Last night (full moon? all the vibes in the ethers?) I had quite vivid dreams. Without too much details, my night was about the conflict between the two major private figures for the archetypes for the feminine and masculine in me: my mother and my father.

Long ago an astrologer told me that in my birth chart there is a rare and totally important opposition of the Sun and Moon. Now, I know nothing about astrology but even I know that the Moon represents the feminine and the Sun stands for the masculine. And yes of course: literally from the moment of my conception this theme defined my life.

And just exactly what theme am I involved in right now too? : )

And in re: how Open too tuned into the ethers last night feeling the birthing karma being (as he put it) "kicked off":

What is being birthed here (I mean not only here at OHweb but the world right now) is a totally new image of men and women through a total dissolution of old roles. I really feel all this is because we need to shred, collectively, the false images of what it is to be a man and woman. Reading the thread I feel that our (all of our) responses here are still defined by old paradigm ideas about genders. Of course, I know very well (major part of my work is exactly about the fact) that we are defined by our bodies, its strengths and vulnerabilities, but I also know that right now in the world we are asked to step beyond very deeply rooted ideas about how these strengths and vulnerabilities help or block us.

Helen speaks about her generation's implanted idea (a programming) about how a "real woman" should be suppressive (frigid) in order to be expressive (seductive)... Aunty Angel from another generation talks about how feminine ("real woman" again) is about getting in contact with a sexual power, and literally of goddess qualities. Many of you express this from the side of trauma, of pain and powerlessness.

In order to be able to let a new paradigm be born through us (collectively) * first we really need to shred the old role models totally, * then immerse and experience both polarities in their pure essence, * and then finally die into them (so to speak), allow them to flow through us and create a different brew of balance between the feminine and masculine in us.

I'm not asking any less than to regress back to the time of creation point ; ) -- I am joking but true, the more we are able to do that the more clearly we can see beyond these distorting veils that overcast the original Yin and Yang essence in us.

What is the Authentic (undistorted) Feminine, really? The Primordial Yin factor of Creation?

It is a deep and brave, often confrontational exploration. Often not so much with the ideas of the outside world but the preconception carried within. What do I think makes me a woman, men?

As many people as many answers. Zac above talks about how he experiments with expressing his feminine through his male body, in his own way. And I hear the same need to express the feminine in Aunty Angel's (and other's) deep urge to really go into the thick of specifically feminine topics. All the pain that Jen, Fiona, Kim and Trin talk about have such an essential part in it, too!
(I hope we will go into all of this. I can hardly wait to talk about "blood and milk and honey"... Pain and trauma, strength and nourishment, desire and creation.... And I hope men will NOT be frightened away from these "just because" they don't menstruate! Oh, just how this would be a better world if they started to : D -- it might not be a crazy idea in the future, just like "immaculate conception" {self-conceiving} is not off the rocker for me.)

Now obviously this is a very long journey -- and this thread is only 3 days old!!! Clearly, we are only scraping the surface of this all. Nevertheless, this is the general idea. To heal. To purify - not from "sin" but from misconceptions.

And I can tell you it does come with a sense of losing self. It's a dying and rebirthing process.

I've been working with feminine topics for long, so often women come to me with a certain expectation, even projection about what I should be like, look like, speak like. And then they are surprised. Because I do not fit these at all. I am trans-identity - more and more. In my quest for the Authentic Feminine I lost aspects of the feminine and regained others. This is the same for all of us, maybe it is only a question of the degree of freedom one allows herself to let go and embrace faces unknown before.

But I also know that what really makes me able to do this work is the never ending process of cleaning both the feminine and the masculine in me. In order to be able to express their strength, I have had to carry this heavy karmic thread in my life, pushing me to go into the extremes, experiencing them at times as very painful, irreconcilable opposites.

This is really so much, I'm not sure I'm being entirely coherent here but again, I am just going ahead, sentence by sentence, if you allow me. Because I really think there is a change coming.

In the new paradigm, as much as I see it, women will carry many of the qualities than men and men will carry many feminine qualities. I mean qualities, not simply roles. We can already see this in the world it is already taking place - it is still in a labouring phase, so there is lots of pain an suffering and confusion about it in us all. Just an example: right now in Hungary there is a rather a heated gender discussion going on in the public, involving political activism too. I'm not so interested in that but I am interested in helping to leave behind victimized states of minds - for both men and women. What happens in the birth room, to a woman is only a metaphor for what is going on out in the world - for both men and women.

So as a doula I learnt that what labouring needs the most: it is patience, love, containment, safety, encouragement, freedom of self-expression, and in the end a total letting go of "what was", of a previous identity (e.g. for a woman with a first baby, in the concrete birthing situation, it is mostly about the fear of letting go the personality of the maiden before stepping into the identity of the mother).

I think right now we are asked to leave our identities behind. But not through suppressing them - on the contrary: first through delving into the depth of each polarity with as much free experimentation as possible and proceed towards a dissolution, a death and rebirth in and into the continuous interplay of those yin and yang primordial powers in and through us all.