Women and "the feminine" - what's the difference?

Recent decades have brought an increased interest in and awareness of women’s contributions in all aspects of society, including religion and spirituality. At the same time, in religious and spiritual communities particularly there is not a clearly articulated distinction between women’s contribution and what has become understood as the feminine, or the divine feminine.

Our collective growing interest in all things “feminine” in a spiritual context can easily seem like an umbrella to the challenge of recognizing and acknowledging women’s contributions. But these are distinct fields, and in some cases, can actually oppose each other, as our sense of feminine wholeness and harmony can sometimes seem threatened by the focus on women’s particular gifts and challenges.

But submerging women’s spiritual uniqueness under the umbrella of “the feminine” is an obstacle to change – individually and collectively. We can’t afford to avoid, ignore, or downplay the differences between “women” and “the feminine,” because both are independently important and associated with different psychological and spiritual challenges.

A few leaders and visionaries are willing to take on the difficult task of emphasizing gender distinctions in a spiritual context, and are calling attention to women’s spiritual qualities. This is a key step to empowering the next turn in our collective evolution and it depends not simply on a growing respect for the feminine, but a growing support of women taking on more spiritual responsibility for their own and our shared future.

Other fields

Other fields are willing to explore and honor the differences in men and women. Moir and Jessel’s 1989 Brain Sex, the wonderfully readable translation of neurological research about male and female brains shows clear biological differences – and their sociological reflections. Echoing common experience, research indicates that male brains support compartmentalization and focus, while women’s brains process across a variety of areas, supporting multi-tasking. Male brains and hormonal systems generally support aggression, competition, and better math skills than women, whose brains generally help them become people-oriented, better judges of character, and good readers of nuances in expressions. Men are likely to be better at reading maps indicating directional cues, (north, south east and west), while woman are better at following directions that include landmarks (take the right hand turn onto the bumpy road just past the red barn and stop at the house with the giant white veranda). Socialization matters in understanding gender differences, the authors say, but so does our basic neurological makeup.

Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan’s classic, In a Different Voice led the way in extensive research into the different models of psychological and moral development followed by boys and girls. Boys develop along lines that emphasize rights and objective ethical codes, while girls’ morality emphasizes feelings, responsibilities and relationships.

Psychological research supports educational initiatives and best practices for boys and girls, especially in the area of younger children. In the workplace, there’s a growing effort to include awareness of gender difference to create happier and more productive employees. And Nicholas Kristoff and Cheryl WuDunn’s recent Half the Sky documents the important improvements to family and community when women – instead of men - are given responsibility for managing finances.

In many areas we understand and value the real and relevant differences between men and women. We accept biological and cultural factors both. But in spiritual circles this distinction is yet to be accentuated. Instead, we find the literature about women’s contribution largely subsumed into a diffuse support of “feminine” spiritual experience and energy. In these cases, women are primarily symbols, vehicles, or representations of a greater force, like the Taoist “Yin”.

While this is of course true, it is also not the only truth. And to adhere to this perspective ignores the very important dimension of the relative in which difference, particularities, time and space and the needs of the transient realm also have spiritual relevance.

Moving toward the feminine

Many spiritual traditions are embracing “the feminine” and recognizing the need for feminine spiritual awareness to balance traditional patriarchal values and methods. Sri Aurobindo, an early visionary, claimed, “If there is to be a future, it will wear the crown of feminine design.” And many in various lineages are helping us all become aware of what feminine awareness is and how it works.  Andrew Harvey’s The Return of the Mother, an in-depth survey of the sacred feminine from the world’s religions, is one example. Harvey reminds us of the important fact that we have a divine Mother as much as we have a divine Father and highlights the many on-the-ground implications of this spiritual truth.

In Christian circles, we find more books than ever about Sophia the complex feminine figure representing divine wisdom, and in Judaism we have increased recognition and respect for Shekhinah, the indwelling, immanent nature of God.

But in some cases, we are taking on this task of raising awareness about the gifts of feminine power, while blurring the lines between “women” and “the feminine”.  We notice this blurring in texts or talks by or about women and women’s contributions, which focus most enthusiasm on reverence for “the feminine” and ignore the issue of women themselves. There is often simply a lack of clarity about how “the feminine” relates to “women” and where the line between the two ends. In many instances we find writers and teachers linking the two but also trying to ensure they remain separate, without leading us clearly through that process.

The task isn’t easy. Imagery of the divine feminine often depends on female forms and attributes, yet we are also told it extend beyond the realm of gender duality. Dakinis in Buddhism are called “gendered symbols”[i] for feminine wisdom, available to all of us equally. Despite their egalitarian nature, dakinis are imaged as women, and seem to take on the form of living women (consider the historical Yeshe Tsogyal, or today’s Khandro Rinpoche) but not men.

Also in Buddhism, we learn about prajnaparamita, whose essential emptiness births all compassionate action. Likened to a “womb” and described as the “Mother of all Buddhas” she is nonetheless genderless and absolute. And women in Tibet, are still considered –as the literal translation of the word – to be of “lower birth.”

Sophia, Bride of Christ, is of course not limited to women, despite the book-covers that have her appear as one. And as an interesting cultural turn, Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame explored the feminine nature of God through his photographic exhibition entitled, “Shekhina” which was, of course, a collection of photographs of women.

One of the more clear reflections of the blurriness around “the feminine” and “women” comes from Sufi guide Lynn Barron who describes “The Unknown She” as an ancient consciousness of love, returning to the modern world. “Just because I call it ‘She’ does not mean that it is female,” she says. “It isn’t a gender, it is neither masculine or feminine, but for some reason you want to say “She.”[ii]

But what is this "some reason?" and what does it have to do with gender?

Another confusing trend is the collecting of women’s stories about spiritual experience that point us ultimately to a spirituality beyond our womanhood, as though being a woman is important – but only at the beginning of the path. For example, in Lenore Freedman and Susan Moon’s Being Bodies we find a collection of women Buddhists discussing embodiment. By including only women, we seem to have a book about women, and even women’s bodies. Yet, in the introduction, the authors describe that spiritual insight shows us that the body becomes -  as quoted from Advaita teacher Joan Tollifson – “permeable, borderless, empty space” (xi)  as thought the gendered particularities of our embodiment are only a beginning to an ultimate experience of genderless non-body.

Or in other words, we only start out as women.

In more recent books, we begin to see woman-ness remain on the path, and begin to sense how spiritual awareness can ground itself in women rather than only help women ascend beyond their gender, as in my own The Unknown She, as well as Rita Marie Robinson’s Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom. But even so, women here are generally understood to be the natural – but certainly not the sole – carriers of feminine wisdom and power, which is generally accepted as a force in the universe. Robinson’s subtitle is “The feminine face of awakening” and my own is “Eight faces of an emerging consciousness,” indicating this vaster terrain beyond gender.

All these contributions are important and valuable. They encourage us to know and revere the sacred feminine, and point to women, particularly, as ones who can reflect this wisdom into our collective consciousness. This honoring of the feminine is critical if we are to ever move into a more balanced future in which divine feminine values such as reverence for the earth, responsibilities to care, and a commitment to peace and harmony can thrive.

But there is another task we mustn’t forget, and which in many ways we are hiding among this broader examination of the feminine. This is the task of examining and honoring women’s spiritual nature.

This task challenges women and men both to into the uncomfortable spot of acknowledging that all spiritual wisdom and power is not universally accessible to all people equally. It encourages us to hold the possibility that women are different then men in important ways, have something specific to offer, and should be respected as leaders in a variety of spiritual challenges facing our shared world.

Bias against the manifest

 In the challenge of honoring women’s specific, gender related spiritual gifts, it’s important to look at our assumptions that physical form and difference have little or no spiritual significance. On the level of the soul or the Self, we are told again and again, there is no gender. So why would gender really matter? In oneness, there is no duality. So how could the world of duality matter? As we focus on the absolute and unconditioned, why would we value the world of relative difference?

While the relationship between relative and absolute has long been a theological mystery, our western world remains steeped in a prejudice toward the latter. The signs of this prejudice are all around us and deep within us, in the degeneration and disregard for our earth-based natural systems, our own physical and mental health, and our spiritual connections to the material realm.

Many of our assumptions that gender is largely insignificant in the spiritual search are born from a patriarchal spiritual view that the body, the earth, the physical, transient, and changeable realm is irrelevant to spiritual experience. This is a view that has denied women their spiritual power for centuries, as it has linked women to the base world of earth and physical desire, the realm from which the seeker needs to be free.

Examples of these attitudes reside in every tradition. Remember the Buddha’s words: “In accepting the true Dharma, may I abandon body, life, and property…” [iii]

And in the Bible, Peter, in Book 1, 2.11 clearly articulates the duality of body and soul: “Beloved I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, obstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against our soul.” And of course our general cross-tradition assumptions that a better life awaits us after we leave this earth.

We must acknowledge that this sense of waging a spiritual war with our bodies and our physical needs not only has influenced all of us, but has had little relevance to woman’s innate spiritual intelligence, which is often most alive and active when fully and consciously engaged with the processes of the body – our menstruation, our sexuality, our pregnancy and our wisdom of caring and sustaining of life. This connection to body is not only a symbol but part of a material reality.

In many ways, a woman’s path is very much what we are coming to know as “feminine” in that it honors the realm of creation and the immanent, not just transcendent divinity.

But it also honors women. It brings with it an inherent valuing of the manifest world and its many mysteries of incarnation, thus protecting our inquiry into women’s unique spirituality.

It allows for our bodies to hold and reveal meaning, and it marvels at their power, beauty, and relevance in spiritual understanding. It supports women’s transformation that so often happens while fully engaged with ordinary material life, the body, its needs, and often the reality of staying home in one place for much of one’s adult life. It honors the microcosm as well as the macrocosm, for it affirms how the greatest power of creation is available within our bodies and how material world is not separate from absolute, enduring, and unconditional love, which is in every tradition described as a divine attribute.

This kind of path also allows us fully acknowledges and values men’s gifts to our spiritual heritage – the gifts from the ascent, the glories of freedom, the joys of life beyond the body, so echoed in men’s physical strengths and role in procreation and in the development of our global cultures. But it acknowledges them as different and perhaps relevant to time and space and needs of a historical moment.

Women and men

This spiritual insight into the created world inquires into the nature of women’s bodies, and asks if the receptivity of the vagina, the spirit/matter-integrating capacity of the womb, the nourishment of our breasts, reflect an esoteric dimension that receives energy, serves the infusion of spirit into the physical world, and feeds life in a way men cannot. Do our bodies show that we offer different gifts and have distinct roles in our collective spiritual evolution, just as they have different roles in the material realm?

While answers to these questions are not easy to come by, asking them opens us to an intriguing and compelling line of inquiry into an entire new spiritual territory – the spiritual nature and power of the incarnated world.

 Bodies of knowledge have already been developed in this domain, like the knowledge of the healing elements of various distinct plants, of the specific powers of various animal totems, of the power of place. When a particular help is needed, a shaman knows to call on a particular spirit animal. A healer knows to use a particular herb. In the realm of the particular, it is wise to know the gifts and powers of distinct bodies – whether it is the body of land, animal, plant, or human.

This kind of knowledge has been the foundation of indigenous and shamanic cultures that have yet to over-emphasize the world beyond or above earthly existence. Not surprisingly, in the West this kind of knowledge was identified with women, witches, healers and hags, and many women were burned or killed because they threatened the Christian patriarchal power structures. Often it was enough for a woman to express love for animals or nature to become labeled a heretic and killed or imprisoned by the Inquisition.

But this wisdom is only the tip of the iceberg, and there is more to discover in this world of the incarnated, and in the differences between men and women. Hints have always been with us. From ancient yogic traditions, we learn that the male and female nervous systems are slightly different, as are the subtle energies within the chakras and channels. In various Tantra traditions (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist), a female practitioner provides essential energy for a male practitioner’s own evolution, and vice versa.

These ancient hints and suggestions of esoteric differences between men and women and our gendered esoteric bodies are echoed through the work of a few contemporary spiritual leaders who lay the groundwork for further developments.

Eckhart Tolle explains the importance of esoteric pain bodies – collective bodies of thoughts, feelings and experiences connecting us to each other and throughout time, and which group together different cultures and countries and also genders. Ethnic groups have different pain bodies, different experiences, and different karma. Similarly, women’s pain body differs from men’s and it is often experienced as emotional upset, caused by centuries of destruction to the feminine principle. This pain body links women to a collective experience of violence and loss, and influences our daily lives. This esoteric reality, intertwined with the physical realities of being women, creates different challenges and also opportunities in women’s spiritual evolution.

Tolle is even bold enough to declare that women’s esoteric makeup and world experiences make them better candidates for moving beyond the ego: “Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is losing its hold on women more quickly than on men.”[iv] Tolle’s thought echoes the Tibetan Buddhist understanding that women only need altruism or bodhicitta in order to become enlightened, as their nervous system is quicker and more flexible than men’s, naturally helping them to not cling to ideas or thoughts or identities.

Another bold voice belongs to Pansy Hawk Wing, a leader of Lakota ceremony, whose work focuses on emphasizing the role of women and feminine values in traditional Lakota spirituality. Her work has been empowered, in part, by a vision of a Ghost Dance ceremony in which no men were present. A hundred years ago, the Ghost Dance was practiced by the Lakota people as a method for saving themselves and their way of life against the attack of the U.S. Cavalry. In her vision, Hawk Wing understood that a second Ghost Dance was occurring and men had no contribution to make. “I understood we were all near death again, as we were a hundred years ago, and I understood the men had no part to play in saving us from destruction.” [v]

When asked why not, Hawk Wing explains that feminine energy and power must now be the prominent force in ceremony.  Remembering that the Lakota teachings came through a woman –  the White Buffalo Calf Woman –  is also key. But Hawk Wing makes a distinction between the feminine energy available through one of the seven directions – the Grandmother – and the fact of womanhood. Grandmother energy, which focuses on our capacity to nourish, and also honoring the earth and nature must be accessed by all of us this and balanced with that of Grandfather, which is an uplifting, force of transcendent love.

At the same time, women have their specific spiritual gifts. “Women are given an extra charge by the Creator, the added responsibility of procreation,” she explains. This difference between men and women is important, and women must use accept this responsibility and take responsibility for its spiritual implications.

Another clear voice echoing Hawk Wing’s emphasis on women’s creative energy, comes from Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Sufi teacher. His own teacher in his Naqshbandi Sufi lineage, the great Saint Bhai Sahib articulated an esoteric difference between men and women that influenced their individual paths to realization: Men need more practices in order to control prakriti (nature) in themselves, while women, “because they are nearer prakriti, are fertilized by the Divine Energy which they retain in their Chakras, and because of this, very few practices are needed.”[vi]

Vaughan-Lee extends reference to this esoteric truth into the context of the needs of our collective human/earth spiritual evolution. In a 2007 talk in New Zealand, he stressed women’s creative power and closeness to nature as a healing tool for the natural world, a way to restore the earth’s spiritual nature, which has been destroyed by centuries of human neglect and misuse.

 “A certain spiritual work needs to be done by women that has to do with healing and transmuting the earth so it can function as a living spiritual organism.”[vii]

In the same talk, he explains that women have a substance within them that facilitates the process of a soul entering the created world during pregnancy. In a similar way, women can help spiritual light enter the body of the earth. “A higher energy can come down through a woman’s spiritual vehicles through her body into the physical body of the world and it brings with it a sacred substance that a woman has.”

Not many spiritual teachers are committed today to understanding or supporting the role of women in the spiritual evolution of our world. But the Dalai Lama made a claim along these lines during the 2007 Vancouver Peace Summit, when he declared, “The world will be saved by the western woman.”

Women and the feminine

Some will think that a global emphasis on “the feminine” is enough to help create a more balanced and peaceful world and usher us all into a new evolutionary cycle. And many will feel that an exploration into gender differences and women’s roles in spiritual life is unnecessary or worse, divisive, polarizing and “low” compared to the “heights” of an idealized and transcendent unity that surely awaits us.

But as we move into a future that includes a new understanding of the earth and our own humanity, it behooves us to honor the feminine and to also honor women as unique. Why? First, because not doing so feels like part of an old paradigm infused with prejudices against both women and the material realm, and second, because the tasks and challenges inherent in them are quite distinct. If our emphasis is on a return to feminine values and feminine understanding, women might be able to lead the way but men are equally called to understand their own feminine aspects and work towards valuing and reflecting them into worldly systems.

However, if it is women who will, as the Dalai Lama suggested, save the world, then the task for men is likely to support women’s rise to leadership roles in key areas, and for women to accept a new level responsibility for life and culture both. In this case, a massive shift of power might come into play in which women – not the only feminine aspects in all of us – rise in standing in many sectors of society, including perhaps our spiritual systems.

To turn from these tasks because we hesitate to single out groups of people and recognize their uniqueness would be unfortunate. Historically we’ve seen and suffered from the violence and degradation that goes along with this kind of identification and separatist thinking, but perhaps it is because we’ve learned from the past that we might be able to do this with no violence and reactivity. Does it need to degrade a rose that we recognize the beauty of a peony? Does it need to degrade the role of one herb when we chose another for healing? Can we develop a system of identifying, honoring, and using specific groups of people for specific tasks that does not denigrate the gifts of others?

If we can develop this line of inquiry now, we might be able to revive some of the gifts of those who have been denigrated in the past, and support their unique contributions to the future. Indigenous peoples, First peoples of North America, African Americans, women, all those who have been denigrated in the past most likely have hidden gifts for the future.

The great Sufi leader, Hazrat Inayat Khan once said: “Everything that is to be built on the spiritual plane is finished when it is also built on the physical plane.”[viii] Interestingly, in this perspective we do not start in the physical and finish in the non-physical, formless realm, but we go the opposite direction, with our attention on the physical being a necessary and final reflection and grounding of the spiritual. In the context of the feminine and women, we assume then that as we strive to know and honor the feminine, women – as women, not symbols – will be also be recognized anew.

In exploring and honoring women’s unique spiritual power we would collectively be doing something historically revolutionary – fully respecting the manifestation of the divine in world of manifestation and distinct form.

This step alone – to fully value the physical dimension as an expression of spiritual truth – would be a milestone for all of us.