Any discussion that involves sex or gender or polarity is very difficult to have in today’s world. Our perspectives are muddied by misinformation. They are muddied by traditional cultural archetypes and gender associations. They are muddied by the trauma inherent in the collective human story of sex and gender across history. They are also muddied by our own personal traumas that involve sex and gender. There is so much pain and fear involved. And seeing as how these discussions relate to everyone, absolutely everyone has skin in the game.

If you have spent any time in new age spiritual circles, you have probably heard people say that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that what is healthy (the ideal state of being) is when their masculine and feminine energies are balanced. This argument is often used to shoot down the idea that women need to be in their feminine and men need to be in their masculine in order to be in a state of alignment and have a healthy relationship with one another. Today, I’m going to present an alternative perspective. One that is sure to ruffle some feathers. But, let’s strap on our seat belts and get going. 

The argument that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them, and that the goal is for your masculine and feminine energies to be balanced, rests on the recognition of duality in this universe. That part of the picture of creation itself is the existence of masculine and feminine. And that you can divide all things into the camp of masculine or feminine. These philosophies tend to be especially focused on qualities. For example, you could divide traits like assertiveness, direction, stability, strength and action into the masculine camp and things like receptivity, intuition, nurturing, wisdom and creativity into the feminine camp. This philosophy goes further to assert that if you possess too much of any one polarity, you end up in the shadow of that polarity. So, in order to be healthy and in alignment, you must try to achieve balance. To cultivate both your feminine side and your masculine side. 

Well, the truth is far bigger than people like to make it when they argue that you have both masculine and feminine within you. What is true at one level is that you have the universe within you. You are a fractal of the greater universe. And given that this is the case, all things are within you. This includes masculinity and femininity. But this also includes every other possible thing in existence. What is true at one level is oneness, non-duality. And at the same time, what is true at one level is duality. In this time space reality, you made the choice to play in and experience duality. You made a choice to experience through the perspective of a physical human. And as a specific sex, gender or polarity. This is true even if a person doesn’t fit the typical male or female categories because they represent a variation of the two polarities. This was not an accident. You knew that doing so would best serve your personal expansion and with it, universal consciousness and expansion. In the same way that you made a decision to be human, you made a decision to polarize. You came here to be a unique expression of that picture of polarity. You did this because you knew it would serve this specific incarnation. You did not do this in error. It is not something you came here to transcend yourself out of or to correct.  

Most people come into this life as a specific polarity in order to master something within the camp of femininity or masculinity. And in alignment with their life purpose, the embodiment they chose allows them to embody and express something (or a great many things) within the camp of masculine or feminine. To be truly conscious, we must be able to hold both the reality of oneness and dualism. Both the realities of identification and disidentification. We came to play in both. And contrary to the currently popular view, there is lots of personal and spiritual growth in the experience of dualism, including conscious polarity. 

The belief that every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that the ideal state of being, is when their masculine and feminine energies are balanced, can put a person severely out of alignment with their thought form as well as their temporal embodiment. The concept of you exists before the physical body does. When a stream of consciousness is projecting itself forth into a physical manifestation of a human, it first creates a thought form. This thought form will fit into the polarity of either feminine or masculine or rarely, represent some variation of the two polarities, with the conditions for the physical body then usually following suit. As you can see in my wording, there are some rare exceptions. A person’s pre-birth intention determines the polarity they choose. All people did not come to this life to transcend polarity. Rather, for most people, fully embodying their unique natural, authentic expression of the polarity they chose is to be in a state of alignment with their life purpose and thus their thought form and thus their physical embodiment.

Now let’s look at the body. A human being is not a frog or a clownfish or a banana slug. A human body does not change its polarity in the same way that the bodies of certain other species do. Human sex chromosomes lack plasticity. This was a decision made far before the human species existed. Basically, physical polarity is not as flexible as many people would wish it were. If the human body was, no person would need to get a hormonal or surgical sex change.

And so, here is the first major fundamental crack in the argument that every person has both feminine and masculine within them. And that the ideal state of being, is when their masculine and feminine energies are perfectly balanced. To make this claim and for it to hold water so to speak, you need to divorce energy from the body entirely. Meaning the body and its polarity is just some independent entity that has nothing to do with the psyche nor a person’s energy. You cannot do this. Period the end. It isn’t how this universe works. There is a profound interconnectedness between these aspects of you. And what happens on one level, affects the other. Your physical incarnation is an extension or condensing of the energetic dimensions of you. If what was true was that you are a perfect balance of masculine and feminine, people’s bodies would be naturally intersex or would have no sex at all. You would see a plasticity. If this plasticity existed, men could simply develop the capacity to give birth by developing their feminine side. You don’t embody everything all at once in this one incarnation. If you did, and your incarnation was a direct reflection of the highest dimensional truth, you would have no issue turning into a tree, much less turning into a woman or man or erasing sex and gender all together. 

Though everyone falls somewhere on the scale of polarity (and we are talking about originally, not about adaptive strategies that change the picture of a person’s gender and polarity), what you will see as a general rule, is that a woman’s wellbeing mentally, emotionally and physically will start to decline when her life experience requires her to consistently bring forth and be in the masculine polarity. It is not compatible with the female embodiment. And a man’s wellbeing mentally, emotionally and physically will start to decline when his life experience requires him to consistently bring forth and be in the feminine polarity. It is not compatible with the male embodiment.   

For the argument to hold water, you need to either divorce the body from the energetic dimensions of a person entirely, or you must claim that a person being born female or male means they have an excess of one or the other energy (something not good) and thus, must overcompensate for that by females cultivating their masculinity or males cultivating their femininity. Play out that idea both personally and globally. Also, recognize the inherent resistance to your own embodiment in this idea. 

It is at this point that I need to insert a little history lesson. So many of our current ideas about spirituality and awakening are a Hodge podge collection of different philosophies coming from the Eastern world. Philosophies that people in the spiritual world unfortunately tend to regard as perfect doctrine. It is a trend for the philosophies of the Eastern world to divorce the body from spirit. So many of them are resistant to the body rather than integrative of the body. Many of them see all forms as empty of inherent existence… The body itself and all identifications, including sex and gender as a delusion. The goal of many of them is to disidentify from the body and transcend the body. This is deeply problematic. 

The traditions that influenced current Western spirituality the very most were Taoist, Buddhist and Yogic traditions. Well, what most people don’t know is that Taoist and Yogic tradition completely disagreed about the classification of the core principle of masculinity and femininity. In Taoism, the feminine, yin is associated with the void, darkness and the potential from which movement arises, where the masculine, yang, is the active, pushing force of creation and light. Whereas in Yogic philosophy, the masculine, Shiva represents pure, unchanging consciousness and stillness (the silent witness). And the feminine, Shakti is seen as the activating power. The kinetic, creative energy that makes everything move and manifest. And many Buddhist traditions consider compassion, one of the traits that people believe to be uncontestably feminine, to be masculine instead. So, it isn’t like there is this one truth that all Eastern philosophies agree about. 

Many people who support the idea that people have both masculine and feminine within them and that the ideal is to bring them into a state of perfect balance, love to point to the concept of Yin and Yang. But they do not understand that in ancient China, where this concept originates from, it was believed that a child being born a male or female was due to the dominance in either yin or yang energy at the time of conception. And that this obviously made the child either yin or yang dominant. An imbalance. Yet, they believed this specific imbalance to be a normal, healthy state of being that is essential to the balance of human relationships, human society, the earth and the universe itself. The Chinese view did not moralize or pathologize natural differences in the same way that we do in the Western world today. Rather, they believed in the functional harmony and correlation of all natural phenomena, including sex differences.  

Beyond the Eastern world influence, this popular perspective was very much shaped by the modern psychologist Carl Jung. And guess what? Jung spent decades studying Eastern thought. His thoughts were influenced by Yogic philosophy, Hinduism and the I Ching of Taoism. He explicitly used the concept of Shiva and Shakti as well as Yin and Yang when he asserted that every man has an unconscious and repressed female side (Anima). And every woman has an unconscious and repressed male side (Animus). And that psychological completeness required integration of the two. He treated biological sex as merely a biological fact that contributed to a person’s persona, creating a kind of one-sidedness, which the psyche then seeks to correct. And that the ideal state is a kind of inner bi-genderism. And Jung really did not understand how much his own classifications of energies and qualities were influenced by the cultural attitudes and rigid gender roles and associations of his day. Gender roles which did not reflect the truth about femininity and masculinity. 

 With so many of the qualities that we sort into the camp of masculine or feminine, there is a conscious expression of that quality. And there is an unconscious expression of that same quality. For example, courage. Courage in its conscious form can inspire others. It can allow you to overcome fear, to achieve goals, to build confidence. In its shadow form, it can draw you over and over again, even unnecessarily into dangerous situations, it can lead you to burnout if you’re always facing challenges and are living in stress, it bulldozes past good judgment in that it can push you to take on a negative consequence that would have been best to avoid. 

Trying to succeed in life by figuring out what qualities fit into the masculine camp and what qualities fit into the feminine camp and then trying to achieve some balance by practicing the perfect proportion of each, is an abstract and impossible task. A far better approach to life is to simply commit to being conscious relative to any quality you encounter internal to you or external to you. And to think in terms of antidotes. To be conscious relative to a quality means to see it fully, including both its potential benefit and its potential detriment. It is to ensure to the best of your ability that you are operating from the beneficial expression of that quality, rather than the detrimental expression of that quality. Using our example, this means becoming aware of the full truth about courage and making sure to use it to inspire others, to help you to overcome fear, to achieve your goals and to build your confidence rather than to draw you unnecessarily into dangerous situations, lead you into burnout and constant stress and bulldoze past good judgment. 

If you are thinking in terms of antidotes, rather than thinking about what is male and what is female, think of the potentially detrimental aspect of any quality as having an antidote. Something that can counteract the negative effect of that quality. Keep in mind, this isn’t always a quality’s logical opposite. For example, if you take courage, the antidote to the potential detrimental effects of its shadow expression may be something like wisdom or self-kindness. And you develop that alongside courage or as an antidote to the courage you already have.    

When people argue against conscious polarity and for the philosophy that we have been discussing today, they often argue that the goal is to be whole in and of yourself. Not be dependent on anyone outside yourself for your needs or a sense of “completeness”. For many people, the idea of lacking anything that would put them in the position to need another person, makes them feel too vulnerable. And so, they would rather find a spiritual justification for being an island unto themselves. They like the idea of making themselves a complete, self-sustaining, independent island so that the relationships they have with other people can be between two complete, self-sustaining, independent islands. 

People in general are so relationally traumatized that they do not like the idea of achieving a state of harmony and wellbeing in life through any external means. It makes our wellbeing dependent on something outside of us. And we are not brave enough to admit to this inherent vulnerability. We can see it in other species, but not our own. We can barely handle this truth when it comes to air, food, water and our basic relational needs. So, we’d rather tell ourselves spiritual stories that make us feel more empowered and independent and therefore safe. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs, The Thing That No One Will Accept They Have.  

So many people that align with this philosophy are traumatized specifically regarding gender. Most especially, the gender associated with their biological sex. And this argument serves as a counter reaction to it. Also, as an avoidance strategy of that trauma. For example, a person who felt no freedom in identity or ability to be authentic because they grew up with the pain of constantly being told who they should be and how they should be based on what gender they are, may adopt this idea because it allows them to avoid all sense of restriction. Or for example, a woman may have been consistently suppressed and prevented from all kinds of things based on being a “girl”. So, this philosophy allows her to fight back at that and assert that she isn’t wrong for those behaviors or those ways of being or those career ambitions and to let her authenticity out. Or for example, a man who grew up with a great deal of shame about being a man, may adopt this idea that he and all men within society need to develop their feminine side, because it serves as a path to moral redemption because he feels guilt for what his forefathers did as well as for even being a man. And it also serves as a way of canvassing his own goodness, setting himself apart in people’s eyes from the men who came before him. Or for example, a woman may be in a lot of pain about the fact that human society requires her to be so masculine in order to thrive within its current structure. She may adopt this belief because she can tell herself that the pain that she feels is just a natural growing pain and even a healthy one, because she is developing her masculine side. And she can feel safer within society when she does not recognize society as antagonistic to her wellbeing. Or for example, a person may have experienced tons of pain in relationships with the opposite sex in general. This belief allows them to justify staying safe by not actually needing them. With this belief, you can feel empowered to be able to be an island unto yourself, tell yourself that you have no need for and no dependence on the thing that hurt you. And not have to face the pain and terror inherent in the interconnection and interdependence that comes with life, much less being in a specific polarity and that implying that their sense of wellbeing is dependent in any way on the presence and contributions of the opposite polarity. 

Humanity needs to wake up about something. And that is that sex, gender, polarity, gender roles and gender norms were not and are not in and of themselves the problem. The actual problem is human cruelty. Not to argue for or against gender roles, what if I told you that there are plenty of species within our vast universe that have the equivalent of gender roles and gender norms where there is no pain experienced as a result of this, because the highest commitment is to the wellbeing of each member within the society. And this means that society is set up to prevent the suffering of any member of society and be immediately responsive to any individual who is being caused pain, not just force them to put up with it. I’ll give you an example of what I mean if this principal were applied here on earth. No woman would ever have found herself in a situation where she was not provided for and yet, was prevented from earning an income on account of being a woman. Nor that she must leave an infant to go back to work immediately because a woman must function like a man in the work place. No man would ever have been systematically separated from his own emotions to serve government aim, like men were from the eighteenth century through the industrial revolution and on through the 20th century. Indoctrinated with the idea that this is natural and good and must happen because he is a man. If an individual were to not fit into the norm in some way, then there would be a flexibility around their specific unique circumstance. Not an ostracization or an expectation that they suppress themselves so as to fit into a box they clearly don’t fit into. Exceptions to every rule are recognized.

As long as we are scapegoating sex and gender and gender roles and gender norms and polarity, we will fail to recognize the real problem that needs to be solved, which is human cruelty. People play zero sum games against each other. They do not prioritize taking care of each other’s wellbeing and best interests. They cause each other to suffer and they tolerate suffering. And human beings have used sex and gender to carry out this cruelty. They run just as much a risk today of using ideals of bi-genderism or genderless-ness to carry out cruelty. 

This philosophy we have been discussing today has an incredible way of preventing people from actually facing their own pain and traumas relative to sex, gender, polarity and even their pain within current human society. This belief is used to cover all manner of shadows. People would do better to take this idea about people having both polarities within them. And to ask themselves “If this were not true at all, what would that mean for me and why would that be so bad?” And to then begin to resolve all of what this question reveals.  

Continuing on with the philosophy of being whole in and of yourself. Not being dependent on anyone outside yourself for your needs or a sense of completeness. People put this idea forward as a more spiritual state of being. And at the very same time, they often support the idea that it is important to transcend the ego. What they don’t see is how egoic their philosophy is. It is to draw a line of pure separation between self and other so as to engage purely in and with the self. If they were truly in alignment with the highest spiritual principals, they would not draw such a line. They would not discriminate against an external integration between feminine and masculine, in favor of an internal integration between the masculine and feminine. And so, they could see that conscious polarity within relationship is in fact a path to awakening. 

The belief that each and every person has both feminine and masculine within them and that what is right is for a person’s masculine and feminine energies to be balanced, enables us to continue to maintain a society that is not conducive to the wellbeing of individuals within either polarity or within any variation of the two polarities. It prevents us from creating a society that is actually configured correctly and that accommodates for the unique needs and unique strengths and unique picture of wellbeing of both men and women as well as those individuals who represent a variation of either. Why? Because it forces us to see women and men and all people in general as the same. It paints a picture that both men and women can and should be able to thrive in any setting and situation, provided they simply draw forth their masculine or feminine energies. And this, is simply not reality. Trying to achieve a sense of equality in the human rights sense of the term by trying to establish sameness, is a huge mistake. One that is destroying the fabric of male-female relationships within society as we speak. When you try to get rid of polarity by trying to get everyone on earth to be either bigender or a-gender, you start to see a total breakdown in the wellbeing of people as well as a total breakdown of male-female relationships. And this ripples out and negatively affects every other element of society. 

In a society where sex and gender have been used against the best interests of people for thousands of years, gender norms do not necessarily reflect the truth of masculinity or femininity. Nor do they necessarily reflect the truth of healthy polarity. Humanity is at the very beginning of weeding through all of this mess. But a great many people are currently walking down the very tempting road of using thoughts like this one that we have been talking about today, to bypass this mess rather than to weed through it.