Dear Men…

To the men…

• Big respect to the men I know who are doing this work.

Dear Men,

Here on this day of the sun/moon eclipse, as the feminine eclipses the masculine..

I’d love to know what holds you back from attending Family Constellations workshops? I’d love to know how to encourage you to come and do some work in one of my groups.

I was talking to my colleague Neil Meekin about this very subject yesterday, he was saying the crisis of our time is the imbalance between the masculine and the feminine. This is happening in real time in my own energy field. How about yours? This resistance and surrender - it’s LIFE. If we can ALL do this work, maybe we can see profound societal change. Maybe we can see an end to, or at least a diminishing of, war.

I had a reading with a Mayan elder last year. She gave me a ritual to do to help balance my femininity. If my own masculine/ feminine is balanced, then I don’t need to take on the masculine roles in my life, and I can fully immerse myself in my feminine power, which is what I long for. I make an offering of sweet things, of flowers, honey, chocolate and tobacco to Mother Earth. It’s a powerful ritual. This is the issue as I see it, at the very least in my life right now, and also in the wider field. This imbalance is another casualty of late stage patriarchal capitalism, that vile box-ticking, bland, magicless, decaying culture that makes us all live these half lives, these lives that Francis Weller so rightly says we were not designed to live.

It’s not like I’m completely baffled about why this imbalance so painfully exists: I know men carry the war trauma of their male lines; and we women also carry war trauma from our male lines and for the women who were left behind to do everything, including protecting the children. We need to find a way to work together to rebalance this. Women are strong, but it doesn’t make any of us happy to be so unbalanced. War is still leaving its mark on all of us, and we have to work together to move on from this. We have to work on our trauma to bring about radical change in the world. This is my plea to you, the men.

I chose the name The Alchemy of Shiva for my retreat. Originally I’d planned to call it Resistance and Surrender, but the field I was in was pushing me further, harder, and into the field of the sacred Masculine and Feminine. It’s not a comfortable place for me. Like so many of us, I carry my own wounds around my femininity. None of us are exempt from the ravages of patriarchy. A third of my followers on Facebook are men. Most of this number have started to follow me since I named my retreat and publicised it. So I have been called to look further into this - and what comes out? The balance of masculine and feminine, so profoundly embodied by Shiva, and Shakti. I had not even thought about this, when I named the workshop!

“The term shakti refers to multiple ideas. Its general definition is dynamic energy that is responsible for creation, maintenance, and destruction of the universe. It is identified as female energy because shakti is responsible for creation, as mothers are responsible for birth. Without shakti, nothing in this universe would happen; she stimulates siva, which is passive energy in the form of consciousness, to create. Ardhanarishvara, a Hindu deity who is half male and half female, is an iconic representation of this idea. The deity is equally male and female, illustrating that the creation, maintenance, and destruction of the universe is dependent on both forces.”

https://asiasociety.org.

Once I had more than enough people to run this retreat, I realised I had to turn away the one man who had applied for a place. It did not feel comfortable for any of us to have one man in a group of thirteen women on a residential retreat. I went on a journey to explore why this is. I am still on it. There were 3 other men waiting in the wings, none of whom could commit to the retreat at this point for various different reasons. But this one man who did commit, he wants and deserves a place, and I do not want to exclude him. However, for myself, I cannot run the retreat with a mixed group unless I have a minimum of 4 men, and I can expand to fit in 5. So my plea to you, the men. Book onto my retreat coming up in Wales in a beautiful retreat centre, there are saunas, a wild swimming pool, acres of incredible landscape, fantastic food, horses, dancing, deep work for all of us. You won’t regret it. If you’d like to know more about Constellations work and how it is used all over the world for conflict resolution, to help huge companies and corporations, in the Brazilian legal system and more, why not schedule a call with me to hear more?

Big respect to the men I know who are doing this work, to Neil Meekin, Francis Weller, Dan Cohen, Adam Barley and all the men I’ve met through my years of doing Family Constellations and other embodiment work. Neil is running Family Constellations groups for men in Liverpool and if you, men, are not ready to go into the mixed groups yet, or you prefer a male facilitator, I encourage you to attend.

What are your thoughts on this? Comment below and let’s have a discussion about it!