Over the last week I have been doing a little experiment in posting about “masculine” qualities and “feminine” qualities. I was interested to see what people thought about the categorization of different qualities, but mostly I wanted to see how well people identified with the societally-imposed separateness of qualities. From the discussion, it seems that when we talk about masculine and feminine qualities, people cannot help but assign a gender to them. The posts on my social media pages made no reference to physical characteristics of men and women - in fact, they didn’t say anything about MAN or WOMAN, yet everyone that commented on them assigned the masculine traits to a man and the feminine traits to a woman. It caused quite a stir for some people. The ancient practice of the Taoism discusses the masculine/feminine in terms of energy within each human body. It is understood both males and females contain both Yang Qi (masculine energy) and Yin Qi (feminine energy). The symbol of Taoism, the Yin Yang, is a representation of the perfect balance of these two energies. Taoism, along with many ancient and New Thought teachings, stresses the importance of harmony between the two energies to maintain optimal physical, mental, and spiritual health. What if men and women were exactly the same physically? What if there were no physically defining gender characteristics? Would we all have exactly the same balance of these traits? I don’t think so. We are personalities and souls before we are meat puppets… Of the masculine traits I posted in a graphic last week, here are a few that are work-relevant: Mind Thinking Directive Reasoning Logical Linear Structure Survival Assertive And a few of the feminine traits: Receptive Imagination Stillness Creativity Intuition Vision Attraction Flexible Flowing Traditionally in the education system masculine personality traits are cultivated more than feminine traits. In school we are taught structure, memorizing, reasoning, logic, and we are taught to be very linear and goal-driven in our thinking. It’s for this reason that masculine qualities have historically been regarded as “higher” than the feminine qualities of creativity and imagination - along with intuition. Yet… as we move forward things are changing in a big way. We are in an age where creativity and imagination are not only valuable in work and business, but absolutely vital. In any given business or line of work there are hundreds of others just as good at cranking out work products, widgets, and even ideas. It’s those that crank out uniqueness that move well beyond the others they are “competing” against. In fact, powerful creating takes you above and beyond the competition. Once you operate on the “creative plane” (a term coined by Wallace Wattles) you transcend the need to beat the other guy or gal, even in a crowded marketplace of products, discoveries, and ideas. Because of that, the feminine qualities are finally coming into their rightful position in the workplace. And that’s true, whether or not you happen to be carrying a pair of testes or ovaries (or neither) around in your body. It is amazing to me that our society is so stultified on the topic of gender that we aren’t having any kind of authentic discussion about this. Well, it is time, and who but your humble host to stir the pot with such a discussion… More coming soon!
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:03:17 +0000