The forgotten polarity: The masculine yin and the feminine yang (Based on Genia Haddon's work)
Integrating the masculine and the feminine is critical for a number of things. In some ways it's just another map. But because it's existential - it's a good portal to step in through.
Integrating the masculine and the feminine is critical for a number of things. In some ways it's just another map. But because it's existential - it's a good portal to step in through. To get to the juicy stuff, the life that lies just beyond. That place that Rumi talks about beyond good and bad perhaps. Or just that place of relaxed authenticity that at least I long for. Where I can just be me.
Genia Haddon wrote a book I haven’t read in the middle of the 90’s. Yet it has had a deep influence on how I’m coming to the topic of masculine and feminine. Haddon is introducing us to a map of the masculine and the feminine that rings deeply true to me. There are 4 corners in the map she’s presenting. She speaks of the masculine and the feminine and the yin and the yang. I’ll go thorough what the main aspects of the map are and then point to a couple of conclusions that I have derived from it.
A couple of things. I believe that gender is socially constructed. I believe sex is not. I believe that our biological sex is deeply influential in how we form our worldviews and that has to do both with how we are in society as well as just strictly physiologically how our differently shaped genitals allow us to discover and explore the world. As much as the male and female is related to biological sex in my book, the gender divide is rather masculine and feminine on a dynamic spectra. Meaning these concepts are highly relevant as high level generalizations, very relevant to look at on a population level. As an individual predictor however my feeling is that gender is too locked in. Be it a third circle or a LBTQIA+ type labeling it feels like we are doing ourselves a disservice. I’d settle for saying that the gender divide exist along a spectra with infinite resolution. Regardless of our sex we can inhabit different positions on that spectra, but our sex matters in which positions we inhabit. The dynamism is also something that comes down to relationships, trauma, personal stories, cultural stories, experiences, the other members of the particular context we are in etc. We can get pushed and pulled into different dynamics depending on… well depending on everything.
Ok back to Haddon.
The basic nodes in her map - sketching the territory.
Masculine yang (erect penis): this is the sort of executive, penetrating masculine we are used to thinking about when it comes to men (yet most often immature and rich of shadow). The masculine yang is the explorer, adventurer. The penetrator of new worlds and the discoverer. It goes out to conquer or discover. There is a discernment that it needs to be fully in its power. A rightness. And in order to know that rightness, the directionality, to be able to discern the masculine yang needs to be in service and in relationship. Perhaps even in devotion to.
The masculine yang is situated in the head for me, it is an aspiring skylike masculine that is striving towards the heavens, its fuel is ideas and new discovery. He is also aggression, dominating power and connected to the thrusting hips.
Feminine yin (receiving, fertile womb): this is the sort of nurturing, holding, soft, gentle, motherlike feminine we are used to thinking of in our society. This is the mother with her child. This is the child bearing womb that is holding and seeding new life into being. The feminine yin is the caretaker. She is distracted in everything else than being of service. Her defining choice revolves around generating the energy to allow herself to step out - otherwise she lives in and through the other (even as herself). Unintegrated she is manipulative and extractive - sucking energy from those around her, integrated she is giving, generous and is the bringer of life.
The feminine yin lives in the hidden alluring arched, strong back. She lives in that circular hip movement in the back half of the circle. Hers is the heart, and the vulnerable throat and stomach, that which is surrender and her power lies in that surrender, when she dances with the intuition she is irresistible.
Masculine yin (testicles): the forgotten quality of the masculine is the testicular masculine. The holder of the seeds to life. The value it brings is the continual being there. The steadfastness. The abundance of the oak, the dependability of the mountain. In its steadfastness he is in complete service. His is to hold the palisade in the old western fort so that conditions conducive to life can flourish inside of him. He is there once the penetrator has pulled back, continuing always to hold the space so that life can rush in.
The masculine yin is centered in my body. He lives in the core and balance that is cultivated in dance. He is dynamic and responsive and is very difficult to break or push over. He is open and holding, he creates the conditions for other energies to move and dance. He is the invisible source.
Feminine yang (exertive womb): the forgotten quality of the feminine is the exertive womb. Haddon reminds us of the other mode of the womb. The one that is most there during the birth of the child. The force that pushes life into the world. There is power there. Lots of it and she acts with a primal, unfiltered force that is unparallelled.
The exertive womb lives in the front part of the hip circle. In the ‘contracted’ core, hips pulled forward. Imagine a woman on top of a man riding him, that forward motion with the hips is where she lives. She lives in the contracted, powerful, crunched stomach where the pushing originates during labor. And she is uncompromising. When this force is on the move she will move anything.
That’s the map. A couple of side notes. On the map that I saw there are interesting top and bottom points. On the feminine side: part of the female’s ego and males anima. On the masculine side of the map it says part of the males ego and the female’s anima. Pointing to the dynamic I mentioned earlier, there is a very strong connection to our physiology when it comes to these themes. The other aspect I wanted to highlight is that the yin side of this equation are more extended, powerful in their steadfastness, they command tremendous power but it is not subject to exertion, these operate in the realm of the transformation. The yang energies are typically very powerful but both of them are transitory. The penis is only erect for a very short time of the day. The exertive womb is active in a similar short time span. The forces they command when they are active are tremendous. The difference between the yang masculine and feminine however is that the masculine can only create the conditions to life through penetration, it is the feminine that can manifest/separate/birth life as a direct result of its action. I write separate since the creation of life, even though it is held within the feminine body, is still a deeply mysterious process to me. Not the physiology of it of course but where the movement begins.
The final suggestion, which is not mine fully, is that this diagram or map that we are looking at is dynamic in itself. As we move through the world, through different contexts or environments (whichever you are more comfortable with), relational, spiritual, physical etc. we move around in the map on the individual level. It means in a group of guys if one steps in and ‘penetrates’ the space with his ideas, the others will have to step into other roles of the map. This is not conscious; it is normally a fluid, smooth result of fully socialized individuals. The same goes for women. It means that we can actively or passively be shifted in this map. And as we shift, the move comes at the cost of something else. Look at it as a spider diagram with a total maximum of points that you can allocate throughout. Dance through the map but every action has a reaction or rather comes at a cost. You gain in masculine yang but only at the expense of the masculine yin as well as the feminine yin and yang.
Chapter 2: 3 lessons learned from play in the map
Now for some things I’ve gotten to learn about myself in playing with this map. Using it to move in the world and to test different hypothesis has been hugely valuable to me and it has allowed me more perspectives and more energy and dynamism as well as clarity in my life in very unexpected ways.
Directing the attention and finding freedom.
The main benefits I’ve found in playing this model out in my body and using it to direct my attention. To breadth into the tension and grasp the subtle undertones of a perspective just shared as I let it settle, particularly in the territories in this map that are less conventional in our current moment.
It allows me freedom. This fundamentally points to something I’ve been told many times. The masculine-feminine polarity is just another polarity. Especialy since it relates to gender not sex as distinguished above. And at the same time that is not true. This particular polarity holds tremendous potential (as in energy or force) to transform us fundamentally because it is one of the few domains from which we cannot so easily brush ourselves off and move on. If we fall in this area there is a risk of our ending up alone (or so we’re told) and in that failure we will become and remain branded a misfit. That is an existential threat to our being. Alone does not survive - that is the wisdom we carry with us in the body through eons of programming our DNA. Cultural impressions be damned, that is an edge that will elicit some sort of response. What I’m saying is that most other failures in today's society (if we are in a WEIRD context at least) has little influence on our development. We can fail spectacularly, shrug and move on into a new role, remaking the same mistakes we made at our last place with very little actual consequence. There is enough noise and the protocol for vetting is done on the communication level, not actually looking at our behavior, how we move in the world. You can move through life and never get one solid, sovereign signal on the type of destruction and havoc you are creating in the world. You might move with your eyes wide open, completely awake and still not seeing. Because only a few of us are fortunate enough to have to face the consequences of their trauma head on. The masculine feminine polarity in my experience, which is why it's scary, is existential and still holds potential for transformation in that sense.. Failing in this domain still comes at a price. It still has consequences. For those that wish to continue playing its crucial to clean up, grow up as well, to integrate.
That said as we move into and then through this map to get where I’m looking. It is in a way a finding yourself in full Stockholm syndrome to the polarity. As you fall in love with your captor and step into the cage there is a certain type of attention you can pay to it so that it becomes translucent. The embodied discovery that as true as the map is, it’s not the territory. These categorisations have nothing on you as an individual. At least not in terms of locking you in. But these are dynamic spectra that you can dance within. As you find yourself in one context with clarity and calling the bullshit i.e. exercising your yang masculine muscle you might also float back into a holding, space creating, nurturing stance on the border between or in the yin feminine or masculine energy. This is not a trait, it is rather a stance. A posture you are holding for but a moment, it is continuously fleeting and changing. Where the map is useful is to see if there are aspects you have not integrated, aspects you do not recognize or experience. It can shed some light into that part of ‘Joharis window’ of both the unkown unkowns and the unkowns that only others know about you. But in order to see those reflections it is crucial that you move off the map and pay attention to the primary processing as Gregory Bateson puts it. Look at the direct experience. Don’t put down the shame you feel, or the hard work of continuously aspiring for integration because you found a category where your experience fits. That’s the one thing you cannot do. The invitation is to lean in. Find compassion in that others have worked with this, seen this, felt this, been stuck in this way before you and then found a path through it. It’s not a question of what you can do to get unstuck, it is a question of how you can find a way.
This is all an important preface to saying that I believe that this map holds a really powerful, potential piece in the puzzle that might release us from the terror the culture impose on us in this field of masculine and feminine. It allows you a release that lets you sink into your complexity and become an amoeba, dynamically floating, auto-poetically self organizing yourself in a 4 field matrix of these energies. As you extend somewhere you contract somewhere else but you are constantly with part of your blobbiness in each field and there is no avoiding it. Another way of saying it is that we will eventually put down the map and just be, but you do not get to do that to start with. We are not privy to that before we’ve carried, felt, cried, bled and laughed every drop of emotion that our trauma is causing us. And that is an incredibly taxing and rewarding process. In fact it is regenerative. As you are moving through the map in yourself there is energy bubbling from the release. As we get unstuck and begin to move we regain our grounding, in our grounding lies our balance and in our balance we can find the joy of dancing… through the China shop without stepping on anyone’s toes. Well unless we’d want to step on someone’s toes. The polarity has the potential to become a firm belief held lightly. An identity that isn’t a fixed point but a dancefloor. A field where we can play another game. But doing that requires us to examine it deeply in our systems, in our economics, in our relationships, in our ancestry and of course in ourselves. It is like the end of Gladiator as the companion of Maximus speaks into the rising sun saying that “I will come see my family again, but not yet, not yet”.
Coming into relationship with creation
The second affordance of the map in my life has to do with creation. It is a deep question, the one on men and childbirth. In this I will intentionally muddle my gender/sex divide I set up because that is the state of the confusion in the societies I know and live in: It goes something like: Man (the masculine) cannot create life only transform it. How do men relate to that loss, envy and being secondary?
I motioned towards it above already in the description of the map, pointing to the importance of relationality and service when it comes to the male. That is a hard pill to swallow. Or it has been for me. It goes directly to the core of my worth. As a person who’s made it his calling to move and be in the world in a manner to generate more life - what does it make me when I am not able to directly conceive it? How does that shadow of my desire to birth manifest in my relationships with other men? Women? Masculinity? Femininity?
Especially layered on the stories of the Bible with the creation of the man and then the woman in service of him. The other story is about the importance of work, monetary wealth, the making yourself someone in the world. Especially as there is a newer request, asking me to shut up and sit down, to never conduct violence or aggression across the board, the introduction of the redundancy of men. At least that was the trend prior to Russias invasion of Ukraine. Now there are more nuances.
What it did for me was create a Jenghis Kahn like desire to spread my seed. My system was telling me that in order to create life I needed to physically penetrate a lot of women. This map and those small notes on the edge of each side of the map: “In X ego and Y’s anima” revealed to me a different stance. What if this desire I was feeling, my yearning to be of importance to have worth could be satisfied from a different position altogether? As it turns out, my working hypothesis is that it can. In learning how to channel the darker aspects of the yang masculine - aggression, violence - through my body. Moving them through the heart initially. And then through the crown as well. Feeling that connection and incredible resonance that kingly discernment of “right order” was offered to me: I began questioning the stories. I saw that I had castrated myself and handed over my power. In stepping away I allowed what is going on to continue. The boundary setting, the healthy responsibility lies in that same quality. It is liminal. And it is existential. It requires you to be prepared to die to the person you are, or actually fully physically die.
Working with women I saw the same resistance from the yang side. It is a power they were giving up, they could not even step into that full hip circle and move it through their body. And as we worked it out there was attraction. Very strong attraction. As we stayed in the primary experience and suspended interpretation, there was creation. For the feminine there was tremendous trust and safety. For the masculine the process offered direct participation in bringing forward, birthing, life in that union. It was the walking of the divine and the divine looked like merging to be able to embody more of the map at once. And as the initial programing and fear connected to the misinterpretation of the attraction as sexual subsided the transmission and relaxation was rich. This process is probably the first time in my life when I felt truly centred. And having seen the contours of it, my center, has allowed me to explore it in myself. To feel the playfulness this map allows and how that gives me more tools in my toolbox for creation. I can observe, transform, generate and dance.
To gain access to the direct creation however it is a stern practice of capacity building, of full authenticity. Anything less and I’m separated from it. Stuck in the codependent, choppy, unintegrated, procreative, rule bound, ‘going to the motions’-like dance (where lips are still counting out beats silently and movements are choreographed and feel awkward) that we are in at the moment. Only in setting the boundary, shifting my stance and leaning in I gain access to the interdependent playfulness that real dancing is. Where we can find the relaxation where our body is moving us and we let our flesh-colored superpowers teach us what we need to know. It’s our way out of our grove and into the spaces between. And finding out that it’s where the music actually lives. Between. Immersion in the between is interdependence. Interdependence is the portal to creation. One can hold that nexus in oneself. But it is a high practice. It’s taxing but it’s feeds an urgency that one can understand as a thirst for discovering more life rather than the urgency of the current climate movement to avoid death. There is so much cosmic joy in the surrender, in putting yourself on the line, of falling into service. Committing yourself only to the generation of movement, in the most attentive, caring, trusting, compassionate way you are capable of. Tending the center with deep care while letting your attention discover your effects on the context you are in.
Capacities to cultivate for the work
Finally what this exploration of Haddon’s map has placed firmly in me is the humility by which these circles overlap. How much they differ as a matter of lived experience between individuals of different context, age, gender, sex. There is no way to understand any other individual's map. And so it is important that we step off the map and into the territory with - you guessed it - compassion. Lots of it. Realizing that we are not here for the story nor imposing a point of view on anyone. What we can hope for is a self-discovery process and best case a generative process that will feed our amoeba and give us more wealth to work with, the capability to inhabit larger swats of the map in ourselves. This is not work one can force nor stress. It is not work for the lazy but with guidance it can be easeful. Skill is necessary, sovereignty and community are crucial parts. Dealing with narcissists is a team sport is one of Tyson Yonkaporta’s favorite quips and I believe that so is this. This work is an invitation for all of us called to come into service. I see it as a process of gifting the world with more life. It is a process of initial unsticking what is stuck (transformation perhaps) and then a process of true creation.
The catalyst that I’ve found is clarity. Clarity brings friction into groups and if that clarity is held lightly with an open heart and curiosity it can be a tremendous source of sparks that propagate. Bodies are clear. There are few hesitations. They move or they don't. We know how to interpret them if we let ourselves remember. To go beyond the words.
The orientation that I’ve found that seems to be generally beneficial is a desire to focus on the differences that make a difference. Rather than all the other differences.Taking the systemic wisdom of tending to the relationships, the inbetweens, the beneathes - to remember to look also where we normally don’t - that’s where the juice is. Sometimes. Tune in to those differences of importance. Those that act as repositories of energy that - when uncovered, explored and released - can then fuel the rest of the process.
Pause, take stock, dance
So summing up. Not as a final conclusion but as an entry into a diary of an ongoing exploration.
The map is bigger than we thought. There is more to it. Even though this polarity is an important one it is mainly important because of its existential qualities. That gives it a liminal quality that one has a hard time ignoring. This map is generally true and individually uninhabitable. One cannot live a map. Our feet need to touch the ground. Otherwise we are dead.
This map has given me personally a look into freedom, creation and has reminded me of the importance of humility. This is hard work to integrate but the purpose of it for me is clear - to get to tap into the generative potential of this polarity. To get there we need to clear the debris. And that is what we do together. Walking eachother home.
Finally the orientations that seem to be able to move this work along, once trust and safety has been established, is clarity. Particularly focused on the differences that make a difference. But neither clarity nor the orientation matters if we have not cultivated our attention and have at least one of our subpersonalities (a passionate one preferably) longing for stepping into service.
This is what I’m learning at the moment but I’m hoping to have more to say on it going forward. Or actually let me rephrase that. This work is very clearly not about words, so what anyone says, draws or thinks has little to do with the actual movement. What I meant to say was probably something like: I’m hoping to be able to add much more sense to it going forward. For now I’ll just keep moving.