In English there is a saying “to throw the baby out with the bath water”. Or rather not to throw the baby out with the bath water which really is another way of saying that you don’t always want to throw out everything – just throw out what no longer is of use, and keep that which is still useful (the baby!).
Sometimes we accidentally do throw the baby out with the bath water and here is one example.
As we all know it has been rather challenging, to put it mildly, for women to live in a world that has been dominated for a long time by men. Men who did not have a clue on how to protect and nurture the feminine spirit, but rather, by men who were supressing and violating women left and right.
The masculine energy that has been in charge of the human race over the last few thousand years, is not the divine masculine energy. I like to refer to it as the immature masculine energy.
The feminist movement, in my opinion, has been a reaction to this occurrence in history when women were finally able to say “No, we don’t want that. We never wanted it and now we actually have the freedom to say we really don’t want it and we are not having it.”
Out of the feminist movement many changes for women have come about, that were very important and useful. Many changes in education, in health care, in the work place, the way society relates to women, the way society values women; a lot has changed indeed. Even though you could argue that so much more needs to change, still, a lot has changed.
Now there is a very paradoxical phenomenon that I would like to bring up, which I refer to as “the baby and the bath water”. As a result of thousands of years of oppression, women are apprehensive to really trust and connect with a man at a deep level.
It is very deep in our subconscious psyche as women that we need to stay independent. We need to always be able to get up and run just in case the situation in this relationship turns against us. This is very understandable and predictable.
And you may wonder, why I talk about this in such a large, historic context. Well – all these behaviours and programming are stored in our collective subconscious. And until and unless we do the deep work to unhook ourselves from this programing, we are not actually able to choose different behaviour. And if we are able to choose different behaviours, the energy behind them is still one of reaction to a negative situation. Hence, it is not free, it does not feel good, and it does not produce nourishing connection.
I know the word “dependence” has become something of a dirty word in our current society. When you are dependent on anyone, you are called co-dependent and co-dependent means there is something wrong with you. So being dependent on someone else is inherently wrong, that is where we at are right now in our shared collective about relationships. I think that is very confusing to all of us, since in a deep relationship, you actually are dependent. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Right now, you are dependent on your phone or your computer and whoever operates the power plant in your area that supplies either power or Wi-Fi for you to be able to read this newsletter. You are dependent on that person and it is actually many, many people that you are dependent on.
The food you ate today you probably didn’t grow yourself and if you did grow it yourself, probably someone helped you. In other words, it is an illusion to be truly independent and at the same time being independent and self-sufficient is a value especially in the American culture that is considered very important.
As long as you are searching and seeking to be independent, you can’t really let yourself trust and connect deeply with someone and work out whatever comes up for you and the other person in relationship.
It is very inconvenient to depend on someone. For one, you have no control over another person.
I really like the word “Inter-dependence” because it indicates that we are all connected. We are all like a biological organisms that needs one cell to do one thing and another cell to do another thing. We are all needing one another to live.
So, I wanted to just share this thought that I had the other day when I worked with a female client who was noticing how much she was resisting, actually feeling the dependence she truly has with her partner and the image of needing to pull that baby back out of the bath water. You know when you throw the bath water out with the baby in it. That baby went out with the bath water when women were desperately and rightfully seeking independence from relationships that were not honouring them as sovereign beings.
And now it is our sacred task to re-establish deep connection with men, that are based on trust. Going beyond the collective unconscious programming that would strongly suggest, it is not safe to be deeply dependant on a man.
Just some food for thought.