Embodied Polarity

TRANSCRIPT:

KATE : So these qualities of masculine & feminine, the way that I see it is they're principles of life, and we are woven by these principles of life. By earth and sky. I see the Earth as feminine. I see the sky as masculine, and I see that we're woven by this design, these principles of life. Consciousness, which is the downloads and the insights and the wisdom that we receive from the cosmos, and the earth, which is the fecund sensual beauty of being alive in the body.

And so we're woven by these masculine & feminine principles, and we are remembering, you know, our spirit, psycho, emotional, erotic, spiritual journey, is to remember ourselves as part of this design. And so these principles of life, these masculine and feminine principles of life, are inherent within everybody. But within everybody, we're either going to lean more towards being more feminine-essenced or being more masculine-essenced, right?

And so the practice as feminine-essenced beings, you know, you've all been with me for a certain amount of time. We've all been working this muscle, of like, really, like embodying the feminine, like this kind of secret elixir, of like, our feminine love, our feminine juice. We've been like, bringing her out of the dungeon, and like finding by opening the pathways in our body so that she can really, like, have space to breathe and be expressed and not be confined in the way that we've been conditioned into.

And the same goes for this masculine principle, which is what we're here to learn today, is that this quality of, like, the spaciousness, the clarity, the direction, the freedom, the expanse, the openness, the consciousness, these are, like, principles that can be embodied...

Like, you know, the more common narrative is that we do spiritual practice, and we get to these heightened states by leaving the body. But actually the real practice is how we bring these principles. How we awaken these principles in the body? Yeah, why do we need them in the body? Why don't you tell us that, like, why is it important for these masculine principles to be, like, in the body, as opposed to, like, principles that are just out there floating in the cosmos?

SPEED: I work with men who have meditated for a long time. Not all of them, but about a quarter of the guys who come into my work, into my circles, who've meditated for a long time, and they're such great meditators, they're like PhD-level meditators. And they can't figure out why they're squabbling with their partners, or why they're terrible dads. It's because their connection to consciousness isn't here at all. It's on some other plane. It's really for them, a checking-out, and it feels blissful to them. They love it, but they don't actually know how to live and meditate at the same time.

And I had some of that coming into this work for sure. And so like you were saying, I loved what you just said, Kate, about to remember and to live this way. I certainly aspire to, and I try to lead my guys toward living in their embodied, masculine, feminine, whatever vectors that those are, like, in the real world, in the moment. On a walk in nature, at the moment of lifting up their kid into their arms, at the moment of penetrating their partner and looking deeply into their eyes, if you can only feel bliss when you're popped out. Where is the sacredness of the mundane?

KATE: I want to say something about the avoidance psychology, that all of us can fall into, but it's it's very common in the masculine psychology. And masculine psychology that like the outgrowing of the avoidance psychology. Whereas the ways of spirituality and meditation, what you're speaking to is, but those can further perpetuate the disconnect from the relational reality.

Whereas bringing the masculine principle into body, it actually allows you to show up more in your masculine essence, in the relational reality, which allows for the possibility of being in the unification of the masculine-feminine, and then being in the polarized dance, which is where more love and more consciousness can actually be enhanced, essentially. But in order to do that, first of all, it requires, you know, each person having this in a unification within, but then also being able to strengthen their own innate, organic pole so that, so that that dance can happen.

And if one person is like their masculine practice is just : "Okay, I'm just going to check out, and I'm just going to go to the cosmos." And then the woman shows up, and it's like: "Well, great, you've been in spiritual practice, but like, there's no capacity in the relational embodied field." Then that's where the missing piece, like, comes in, right?

So this is what I love about, you know, especially this lineage and these teachings of the masculine is like, you can have spiritual practice, and you can show up in relationship, but it's in a way that's teaching you to be actually more masculine. It's not about you becoming more feminine so you can be in relationship, or you being more feminine so you can be in touch with your feelings. It's about you being more more more embodied in the masculine principle, so that you can bring more masculine in the body to this earth. And that is what, you know, I see and feel and I think I'm not alone. This is a collective feminine cry. This is what the feminine and women are craving for from men. It's like, this embodied, rooted, grounded: "Okay, I have the capacity to feel spaciousness in my body and be present for the relational reality. I'm not going to be in the relational reality, have no internal space, get really overwhelmed, and then check out and do my avoidant thing. Like, I'm training my capacity because I'm coming into masculine practice to be able to be more present in the relational reality."

SPEED : It occurs to me that in some ways, the notion of meditation as checking-out is a first of all, it's an artefact of the way Americans picked up Buddhism, because the Tibetans who honed that craft over 1000's of years were generally themselves pretty embodied. They chopped wood and they carried water, and to the extent that we're and I really believe this right, like our evolution has not outstripped civilisation in any way. If you were to go back 700 800 generations, some dude in the forest among the other guys trying to hunt the wolves, who is "popped-out" for his spiritual moment. He's dead. He doesn't last very long.

And so all of our ancestors, up until a very, very short time ago, were embodied and in the present and in relationship with the wind and the water and the sound of the stag over that hill. Like, it's our natural way of being. So we're just trying to recover that after 7000 years of agriculture and 500 years of the age of reason and 200 years of the Industrial Revolution and 10 years, 20 years of the information age, all of which seem to tend us in the wrong direction, right, or the disembodied direction.