Unlocking Gender Bias and Balancing the Feminine/Masculine Energies

The Dance of Feminine and Masculine

Have you ever noticed how we often treat power and sensitivity as opposites? In our drive to succeed, we’ve created a world that celebrates doing over being, force over fluidity, and achievement over awareness. But what if true power lies in embracing both? What if the key to unlocking our full potential isn’t in choosing between our masculine and feminine energies but in learning to dance with both?

To re-balance our feminine and masculine energies, we must recognize how we contribute to the imbalance in the first place. We try to measure up to an idealized version of who we are supposed to be, defined by society’s conditioned perception of our value and success as women and men.

As a conditioned society living with the pain of the collective unconsciousness, we view our masculine and feminine counterparts through a fractured lens. We associate masculinity with power and femininity with weakness.

We have become locked into the survival of the fittest narrative, guarded against one another’s essential goodness, to protect ourselves from loss and hurt. Inadvertently, this false narrative protects us from love and nourishment.

The Cost of Imbalance

Denying or becoming over-identified with either the masculine or feminine disrupts our natural wholeness. When we dismiss the feminine as weak, we silence our inner compass, overriding our felt senses and intuition. We discount our emotions, repress our needs, and slowly bury our worth beneath layers of guilt and shame. Ironically, when we elevate the masculine as the only source of power, we become truly disempowered.

Cut off from our inner knowing; our actions degrade into mere reactions, automatic responses rather than conscious choices. True strength lies in embracing both energies, supporting and enriching the other.

Understanding yin and yang energies

The feminine (yin-energy) is the state of being open to receive, feel, contemplate and connect with Spirit. The masculine (yang-energy) is the doer, activator, nurturer, provider, warrior.

It may seem that being the nurturer is a feminine trait, but actually, it’s a masculine attribute because it is ultimately an action. Being tuned in to what someone needs is quintessentially feminine; it’s a state of empathy, a state of feeling. But the moment we take action, we’re functioning out of male energy. 

Because most women have less testosterone than men, they tend to become depleted when they run a lot of male energy. Women need to retreat, feel their emotions, communicate with fewer words and be supported. 

While most men have more testosterone than women, they, too, can become depleted because they tend to override their body signals. Men need to slow down, listen, reflect and share their feelings so that they can be replenished, as well as nurture their relationships.

Finding Your Natural Rhythm

The Power of Integration

Without action, there would be no spark of creation – through doing, we bring forth the sacred dance of life. Taking charge, providing, and embodying the miracle of life through our actions and activities is crucial for the balance we need. But too much masculine energy means we’re not listening, over-identified with our goals and expectations, and not embodying our inner-knowing. Too much feminine energy means we’re disconnected, disempowered, and over-identified with our wounds.

Life requires that we surrender our masculine to the feminine and our feminine to the masculine – one leading into the other. These deeply interconnected forces find a harmonious balance in 5Rhythm dance designed by Gabrielle Roth. The first rhythm is inward, the second external, the third chaos, the fourth is elation, and the last is stillness. Each rhythm leads the feminine towards the masculine, then creation, insight and release, back to the feminine repeatedly.

According to Taoism, everything in our Universe is composed of two opposing but deeply interconnected forces – the Yin (feminine) and the Yang (masculine), explains Rodika Tchi in The Ying.Yang Theory of Feng Shui. “One cannot exist without the other, as in their seeming opposition, they deeply support and nourish each other.”

Finding Your Natural Rhythm

If you never exhaled, you would die. You can’t just inhale, inhale, inhale, and inhale without letting out your breath. Whatever action you take, your body needs to rest. Whatever objective thought you have, there needs to be room for subjective contemplation. The rational mind needs to be tempered by feeling.

Embracing Your Whole Self

Justin Baldoni asks this tough question to the men in the audience in his Ted Talk, Why I’m done trying to be “man enough.” He asks, “Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life?”

I want to ask the women reading this blog, “Are you vulnerable enough to listen to the men in your life?” What if you receive their words, actions, thoughts, and feelings into your body of awareness and trust yourself? Then you wouldn’t be disempowered, and there would be nothing to complain about; you would cease to fight for what you want and need and instead value what you want and need. You would disengage from anything that isn’t completely aligned with your sense of worth.

The changes we desire must begin with us. We can choose to disconnect and react based on conditioned beliefs and fears, or we can choose to be the empowered, beautiful, life-changing women we are.

Change always happens on the inside first when we take the time to nurture our femininity and let go of trying to measure up to the perception that masculine energy is more powerful. We’re powerful as sensitive, feeling, and intuitive women who know how to care for themselves and how to guide the men in their lives.

Beyond ‘Manning Up’: Challenging Professional Gender Bias

I cannot speak about gender inequality and the imbalance of yin/yang energies without sharing a powerful example from my colleague Maureen Fitzgerald. At a women’s lawyers’ conference, she witnessed something telling: a junior male lawyer instructing an audience of experienced women attorneys that their approach to law was fundamentally wrong. Their failing? They weren’t being ‘man enough,’ as Maureen recounts in her TEDx talk.

This story echoes what I’ve heard countless times from my female clients in law, medicine, and other professional fields. Through her work, Maureen advocates for essential changes in addressing these deeply embedded pink and blue biases in professional spaces.

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Feature Image by Alexey Skachkov