The Sacred Masculine

Betsy ChassePost

 

What is the sacred masculine? Especially during this time when we are really re-defining our roles, it is important to ask this. What is gender? Is there gender? This really is a time of transformation and illumination of consciousness, where the deeper understanding, the deeper resonances of these energies, masculine and feminine, man and woman are really up for a curious and interrogated approach, dissecting what we have believed in the past, recreating what the future will bring.

 

What future will we create as conscious beings? Now that we have decided that we have a say, that we are part of the creating consciousness that runs the world, we have so many opportunities to open up these conversations, to look at what we’ve been taught with a different set of eyes, to hold a different viewpoint of what masculine and feminine really are.

 

Last month I talked a great deal about enlightenment, how to attain enlightenment, awakening. The month before that I focused on women and what does it mean to be a woman today. In honor of Father’s Day, I decided to make June our time to explore and discover men.

 

First, let me state that I think men are really fabulous and incredible. I have two brothers that I’m very close to, and I love working with men. I have worked with many so far during my life. From my experience as a wisdom keeper, as a clairvoyant, as a student of the mysteries schools and my close personal mentorship with many psychologists, I have a unique perspective on the sacred masculine. And what I see is that we are at a time where the birth or the rebirth of the sacred man is coming. The old ways of aggression, the old ways of having to fit into a box and be defined by a very narrow intellectual understanding is being shaken up. Women are really the big shakers, and we are really shaking it up right now.

 

This is a service of ours, a service to our brothers, our fathers, our sons. Because we, as women, hold the heart space. Now that doesn’t mean men don’t have heart space. They do. But it is primarily women who hold a heart space—the hearth—and the vision of connection.

 

The sacred man is the place in man or a place in our masculinity that marries wisdom with action. Because the male energy is action, it is movement, it is reaching out. Wisdom is a feminine energy—the Sophia—it comes from introspection, from quietly looking within. The sacred masculine arrives when these two dynamics, action and wisdom, come together—when we connect both the right and left sides of the Kabbalah in the Tree of Life. The Hesed and the Hokhmah are the masculine side, the Gevurah and the Binah are the feminine. When the energies of feminine and masculine, of wisdom and action, come together, you are the sacred man. It’s really that simple.

 

The masculine energy is also nurturing and protecting. The masculine energy is that which contains, that which structures, and that which manifests. Now remember, I am talking about consciousness. We can describe our genders in this fashion, but ultimately it’s about consciousness and the qualities of consciousness. The masculine consciousness when it is fully ascribed to its divinity is nurturing, is providing, is protective. It is action with wisdom, holding a grounded quality. The sacred masculine is very grounded, very anchored, very rooted. The feminine energy is a dance, it is a movement that can go into chaos unless it is fully grounded, anchored into what I call the central pillar of our Tree of Life.

 

Now, let’s move from the realm of consciousness into gender. The sacred man is an embodiment of both male consciousness and feminine consciousness. The sacred man is aware of the feminine qualities within him and is at peace with them. These qualities are emotion, feeling, heart space, connection, tenderness, receptivity and intuitiveness. All of these qualities are what we call feminine aspects. When they are fully integrated within you as man, it’s a fire. We call this the Shekinah (or Malkuth) which sits at the bottom of the Tree of Life, the fire which gives us life. This integration actually lifts up the male energy, the masculine energy of action, of building, of manifesting, of finishing a project, of protecting, of providing for, of being grounded. So the sacred man is the balanced man of internal energy. The sacred man is comfortable with feminine qualities within him. The sacred man does not need to avoid these qualities or relegate them into the shadows.

 

Without the tempering feminine qualities we see the macho man—the tough guy—the macho dude we all love to see in our movies. But when masculine energy is not tempered with the feminine, unfortunately the masculine energy turns into aggression, it turns into being a perpetrator, it turns into destruction. This is masculine energy that has taken the inner feminine and projected it outwards and pushed it away. It is as if the consciousness of the masculine says, “Hey! I can’t be that! I can’t be soft. I can’t be vulnerable! I want to destroy that!” This is a twisted form, a destructive form of the masculine energy.

 

When the masculine begins to disassociate from the natural union between the masculine and the feminine, the masculine goes awry. We see a lot of that happening today. And the women are really calling men out on this with the “me too” movement. We are saying, “No, you cannot destroy us! It’s not okay to denigrate or harm women. It is not okay to not respect women.”

 

My hope is in this call to action that we move forward with wisdom. To direct the conversation as to how can we heal this paradigm. Women, we must heal this paradigm also, because we put men in a box. We see them a certain way, then we hold them there in a kind of prison. I want to invite you to see that whenever a man is overly aggressive, or acting out unconsciously, to know that this is the result of years and years of conditioning. It’s in our DNA that men and women are separate, that masculine and feminine have to be separate, have to be two separate places. But we are entering the age of transformation, we are entering the age of The Beloved. The Beloved energy is the masculine and feminine qualities coming together in harmony, merging together, spiraling together, each serving one another so that we create a harmony of consciousness for our world and for ourselves. When that harmony happens there is peace, there is forgiveness.

 

When it comes to male-female dynamics, I think one of the most difficult things to handle is being married. I have been married twice and in four or five long-term relationships in my life. Now I’m married to my beloved and it has been a wonderful journey. But I know, for us, we are always navigating this Venus and Mars territory. Both of us wonder at times, “Why didn’t you react the way I wanted you to?” And it’s because we both react and see the world differently. But when we come together and we really get into our vulnerability of what the truth is for us, we become closer and closer. That is so yummy and so delicious that I wish it for everybody in their relationship. But in order to get there we need to understand our differences. We also need to understand what makes us alike. Because we each have these masculine and feminine qualities within us.

 

That said, our brains are very different. We have different processing centers. We have different neurological pathways. So we interpret and we see the world through different eyes. But we are actually the same being because we are consciousness, we are spirit. When we can find our way back to that, it is gold. That is the brilliance of a diamond.

Before I share a meditation here, I would like to share the following quote from Thomas Mallory’s book, Le Morte D’Arthur. Here is the vow King Arthur had each of his knights of the Round Table take:

“I will develop my life for the greater good. I will place character above riches, and concern for others above personal wealth, I will never boast, but cherish humility instead, I will speak the truth at all times, and forever keep my word, I will defend those who cannot defend themselves, I will honor and respect women, and refute sexism in all its guises, I will uphold justice by being fair to all, I will be faithful in love and loyal in friendship, I will abhor scandals and gossip-neither partake nor delight in them, I will be generous to the poor and to those who need help, I will forgive when asked, that my own mistakes will be forgiven, I will live my life with courtesy and honor from this day forward.”

That is the sacred masculine.

 

The sacred masculine is when a man enters his true state of kingship. Please know that in this sense “King” is a metaphor. It is the Malkuth of the Tree of Life (Malkuth means kingdom associated with the realm of matter/Earth). The king is the sacred masculine when a man is in balance and in his full power. The power becomes the magical, it becomes the mystical, it is the wizard energy, it is the energy to manifest in quantum creation in order and in synchronicity. That is the gift that you receive from living in the sacred masculine.

 

The upholder of virtues and of value, the sacred masculine is the consciousness of truth and justice, creating order so that there is a balance in truth and justice, so that there is a balance in protection and providing, so that there is a balance in holding the feminine energy and caring for her within yourself and within the world. The sacred man is the man who cares for the Earth because the Earth is feminine. He respects the Earth and honors her. The sacred man is the man that will stand and take the fire for truth, when every voice is going the other way. I am sure you can think of those today in the political environment standing up and saying, “I am not going to follow the crowd right now, I am going to stay in my truth.” That is the sacred. Masculine.

 

We need this. We need both men and women to access that inner masculine. We need men to know how valuable they are, how needed they are. That their honor, dignity, power, and nobility is what will be enable the new feminine, the new woman to birth. We can’t do it alone. The women’s movement can’t do it alone. Because truth is, we are all one—men, women, the Earth, the animals, the trees—we are all together. If we don’t come together we will always be fragmented and we will lose the wisdom we all have for each other, the holistic synergy that creates harmony, peace, joy and happiness. So we need the sacred man, we all need each other.

 

Now, the consciousness of the sacred man is not something you can hold 24 hours a day because we are human, right? Even though I work on myself as a woman, I make lots of mistakes, I slip. (You can ask my husband and son and they’ll tell you that I am not so perfect.) But I try to stay true to my virtues and values. And I feel that if we just set our attention, our intention on these values, that they will overcome the discrepancies and differences that we have. That they will overcome our human foibles. These qualities and values are so strong and so powerful that when we make a mistake it is just that, a mistake. It is not a destruction that cannot be undone.

 

So, I want to encourage you, support you, and ask you to begin to have this conversation with others about what is the sacred man, the sacred masculine. How can we bring this energy, this consciousness into the world? How can we teach this to our sons, to our young boys? How can we encourage our youth to embrace the vulnerable places within instead of pushing them away and seeing them as weak? In our Western modality, tragically we see vulnerability as somehow weak. But it isn’t weak. It is the engine, the fire, which propels us through the world. When that fire is tamped down into the shadow or projected elsewhere, the tragedy is that the fire becomes black obliterating smoke—the black smoke of aggression and destruction—the masculine energy completely un-tethered and broken from the feminine.

 

So let us say a prayer and come together to bring our consciousness and awareness, and our intention that we find and hold the sacred masculine within ourselves. That we encourage the birth of the sacred man into our world, the king. That we pray for all men in the world to find joy and love, harmony and truth. We pray that this beautiful energy of the masculine becomes the great sword of King Arthur, the great sword of truth, the sword of justice that will bring our world, our countries, our communities and our families into harmony, peace, and joy.

 

Please, take a moment of silence to pray and bless the sacred masculine energy. See that this energy is being birthed, moving upwards into the world like the great Phoenix which returns from the ashes, carrying the sacred masculine into our world to manifest an end to violence, an end to fear, an end to destruction, and an end to the ego minds that exclude everything else. The Phoenix brings the sacred, the masculine, the powerful energy of the protector, the nurturer, the wise action, the holding, the comforting. The central pillar. Bless now the patriarch, this consciousness that we have been in for thousands of years. It is not bad. It is simply time for the patriarch to fully become what it was meant to be: the divine patriarch standing side by side with the divine matriarch, the beloved and the beloved.

 

Look into your heart. Here, in the left side of your heart, is the feminine, your feminine presence. Here, in the right side of your heart, is the masculine presence. Just see these two sides of your beautiful heart merging together until the center of your heart has a violet flame, a beautiful, brilliant, purple flame. This flame is the flame of peace, the flame of integration, the flame where the masculine and the feminine become one, merging into divine order. Now, gently watch your breath and breathe into this violet flame. Allow this violet flame to ascend along your chakras, enlightening each chakra. In the beloved I am that I am.

 

Now imagine the two halves of you, left and right along the central pillar of your body, merging together in a thousand-million filaments of light. Merging together as one. One in harmony and one in balance and peace. And from this divine place let us now forgive each other. Let us now forgive our men for the unconscious places where they act out. Let us now forgive our women for the places where they are unconscious and act out. Take a deep breath and let that go, let the past go. Right now in this moment, right today, you can feel the central connection of this union of masculine and feminine coming together in you with the words of grace: I forgive you.

 

Let this light radiate through your body, filling your mind, your spirit, your heart and your soul with pure love for each other.