Australian Surf Coast, the late day radiates a lavender hue across the landscape saturating a mystical luminosity all over. This was the most romantic part of my birth memory, fitting nicely with the bubble of romance that auraed around me. Brad supported my weight while I leaned on him to breathe through each contraction. We walked along the water as the flowing waves rolled through me mirroring those on the beach.  

What is Consciousness?

In order to understand feminine consciousness, we should first ensure we agree on the meaning of consciousness. Historically, scientists conceived consciousness as awareness of one’s existence and a trait unique to humans. Most recently there is growing agreement that consciousness is a universal presence throughout all sentient beings. While one can argue about differences between its studies in the East versus the West, specifically in Buddhism versus evidence-based science, there is general agreement that rising into our higher consciousness will give way to a better humanity.

We grow our consciousness through personal transformation, according to modern learning theory. The founder of transformative learning theory, Jack Mezirow, explains that, as humans, we resist learning anything that doesn’t fit comfortably into our existing frames of reference. Once an experience comes along that is so big, though, we must stretch our viewpoints to be more discriminating and inclusive in order to understand the meaning of our experience. He further explains, “We are confronted with a disorienting dilemma which serves to trigger a reflection. Reflection involves a critique of assumptions to determine whether the belief, often acquired through cultural assimilation in childhood, remains functional for us as adults.” This transformative process of breaking through mental confines is the expanding of human consciousness.

From this perspective, there was nothing all that unique about the transformative nature of my birth experience. In my case, though, the transformation gave way to feminine consciousness. Up until this point in my life, my feminine consciousness was virtually nonexistent. I blindly followed the definition of “the feminine” that I assimilated through society. I was unconscious of the feminine within me or how the social constructs I lived within suppressed my feminine.  This masculinizing of my existence had all worked out fairly well for me – until now.

Phase 1 - A Disorienting Dilemma

Eighteen hours after contractions began, night had fallen and anxiety had risen. Those flowing waves were now severe contractions, balling me up on my bed with clenched bedsheets to bear through the pain. One of the midwives came to see how I was doing. She asked me how it was progressing and if the pain management strategies were working.

I have no fucking idea. The birthing philosophy of this midwifery was that my female intuition would guide me through my labor. Sadly, I had developed very little at this point in my life. Rather, I was a blundering female patriarch who willfully relied solely on rationality, objective data, and cause/effect. The confidence I had entering childbirth had dissipated. It was rapidly becoming clear that I was way out of my depth.

She asked me if I thought I was ready to move to the birth center.

I have no fucking idea. I knew didn’t want to be there anymore. All I knew was that I wanted to get the birth moving, and I didn’t even know if I could move myself off the bed. I pleaded for her coaching, “Tell me what to do!”

She told us to pack up and transition to the birth center.  

It was sleeting rain on a biting cold and humid night. My husband, my sister Michelle, and I arrived at the birth center to find that we were locked out. What the hell?  We huddled in the rain while Brad ran around back to get someone’s attention. I had a sneaking suspicion that things were not going according to plan. But I had learned in birth class that things never go according to plan. I reminded myself that my job was to focus on my labor and my baby. Brad came running back through the rain and explained that for the first time ever, two families were birthing the same night and the birthing suite was full. The midwives had prepared the classroom for us to birth in.

Perfect.

Finally, the midwives let us inside. The classroom was indeed roughly adapted to a birthing room. There was an inflatable birth pool, piddle pads all over the floor, and dimmed lighting. Down the hall was a shower and a bed to help with labor. This was far from ideal, but I wasn’t in a position to make ultimatums. The midwives began filling the pool with water heated on the stove, bucketful by bucketful. The room was freezing, and the tile floor that lined the hallway was like ice on my feet. This seems backwater, but whatever. I tore off my nightgown and got in the pool. Somehow full naked laboring seemed like it would progress the situation.

Hours ticked by as I hung my upper body over the side of the pool in locked arms with Brad and breathed through the contractions. Each one took every ounce of my concentration to roll through. I envisioned hauling a 200-pound beam across a field of darkness. If I wavered, lost focus, or buckled under the weight, the pain would tear through me like a jackhammer. I was running on steam and losing hope to desperation. I could see my breaking point approaching, and I begged with the midwives to tell me I was close.

  “It might be one hour, or it might be ten more hours. We just can’t tell,” explained the midwife.

You’ve gotta be shitting me! The idea of laboring for ten more hours was out of the question. By this point, I was shrieking in pain, on the toilet, off the toilet, in and out of the shower, and desperate for relief. The room cleared to discuss my situation. As my body faded, the contractions raged even harder. Now there was no rest or reprieve between them. It felt like a constant stream of violence shredding me from the inside out.

I crumbled into tears and cried to Brad, “I can’t go any farther! You have to take me to the hospital to cut the baby out!”

What is “the Feminine?”

To discuss feminine consciousness, we should ensure we’re talking about the same thing when we say “the feminine.”  Most of us would describe “the feminine” as nurturing, compassionate, or empathetic. Some would even link women’s sex appeal to the term. These are essentially oppositional traits of “the masculine,” which is typically described as assertive, independent, or powerful. The problem with these traditionally feminine traits is that they have been identified from within the patriarchal lens. As “female” is derived from “male” as a subsidiary or accessory, then female traits are also subordinated to male traits. 

If we acknowledge that the predominant paradigm is one of domination, then genuine feminine can actually not be ascribed from within patriarchal influence. One mother of ecofeminism, Val Plumwood, writes on defining the feminine, “So, since [the feminine] cannot be in actual existing women whose character forms the basis of the ideal, this position sets off a search for some sort of feminine essence which eludes expression in present societies, but appears as an unrealized potential.” That means that genuine feminine is yet to be fully recognized or known in modern culture. So where do we find this unrealized potential of genuine feminine essence?

I draw inspiration from ecofeminist Vandana Shiva’s description of Prakriti, originating in ancient Indian Hinduism and Ayurveda, “All existence arises from [a] primordial energy which is the substance of everything, pervading everything. The manifestation of this power, this energy, is called nature (Prakriti). Nature, both animate and inanimate, is thus an expression of Shakti, the feminine and creative principle of the cosmos; in conjunction with the masculine principle (Purusha), Prakriti creates the world.” Meaning, Prakriti is the life force that exists throughout the Earth and all of her creatures.

Could genuine feminine essence be as simple as Prakriti? Alternatively, is Prakriti too complex for our linear and compartmentalized minds to fully fathom? I have come to embrace genuine feminine essence as the aliveness, wholeness and connectedness that channels throughout the Earth. I believe this genuine feminine essence is living, but sleeping dormant, in all of us. There is immense insight yet to be revealed about this essence by tapping into our own innate wisdom and that of nature, while learning from those who held knowledge before colonization by the Western tradition, namely Indigenous ways.

In short, we cannot accept “the feminine” as it has been given to us, filtered through the cheesecloth of patriarchy. Rather, we must discover genuine feminine essence ourselves and deliberately outside of domination. Embracing the life force of Prakriti is a starting point to begin understanding the genuine feminine.

Phase 2 - Descending into Disintegration

After 22 hours of labor I was disoriented, lost, and tangled in pandemonium. I was ripped from my world, spinning through space, and unable to find any solace. I had a new partner of only two months before reckoning with a surprise pregnancy, a knee-jerk move across the planet to Australia, and now I was giving birth in a classroom. All this had my head whirling with unfamiliarity. Further, I had no experienced sense of inner knowing to guide me. I followed the prescript for patriarchal thinking that I had assimilated through life: mind over matter, and self over object. And none of it was working for me.

My collapse must have scared Brad. He left the room to talk with the midwives once again. When he came back, he told me to reach up into my vagina and see if I could feel a head. Could this be a light at the end of the tunnel? I reached and felt a surprisingly wide opening to my vagina and a firmness bulging at the lip of it. It feels smooth, I thought, the sack must be intact. I’m not sure what a baby head protruding from a vagina is supposed to feel like, but this must be it. And if it wasn’t, I was better off believing it was.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “There’s a head!”

That was enough to convince the midwives that I’d advanced into active labor. They rallied around me, and assured me that it wouldn’t be too long now, maybe just 2-3 hours. I didn’t care about the time; I just needed hope that I’d make it to the end. Should I push?

“No.”  The midwife softly explained, “Just breathe your baby out. . . Breathe your baby into the world.”

What in the fuck does that mean? How could anyone possibly breath under these conditions? Regardless, the circumstances allowed me to access my emergency energy reserves. I was ready to reengage my contractions in hopes of getting to the finish line.

Again, the room was conferring in a background muffle of concern. “Stephanie,” the midwife asked, “How about we move you to the pool?”

No fucking way. I couldn’t be distracted. Each contraction would unleash a mountain of hell if I lost focus for even a millisecond as it tore through my body.

“We can move you so you don’t have to walk,” she added. “Do you really want to deliver you baby on the bathroom floor?”

“Yes,” I said sharply trying to get them to shut the fuck up. I breathed through another contraction and envisioned my baby’s first pictures in a dark room poised against a toilet. “Okay. Move me to the pool.”

By the time the whole birthing team carried my body to the pool, labor was a thick river of terror raging through my whole body. No one said push, but I thought if I pushed it might be over sooner. So, I pushed. I still don’t know whether or not I should have. But I felt my baby starting to make her way down the birth canal. The voices and sounds in the room began drifting far away from me. I fell into a trance as I lost all control of the contractions. A force appeared – whether it arose from within me or outside of me, I couldn’t tell – but it took over.

“Stephanie, can you feel your baby turning?” I heard from outside of the force field that was beginning to encapsulate me.

Quiet, quiet! I feel everything! My agitation roared at anything distracting me from the comfort of my trance.

“Her head is out! . . . And she’s looking at us!” Michelle exclaimed.

The pain was raging beyond comprehension, and I had no will left. The force was in control. I surrendered completely to its power. 

Then out of nowhere, my baby’s body slid smoothly into the water. And just like that, it was over. The pain disappeared immediately.  I turned around looking for my baby in the water, as a flicker of worry flashed through my mind that I wouldn’t be able to find her. The water was dark, but I pulled her out and looked at her. She was tiny in my hands, and her face was smooshed in rolls.

“Isn’t she supposed to cry?” I asked. “Is she OK?”

The midwife assured me that my baby was perfect; Brad wondered aloud why the water was so bloody; and Michelle jumped in to get some close-up photos.

“Hi Astraea. I’m your mommy. Do you recognize my voice?” I asked to see if she’d respond to me.

She gazed back at me and said, “Awaaw.”

My baby’s first sounds washed all over me. I let the stress ooze out of my body, and I took a deep breath. I knew that everything was alright. And every iota of pain was gone – almost like it had never happened. The room was calm and quiet. Brad and I sat incredulously examining her, wondering who she was and how she got here. Time slowed down while we sat amazed and enamored with our new baby.

What is Awareness?

The concept of awareness is closely tied to that of consciousness. It’s one thing to be conscious of your existence, but it is quite another to aware of your consciousness. Awareness as to do with understanding your Self and your surroundings. Importantly, self-awareness allows one to introspectively know their personality and being, both internally and externally.

Mindfulness is the practice of developing awareness of one’s consciousness. Mindfulness is the ability to calm and focus the mind in the present moment, while honing awareness of one’s senses, feelings and emotions. Originally drawn from Buddhist traditions, Eastern mindfulness typically centers in universal interconnectedness while Western-translated practices often focus on the thinking mind.

While I acknowledge mindfulness and self-awareness practices to be extremely valuable steps along the way to broadened consciousness generally, as well as feminine consciousness, I will also point out that traditional Eastern mindfulness has been almost exclusively led by men. Patriarchy and domination have found their way across the globe and throughout the world’s predominant religions and traditions. Bearing this in mind, it is important to be scrutinizing in the quest for genuine feminine essence and awareness of the feminine outside of domination.

Phase 3 - Discovery of Genuine Feminine Essence

The midwives asked me to get out of the pool so they could monitor my bleeding. They picked me up and moved me over to the sofa against the wall. Being out of the pool reminded me of how strange it continued to be that I was in a classroom. I had sat on that sofa two months earlier when I was in my birth class, and there I was again having just given birth. But I was relaxed now.  I wasn’t bothered by all the hiccups that surfaced in my birth plan. I made it through 24-hours of grueling labor; my body persevered; and now I was holding this odd, alien-looking creature who apparently was my baby. The spirits were lightened, and even the room seemed brighter.

And just when I was beginning to feel collected, a splintering contraction came tearing through my body once again. “It’s back!” I wailed in pain and bewilderment.

“It shouldn’t be that painful,” the midwife tried to comfort me.

I heard “placenta” come from somewhere in the room. Right; I forgot about that part. “The placenta is coming now,” I said. I spread my legs on the sofa and shot out a bloody organ into the midwife’s hands. She shot back a look of shock.  

Is this labor finally over yet? Things started to seem foggy. Maybe it was the exhaustion; I couldn’t do any more labor. Maybe it was a dream – or nightmare that just kept going.

The room turned into a fluster again, but I didn’t know what they were doing. I saw the umbilical cord attached to the placenta, which was now sitting in a baking pan next to me on the sofa. My legs were still open and outstretched as I sat on piddle pads that lined the sofa. I looked down and saw blood pouring from my vagina and collecting in a puddle between my legs. It was a lot of blood. I had never seen this much blood outside of movies. The deep sanguine pool was slowly rising between my thighs.

This was definitely not part of the birth plan. My mind instantly snapped back to an Instagram post a friend had made months prior about the maternal death rate of women in Africa – and how many women “simply bleed out” for lack of life-saving care.

I looked up at the midwife who had caught my placenta. “Am I bleeding out?” I asked.

She stared back at me stunned, and a look of terror crept over her face. She sat that way, frozen, just for a second or two. “You, take care of your baby,” she directed with unconvincing confidence. That look on her face told me everything she didn’t want to say out loud.  

My sensory awareness flipped on, and I did a self-check-in. I’m bleeding uncontrollably. This is one of those childbirth stories that isn’t supposed to happen to me. But it is, and I’m not in the hospital. The hospital is a 5-minute drive away, which means there’s at least 10 minutes before I can get care. I wonder how long I’ve got before I bleed out? Not only was I emotionally exhausted, but I couldn’t move my body. I looked around the room. They were panicking.

I’m going to have to trust these people to save my life for me, I thought. In that moment, I renounced control once again to the life force encapsulating me. I let go. All I could do – and wanted to do – is what the midwife had instructed. I connected to my baby, the sweet baby girl I always wanted my whole life. I was with her, enveloped in a life force that I completely trusted.

I was impervious to the fluster happening around me.

“Stephanie, we’re going to give you a shot of Pitocin to stop the bleeding.”

“What are you waiting for? Do it!”

“Stephanie!”

“We’re going to massage your uterus to see if we can stop the bleeding.”

“I need you to try to sit up so we can swath up some of this blood.”

“Keep snuggling your baby.”

“Do you feel anything in there? Keep massaging it.”

“Stephanie!”

I don’t know how much time went by. I don’t know how long they worked or what they did exactly. I learned later that my sister sobbed, pulling linens from around the building and calling the hospital for instructions. Brad drove his car around the building to load me into the back, since it’s faster to drive to the hospital than wait for an ambulance. At some point before moving me off the sofa and with mounds of blood-soaked linens piled around me, they determined that I was stable. I just needed to rest.

The midwives carried me from the sofa to the shower and scrubbed me. There was blood dried and caked all over my body. Someone put a fresh nightgown on me, and they carried me and the baby to the bed. I still felt floaty and euphoric.

I was so naive about childbirth and advocating for myself in a different country, that I didn’t even consider going to the hospital thereafter. What had gone wrong? Why all the blood? We don’t know. The paperwork we were provided curiously checked the boxes for a regular birth. It wasn’t until a few years later talking to a general practitioner that I learned that I likely had a condition called uterine atony. That’s when a tired uterus fails to contract and gives way to a postpartum hemorrhage. Come to find, I should have had a blood transfusion, iron supplements, and hospital care, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

Over the next two weeks, I recovered at home. I was wrecked, emaciated, and too weak to leave the house, bleeding profusely when I tried to get on my feet. Each time I moved too much, I bled. I was reeling from the shock of having been in between the spheres of life and death. So I laid low, coddled in my cocoon, and waited for the right time to emerge.

What is Domination Ideology?

It is important to clarify the meaning of domination in order to understand the urgency of navigating a way out of it. As feminist writer bell hooks brilliantly termed, the “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” is an interlocking power structure with a common root in an ideology of oppressive domination. This paradigm of domination informs the thought patterns, concepts, values, constructs, and world view of our, now global, culture. Read more about domination in here. All of this is mostly invisible to those who perpetuate the social orders of domination. That’s the problem that most people have with capitalist patriarchy, for example. They cannot see it. It is a social order of the domination paradigm so omnipresent and deeply woven into our origin story of human civilization, that we aren’t easily able unwind ourselves from it. The language, assumptions, and schemas we casually use are often tied into the myth of capitalist patriarchy, and we rarely have an opportunity to question it.

Most feminist theorists have uniformly agreed on one thing. Dualism is central to domination ideology.  Dualism is the organizing system of binary oppositions which legitimizes not just male domination, but domination generally. For example, mind/body, self/other, white/color, civilized/primitive, colonizer/colonized, science/superstition, male/female, etc. It is a construct that has founded predominant philosophy and world view since the dawn of Western tradition.

Ecofeminist philosopher, Freya Matthews, writes on unwinding this hierarchical dualizing schema of Western tradition which dominates over women and nature, as well as race, class and the other. She determines that, “We cannot escape dualism merely by theoretically deconstructing it or by devising theoretical alternatives to it.” In order to circumvent domination, the feminine should be fostered primarily as a discipline of practice, she explains, like in the manner of Daoism. She concludes that we are best to cultivate the feminine as a form of consciousness. Further, we must foster ways of understanding the Self and the collective in this holistic consciousness to release the power that dualism uses to grip to our realities.

That means that we cannot escape the paradigm of domination with the same tools that created it. Theorizing, compartmentalizing, and separating into even smaller interest groups is perpetuating the same old thing. Further, we will not succeed at fighting domination with dominating tactics. Striving to “smash the patriarchy” or “conquer the workplace” will just exacerbate the existing battle for power-over one another. Our solution must not be to raise the traditional feminine, which has historically been regarded as less-than or lowly, to an equal status of the masculine supremacy. Rather, our solution must be to cultivate a holistic, ecological, and feminine consciousness in order to circumvent the traps and legacy of domination paradigm all together.

Phase 4 - The Puparium

It took time to process my birth experience. I replayed the scenes in my mind routinely, day after day, for more than a year.  I couldn’t escape it - the swirling mix of joy, clarity, and terror. It felt like I was clogged in a generally muddled discomfort and confusion. I tried to carry on with life - my job at the investment firm, building a home, and my career - but something no longer fit. I had found a new awareness that had blown the top off my world. I felt like I had inadvertently pulled the curtain and seen the real Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy, I found myself trying to make sense of my new awareness with the world I had previously known. The story I’d been told about the all-powerful Wizard of Oz now seemed ridiculous; it was just a man pulling strings behind a curtain.

I reflected on my experience and critiqued the rules, structures, and assumptions and of my existing reality.  I had channeled true life-power through my being, even though I couldn’t see it or measure it. I spontaneously formed life in my womb, grew a human, and birthed her. The birth experience, itself, seemed to be a short space and time of existence between two worlds, the material and spiritual. I felt like a portal to the divine had opened up all around me to help usher my baby into the material world. That life force was Prakriti, the genuine feminine essence; there was no denying it. Between birthing in all its messiness, the electric shock of being so close to life and death in the same moment, and the divine mysticism of discovering my ability to create life, my reality cracked.

Few people talk about how this part of transformation melts you into a pile of goo. It’s not very glamorous. But that’s exactly how real change transpires; you must relinquish everything you know and disintegrate into a pile of goo on the floor. 

And so, I stayed in a gooey state of existential dissonance, trying to make sense of the two realities that I was stuck between. My new reality was informed by my awareness of genuine feminine essence, which I knew to be present and true in every fiber of my being. My old reality was defined by business as usual, socially and culturally, which harbors a belief that women are simply mundane. More accurately, in the old reality women are not only lacking of divine life-creating power, they are subordinately valued as the universally inferior sex.

The first contradiction between my realities showed up when I returned to work. I was thrilled to share my incredible experience with my peers, but no one asked or seemed interested. I had just experienced the ultimate human miracle, and yet, my miracle seemed to have been dropped from the agenda.  Business as usual continued. Linear and constant productivity was expected. And I wondered, what is the point of this urgency? How is this misplaced importance unrealized in the face of the genuine realness that I just experienced? The arrogance of not honoring the deeply spiritual magnificence of birth was beyond my comprehension.

The second contradiction happened about 3-months postpartum on one of my first conference calls. I was shattered, wrangled in newborn-ness, and frantically shoving a boob in my baby’s mouth to keep her from screaming. One of the investment managers was also on the phone and nonchalantly announced, “Oh, I have a 5-month-old at home too. Isn’t it great?” This is the same guy who once joked about never leaving the house without Gucci shoes, which was a far cry from the unwashed bathrobe that draped my ravaged body. The ludicrousness of drawing a parallel between his experience and mine graded over me like coarse sandpaper. My throat swelled, and all I could muster was a false laugh to hide my cry. I felt shamed by my humanness and aghast that they couldn’t see what I saw.

When a truth becomes so completely real and undeniable, then the delusion that had been hiding it loses integrity, becoming paper thin and eventually totally transparent. That’s what happened to capitalist patriarchy. It slowly shriveled, bit by bit, as I developed the courage to see the truth as it is.  The invisible form, structure, and workings of capitalist patriarchy became clearer. The rationale justifying subordination of women went like this: “Yes, historically, women haven’t had the same opportunities as men, but things are changing. The discomfort you might experience is just temporary until equality is reached. None of us actually believe in inferiority!” However, my intuition told me something different. Everyone seemed to be unconsciously trapped in a paradigm of domination and beholden to keeping it running.

It took two gooey years for me to make sense of my two realities. Still, there were far more unknowns than certainties at this point in my evolution. Was capitalist patriarchy perpetuated through malaise, ignorance, or cowardice? How deeply did it run in our psyches? Was I insane for being stuck in this dissonance, or was I the only sane person in the room? The appeal of capitalist-patriarchy was quite seductive – credibility, status, power, and a good paycheck - and the implications of leaving it were dire. But one thing was certain: capitalist patriarchy was spiritual warfare.

I wondered if I could find a new way of living or let my spirit be slowly suffocated. Did I have the courage to leave the paradigm of domination?

What is Feminine Consciousness?

Let’s synthesize our discussion.  Genuine feminine essence must be discovered – not assumed. Awareness of the genuine feminine must be a consciousness – not theory. This holistic consciousness will emerge in our beings – not our minds. And it must be cultivated through practice – not discourse. Lastly, this route out of domination must be a way of being – not doing.  

Feminine consciousness is a state of being, honoring, and living within (not over) Prakriti, the life force that creates the world. Feminine consciousness must be a way of repairing the separation that has been severed by Western tradition - of being in connection of the mind to body, humans to nature, reason to emotion, and universal to subject. Self-awareness within feminine consciousness is conceiving of the Self ecologically, connected to the life force throughout all of Earth’s beings.  Therefore, being in feminine consciousness means living within nature’s seasonality, honoring one’s personal cycles, and being in one’s own and collective wholeness. Thus, feminine consciousness is being and awareness of the Self within this feminine way.

Discovery, claiming, and growth of feminine consciousness surely happens in a diversity of ways. It can be incremental; it can be immersive. It can be deliberate; it can be unexpected. My story will be different from yours. Certainly, it doesn’t need to be through childbirth as mine was. In fact, as Plumwood illuminated, we must be careful to not attribute traditionally “feminine” traits or activities to seeking of the genuine feminine. Genuine feminine is free to be claimed in any sort of authentic way imaginable. Women and men, alike, have immense capacity for diverse discovery and holding of feminine consciousness.

Phase 5 - Reintegration Transformed

It took another two years for me to gather the courage to claim my Self. I determined that life is worth living if one can self-actualize, but I was forced to find existence outside of domination in order to do so. A woman’s greatest potential simply cannot be realized from within patriarchy. Because I was no longer willing to deny my genuine feminine essence, this crystal-clear reality finally gave way to a complete fading of the delusion of capitalist patriarchy. I determined that a domination-based social order that suppresses the magic of women’s life-creating divinity simply cannot be true. Thus, capitalist patriarchy is false. And I claimed this truth – not rationally, but deeply in my being. I was finally able to develop a deep knowing of my Self within a great ecology of aliveness and connectedness throughout the Earth – rather than the rigid confines of domination. This was the birth of my feminine consciousness.

I am very much in the early stages of my own feminine consciousness. Even so, I think the early stages of this discovery are an absolutely critical part of our personal and collective evolution. As Matthews pointed out, feminine consciousness cannot be realized through theorizing or discourse, lest we will remain ensnared in the dualizing schemas of domination. Rather, it must be holistically experienced to be truly known. This must be a shared practice, not an individual one.

Therefore, I invite you to join me on this journey to cultivate feminine consciousness. If you feel any resonance with my story, then this invitation is for you. The late and great bell writes on the importance of sharing our stories,

Not enough has been written about the transitional period women go through when we let go of old agendas for our lives and begin to embark on new journeys. While there is much historical and sociological writing documenting shifts that occurred in women’s thinking and behavior in the late sixties an early seventies as a consequence of advanced methods of birth control and the women’s liberation movement, the psychological consequences of these shifts are not articulated as clearly. – bell hooks, Communion

In order to realize our immense untapped genuine feminine potential, we must release our stories. It is time to normalize and embrace all the messiness that is necessary to evolve into our best selves. I urge you to share your own stories for this movement to catch fire. Feminine consciousness is a vital part of the way to regeneration. Please join me!