A BALANCED EARTH, Chapter 2, part 3

The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Hello beloved reader,

This post is a continuation of the serialization of my book. Please click this following link, to read the contents I’ve serialized so far, and please also be aware that one month after publication each post moves behind the paywall.

I also invite you to tell friends and family all about what resonates with you in this book. This word-of-mouth kind of grassroots marketing is what got Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass onto the New York Times bestselling list seven years after it was first published, and where it still remains now five years later! Books can be a powerful agent in stimulating an evolution of consciousness.

A BALANCED EARTH: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine for Personal and Planetary Healing

Chapter 2: The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Section 2.3

When the Inner Patriarch Meets Consciousness Beyond Gender

When the feminine is dismissed in public life, we start dismissing her inside ourselves. Yoko Ono showed through art what conscious awareness beyond gender gives insight into: when the Divine Feminine is denied authorship, the integrated ‘whole’ is wounded—psyche, culture, and collective imagination alike. The same reflex that scapegoats a woman in the culture quietly censors which parts of us are allowed to speak.

To heal that fracture, we need to look beyond gender to consciousness itself. Consciousness is simple presence; the clear space of awareness. The pause between the thoughts. That space where we get to practice expanding into peaceful presence. This space of consciousness is not male or female.

What is shaped by culture and is gendered, is the ego: the part of us that learns roles, status, and rules. In patriarchal systems, ego is trained to prize control over care, speed over ripening, conquest over connection. Those ‘win/dominate/outperform’ values harm everyone because they starve our capacity for connection, reflection, and care.

This is not a rejection of the healthy masculine—clarity, steadiness, protection, generativity. It’s a recognition that without the balancing intelligence of the Divine Feminine—receptivity, relationship, embodiment, cyclical time—any dominating force tips into harm. Life thrives on reciprocity, rhythm, and interdependence. Polarities—like masculine and feminine, reason and intuition, activity and rest or doing and being—are how creation stays alive: not one side over the other, but a living dialogue between them. Not one better than the other. Patriarchy confuses polarity with hierarchy and attempts to value one more than the other. That’s not only unjust; it’s out of step with how life works.

The Divine Feminine is not a “look” or a form or gender. It’s an energy and an intelligence available to everyone: relational, intuitive, embodied. Remember when I use the term Divine Feminine, I’m naming the archetypal field of receptivity, intuition, relationship, and embodiment—an energy that dances inside the space of consciousness which is genderless. Paradoxical perhaps. But when culture marginalizes the energy of the Divine Feminine in our stories—particularly in religious stories—that marginalization also flows in our systems of law, medicine, finance, and especially religion—and even inside ourselves, as we know from the Inner Patriarch. We learn to distrust our softness and to outsource our knowing.

So if consciousness is beyond gender, why don’t we live that way? Because the ego has been trained by patriarchy, and we unconsciously identify with ego. We identify with our thoughts, our perspectives, views and opinions. The result is what many of us meet inside: the Inner Patriarch, which we identify with as well. He’s not a personal invention so much as a cultural inheritance—the inner voice of the same story that pushed the feminine into the margins.

He rarely sounds cruel; he often sounds reasonable, even caring. Yet he tells women: be smaller, be tougher, don’t feel so much; prove your worth before you rest. He tells men: never break down; never need; control your fear and anyone who mirrors it back.

He isn’t the enemy; he’s a symptom. He shows us how hierarchy becomes personal; how the dominant story set up shop in our own minds. We don’t fix this by swinging a sword at the mirror. We heal this unconscious imbalance with awareness. From awareness we can re-parent ourselves with the wisdom he didn’t trust.

The vow I made that night at Iso—to belong first to myself; to honor the connection and commitment in love with the Divine Beloved—that mystical Force that is beyond who “I am,” before honoring a commitment in love with anyone else—that was the soul’s quiet rebellion against the Inner Patriarch’s rule.

Crossing the Threshold

Real change and evolution of consciousness asks us to move from outer critique to inner noticing. That threshold is where activism meets awakening—where we stop blaming culture alone and see how its patterns live in our beliefs, habits, and self-talk.

Because the same story that silenced women publicly learned to speak through our thoughts. We absorbed the messages without meaning to. They surface as self-doubt, perfectionism, fear of being “too much” or “not enough.” The culture’s voice becomes the inner voice that tells us to stay small, to withhold our truth, to mistrust our intuition. Even when external barriers loosen, their echo keeps sounding inside.

Healing begins by noticing when that old voice is speaking through us—and cultivating the muscle of observing and conscious awareness. When awareness beyond gender meets the wound of internalized hierarchy, the psyche remembers its wholeness.

What we internalize, we also tend to institutionalize. The same conditioning that shapes our private thoughts shows up in public systems. And nowhere is that clearer than in the cultural machinery that trains women to be prizes rather than protagonists.

Systems That Train Women to Be Prizes

The Inner Patriarch does not live in isolation; he is fluent in the languages of our institutions. The same logic that polices worth within us is built into the systems that surround us. Once we learn to hear his voice internally, we begin to recognize his tone in the world’s architecture—in classrooms, clinics, boardrooms, courts. Systems and our internalized hierarchies mirroring each other. The stories we walk through in the world become the stories that shape our self-perception, our choices, and even our nervous systems.

In the Systems of Education. Classrooms often reward linear mastery, speed, and competition. Quiet forms of knowing, like field-dependent learning, somatic and emotional intelligence, creativity, collaboration and communal problem-solving, are all marked down as “soft” skills. Curiosity without immediate “outcomes” is discouraged. The fictitious myth taught beneath the lesson is that knowledge is a ladder to climb, not a vast and intricate tapestry to explore.

In the Systems of Medicine. Women’s bodies have been historically pathologized. Menstruation, menopause, birth, and pain have been treated as problems to fix rather than mysteries to understand and work with. Intuition and lived experience are routinely dismissed—overridden by metrics that don’t always measure what matters. Rather than intuitively listening to our body, we’re actively taught not to—taught by systems, training, and even language. The myth at work here is that the body is a machine, and “experts” are the only reliable narrators or “masters” of its story. When the body’s own wisdom is silenced, people instinctively look elsewhere for a fuller map of healing.

What delights me beyond any rational comprehension is the fact that Louise Hay’s 1984 book, Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them, became an international bestseller, was translated into more than twenty-five languages, and is still in print more than forty years after its debut. This speaks to a collective hunger for healing that goes beyond the purely rational or clinical, and to a cultural need to acknowledge the healing energies available to us, not limited to the narrow lens of allopathic medicine.

And this is not to discount allopathic medicine, which continues to save lives every day. Broken bones, acute infections, emergency crises—these are moments when medical intervention can be miraculous. But healing is larger than treatment, and the soul reaches for what the scalpel cannot touch.

That hunger for healing continues to show up in new forms. The renowned psychic medium and New York Times bestselling author, Laura Lynne Jackson, has just released Guided: The Secret Path to an Illuminated Life, a book that invites readers to notice the synchronicities, connections, and unseen threads of support that shape a human life. Her work points to the same truth Louise Hay intuited decades earlier: that there is more to us than materialism allows.

Jackson’s language of a “Team of Light” gives contemporary form to an ancient intuition—one that is part of the reclamation of the Divine Feminine. It reminds us that we are held in relationship with forces of love, wisdom, and guidance that move through and beyond the visible world, back through generations to ancestors. It recognizes that life is relational at the deepest level, that wisdom moves through connection, and that guidance often appears through the subtle, the invisible, and the liminal. Both Hay’s and Jackson’s work illuminate different facets of a larger cultural shift: away from a mechanistic, hierarchical view of the body and soul, and toward a more intuitive, relational, Earth-honoring understanding of healing, meaning, and belonging. This return to intuitive, embodied ways of knowing is not a trend—it is a remembering.

This remembering is not limited to medicine. Once we notice how the Inner Patriarch distorts our relationship with the body, it becomes harder to ignore how the same logic has shaped our relationship with money, power, and worth.

In the Systems of Finance. Access to capital, credit, and property has been unequally distributed for centuries. To enter the arena, women are coached to mirror aggressive postures. The myth reinforced is that value equals extraction plus control. Money becomes a test of masculine-coded mastery rather than a relational flow of energy—a tool for sustenance, reciprocity, and shared flourishing. Tosha Silver’s 2019 book, It’s Not Your Money, explores the idea of money as an energy: we never “own” it. It flows. From a Divine Feminine lens, money is not a prize to win but a current moving through relationships, shaped by our intentions and values. Money itself is not evil. The harm can lie not in the currency but in the states of mind we bring to it—greed, hatred, and delusion.

In the Systems of Law & Politics. The dominant languages are order, debate, and force. The performance of certainty is rewarded; humility is punished. The myth at work is that legitimacy must sound like command, not listening.

These systems are like rooms in the psyche; walk through enough of them and the Inner Patriarch becomes fluent. To avoid penalty, many women grow an even stricter Inner Patriarch than the men around them. He keeps you “safe” by making you smaller. He teaches you to be the most polished prize in a structure you did not build.

In the Systems of Religion. For centuries, religion has been one of the primary architects of meaning—which it transmits through stories—and one of the deepest enforcers of hierarchy. In many traditions, women’s spiritual authority has been restricted, mediated, or erased altogether. The sacred is often narrated through masculine-coded language: father, king, lord, shepherd, judge. Meanwhile, the feminine aspects of the divine—wisdom, intuition, embodiment, birth, creation—are either relegated to metaphor, recast as dangerous, or severed from spiritual leadership entirely. Lived experience, mystical insight, and relational knowing are often viewed with suspicion, framed as “less authoritative” than doctrine delivered from a pulpit.

The myth taught beneath the liturgy is that transcendence requires leaving the body, the Earth, and the feminine behind. But at its Latin root, religare, religion means “to bind together” or “to reconnect”—and any tradition that sidelines half of the sacred story binds its people to only half of themselves.

An Interlude: The Monastery Across the Road

Every institution, no matter how well-intentioned, carries its own mythology about who is central and who is peripheral. Remember when the Buddhist monastery opened across from our home, I asked the abbot where were the women in their tradition. He said this monastery would train male monks only. A devoted supporter smiled and said she had never experienced sexism or misogyny with the monks. Her answer was sincere—and missed the point. You can be treated with kindness and still live inside a structure that excludes you from spiritual authority.

Later, my teacher, Rev. Dr. Stephanie Rutt, named what I felt: women often minimize the ache of structural absence because they love the community that holds them. Love for a community does not alter its structure; sometimes that love delays our willingness to question it. I do not doubt the monks’ intentions of compassion and loving kindness. I see the Divine Feminine embodied by these men. Yet the institution normalizes women’s absence in its hierarchy. We need to hold both recognitions without collapsing into cynicism or sentimentality.

This is the paradox of reclaiming agency: honoring the good that is, while telling the truth about what is not yet.

Love is not an alibi for erasure. Love asks for wholeness—balance of feminine and masculine, yin and yang, anima and animus—within and without, so that our inner life and outer structures can come into coherence.

you may click here for Chapter 2, part 4…

---