Self-Actualization Through Merging Our Masculine & Feminine

Through embracing the joyful dance and union of the masculine and feminine within, we get to experience who we are in our wholeness. Imagine all of our chakras fully shining and playing in the world - living life in ways that we have only imagined possible. Loving our life on Earth is the exciting adventure it is meant to be.

Transcript

So today we're continuing our series all about the union of the masculine and feminine.

And today we're talking about self-actualization through the masculine and feminine.

So why do we want to talk about this?

Why is this important?

So often when we talk about the masculine and feminine,

We think about interacting with others.

And of course if you're new to this,

I'm not talking about men and women.

I'm talking about the cosmic forces of the masculine and feminine that really make everything happen in the world.

It certainly plays out in relationships,

Which we've talked about in a lot of our past talks.

But very often we kind of feel stuck if it's just us.

We feel like,

Well I can't really explore this because maybe I don't have a partner or the partner I have isn't interested in this or whatever.

And we've been very culturally trained to believe that without other,

We don't exist or we don't matter.

But the reality is that this masculine and feminine is first at play within us.

And whether or not we are surrounded by loved ones or we're all alone,

Our entire experience of that solitude,

That experience of the people around us,

All comes from the health of the union within us.

We could have the greatest relationships,

We could have no relationships,

But everything is determined by that inner self.

It's kind of like imagining you're really sad for some reason,

Maybe you're grieving.

It doesn't matter what happens out in the world.

It doesn't matter if the greatest thing happened because we are filled with grief.

If we are elated,

Maybe we're in that new love phase.

It doesn't matter what happens out there because we're just going to see all the happiness.

And that's where everything starts from inside.

The other big piece of this self-actualization is that one of the foundations of understanding why the masculine and feminine has been a muck for so long is that we've lived within this domination paradigm,

This patriarchal paradigm,

This unhealthy disconnection in society.

And because of that,

We,

Being the masses within that,

Have been sort of forced into a very unhealthy,

Childlike existence.

It's almost like we've been trained that we can't do without the authority taking care of us.

We can't do without those people out there doing the things in life that we will be the spectators for.

It forces us into a perpetual state of victimhood,

A state of stagnancy,

That I can't do anything in my life.

And it's all because of this weird pressure we've lived within.

This could have happened in our childhood home that maybe we weren't really cared for.

Maybe we were abused.

Maybe we were just simply forced to live a life that we didn't actually want to live,

That wasn't our soul's path.

Maybe it wasn't abusive at all.

It just wasn't really in line with who I am.

Maybe we went to school and we learned that life was about becoming graded.

No matter what I did,

I'm going to get an A or an E,

And it's up to someone else.

It's other,

Out there,

That will judge me.

So no matter what I do,

I have to get an A.

So if I'm not sure I can get an A,

Maybe I won't do anything.

And then I stop growing.

Maybe the education system said,

What you want to do isn't important.

You have to do what the authority says you have to do.

And that was taught to us from the time we were five years old on.

So this keeps us in a state of sort of this childlike state,

No matter how old we are,

That we are perpetually looking to see what other people gave us on our report card,

Seeing what other people are doing and not us.

Always in the victim,

Never able to stand up and actually walk on our own and say,

You can think whatever you want,

Or you can do whatever you want.

I'm not sticking around for this.

So self-actualization,

In many ways,

Is the process of growing into our full adult selves.

That we're actually,

We're not growing up in some weird way.

We are actually growing.

We are connecting all of the chakras.

We're connecting all of who we are,

Our divinity,

Our physicality,

Everything we know.

We are living our wisdom.

We're walking what we know.

And we're actually being fully grown adults.

This is self-actualization.

And we can do this through this masculine-feminine paradigm,

Because of course,

In many ways,

It was the broken masculine-feminine paradigm in the patriarchy,

The domination,

All that kind of thing,

That's keeping us so small.

That's keeping us believing that we can't make the choices we want to make,

Or we can't make a difference,

Or we can't be happy.

So this is what we're going to explore.

So what's the primary thing that we want to look at when it comes to self-actualization?

Well,

First we have to ask ourselves,

What do I even mean by self?

Really,

What do I mean?

Do I just mean Katrina?

This personality known as Katrina?

Or is there something else?

Is there someone inside that I am simply called Katrina?

In this incarnation here on the planet Earth,

In the star system,

This soul is called Katrina.

That's just my name.

This is just the personality.

This is just the assignment I've been given here.

But what's inside there?

This is what we're going to call the self,

The big S self,

Our soul,

Whatever you want to call that.

So self-actualization means that I'm going to bring this eternal energy,

This eternal blueprint,

And I'm going to actualize it.

I'm going to make it real.

I'm going to actually live that self here on the planet.

And so how do we do that?

Because very often that isn't what we're doing.

We're actualizing the goals of others.

We're actualizing the expectations of others.

We're actualizing a comfortable path that maybe doesn't rock any.

.

.

I have mixed metaphors in my head.

It doesn't cause any waves in the world.

Maybe that's what we're actualizing.

What would it feel like to actualize from the inside out?

So the first dynamic we want to look at is the feminine masculine dynamic of inspiration and manifestation.

Inspiration is feminine.

This is how we receive information.

This isn't just an idea.

This is something that we receive where we go,

Ooh,

We could do this thing.

That would be so much fun.

Hmm.

Manifesting is when we do it.

So what stands between these two things?

I have the idea.

If we are fully actualized,

Maybe we think about it,

We sort it out,

We do the math,

We see how possible it is,

And then we make it happen.

And that becomes our life.

I have an idea and I do it.

I have an idea and I do it.

I have an idea and I do it.

How easy is that?

But what gets in our way?

What about the need for approval?

Again,

This comes back to this,

If you imagine sort of the child self and the adult self,

An adult not meaning the negative kind of adult,

But just sort of the fully grown,

The fully fledged human.

What does it mean to be a fully fledged human?

Well,

There's no need for approval because I'm at the top of the pecking order.

Lots of you guys read my book,

What If You Could Skip the Cancer?

One of the big teachings of my teacher was that you have to get your pecking order straight.

And so if you don't know the story,

I had breast lumps and I was,

My mama just died of breast cancer and her mama died of breast cancer.

It was a huge deal.

And when I was sick,

My kids were two and four years old and I wasn't quite sure what to do.

And I was laying on my,

My teacher's table and he said,

If you were to imagine what your pecking order was in life,

Where do you take your orders from?

What would it look like?

And I wrote down,

I don't know what I wrote down,

But I wrote down something like my husband,

His parents,

My dad,

Cause my mom had already passed,

My kids,

The neighbors,

The school PTA,

Whatever,

That was my pecking order.

That's who I took my orders from.

And he looked at it and he kind of smiled and he says,

Wow,

That is a great pecking order to get breast cancer.

And I was like,

What is it supposed to look like?

He says,

Your pecking order has to be God,

Self,

Partner,

Children,

Everyone else.

This is going back 26 years.

So some of it's a bit timely,

But what's really interesting is a self-actualized person.

Their pecking order is God,

Divinity,

Consciousness,

However you understand that,

Self.

Those are the top two.

That's it.

There's nobody else.

No one can give us approval for anything that we do.

No one,

No matter how much that was banged into us in school,

As a child,

At work,

Where our boss can give us assessments or what have you,

There's no approval.

So now imagine if you wanted to do anything,

There's no one on planet earth who can give you a grade on this.

Nobody.

Like I remember I once owned a dance studio back in 2006.

I opened a dance studio and it lasted a year.

I lasted a year because for a million reasons,

But on the surface,

My business partner had huge issues and we ended up splitting.

That's why it broke apart.

Great concept,

Great everything.

So on the surface,

Someone else could look at that and say,

Wow,

One year,

I give you a D for effort.

Did I make a pile of money?

Oh,

Well in this part of your report card,

You get an E.

But I also learned in that year that I love teaching.

I overcame all kinds of body issues and all these kinds of things.

I learned so much about running businesses.

I learned so much.

No one can give a grade on that.

Not even me.

It's taken me 17 years to unpack how amazing that one year was of my life.

So we have to get over this whole concept of approval.

This whole idea that anybody can grade us.

It's so interesting when you read Taoist texts,

There's one thing where they say,

As soon as you say something's beautiful,

You create the ugly.

As soon as you say that something's good,

You create that something else is bad.

So what if everything just is?

There's something else about this becoming a fully fledged human,

Like kind of growing up.

And I'm still going to,

I'm going to say that because it sounds a little harsh,

But that really is what we're doing.

When someone is 90,

And maybe they've lived through the birth and loss of many,

Many people,

And they've been through many,

Many things in their life.

If they're lucky,

They're very wise.

They've seen the circularness of life.

They've seen things come and go.

This is the same as us.

When we're in a young state,

Things can be very black and white.

That was a right choice.

That was a wrong choice.

That was a right choice.

That was a wrong choice.

We put this judgment on ourselves.

We put this judgment on other people.

But with time,

We start to realize that nothing is so clearly right or wrong.

Everything just comes and goes and repeats itself.

And we continue to spiral through our experiences.

So there's something else about that.

There's something about how could we ever judge?

How could we ever give ourselves a grade or grade someone else?

When life is just going on,

We're just experiencing it.

And so,

Of course,

Within all that,

To imagine that if you want to manifest something,

An inspiration,

Imagine there's no such thing as success or failure.

There's no right or wrong choice.

We just live.

Because again,

What's the point?

The point is we're just actualizing the self.

Actualizing the self.

We're just doing what we hear from the inside.

It's not about a grade out there.

It's not about anyone else telling us that you're a good boy.

You're a good girl.

You did a good job.

No one's telling us that.

This is just our self saying,

Hey,

That's a cool mountain.

Want to climb it?

Sure.

And you get climbing up the mountain.

Maybe you get halfway up the mountain.

You go,

Well,

That was fun.

I don't want to climb this mountain anymore.

And you go trucking down the mountain and you go for a swim.

It's just the manifestation of self.

No one's going to say,

Yeah,

But you didn't make it to the top.

So,

I mean,

Why'd you even bother climbing it?

Another aspect of the masculine and feminine is this idea of the protector and the vulnerable.

The protector obviously being the masculine and the vulnerable being the feminine.

So these two things,

You can imagine this again with this sort of the child experience and the adult experience or the grown experience that we need to be our own protector.

We need to be strong.

And depending on our childhood,

Depending on the experiences in our lives,

Depending on the trauma we may have experienced,

We may be perpetually staying in that vulnerable state.

We may never be actually stepping up into the protector role and balancing that because we have been so conditioned to stay down here.

It's like,

Well,

That person can help me or that institution can help me or without this relationship,

I'm just,

I'm nothing or without my family's approval,

I'm nothing.

It's like,

No,

You are your own protector.

Each one of us here is a universe unto themselves.

Every one of us has that strength.

And when we become that protector to our vulnerable self,

Because to understand that our vulnerable self should never be weak.

It's just our truth.

It's almost our exploration self.

It's the part of us we're not sure about and maybe we were hurt and maybe we'd have had trauma and we've had things like that,

That we need to care for that self.

Well,

Then it's us that also rises.

That's part of the healing.

The healing doesn't come from just staying in the vulnerable.

It's the balance.

It's bringing ourselves back to wholeness,

Which includes this protector.

So suddenly we no longer in that child space.

We're in a strong space.

We also have our vulnerable self,

Our truth.

It's kind of like our underbelly.

We need our gentle,

Soft underbelly,

Or else we'll do things that we don't really want to be doing.

We'll agree to things that we don't really want to be doing.

And the stronger our protector is and the more connected it is to our vulnerable side,

The more sensitive our underbelly can stay.

It's almost like because we know we have this sentinel at the door,

I can be squishy inside and I can be sensitive and I can be aware and I can be empathic and I can be all those things because I've got this huge strength protecting me.

But if that protector is not there,

I am perpetually vulnerable to the world.

So what happens?

I have to harden.

I have to protect myself,

But not in a healthy way.

I shut down.

Well,

If I shut down,

I just become nothing.

And so this is really important.

And again,

It asks us to go back into our lives and ask ourselves,

Have I ever felt protected?

Have I ever felt like someone had my back?

Parents,

Friends,

Even sometimes at work.

My parents were teachers and my parents were always so happy when the principal or the vice principals supported them in decisions they made or struggles they had.

There's nothing worse than having whoever's above you not actually take care of you.

It's a huge deal.

So suddenly we now have to become that.

Maybe we've never even seen it,

But we have to become it because otherwise we're perpetually in that childlike victim state.

The journey is the development of the protector in a healthy way that the feminine still exists because this is where we get the information from.

It's still important,

But this dance has to be inside of us for us to have this self-actualization.

In many ways,

That soft underbelly is almost the spidey senses of our self,

Of our great self.

If we really want to know if something's okay or not,

We need to be able to check in with our most sensitive,

Vulnerable selves.

And that requires us to have an equally strong protector within.

Another dynamic I want to talk about is logic and intuition.

This is really interesting because,

Again,

In the context of growing into our fully developed self,

We need to be able to hear our intuition and understand that it may not make sense.

It kind of comes from the chaos side of the feminine,

But that's why it's rich and interesting because we have no idea where it's coming from or what it's going to say.

And then we have logic,

Which is the masculine.

It's also structure,

Order,

All those things.

Again,

The problem with this curious world we've lived within,

It's like we're almost always being assaulted by things,

Whether it's watching the news or even really romantic or tragic movies and TV shows and stuff.

It's like we're perpetually being driven to this emotional state.

We're always almost being emotionally traumatized by something,

Or our lives are living out some weird reality TV show that we're just being programmed that it's normal to live with this amount of drama.

When I grew up,

We used to watch soap operas after school,

General Hospital and Young and the Restless and all these things.

It's almost like my teenage psyche was being programmed that this amount of drama and crazy bad decisions and all the ripple effects of them,

Completely normal.

It makes your life interesting and very sexy and romantic.

So all of a sudden,

We end up living in this strange emotional state where we're always oscillating from one emotion to the other to the other to the other.

And emotions are good.

Emotions are very healthy.

Emotions are one of our most primal biofeedback mechanisms to tell us when something is right or wrong or on our path or not on our path or safe or unsafe.

This is really,

Really important.

When emotions are online,

Logic is gone.

Emotions create like a chemical soup in our system that doesn't allow rational thought.

I didn't really know this until a few years ago,

I was seeing a man.

He had done something and I was upset about it.

And so I shut down.

You could almost watch me.

I looked at him,

He did this thing and I went,

And I emotionally shut down.

And I turned away and I just,

You know,

It's almost like I was trying to meditate in the moment to kind of get some clarity as to what was going on.

And then he kind of kept talking,

But I really wasn't there anymore.

I wasn't in the experience.

I had pulled away.

And he looked at me and he said,

Can you make me a promise?

I said,

What?

And he said,

Can you promise to never pull away like that again?

Can you stay in the experience no matter what?

Then I looked at him,

I was like,

Are you sure what you're asking for?

Like,

Do you know what could happen here?

Because my normal response to conflict in almost any situation,

Besides maybe raising my kids,

It's almost like I give up on you in that moment.

I come within,

I start to sort it out myself.

I go away,

I journal,

I talk to my friends,

I talk to my sisters,

I do whatever.

And I try to sort it all out.

And then I come back with a rational explanation and a solution.

And now this will work,

Which of course never works.

But it makes me feel good,

Because I really like that rational mind.

So I said,

Sure,

I can promise that.

Well,

Inevitably,

Something happened.

It was quite a tumultuous relationship.

It really taught me a lot.

And so inevitably,

Something happened.

And I felt myself start to do my normal turning within.

And I stayed instead.

And I stayed emotional.

And I cried.

And I was upset.

And he stayed.

And the two of us sat there in this horrible emotional state together.

In that moment,

I realized why I always pull away.

Because you can't think straight when you have high emotions online.

I actually had to say to him,

Like,

I can't even think right now.

Like,

This is insane.

It's like my body was flooded with these emotions,

Anger,

Sad,

Fear,

Loss,

Everything.

It was a very different process to actually allow myself to kind of allow my boat to float on the ocean,

To keep the emotions there,

To keep his emotions there.

And it's like we stayed present with it.

And then eventually,

My waves hit his waves,

And all the waves kept hitting,

Nobody backed off.

And eventually,

Everything sort of flattened out.

And as long as we're still kind and everything,

Right,

This isn't this isn't like raging at each other or being mean,

This is still being kind.

And all of a sudden,

Everything was calm.

And we could think rationally again.

And we actually would come up with solutions.

It was very interesting.

Developing the ability to have this logical mind to have this quiet space in life is also a huge part of our ability to self actualize.

Because if we don't,

We will just be living like we're inside a pinball machine,

Just from one experience to the next experience to the next one.

And we're just banging back and forth going around in circles and around in circles.

At some point,

We need to be able to develop the ability to quiet those emotions down and actually hear rational thought.

So this,

Of course,

Is why we meditate,

Or why we do yoga,

Or why we do all of these spiritual practices,

Because we have to be able to connect with the rational mind as well.

Emotions are important.

This isn't about ignoring them.

But if we get stuck there,

If we get stuck in these emotional states,

We just circle in a very lateral way,

And we get stuck.

Even if you imagine,

It's almost December,

It's almost Christmas time.

And how loaded the Christmas season can be emotionally.

Requirements for insane spends of money and family gatherings and all these kinds of things and expectations and memories and stresses.

Think of this circularity of the year.

Every year,

Here we come to Christmas.

Oh,

Now all this stuff I've got to do,

And so-and-so is going to say this,

And I don't want to hear it,

And I just don't even care,

And blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Imagine instead,

We said,

Okay,

We've been here before.

Let's calm that down,

And let's imagine a logical self,

The rational mind.

It's sort of that Vulcan Dr.

Spock,

Mr.

Spock,

Not Dr.

Spock,

Mr.

Spock.

We need to have that too.

And this kind of lends ourselves back to this idea of almost reparenting ourselves.

We've talked a lot about this over the years,

About this idea that,

But I didn't have a healthy upbringing.

My parents themselves perhaps weren't adults,

Perhaps weren't fully fledged humans or self-actualized beings,

And so then anyone in their care was sort of left to their own devices.

Developing this clarity is also becoming a very healthy parent for ourselves,

Because that's ideal.

If you have children,

Children are in a beautiful,

Chaotic time of their life.

They're growing into themselves.

They too are trying to figure out their own wings and becoming fully fledged.

The ideal parent has that quiet center,

That while the child is sort of in their wildness and they're growing,

The parent provides this lovely center.

This is what we can do for ourselves.

Another thing I want to mention is one of my favorite dynamics of the masculine and feminine is the pursuer and the pursued.

Obviously in relationship,

It is the masculine partner pursuing the feminine partner,

All genders,

But this is what keeps a marriage or a relationship alive.

As long as that dynamic is happening,

As long as there is the pursuit of the feminine partner,

There will always be romance,

There will always be excitement,

There will always be renewed energy in the relationship.

The exact same thing is within us,

Because we have to understand that the feminine,

That the universe,

That what we are living is an infinite experience.

We ourselves are infinite beings.

We are sort of that Aladdin's genie.

Great,

Infinite potential in a tiny little living space.

That's us.

This is the living space for this experience,

But within us we have infinite potential.

Even if you were to imagine on a bad day or a good day,

But bad days unfortunately are easier to access,

Think of how infinite your imagination is.

Let's just say you're worried about something and you can come up with hundreds of potentially bad situations.

We can do it in the positive,

We just don't tend to be as well trained in that.

Infinite ideas inside of us,

Infinite ways of having emotional responses,

Infinite possibilities.

We tend to live very sort of contracted,

Tiny,

Scheduled lives,

But there's actually an infinity within each of us,

Every one of us.

Not just the interesting people over there,

Every one of us.

I remember I was taking a dance class.

She was teaching an African dance in Northern Africa of a bird and the bird was sort of flittering away with the arms,

Like flittering away and flittering away.

And she said,

You have to remember that the divine feminine is uncatchable.

So obviously we can talk about that in relationship,

But today we're talking about self-actualization.

Imagine that your masculine,

Being your consciousness,

Is in perpetual pursuit of your own divine feminine.

It's in perpetual pursuit of who you are,

Your infinite self.

Imagine how exciting that is,

That at any moment you can go within and say,

What's next?

What else is possible?

At any moment,

We never have to be stuck.

We never have to live yesterday's life.

There's always something new.

And even if your life is very full,

And it seems that I am,

I kind of have all I can possibly imagine.

You know,

I've got the kids and the jobs and the parents and whoever else I'm caring for,

And I've got to make the money because the rent's so high and there's so much,

There's no way.

What is she talking about?

But even within that,

You can sit,

You can meditate,

And you can ask,

What would my soul love to do right now?

And there will be something,

Some tiny little thing.

It could be as simple as cooking your favorite meal that brings this total joy and brings these beautiful smells into the house,

And all of a sudden,

The entire day is different.

These manifestations of our infinity don't have to be things that get us Nobel Peace Prizes.

They're all tiny.

They're all,

You know what?

I've been wanting to call that person.

You know what?

I've been wanting to sit and have a coffee with them.

I'm going to do that.

You know,

I've always wanted to learn to play the mandolin.

I'm going to learn to play the mandolin.

I've been reading Alan Watts lately,

And he says that it's really healthy for North Americans specifically or people in the West to learn Chinese,

Especially learning how to draw the ideograms like the pictures because the Chinese philosophy is so different than ours.

It gives us this incredible breadth of understanding humanity.

So here's me last night looking up ways to learn Chinese,

And I'm kind of laughing at myself going,

Really?

Look,

You've got time to learn Chinese,

And yet it may happen.

Infinite possibilities all day long.

Infinite.

It could simply be taking a different way driving to work.

Maybe it takes longer because Google says this is the shortest way,

But maybe this other way is prettier,

Or maybe it goes by a coffee shop that you'd like to try.

It doesn't have to be big.

So now imagine the journey of self-actualization.

What does it really become?

This perpetual pursuit of self,

Of the infinite universe that is within each of us.

And again,

It starts small because you might think,

Yeah,

But I don't really feel like I'm an infinite universe most days.

Then you just start to just work at the edges,

And you just try these little things that maybe you love to do as a child,

Or maybe you used to do,

But you forgot.

You just do these little things,

And every new connection to self builds because it's almost like when we connect to self,

The energy of the universe gets plugged into our system.

When we're connected to other,

When our pecking order is everybody else,

That's just everyone else's energy.

But as soon as we do something that is according to our truth,

That is on our path,

It is like plugging into the universal socket,

And all of a sudden,

There's more energy than you can ever imagine.

That's how we're supposed to live.

That's how being human could be.

So we just do tiny little things,

And those tiny little things have ripple effects,

And then it gets easier and easier,

And then all of a sudden,

You start meeting people who are like you,

And then they have great ideas,

And you're like,

Oh,

I'm so inspired.

You know when they often say that who you become is sort of dependent on the five closest people in your life?

When we start connecting with that self,

The people around us change.

The people we talk to change,

And then bit by bit,

It's almost like a rocket ship.

We just get built up and built up and built up.

It's very,

Very cool,

This journey of self-actualization.

Reviews

A true blessing. Every sentence resonated with me. Thank you

Excellent recommendations thanks 🙏 for sharing your insights Katrina
Namaste