Who’s Got the Power and How Do I Get Some?

Some of you might remember that phrase from the 1970s women’s movement. It was a rallying cry for us. And I’ve been thinking about it lately.

I’ve been thinking about how that is the very essence of the competitive system we operate under. Winners and Losers. Grab what you can. There’s only so much to go around.

Taking it further, this competitive model we’ve all been trained in for generations is the essence of the Victim/Enemy-Perpetrator archetype. When we women cast ourselves in the Victim role of being left out of the conversations (being powerless), we keep the dynamic of the Perpetrator alive by believing they have the power and we are somehow at their mercy.

Back in the 70s that rallying cry made so much sense to us. It was a different world then. There were no women anchors on the evening news programs; many career paths were difficult, if not impossible, for women to enter, from professions like lawyers, doctors, and engineers to skilled trades like electricians and plumbers. Of course women were supposed to be home raising their kids so who needed a career in the first place?

I could go on, but that’s not what I want to focus on here.

I want to explore how that set us off on this path of fighting an opponent. The energy of adversaries. Us against them.

It was true – and still is to a massive extent – that higher level positions of power in companies and governments, from local to international are held by men. We often also say, white men, but that really depends on where you live in the world.

Yes, much has changed since the 1970s yet much remains the same. Lots of talk about diversity but who is really sitting at the decision-making tables in most companies?

Women Aim to Take Power into Their Own Hands

This feeling of nothing is ever going to change spurred many women to take their skills and passions and create their own businesses.

A 2016 study shows an estimated 11.3 million businesses in the U.S. are owned by women. And women-owned businesses grew by 45% since 2007, while business growth in general increased by only 9%.

It’s easy to think that being your own boss will stop that pushing and striving feeling. That need to keep proving your own worth. But it doesn’t always happen, does it? It can be a shock to see how much you turn into your own mean boss, with no one to blame anymore.

This gives you a wonderful opportunity to see how you might be playing out that victim-perpetrator dynamic inside yourself. The whole point of this particular universal archetype is to:

• teach you to claim your personal power and develop self-esteem
• take responsibility for what happens in your life
• truly understand that the outside world has no control over your attitude and reactions to your circumstances
• learn how to set personal boundaries so you can honor your own needs.

The Laws of Polarity and Gender Operate the 3D Universe

Even though you may not consciously think about the distinctions between male and female energies, they are operating in your unconscious. This is because everything in the entire 3D universe operates through the Law of Gender and the Law of Polarity.

We are all familiar with the idea of hot and cold, light and dark, good and bad and thousands of other so-called pairs of opposites. In truth they are more of a continuum… a matter of degrees or polarities. Two sides of the same coin.

The Law of Gender has to do with the positive or negative electrical charge existing in everything from sub-atomic particles to galaxies. In human beings, the right side of the body is “electric” acting as a transmitter. This is the active force or male principle. Also known as Radiance, one of the two energies that sustains the Universe.

The left side of our body is “magnetic” acting as the receiver, the passive female force, the energy of Magnetism. Their interaction creates the ranges of electromagnetism we experience on planet earth. These are not value judgments, rather gender principles. And in order to come into a state of full harmony, balance, and internal unity, both of these gender aspects of the self must be acknowledged, accepted and even loved.

It’s easy to see how that might be difficult when we’ve been so programmed into thinking that these two principles are inherently at war with each other.

Can we find a whole new way of approaching life itself?

I believe we’re being called into an entirely new way of being within ourselves and between each other. Many of us talk about this as the new era of the Divine Feminine. I was firmly entrenched in that camp for 45 years. It also seemed to make sense. The old model of male domination was giving way to a rise of the feminine.

But when I hear that now, all I see is the same action/reaction model of dualistic thinking and behaving. What I think we’re being called to is so much more than that.

It’s rising above that either/or thinking and fully embracing the paradox of both/and awareness. I’m not good or bad. I’m good and bad. I’m not only a female. I understand I am energetically both male and female. And each of those aspects have both beautiful, strong, heart-centered qualities… and their ego-centered shadow sides. I am all of it. I Am the All That Is.

I am learning a whole new way of being human

If we begin to truly understand that these male-female energies are running inside us, and we can come into a unity of win-win internally, there is no need to be at war with anybody in the outside world. Our power is internal and is not dependent on outside forces. This is the ultimate key to freedom, peace, and true power.

The way to get there is to open up to the parts of us we fear, the parts we don’t really want to claim, the parts that we try so hard to ignore. Because the more we keep battering at that outside door, demanding to be let in, the more the old dramas and traumas keep playing out over and over.

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What does this bring up for you? Share your thoughts below.

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Women on a Mission: Meet Your Inner Partner in  Creativity, Power, & Leadership