Yin – The Mother Instinct

Feminine Energy, Shakti, or the Anima

Symbols and Color

• Background Image: Both warm and fluid, beautiful yet mysterious this stylized image of a kelp forest moves fluidly like feathers in the wind. It reminded me of my favorite aspects of Feminine Energy. It moves effortlessly and adorns the card with softness, elegance and flexibility.
• Border Color: Brown – Augments of Personality
• Yin: Symbol of the Feminine
• Triality: Conveys the presence of masculine, feminine, and the hermaphrodite – both sexes together and that which spawned them.
• Pharaoh: Exalted/Expansive/Inclusive Nature of this Energy
• Picture of Queen Victoria: The Closed Crone – When the Feminine becomes stuffy, stodgy, or atrophied by propriety rather than fluid, accepting and open.

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

The Calla Lily is opening to reveal itself. It denotes the spiral of the TAO and yet within it is the strong stamen ready and Receptive to receive fertility from whatever creature which brings the pollen. A strong and enduring flower; it nonetheless holds itself with grace and can adapt to any wind, but never lose its attractiveness.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Receptivity  or Malleability

(Love, flexibility, generosity, nurturing, divergence, eclectic,  love  order, submission,  intuition,  right  brain,  flow., ‘Yin’ energy, sacrifice,  altruism , higher chakras,  weave, elements of Earth & Water, goodness, lovemaking,  tolerant,  elaborate,  inductive, inclusive, abstract, personal, concept, conserve, relatedness, generalization and extrapolation, conserve and save, natural and organic, inner creator)

1. Be receptive to new ideas. Allow  flexibility to enable or adopt any form needed for doing a job. Be like water: spread out and fill the gaps.
   
2. Yin energy’s receptivity and desire to nurture is utilized for filling gaps and supporting cohesion. It can diverge attention for effective multitasking.
3. Let things settle out. Look to your sensitivity and intuition. Female persons may figure prominently. Make time for nurturing.
4. There’s no greater loyalty than that of mother to child. Whatever you can nurture in this way will be yours forever.
5. Feminine energy tend to understand that sometimes all it takes is empathy. And, some gentle manipulation of the person’s own desires, to remind them that the best course of action is in cooperation rather than a power struggle.
6. Find your own inner feminine energy and employ the care, compassion, and yes, maybe even a bit of subterfuge.
7. In many traditions, the Divine Feminine is that aspect that allows us to experience beauty, loyalty, and desire. Regardless of your sex or gender, cultivate these qualities in yourself and your life will be richer.
8. Women understand that sometimes all it takes is a little empathy, and perhaps some gentle manipulation of the person’s own desires, to remind them that the best course of action lies in cooperation rather than a power struggle. Find your inner feminine and use her care, compassion, and yes, maybe subterfuge.
9. Be like water: spread out and fill in the gaps.
10. No matter whether you are a male or a female, the body always requires care and attention. People who forget this end up ill, injured or dead. Make time for nurturing yourself.

Quotations Illustrating this Pole.

• “God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met.” Farrah Fawcett
• Shakti Energy in Hinduism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakti  
• “The material world is all feminine. The feminine energy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”  Zeena Schreck
• “You were wild once, don’t let them tame you.” Isadora Duncan

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

This Hawaiian petroglyph portrays a woman giving birth. Ensconced in stone the image suggests the fertility of the feminine, but woman only as a vehicle for life. Chosen for the negative pole of Diffusion, the petroglyph woman’s body is seen as a hollow outline with a nondescript face conveying no life itself. The female body is thus portrayed only as a carrier, the incubator, but having no value itself. Many cultures have devalued the feminine as the “carrier” but with little purpose itself but to shed, or disperse, its own energy for something else. Not true in my mind, but the coldness of this historic perception, like the coldness of the stone upon which the symbol is etched, remains prevalent in many cultures today.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Apathetic, Passivity, Resentful

(cunning, deceptive, hidden, inactive, whining, bitchy, lethargic, parasitic,  repel & isolate, masochistic, passive/aggressive, fear ambivalent and worthless,  entice to attract, others act on them, avoidance, emotionally identified, indirect, submissive, vanity, manipulative)

1. Mistaken ideas fog the mind and evoke erratic emotion. Such diffusion blurs and defeats one’s ability to contribute appropriately. It is possible that a woman is involved. There are too many things on your plate.
2. Waiting for someone to come sweep you off your feet? Well if you hear the other shoe drop, it might already be too late.  Being passive never made anything happen.
3. There are too many things on your plate. Stop bitching that you “do all the work” and delegate.
4. In our reckoning, the “feminization of the world” is NOT a product of feminism, actual females deserve equal human/legal rights, because they do.  In the negative pole of feminine energy, it is more a background attitude of entitlement, self-indulgence, and whining, that sounds more like a spoiled child than mature adults. What is thought of as effeminate has nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation, it has to do with how weak and cowardly a person is acting. This is the negative pole of feminine energy present in any living person. The positive pole simply means face the situation with grace. Protest maybe warranted against injustice. But petty complaint seldom is.
5. Stop trying to be Mom here. It drains you and it creates resentment while disabling initiative.
6. Roads have diverged. Choose between paths.
7. One of the tests of the Physical Plane is for either body sex to learn to be ‘in-touch’ with the aspects within to comprise a fully diverse self. There are many fully heterosexual women who are more masculine that feminine. The same is true in reverse; many men are more innately feminine energy than masculine yet are fully heterosexual. It is important to stop attributing aspects of Yin or Yang energies to a person of a sexes. These qualities are installed in the Essence. Leap beyond your cultural stereotypes and discover your Masculine/Feminine Energy Ratio and how they work within you.
8. When things are unorganized, sloppy, or scattered, this is a state where this negative pole has diluted any ability to have structure. When things stop moving and settle out, that will be the time to impose/install some semblance of order. This means using focus/masculine energy to corral and organize.
9. Feminine Energy in this pole is more associated with reactions of fleeing or freezing, than its counterpart Masculine Energy to fight. Neither is moral, they are more biological.  It is useful to notice if your passions are aroused and intervene before you simply react.

Quotations Illustrating this Pole.

• “Pornography is just ‘fast-food feminine energy’, it will always leave you wanting more, with little or no nutritional value. There is nothing ful-filling about pornography, it pales in insignificance to a fully embodied loving woman.”  Barry Long, Australian Spiritual Teacher
• “We need to be willing to heal our negative emotions relative to anything we identify as female to set the femininity within us free. Divine feminine does not need to be cultivated or created within us as women. It is us. It is the essence of our choice to come into this life as women. And so, it is ever-present energy that is always there. It is merely obscured by our thoughts and actions. If we begin to clear our minds and lives of the things that are obscuring the essence, it will immediately shine through on its own. It is exhausting suppressing the essence of who we are. And so, it is time to quit suppressing it. It is time to embrace it and let it shine.” Teal Swan

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

Feminine Energy (Yin) is the dark half the TAOist symbol. It relates aspects of human nature which allow rather than assert, receive rather than take, and act in the realm of intuition rather than the mind.  When a person is graced with the majority of this attribute, he-she will most likely experience life as something that is encountered rather than something than is to be made. Yin is the creative force of the Universe through the act of gestation rather than building, which is Yang.

The TAO is the unity from which all things are sprung, but the first duality is the Yin-Yang.  Everything is made from both sides of the TAO yet to which proportion will influence the way a person experiences themselves. The female gender is the Yin energy placed in a body. However, the two ways it may show up are what we term Active or Masculine Female and Receptive or Feminine Female. Each expression takes interest in various ways but suffice it so say that both bring their primary focus to others or to the environment which they live.

Cultural Meaning

The schism between the family and the individual and the vanity as a show of values is core problem facing the feminine aspect of the race today. The version of “family values” set forth shelters beneath the surface a vapid disdain for feminine power and sees it as a threat.

Active (Masculine) Females

Queen Elizabeth II Public Domain – Wikipedia

In today’s world, those women who appear assertive, bold and outgoing are those who usually fall under this category. By no means, all “boyish” or “gay” the Active Female may be just as goal oriented as any male and equally as disciplined and indeed prizing a sexually alluring body, as much or more (as a self adornment), as their Receptive counterpart. Humorously, these strong or powerful women I have dubbed a “guy with a pie” in contrast to the Receptive Male’s “chick with a dick.”

The Active Female may allow herself a more direct and assertive role in achieving this and perhaps mingle personal needs with her sense of service. However, in the event she becomes so focused on outer issues or the Pragmatic use of her energy, she may lose the softness in temperament that is characteristically female.

Examples: Sigorney Weaver, Grace Jones, Meg Whitman, Jane Lynch, Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Rahel Maddow, Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Kathy Griffiths, Jamie Lee Curtis, Indira Gandhi, Valkyries, Betty Davis, Katherine Hepburn,  Former Princess Sarah Ferguson, Margaret Thatcher, Charlize Theron, Madonna

Receptive (Feminine) Females

The “fem-fetal” might be either form of female, but it tends to fall under the category of Receptive Female. The Receptive Female will greatly depend upon the acknowledgment of those who she influences and can seem faultlessly other directed. However in the extreme without a masculine balance of self care, they either fall from exhaustion or require rescue.

Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Betty Crocker, Jane Goodall, Coretta Scott-King, Mary Tyler-Moore, Meg Ryan, Audrey Hepburn,  Christina Ricci, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie

by Stephen Cocconi © 2011, Update, 2024

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