More people, particularly women, are actively seeking a connection with a sacred, but elusive essence referred to as the divine feminine. She is called by many names, including Ma, Mother, Mary, Nature, Durga and Kali, and is seen as the source of all uplifting qualities, including love, nourishment, creativity and meaning in life. A relationship with her equates to the embodiment and experience of these sacred qualities.

This powerful, perhaps unprecedented movement toward personal and societal betterment has great potential to redraft the structure of individual and societal thinking. It can carry us away from the violence and negativity that plague today’s world and move society toward peace and inspiration. This connection, when understood and honored, can change lives and the world for the better, leading people to live more compassionately and with deeper understanding.

The greatest obstacle is the ignorance of the human ego. There are qualities in the mind such as laziness, dullness, greed and envy that lead otherwise sincere seekers to place their faith in half-truths and to become satisfied with immature and incomplete forms of happiness. In a state of ignorance, one apple to feed our own hunger is valued more than the orchard capable of feeding many. According to the wisdom of the divine feminine, such an attitude will inevitably lead only to further suffering and separation.

Another example is adherence to the idea that cosmic wholeness is based in a connection with the divine masculine for men versus the divine feminine for women. This misunderstanding is achieving an almost cult-like following in today’s world, where anger and resentment are stronger than our doctrine of rehabilitation, spirituality is too often weaponized as an exclusionary punishment, rather than offered as a healing inspiration, and where we have yet to wholeheartedly envision a unifying reconciliation of our humanity.

Emboldening practices and attitudes of separation, whether based on sex, gender, skin color, age or other factors, carries great consequences, the most pervasive being an ever-increasing sense of separation, a false superiority or inferiority and a sense of personal incompleteness. Statements like, “The problems of the world are due to toxic masculinity,” are too often misconstrued to somehow include the divine masculine. In this misunderstanding, it may appear that the call of the divine feminine is stronger and more authentic than the call of the divine masculine. In reality, they are opposite sides of the same coin, and cannot be separated.

Human masculinity and femininity are personality traits. The divine masculine and the divine feminine are, respectively, universal consciousness and the sacred flow of that consciousness. To deny, demean or downplay the role of the divine masculine or to bind it to the ego quality of toxicity is also to limit and insult the creativity and grace of the divine feminine. There is no balance or harmony in such perspectives.