Enightenment Ain't Cheap: How Do We Support Our Partners' Transformation?

A little over a year ago, the most amazing woman I'd ever met came into my life. I'd always liked strong women, but she was clearly the strongest woman I'd ever seen: powerful, capable, courageous, loving, and with fully embodied feminine and masculine aspects. Today she is my Beloved, and we're on the way to building our life and future together.

I believe that the reason this woman came into my life and that I was able to step up to her and her power, is because a few years ago I decided I had to be the kind of man that a woman like this would be attracted to. I had to fully step into my own power, and that meant doing my own work, not just sitting by and letting life take me, but by me taking charge of my life and my own embodied masculine. When both of us do our own work, it helps us support each other in the directions that most serve our growth in love, relationship and happiness.

Your woman is going through some inevitable changes in her life. She chose you and she wants you to join her in this growth and she wants your support and your strength. It's the greatest gift you can give her.

I wrote this a few days ago at Anyaa's request. She's writing an article on how the masculine can support their partners as they go through the Shamanic Priestess Process she facilitates for women all over the world. She's asked men who have successfully supported their women through this transformative process to support other men who are now going through what they went through with a couple of written paragraphs she can share.

I have a T-Shirt on the i-Boutique that says "Enlightenment ain't cheap." It's a dual meaning: Yes, we pay a lot of money to attend workshops, etc., but we also pay with our relationships, our jobs, and our blood, sweat, and tears. Many men are frightened that their relationship with their woman is going to change as a result of this process, and it is, but I refer you back to my quote at the top.

One of the responses she got was from a man who objects to the duality of masculine and feminine approaches to conscious evolution, and I understand that once one has attained the ability to rest in the non-dual, that the masculine and feminine dissolve away into one-ness. People can even attain the non-dual in altered states (temporary) before they reach the stage (access at will).

But until we get past the states and into the stage structures, there is a natural hierarchy that must be met (don't confuse natural hierarchies with dominator hierarchies), and one of those is going through and healing our masculine and feminine selves. Women have had thousands of years of domination by the masculine that they generally have to work through before they're able to begin to step into their true power, and this work, at this level, cannot be taught by men, any more than a men's group can be led by a woman.

So to get to the later state-stage structures, especially the non-dual, it's critical that the masculine and feminine work be completed, or we bring the ego and shadow aspects of those qualities with us, to trick us, harass us, and fool us into thinking we've made it when we really haven't.

So for the men who fear the work their woman is doing, do your own work and step up to who she's becoming, or at least support her....because she's becoming....with or without you.

And for those who think we can get to enlightenment in a single, sudden gift of a leap without doing the work (and it does happen but rarely), for most of us, there are many. many paths to the non-dual, and denial of those different paths is just "enlightened" fundamentalism.