The Eternal Feminine Is a Healer.

A powerful trend is underway to bring about more justice and equality for women. An attitude of “It’s about time” is totally justified. But there’s an area where gender roles, as society views them, hides a deeper truth. The eternal feminine needs to be recaptured, a project that would bring healing to everyone. If you pause for a moment, you will recognize that the most healing words immediately bring up a feminine image: for example, loving, peaceful, forgiving, warm, tolerant, harmonious, heartfelt. 

The feminine connotation of these words crosses social, gender, and national lines. They are innate in human awareness, and what makes them eternal is that these qualities are not mind-made. There is no birth or expiration date for them. To access them, you need to bring in feminine energy, no matter who you are. When the eternal feminine is disconnected from day-to-day life, an imbalance results. At its most extreme, love gives way to fear, forgiveness to hatred, peace to violence. Those counterforces do not heal themselves or come to an end just because we condemn them.

It takes the energy of the feminine to exert a positive healing force. There is no other way. “Eternal” is so vast that we have to begin with practical aspects of feminine energy. The “four A’s” that have become popular are feminine:  appreciation, affection, acceptance, and allowing. A loving mother imparts all of these to her children, and she then becomes a lifelong model. If you are distressed by the deep divisions in society, these words seem to describe what has been lost.  they also outline a path to healing.

The rise of feminine energies is not only necessary; it needs to accelerate if we are to regain any kind of healthy balance, socially and in ourselves. The era of masculine dominance, which goes back to prehistoric times, has not benefitted men, who are as damaged by war, violence, and lack of love as women are. The masculine energy arc has now reached a state of exhaustion, which I think is felt quite widely. Brute force, physical strength, and aggression are masculine energies that once had survival value. But a positive future can’t emerge, and the planet cannot be saved, by allowing those forces to dominate.

A healed planet inhabited by healed human beings demands the emergences of the feminine energies that have been ignored and suppressed far too long. I’m not issuing a manifesto. Manifestos are a symptom of intolerance and rigidity. The place where healing occurs is in one’s own awareness. If you wake up to your attitudes and behavior, it’s not esoteric or arcane to discern the imbalance that favors the masculine.

Look at the feminine energies represented in the words I began with, and this time see if they apply to you: loving, peaceful, forgiving, warm, tolerant, harmonious, heartfelt. If you find that they don’t apply to you, why not? This isn’t simply a case of men behaving badly, although many men in leadership positions around the world certainly have. The issue is one of healing both men and women.

In the struggle for women’s rights, it is hard to swallow that women need to adopt the healing role for everyone. But there is no alternative in a world where men abandon peace in favor of war, harmony in favor of partisanship, and so on much more than women do. Where does the desirable side of human nature go? It gets assigned to women. One astute Black leader commented on the history of progressive politics in America by saying, “Black women are always called off the bench to save the Democrats, and we do it over and over again.”

When elections must be pulled out of the fire, it is women we rely on. One has to be grateful, but the underlying message is that men, on their own, would keep fighting, competing, clashing, and generally acting like sworn adversaries.  One of the most warped symptoms of imbalance is the spectacle of the privileged taking pride in putting down and abusing the powerless. Such a betrayal is endemic in every society on earth. We see this in that so many of the births in the world occur without the consent or desire of the mother. A picture of male sexual abuse is hard to escape, and impossible to accept as normal.

Beneath the turbulent surface of mental activity, which is constantly churning up waves of positive energy clashing with waves of negative energy, there is a calm, quiet state of awareness. Until a critical mass of people find this zone of peace and quiet, no real change can occur. Human nature isn’t fixed, fortunately. We are creatures who possess infinite possibilities in ourselves. The silent awareness that lies beneath the surface of the mind isn’t difficult to reach. Everyone has experienced inner peace and quiet.

But we don’t value it enough, and we don’t deepen our experiences. Silent mind is the threshold to a deeper zone of bliss-consciousness, which is where the eternal feminine is found.  (There’s a huge amount to say about how to reach bliss-consciousness, about which I’ve written in my latest book, Living in the Light.) I am not naïve enough to believe that  a list of words like loving, peaceful, and forgiving does more than offer a reminder of our better nature.

But they can do something more by becoming a vision of possibilities. Without such a healing vision, our shared fate is to be tossed about in confusion and conflict. We can take more steps to expand the vision: the eternal feminine wants to heal us. It is in contact with each person at the level where the true self silently awaits. Unseen forces rise to aid us once we set our vision in motion, which begins by knowing with total confidence that we want to heal personally. 

No vision can do much unless it is taken to heart. The paradox of human history is that war, violence, crime, civil strife, and domestic abuse—all generated by men overwhelmingly—are deplored as the root of suffering, and yet, having stared the causes of suffering in the face, we continue to embrace them.  I keep faith that women do not believe in this embrace or join it. At the same time, feminine values have a history of being shrouded and ignored.

Big ideas float around about how to solve some global problems that seem insoluble, including overpopulation, climate change, epidemic disease, and refugeeism. I have only a modest proposal. Become a unit of healing in your own life. Put into practice the feminine qualities that are the only avenue toward inner wholeness and balance. The greatest contribution you can personally make to the world is your state of awareness. Society doesn’t teach us that, but if it had, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a sorry state in the first place.

 DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation.  Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book,  Living in the Light co-authored with Sarah Platt-Finger. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com