My Quest to Understand Female Energy
My life has been a long journey towards an understanding of energy; female energy in particular. It has been a journey made difficult by the fact that I am male. In Western Society males are conditioned to ignore and suppress any female energy within them. They are taught that female energy resides with females and male energy resides with males and that, as males, we must focus exclusively on developing the socially mandated attributes of male energy within us. I am not sure why but I rebelled against this.
As a kid I was a voracious reader. Our father took us to the library every Sunday and I would come home with a tall stack of books that I would read and return the following Sunday in exchange for another tall stack of books. To me, way back then, books were the most wonderful thing in life.
One of the books from that time that profoundly shook me to my core was a book about the life of St. Bernadette of Lourdes. Bernadette immediately became my number one hero. Of course, the story of St. Bernadette is all about the unconditional love of pure female energy. I did not understand it at the time but I was instantly drawn to understand this energy.
I devoured books about far-off lands like Africa, India and South America. I devoured books on history and geography and biography and I especially loved books on animals. Coming home from school I would open a book and be instantly transported to the Serengeti Plains or the Ugandan rain forest or the swamps of India.
I read all the books by Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall and Joy Adamson. While they satisfied my longing for distant places and animals, they also showed me things about female energy. The male way of studying a gorilla is to shoot it dead and then look at the dead body through a microscope. The female way, as Diane Fossey showed us, is to sit with them, observe them, love them, and eventually interact with them on their terms. The female way is to BE with them.
I continued reading, only vaguely aware of any education I was receiving about female energy.
And then puberty reared its ugly head. While I continued reading (it had become an addiction) I slowly began moving my energy education into the realm of physical social interaction. Needless to say, I was awkward, clumsy, embarrassing, and utterly clueless and confused. Learning was a challenge to say the least.
In high school I carried around a copy of the Tao te Ching with me, reading from it throughout my days as though it were some kind of bible. I learned about yin and yang and that we all have both male and female energy within us but, heck, I could not even understand the male energy exploding within me much less find the female energy. Instead of looking within I tried to learn about female energy by mating with females. This tactic proved to be frustratingly difficult and mostly unsuccessful. While I did learn a tiny bit, I remained woefully ignorant.
In my early twenties, at a time when most males my age were reading comic books or war novels or adventure novels or spy novels or technical books (if they read at all) I went through a period where I read every feminist book I could get my hands on. Seriously. I could not get enough of them.
The book that utterly shook me to my core was Marilyn French’s novel, The Bleeding Heart. I was never the same after reading it. That book forced me inside a woman to see through her eyes. It was an earth-shattering epiphany. I realized that I did not want to be the kind of man I saw looking through those eyes.
During this time I was also greatly expanding my energy education in the physical realms. I even went through a short marriage that taught me a lot about what male and female energy balance is NOT. For a while there I had plenty of female teachers but I was not learning much because I was not addressing the energy within myself.
And then John Lennon was murdered. I was a Beatles fan as a kid but I had lost touch with what the four lads had been doing since then. So I devoured any reading material I could find about what John had been doing the last few years of his life. When I found out that he let Yoko take care of business while he stepped out of public life to stay at home and be a house-husband to their kid bells went off in my noggin. I instantly knew that that is what I needed to do. How can one understand female energy without being a mother?
I knew that I had to be a mother!
Of course the girlfriend I was living with at the time was very emphatic about never wanting children. We had a happy, compatible relationship and the sex was fantastic but realizing that I needed to become a mother I realized the situation was all wrong. So I explained the situation to her and we then broke up.
I then wandered the country for a few years in a daze. My energy education was going nowhere and neither was my writing. I refer to this time as my ‘lost years.’
I eventually met an old soul-mate of mine. We had had children together numerous times in past-lives. We got married and moved to Santa Fe where she got pregnant and where our daughter was born. Finally, my greatest teacher of female energy had arrived.
My wife knew of my intense desire and need to experience motherhood and she was happy to oblige. We agreed that as soon as our daughter was weaned from her breast that my wife would go back to work and I would quit my job and become a full-time, stay-at-home mommy.
It was the greatest education I have ever experienced and the best job I have ever had (and worst paying). It was the happiest four and a half years of my life.
Mind you, I was not some half-assed house-husband. I was a full-time mommy and wife. My wife took on all the male roles and I took on all the female roles. I spent my entire day not only taking care of the baby but also doing all the housework, all the cooking, all the shopping, all the laundry….everything!
I bathed my teacher. I clothed her. I brushed her incredible little girl hair and I learned how to French braid it. I fed her the healthiest food I could find. I learned to bake bread. I took her with me to the grocery store and, when she was old enough, to the library. I read to her (voraciously). I took her for a walk to the park every single day. I nursed her when she was sick. I played with her for countless hours. I taught her how to dress herself and how to tie shoes. I taught her how to ride a bicycle. I took her to the petting zoo and I got her a kitten so she could learn to love animals. I taught her how to brush her teeth. I potty trained her. I tucked her in each night and read or told her a bedtime story. We colored with crayons every day and I taught her the alphabet. We spent a lot of time each day just playing. Every minute of every day I was there for whatever she needed. We never once hired a babysitter for even so much as an hour. For four and a half years we were never apart and my entire life was devoted to caring for her and loving her with every ounce of my being.
(By the way, I wanted to point out that, because I was concerned with the environment like any true female would be, I refused to use disposable diapers. I only used cloth diapers, EACH AND EVERY ONE OF WHICH I washed out by hand in the kitchen sink. We are talking about thousands of diapers — all from just one little girl. Is that female energy, or what?)
And then came that fateful day when I walked her to her first day of school. As her hand slid out of my hand she smiled at me then walked into the school building. And I was left standing all alone on the sidewalk. It was one of the saddest moments of my life. I was no longer a full-time mommy. I was beside myself.
Of course my little teacher kept teaching me for many years to come and still does. (She has since gifted me with two new little teachers in the form of granddaughters.) But during that moment in front of the school building I realized that my life would have to drastically change.
I also realized that I had drastically changed. I had experienced four and a half years of super intense female energy. Believe me, if you are a male, you cannot do that without experiencing drastic change. You will never be the same. My teacher helped me to find and awaken the female energy within me and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Of course, that did not bring me to a state of energy balance. I had gone from one extreme all the way to the other extreme. If anything, I was even more out of balance. My female energy was shining like a beacon and my male energy was almost non-existent. But I learned that one cannot find balance having experienced only one side of a polarity. Even though I could not bring forth a child through my body or nurse it with my breasts, my teacher gave me the experience of female energy in almost every other way. Having experienced both sides of an energy polarity my next challenge was to find the balance between those two energy polarities.
I have been working on that ever since.
The first thing I needed to do was to reawaken some of the male energy within me that had gone dormant while being a mommy. What better way to do that than to start a business, right? There is nothing like being in the competitive business world to draw out male energy. So eventually I opened up a bookstore which I ran for nine years. The challenge was to draw on my male energy in order to compete and be successful but maintain enough female energy to stay balanced. Luckily for me, it was soon after I opened the bookstore that a new female teacher came to me.
But she was not human.
She was a wolf-dog. She was 84% Siberian Husky and 16% Gray Wolf. I had never had a dog in my life and certainly was not looking for one but she showed up one day at the back door of the bookstore. She was already two years old at the time and had run away from her owner. We found the owner and returned the dog to her but the next day the dog was at the back door of the bookstore again. This continued for several days until the owner finally asked us if we wanted the dog. Before we could answer our daughter clapped her hands and said, “Yes, yes, yes!”
So this wolf-dog inserted herself into our lives. She showed up to teach us about unconditional love but also about gender energy dynamics. In that regard I was her student.
That wolf-dog and I ended up being married for sixteen years. I call it a marriage because, unlike human marriages, this marriage was most emphatically ‘til death us do part. For sixteen years we were never apart except for that one day when I had to go out of town on business. We spent our entire days together. Every minute that I was working in the bookstore she was there with me. She was the best employee I ever had and she took her job very seriously. She never missed a minute of work. And she was with me every minute that I was at home. And she came with me in the car everywhere I went.
In wolf society gender roles are very clearly defined. There are alpha males, beta males, alpha females and beta females. I came to learn that my beloved wolf-dog was a beta female. That is why she kept running away from her previous owner. It is because her previous owner was a female. Beta females MUST have an alpha male (leader of the pack) to devote themselves to. It is conditioned into their DNA or something.
Well, she decided that I was her alpha male. It seemed like an instantaneous recognition with her. I was her alpha male and she immediately became utterly devoted to me. To my surprise I found myself becoming utterly devoted to her. She drew out just the right aspects of my male energy just as I provided her with the opportunity to be the beta female that she was born as.
In wolf society the beta females are known as the babysitters. While the alpha females get the most loving from the alpha males, it is the beta females who take care of the children. While the alpha males and females and the other beta males are out hunting the beta females stay at home in the den watching over the kids. They have been doing it for thousands of thousands of years.
So as I suddenly found myself to be the alpha male my family became the tribe that my beloved wolf-dog took care of. She would have given her life to protect my wife, our daughter and even the family cat. It was her job and she never questioned it. And all the customers in the bookstore were, by extension, tribal friends so she protected and took care of them, too. Whenever customers brought small children into the bookstore she would immediate go to their side to protect them and play with them; to babysit them. (She was one of the most popular dogs in town.)
We had some pretty good years with the bookstore but eventually Jeff Bezos ran me out of business and I closed it down. My beloved wolf-dog was heartbroken. Every day for the rest of her life she would go to the door at a quarter til ten in the morning and sit there looking at me as if to say, “It’s time to go to work.”
It was a year or so after I closed the bookstore that my wife left me to go live with her boyfriend. Soon thereafter my daughter moved out to go live with her boyfriend. Suddenly it was just me, the wolf-dog and the cat.
My wife and I are still close friends after the divorce but our twenty year marriage had run its course. She was certainly one of the great female energy teachers that I have had but my energy education called for new dynamics.
My sixteen year marriage to my wolf-dog is probably the one relationship in my life that exhibited the most balanced state of male/female energy. And it flourished naturally without discussion or examination or conscious attempts at changing energy. It was a pure state of being. I am eternally grateful for experiencing this.
My beloved wolf-dog finally kicked the bucket at the ripe old age of eighteen and the cat followed soon thereafter. I am officially a dog widower.
So now it is just me. My energy education has led me to a point where I must find balance within myself. There are no longer any teachers or relationships or anything outside of myself to help me or to balance energies with. It is all up to me to find and luxuriate in a pure state of being; of balanced energies.
I cannot begin to express how truly happy I have become. Thanks to the experience of being a mommy I was able to find and awaken the female energy within me. Few men have dared to do this and few would even consider it but it is was an important step on the road to balance. Finding balance in relationships is also an important step towards finding balance within ourselves. I have been blessed with many great teachers.
But it all eventually leads back to finding the balance within ourselves. Everything external is an aid to that process but in the end we must find that balance within ourselves before that balance can manifest outwardly.
(As far as societal gender equality goes, people say that women should do this or do that and that our societal structures should be changed this way or that way. It is my opinion that societal gender equality will never be realized until MEN defy their conditioning and look within themselves to find, embrace and actualize the female energy within themselves. Until that happens realizing gender equality on a mass scale will continue to be a hard, taxing struggle. It is up to us guys to facilitate change and hasten our journey to balance.)
One last quick story…..
Some years ago I read an interview with the genius novelist Tom Robbins. He was asked why so many of his novels have a female protagonist. He replied that it was a tactic he employed to keep his male ego from slipping into the story.
I found this to be fascinating. I had never thought of that before. So I eventually decided to try it. Both of my last two novels have female protagonists. It proved to be quite a challenge. After all, I am male and my writing has always been liberally dosed with male energy. Writing these two novels was quite an education for me and I found that it really balanced my writing to write through the persona of a female character.
While writing the first of these two novels I finished a chapter about the female protagonist going to the apartment of her boyfriend that she is breaking up with. It is a scene about closure. With the chapter finished, I reread it and something was missing but I could not figure out what. I thought and thought and finally it hit me. I failed to write anything about the woman’s purse!
I hate purses. I do not understand why women insist on carrying luggage around with them everywhere they go. It is so annoying. I hate luggage. When I travel I never have more than one small bag. When not traveling I have everything that I could possibly need in the two front pockets of my jeans. My hands are always free. It would drive me bat shit crazy to have to carry a purse around with me — and keep track of it. Seeing women fumbling incessantly through their purses looking for something that they cannot seem to find drives me cuckoo. Why are purses an essential part of a woman’s identity?
After slapping myself, I surrendered to the female energy and then got back inside the female protagonist’s head. I rewrote the entire chapter adding her purse to the story line. And it turned out perfectly! The purse actually turned out to be the pivotal object around which the scene revolved. It totally changed the chapter. I am so glad that I was open enough to female energy to be able to do that.
After that book was published I had a couple of women tell me that they were very disappointed to find out that I was male. The whole time they were reading the book they were convinced that I was female. (My name does not indicate gender and, out of concerns for privacy, I never, ever, include photos of myself anywhere on my books.) This is some of the best feedback I have ever received as a writer.
So, in conclusion, I want to also point out that one of my best energy teachers has been…..me. It took me a long time to realize it but every time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop I am beginning a teaching/learning session. Writing, for me, is as addictive as reading and it is something I do to learn. I have learned almost as much through writing as I have through reading. And that writing has taught me a lot about energy balance. The more I can write from a state of balance, of BEING, the better the writing is and the more easily the learning flows.
Luckily, I still have plenty of years of writing left in me. My quest to understand female energy is far from over.
As a kid I was a voracious reader. Our father took us to the library every Sunday and I would come home with a tall stack of books that I would read and return the following Sunday in exchange for another tall stack of books. To me, way back then, books were the most wonderful thing in life.
One of the books from that time that profoundly shook me to my core was a book about the life of St. Bernadette of Lourdes. Bernadette immediately became my number one hero. Of course, the story of St. Bernadette is all about the unconditional love of pure female energy. I did not understand it at the time but I was instantly drawn to understand this energy.
I devoured books about far-off lands like Africa, India and South America. I devoured books on history and geography and biography and I especially loved books on animals. Coming home from school I would open a book and be instantly transported to the Serengeti Plains or the Ugandan rain forest or the swamps of India.
I read all the books by Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall and Joy Adamson. While they satisfied my longing for distant places and animals, they also showed me things about female energy. The male way of studying a gorilla is to shoot it dead and then look at the dead body through a microscope. The female way, as Diane Fossey showed us, is to sit with them, observe them, love them, and eventually interact with them on their terms. The female way is to BE with them.
I continued reading, only vaguely aware of any education I was receiving about female energy.
And then puberty reared its ugly head. While I continued reading (it had become an addiction) I slowly began moving my energy education into the realm of physical social interaction. Needless to say, I was awkward, clumsy, embarrassing, and utterly clueless and confused. Learning was a challenge to say the least.
In high school I carried around a copy of the Tao te Ching with me, reading from it throughout my days as though it were some kind of bible. I learned about yin and yang and that we all have both male and female energy within us but, heck, I could not even understand the male energy exploding within me much less find the female energy. Instead of looking within I tried to learn about female energy by mating with females. This tactic proved to be frustratingly difficult and mostly unsuccessful. While I did learn a tiny bit, I remained woefully ignorant.
In my early twenties, at a time when most males my age were reading comic books or war novels or adventure novels or spy novels or technical books (if they read at all) I went through a period where I read every feminist book I could get my hands on. Seriously. I could not get enough of them.
The book that utterly shook me to my core was Marilyn French’s novel, The Bleeding Heart. I was never the same after reading it. That book forced me inside a woman to see through her eyes. It was an earth-shattering epiphany. I realized that I did not want to be the kind of man I saw looking through those eyes.
During this time I was also greatly expanding my energy education in the physical realms. I even went through a short marriage that taught me a lot about what male and female energy balance is NOT. For a while there I had plenty of female teachers but I was not learning much because I was not addressing the energy within myself.
And then John Lennon was murdered. I was a Beatles fan as a kid but I had lost touch with what the four lads had been doing since then. So I devoured any reading material I could find about what John had been doing the last few years of his life. When I found out that he let Yoko take care of business while he stepped out of public life to stay at home and be a house-husband to their kid bells went off in my noggin. I instantly knew that that is what I needed to do. How can one understand female energy without being a mother?
I knew that I had to be a mother!
Of course the girlfriend I was living with at the time was very emphatic about never wanting children. We had a happy, compatible relationship and the sex was fantastic but realizing that I needed to become a mother I realized the situation was all wrong. So I explained the situation to her and we then broke up.
I then wandered the country for a few years in a daze. My energy education was going nowhere and neither was my writing. I refer to this time as my ‘lost years.’
I eventually met an old soul-mate of mine. We had had children together numerous times in past-lives. We got married and moved to Santa Fe where she got pregnant and where our daughter was born. Finally, my greatest teacher of female energy had arrived.
My wife knew of my intense desire and need to experience motherhood and she was happy to oblige. We agreed that as soon as our daughter was weaned from her breast that my wife would go back to work and I would quit my job and become a full-time, stay-at-home mommy.
It was the greatest education I have ever experienced and the best job I have ever had (and worst paying). It was the happiest four and a half years of my life.
Mind you, I was not some half-assed house-husband. I was a full-time mommy and wife. My wife took on all the male roles and I took on all the female roles. I spent my entire day not only taking care of the baby but also doing all the housework, all the cooking, all the shopping, all the laundry….everything!
I bathed my teacher. I clothed her. I brushed her incredible little girl hair and I learned how to French braid it. I fed her the healthiest food I could find. I learned to bake bread. I took her with me to the grocery store and, when she was old enough, to the library. I read to her (voraciously). I took her for a walk to the park every single day. I nursed her when she was sick. I played with her for countless hours. I taught her how to dress herself and how to tie shoes. I taught her how to ride a bicycle. I took her to the petting zoo and I got her a kitten so she could learn to love animals. I taught her how to brush her teeth. I potty trained her. I tucked her in each night and read or told her a bedtime story. We colored with crayons every day and I taught her the alphabet. We spent a lot of time each day just playing. Every minute of every day I was there for whatever she needed. We never once hired a babysitter for even so much as an hour. For four and a half years we were never apart and my entire life was devoted to caring for her and loving her with every ounce of my being.
(By the way, I wanted to point out that, because I was concerned with the environment like any true female would be, I refused to use disposable diapers. I only used cloth diapers, EACH AND EVERY ONE OF WHICH I washed out by hand in the kitchen sink. We are talking about thousands of diapers — all from just one little girl. Is that female energy, or what?)
And then came that fateful day when I walked her to her first day of school. As her hand slid out of my hand she smiled at me then walked into the school building. And I was left standing all alone on the sidewalk. It was one of the saddest moments of my life. I was no longer a full-time mommy. I was beside myself.
Of course my little teacher kept teaching me for many years to come and still does. (She has since gifted me with two new little teachers in the form of granddaughters.) But during that moment in front of the school building I realized that my life would have to drastically change.
I also realized that I had drastically changed. I had experienced four and a half years of super intense female energy. Believe me, if you are a male, you cannot do that without experiencing drastic change. You will never be the same. My teacher helped me to find and awaken the female energy within me and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Of course, that did not bring me to a state of energy balance. I had gone from one extreme all the way to the other extreme. If anything, I was even more out of balance. My female energy was shining like a beacon and my male energy was almost non-existent. But I learned that one cannot find balance having experienced only one side of a polarity. Even though I could not bring forth a child through my body or nurse it with my breasts, my teacher gave me the experience of female energy in almost every other way. Having experienced both sides of an energy polarity my next challenge was to find the balance between those two energy polarities.
I have been working on that ever since.
The first thing I needed to do was to reawaken some of the male energy within me that had gone dormant while being a mommy. What better way to do that than to start a business, right? There is nothing like being in the competitive business world to draw out male energy. So eventually I opened up a bookstore which I ran for nine years. The challenge was to draw on my male energy in order to compete and be successful but maintain enough female energy to stay balanced. Luckily for me, it was soon after I opened the bookstore that a new female teacher came to me.
But she was not human.
She was a wolf-dog. She was 84% Siberian Husky and 16% Gray Wolf. I had never had a dog in my life and certainly was not looking for one but she showed up one day at the back door of the bookstore. She was already two years old at the time and had run away from her owner. We found the owner and returned the dog to her but the next day the dog was at the back door of the bookstore again. This continued for several days until the owner finally asked us if we wanted the dog. Before we could answer our daughter clapped her hands and said, “Yes, yes, yes!”
So this wolf-dog inserted herself into our lives. She showed up to teach us about unconditional love but also about gender energy dynamics. In that regard I was her student.
That wolf-dog and I ended up being married for sixteen years. I call it a marriage because, unlike human marriages, this marriage was most emphatically ‘til death us do part. For sixteen years we were never apart except for that one day when I had to go out of town on business. We spent our entire days together. Every minute that I was working in the bookstore she was there with me. She was the best employee I ever had and she took her job very seriously. She never missed a minute of work. And she was with me every minute that I was at home. And she came with me in the car everywhere I went.
In wolf society gender roles are very clearly defined. There are alpha males, beta males, alpha females and beta females. I came to learn that my beloved wolf-dog was a beta female. That is why she kept running away from her previous owner. It is because her previous owner was a female. Beta females MUST have an alpha male (leader of the pack) to devote themselves to. It is conditioned into their DNA or something.
Well, she decided that I was her alpha male. It seemed like an instantaneous recognition with her. I was her alpha male and she immediately became utterly devoted to me. To my surprise I found myself becoming utterly devoted to her. She drew out just the right aspects of my male energy just as I provided her with the opportunity to be the beta female that she was born as.
In wolf society the beta females are known as the babysitters. While the alpha females get the most loving from the alpha males, it is the beta females who take care of the children. While the alpha males and females and the other beta males are out hunting the beta females stay at home in the den watching over the kids. They have been doing it for thousands of thousands of years.
So as I suddenly found myself to be the alpha male my family became the tribe that my beloved wolf-dog took care of. She would have given her life to protect my wife, our daughter and even the family cat. It was her job and she never questioned it. And all the customers in the bookstore were, by extension, tribal friends so she protected and took care of them, too. Whenever customers brought small children into the bookstore she would immediate go to their side to protect them and play with them; to babysit them. (She was one of the most popular dogs in town.)
We had some pretty good years with the bookstore but eventually Jeff Bezos ran me out of business and I closed it down. My beloved wolf-dog was heartbroken. Every day for the rest of her life she would go to the door at a quarter til ten in the morning and sit there looking at me as if to say, “It’s time to go to work.”
It was a year or so after I closed the bookstore that my wife left me to go live with her boyfriend. Soon thereafter my daughter moved out to go live with her boyfriend. Suddenly it was just me, the wolf-dog and the cat.
My wife and I are still close friends after the divorce but our twenty year marriage had run its course. She was certainly one of the great female energy teachers that I have had but my energy education called for new dynamics.
My sixteen year marriage to my wolf-dog is probably the one relationship in my life that exhibited the most balanced state of male/female energy. And it flourished naturally without discussion or examination or conscious attempts at changing energy. It was a pure state of being. I am eternally grateful for experiencing this.
My beloved wolf-dog finally kicked the bucket at the ripe old age of eighteen and the cat followed soon thereafter. I am officially a dog widower.
So now it is just me. My energy education has led me to a point where I must find balance within myself. There are no longer any teachers or relationships or anything outside of myself to help me or to balance energies with. It is all up to me to find and luxuriate in a pure state of being; of balanced energies.
I cannot begin to express how truly happy I have become. Thanks to the experience of being a mommy I was able to find and awaken the female energy within me. Few men have dared to do this and few would even consider it but it is was an important step on the road to balance. Finding balance in relationships is also an important step towards finding balance within ourselves. I have been blessed with many great teachers.
But it all eventually leads back to finding the balance within ourselves. Everything external is an aid to that process but in the end we must find that balance within ourselves before that balance can manifest outwardly.
(As far as societal gender equality goes, people say that women should do this or do that and that our societal structures should be changed this way or that way. It is my opinion that societal gender equality will never be realized until MEN defy their conditioning and look within themselves to find, embrace and actualize the female energy within themselves. Until that happens realizing gender equality on a mass scale will continue to be a hard, taxing struggle. It is up to us guys to facilitate change and hasten our journey to balance.)
One last quick story…..
Some years ago I read an interview with the genius novelist Tom Robbins. He was asked why so many of his novels have a female protagonist. He replied that it was a tactic he employed to keep his male ego from slipping into the story.
I found this to be fascinating. I had never thought of that before. So I eventually decided to try it. Both of my last two novels have female protagonists. It proved to be quite a challenge. After all, I am male and my writing has always been liberally dosed with male energy. Writing these two novels was quite an education for me and I found that it really balanced my writing to write through the persona of a female character.
While writing the first of these two novels I finished a chapter about the female protagonist going to the apartment of her boyfriend that she is breaking up with. It is a scene about closure. With the chapter finished, I reread it and something was missing but I could not figure out what. I thought and thought and finally it hit me. I failed to write anything about the woman’s purse!
I hate purses. I do not understand why women insist on carrying luggage around with them everywhere they go. It is so annoying. I hate luggage. When I travel I never have more than one small bag. When not traveling I have everything that I could possibly need in the two front pockets of my jeans. My hands are always free. It would drive me bat shit crazy to have to carry a purse around with me — and keep track of it. Seeing women fumbling incessantly through their purses looking for something that they cannot seem to find drives me cuckoo. Why are purses an essential part of a woman’s identity?
After slapping myself, I surrendered to the female energy and then got back inside the female protagonist’s head. I rewrote the entire chapter adding her purse to the story line. And it turned out perfectly! The purse actually turned out to be the pivotal object around which the scene revolved. It totally changed the chapter. I am so glad that I was open enough to female energy to be able to do that.
After that book was published I had a couple of women tell me that they were very disappointed to find out that I was male. The whole time they were reading the book they were convinced that I was female. (My name does not indicate gender and, out of concerns for privacy, I never, ever, include photos of myself anywhere on my books.) This is some of the best feedback I have ever received as a writer.
So, in conclusion, I want to also point out that one of my best energy teachers has been…..me. It took me a long time to realize it but every time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop I am beginning a teaching/learning session. Writing, for me, is as addictive as reading and it is something I do to learn. I have learned almost as much through writing as I have through reading. And that writing has taught me a lot about energy balance. The more I can write from a state of balance, of BEING, the better the writing is and the more easily the learning flows.
Luckily, I still have plenty of years of writing left in me. My quest to understand female energy is far from over.
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