The Feminine Rising 2
Part Two: Yin is In
If you haven’t read the first post in this series you can find that here.
On a post election Saturday in November 2024, I attended the Virginia Women’s Conference in the small southwest Virginia city where I live. The Virginia Women’s Conference is an annual event hosted by incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Warner. There were over 700 Virginian women in attendance at the swank hotel and conference center where it was held. As I sat at my table listening to the keynote speaker, the mood in the room felt low. Quiet, resigned. Sitting in the seminars I signed up for, I felt as though I was in a house that was on fire; yet, I had been invited to see only the new wallpaper bathroom, “Isn’t it divine? Ignore the heat, dear. Everything’s fine.” There was no discussion of the dismally high rates of maternal mortality in Virginia, especially among black women. No one mentioned that the childhood death rate in the US rose 18% between 2019 and 2021. In my workshops no one seemed to care that though American women make 85% of consumer purchases, we are paid on average .78 cents on the dollar compared with men’s wages. With each mediocre presentation, I felt more and more like the old white dude throwing this shindig had no idea who the women of Virginia are. We are rising up, Motherfucker. This is not tea time, MARK WARNER, you do not need to sugarcoat reality for us. We are living it.
Feminist energy is yin. If you think of the symbol of the taiji, that circle we are all so familiar with which has black and white sides divided by a curved line, each side having a spot of the opposite color. That circle is actually in constant motion balancing yin and yang. It is the human body, but also the world around us. It is the ultimate yin (female) and yang (male) balancing and complimenting each other. No one is all yin or all yang, all male or all female. We are both the yin and yang. Yet we are each unique in our makeup: some have more yin than yang, and some more yang than yin. The yin and the yang are in an infinite dance, shifting and balancing to help us maintain internal balance when external circumstances change. One rises, tips over the other side, and then the other side pushes against it for balance. This is the always evolving equilibrium of life.
Yin is dark, deep, quiet, still, consolidating, nurturing. Yang is movement, dynamic, repellant, and scattering. Yin is structure, yang is function. Yin is what I felt at the women’s conference. Women are settling in, going deep, being reflective; yet at the same time moving forward, trudging toward revolution. We are rising, but it is not with the temporary yang fueled drama of firecrackers. It’s a foundational build, stone by stone.
Examples of women’s rise in the United States can be seen in Tarana Burke’s Me Too Movement which began in 2006, but went viral in 2017. The largest Women’s March in US History was held in January 2017. Women currently account for record shares of Fortune 500 chief executives and board members in the business world. There has been a significant rise in women holding public office since 2013. Colleges report that more women are enrolling and finishing college than men. Women are more than 50% of published authors. We are consistently making gains in achieving equal rights and equal pay. It is a slow rise, but it is a steady rise. We will not continue to be held down. We can’t. Women are ascending and we feel it deep in our bones. Women’s voices on both sides of the political aisle are being heard and making significant change.
In 2014 when I visited Maggie the cord cutter, I felt the yin energies rising. I thought this rising feminine power would align with my personal political beliefs because obviously, those beliefs are RIGHT. Ummm, I know now, especially after the 2024 election, that assessment was both naive and egocentric. What is happening with women goes beyond Democratic or Republican politics and until women see this our rise will be in a scattered pattern.
Way back in the day when Jesus was a baby, you know the early 2000’s, I worked as the education director at an afterschool program. The program was in a marginalized neighborhood and often kids were not having their basic needs met. We hired many of our employees from the neighborhood so they knew a lot of the families and what went on in people’s lives outside our program hours. During a staff training I facilitated, I remember being shocked by my staff's judgment toward the adults in the families we served. The comments were cutting and cruel, there was little compassion extended. “The enemy here is not the parents or the families,” I said, “What we need to speak out against is poverty. That is what the problem is, not the parents or caregivers of these kids.” That’s the way I saw it when I believed in our nation’s ability to fix the ever growing income disparity. I don’t believe that anymore.
Greed is yang. It can be fueled by passion, but in the end, it is separation. It is the opposite of the nurturing, consolidating nature of yin. In the US this is what the yin is pushing back against. A successful government for its people cannot run when its elected officials are constantly chasing the dollar, or being swayed by it. This is why my deep angst after the 2024 election has been short lived. Intuitively, what women see unfolding in the political sphere is just a distraction from the deeper work that needs to be done. If women are constantly watching the news cycle, no matter what side we are on, we will continually be afraid. Decisions made out of fear are seldom the most well thought out decisions, yet women feel like they are under constant attack. Our children are dying from drug overdoses and school shootings. Half the country feels as if our reproductive rights are being stripped. The other half worry that unborn babies are being murdered in the thousands. These are the large assaults on women and do not touch on the everyday indignities we face. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn are evolutionary traits that work great when you are facing imminent danger, but not so great when you’re trying to figure out how to heal a nation, or how to move womenkind forward toward solutions. The strife and fighting that are a part of survival living are yang traits. They burn us out quickly, they separate us from each other. If we are moving towards the yin we must change.
The more women I speak to about this rising tide of empowerment, the more I hear that this feeling is not mine alone. Women are realizing that the problem is not split along party lines. At this point, no public official can solve the deep and fundamental problems that are plaguing the US. However, the dark deep power of yin rising is bubbling up our souls and women know change is coming. Women in my sphere seem less reactive and more reflective on how they are going to perpetuate the changes that need to happen as we move forward. They seem ready to settle in and work, even if they aren’t sure exactly how that will look. What we know though, MARK WARNER, is that it doesn’t look like a Women’s Conference with empty statistics and chants of, “We can do it.” Women are doing IT. Don’t patronize us.
There’s a part three coming! Stay tuned