Patriarchy and yoga on the new moon
Patriarchy and our conditioning. It’s coming up with today’s new moon. Also, the impact of our patriarchal conditioning on our approach to yoga and the manner in which this can further imbalance our energy, especially as women, if we are not conscious of the practices we are choosing and the impact on our subtle energy. Let alone how much yoga has fallen victim to patriarchal commercialism and almost sold itself out.
But first, let’s talk about matriarchy.
Just previous to what we call the historical period, that is the upper Palaeolithic era extending through the Neolithic era (think of standing stones and dolmens – a crystal grid no less, we were really on it and conscious back then), humans worshiped the Earth Goddess. Here on Guernsey we are lucky to still have two carved Goddess-menhirs highlighting the reverence for the Goddess, one at St Martin’s church (who has shown up frequently on this blog over the years) and one at Castel church.
During this time the entire physical earth was held to be her physical body, the hills and valleys were considered to be her breasts, hips and thighs for example, and the rivers were the sacred waters flowing from her womb etc - Glastonbury Tor is said to resemble a great goddess and there is the Sleeping Beauty mountain on the Isle of Lewis near Callanish stones. Needless to say, this era in history gave the highest spiritual position to the feminine principle and created an intimate connection between us humans and nature, hoorah.
However, a little over five thousand years ago this phase of human evolution dominated by the feminine principle ended as trading began, a nomadic lifestyle became more common (not in terms of indigenous cultures and their nomadic tendencies within a locality, but in terms of moving for trade and commerce) and connection with locality was severed. This marked the end of matriarchy and the beginning of patriarchy and was in contrast to the earlier populace who were deeply integrated with the streams, trees, rocks animals and plants of a particular locality, and had an intimate connection with the spirit nature of the physical environment – think indigenous cultures.
Lots changed. Monotheism and the belief in one God came in. Animals were domesticated. The Earth was tamed to the needs of people. Conflict arose with the environment and the harsh realities of long migrations encouraged masculine qualities and the production of a patriarchal system with a chief in control. Lands were invaded and indigenous Earth honouring populations were sadly subjugated or destroyed. The spiritual relationship between humans and the earth was broken and Mother Earth was now exploited, desecrated and plundered, along with the feminine energy in general.
This was probably the most radical change – the impact of this new approach to life on Planet Earth on the feminine. Previously the psychology of Earth Mother did not try to perfect, idealise and abstract but accepted life and nature as the inseparable connection of opposites. This is important to note. There was an acceptance of the relationship between life and death. It is the Earth Mother who celebrates destruction, death then, for the sake of rebirth – for life to renew it must also be destroyed.
This is the cycle – much like the seasons, the tides and the moon, let alone our own cycles as women, from ovulation to menstruation, maiden to old crone, everything that is created is destroyed as part of a whole. This is the paradox – within what seems to be separation, there is in fact union, a beginning becomes an end and an end a beginning.
But now life changed. The union of opposites was no longer encouraged. Society was soon dominated by rationality, perfection, competition, logic and abstract structures imposed by evolving patriarchal rulership, which led eventually to the great wounding from which we are still as women recovering today, namely the witch hunts and with that – and life generally - the rejection of the feminine. Out went the intuitive, timeless, sensuous, non-linear, synchronistic, empathic and experiential approach to life and in came the analytical, linear, sequential, logical, rational and perfected approach instead. This has impacted our life view which continues today.
And it is this that concerns me with our modern-day approach to yoga, how the practices we choose can merely feed more of the same, more of our need for perfectionism (the perfect pose, the perfect body, even the perfect mat!) and competition (within ourselves as much as with anyone else), just look at the number of yoga ‘businesses’ and indeed teachers competing against one another for the maximum number of students etc.
Let alone all the teaching ‘training’ courses training people to teach a certain way even if that is not natural or intuitive to them or indeed to their students and can create imbalance. This in addition to the slightly questionable motivation at times. Yes, we all need to make a living to survive on this Planet currently, but when that motivates the offering of a course alone, without heart and soul, then it’s bringing a very different energy to a practice which was once shared with deep respect in times gone.
It concerns me that as a result of all of this – of financial gain and trend, yoga has sold out on itself. But this is what we do. This is our patriarchal conditioning. We make things into products we can sell. We have produced a billion-dollar yoga industry in the process, well done us. Now there’s such a wide range of choice of styles of yoga, that people have lost sight of the one-to-one and personalised approach that yoga has always encouraged, which works for the individual body, mind and soul. There are increasing numbers of people being harmed by yoga because they are practising in a way that is not safe for them and hinders rather than supports their genuine healing and spiritual growth.
But back to patriarchy. Because the truth of the matter is that the absolute masculine and absolute feminine are different. When one takes over, the rest of us are excepted to adhere to it, even if it is going against our very own nature – my point above about yoga. For example, males have a greater capacity for logic and reason, while women very often operate more so through a deeper sensitive and intuitive quality of awareness.
Furthermore, the archetypal female does not separate her logical and ethical judgements from sentiment and instinct – she cannot separate the abstract so easily. Archetypal males however, have the ability to set up abstract systems of intellect, logic and ethics. These fundamental differences are the reason men and women should be understood in different values and standards. And the reason yoga should be taught appropriately.
However, in our Western world, there has been a tendency for women to be measured on the male psychology of intellect, perfectionism, rationality and logic. Women then subject themselves to a system of values that is not within their nature and in the process run the risk of dong a great violence to themselves and to their femininity in their effort to fit in.
For example, practising strong dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, born of two different men, taught this way for two very different and specific reasons by another man (albeit an incredible yogi and Ayurvedic healer called Krishnamacharya, more on him next time) and taught to me by two male teachers simply fed more of my masculine energy to my detriment – I stopped menstruating and my competitiveness and perfectionist tendencies increased. I touch on this in more depth in my book From Darkness Comes Light.
Let me be clear, men too can cause violence to themselves by denying their feminine. We all each are born with a mix of masculine and feminine energies and men are also denied their feminine. And I know from talking to men that trying to reclaim their feminine is not easy but look what happens when it is all out of balance – the toxic male is known to all of us, and the pressure for the younger men to conform to this stereotype of what one should look like as a man is huge, it feeds a gym industry, and much unhappiness too.
Fortunately, the tide is turning. The pendulum swings back and forth. And we have to be careful idealising matriarchy over patriarchy. It is entirely possible that towards the end of matriarchy it too was immersed in the excesses and corruption that we see today with patriarchy, where life as we know it is dominated by the need for power and control, which results in a war and greed. We are encouraged to be at war. As Robert Lawlor writes:
“Simply put, the story of Parsifal, [from The Myth of Parisal and the Holy Grail, describes the great number of inner problems and challenges a male must face to achieve his sense of individualisation and his conscious personality] provides a male model that encourages a man to develop by improving himself, rather than by proving himself. The constant wars of self-assertion that mankind wages (the war against nature, the war on viruses, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, and the battle against time) all reflect an exclusive devotion to the archetype of male combat, which has now grown to the extent that it threatens us with self-annihilation.”
I find it all very fascinating. So too the patriarchal dream of permanent peace and the perfect world to live in. It doesn’t exist. Life is not consistent and more fool us for buying into the notion that it could be, that we might experience a constant state of bliss. Yet patriarchy will have us believe it so, and we wage war on anything that tells us otherwise. I like what Robert Lawlor writes on this too:
“The patriarchal dreams of permanent peace (afforded by massive weapon arsenals), of classless societies, of modern democratic or socialistic welfare paradises of functional world legislative organisations, of economic systems of productivity and wealth are now revealing themselves as nightmares of alienation, repression, violence, and a degeneration of the human spirit. We are learning that society cannot be founded on abstract, rigid ideas imposed directly on a living reality.”
We are realising this though. Slowly and surely people are waking up to the imbalance and more are doing the work on themselves to reclaim the rejected and overlooked aspects of the feminine – this in men and women. The chaos and disturbance we see is indicative of this change – always change creates chaos and disturbance. Things are changing. When one considers that martial rape was only made illegal in 1992, it shows how far we have come in that time, how the feminine is nudging more of itself back into our lives.
Yoga is following suit, the more dynamic practices, the vinyasa and power yoga approaches are dropping away in trend, a much gentler, feminine and empathic approach is beginning to gain attention instead, and for good reason, we need this approach to yoga, we need to be radical, we need less rationality and logic, we need more of the mystery, more of the soul, more of the magic that cannot be intellectually understood.
When I stopped teaching vinyasa yoga during the pandemic people thought I was bonkers, literally, stepping away from mainstream and the profit which could be made. But I had found a much softer, paradoxical and feminine approach to my practice, which changed my mind and my body and my life in ways I never imagined, and continues to do so today, thanks to the teachings and sharing of three inspiring female teachers who fully embrace the power of the feminine, two of whom I am still lucky to study with directly today.
There was more balance. The competitive and perfectionist tendencies finally began to drop away. I had more respect for my body, I wasn’t trying to push it or make it do what it didn’t want to do. I wasn’t trying to force it to achieve more, be better, hold poses for longer . Quite the opposite. I had to begin a long journey of un-training myself. Of letting go of all I had been taught about alignment and a right way/wrong way, of false strength and stamina for something far more beautiful instead.
For once, I was truly in my body, and I was more present to the patriarchal tendencies of my mind to push, achieve, rush and compete and I was able to slowly let go of their grip, let the conditioning slip, slow down, rest in and feel more myself, my true self, beyond my conditioning to be a certain way (and the journey continues anon, always another layer to strip away).
Needless to say, I couldn’t teach that old way anymore, which I realised was feeding more of my students’ imbalances, more of their need to be right, logical, perfect, of being attached to the external, not the internal, of feeding, maintaining and at times promoting more of their patriarchal conditioning, limiting their mind essentially by doing the same thing over and over again. I would have been selling out and creating more imbalance in the world in the process.
My next blog will talk more on this, of how modern day yoga came to be and of the benefits but also the limitations. But for now, this new moon is about being true to ourselves. Of not caring what others think, not because we lack compassion, but because opinions come and go like the tides ebb and flow and the moon waxes and wanes and more fool us for being bound by someone else’s liming thoughts anyway. Only we truly know what is best for us, in our nature, a mix of feminine and masculine energies, so the message of this new moon is to stay true, to trust, to honour our nature and to keep walking our own path.
Happy new moon!
Love Emma x
