KING MAKING AND THE INNER PATRIARCH

We are at any one time a mostly unconscious ecosystem of variable energetics and changing internal climates.  My consultation room gives space for the expression, sometimes incarnation, often letting go with kindness and thanks to those energetics that have previously been driving us or are waiting to be birthed.  Hindu spirituality talks of the true self or the higher self but to be honest there is no hierarchy - we are all colonies of self, selves and disparate forgotten parts that need re-membering literally back to our greater wholeness. 

Karma has it that our lack of wholeness will always pull in our polarity pole as a compost to be taken in, digested, broken down into vital nutrients for our inner soil’s health.  Life always has it that until we learn our lessons and change something internally for the better then we always bring in the same dynamic.  You only need to look at how we might change the face of our partner, but that same energetic we are being encouraged to embody will eventually show its face again until we do.  Homeopathy is based on the principle of treating like with like - you have tuberculosis you are given a Tuberculin tablet.  The human eco system is the very same model what you attract or repel is the very medicine you need to take.

There are many of these energetics we could draw on for example if you live with a very narcissistic person you will no doubt be more on the polarity of that energetic - more serving, self-less, giving, enabling.  Your ‘medicine’ would be to start to develop a practice in yourself where you are embodying more of what it is like to be a narcissist ie what are those qualities?  (usually more self centred, self absorbed, self-orientated, lacking in empathy, making it all about ‘them’).  With practise, being more in the land of the extreme you are reclaiming a part of you that got lost along the way in your childhood (you never get two narcissists in the same family as there’s just no room!).  So we often attract just what we need to embody, or we judge what we fail to recognise in ourselves e.g a woman has an affair and friends around her judge and criticise her behaviour and might say ‘that’s just not ok’ - what they are failing to do in that moment is acknowledge their own vulnerability to the potential of them or their partners’ having an affair - instead of sitting with that and ‘owning’ - it they judge out and push the very thought away.

Note: If it’s the patriarch responding to this, their husbands’ might find themselves saying  ‘If you ever do that i’ll kill you’ - that’s the king talking, moving towards a fixed narrative where there’s no debate, instead it’s a rule-maker - a Patriarch!

And talking of Kings and Patriarchs - that’s the subject this month.

 RESISTING THE TEMPTATION TO BUILD KINGS AND BEFRIENDING THE INNER KING - THEY BOTH CAN TURN INTO DISABLING PATRIARCHS IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL!

We are now in the age of Aquarius - the element of Wind - a time where we are being asked to be more conscious of ourselves: how/what we think, how we act.  We need to become inner critical thinkers ie challenge our thoughts, beliefs, values to see if they still serve us and the world we find ourselves living in today. Aquarius is all about collective responsibility: a time to be conscientious about how we show up for ourselves, our communities, indeed, our world. 

Patriarchal capitalism is a concretised system that is in trouble: we only have to look at governments, financial institutions, land territory disputes, religious fascism, our roads, education, etc. The way we’ve always done things is crumbling and many institutional structures are falling down or short, literally, like the Tower in a tarot pack. 

Let’s get our active imagination onto this: I want you to imagine a large lofty ice palace set up on a remote distant peak: it feels to those living  in the valleys (you and I) remote, out of touch, impersonal, unable to relate with or to.  Instead it governs and rules from a position of power and control.  Yet It is so blinkered in its thinking and action that it seems to have forgotten the very platform, the earth, that holds and bears its weight.  To the patriarchy there is an arrogance: little to no awareness to how its build there has affected the living organisms beneath it, the numbers of sentient beings displaced by its magnitude of power.   Mother earth bears the weight, she sees there’s been no collaboration, mutual cooperation or acknowledgment to what was taken, not even ‘given up’ ie asked, for this palace to be built.  There it sits oppressing, ruling, stifling our very life force.

We can literally find ourselves locked up in such an ice palace but this one is internally unconsciously built  in our psyches through our childhoods, culture, schooling, education, our families’ beliefs, values and traditions.  Our inner ice palace is our mentalised energetic plane: inside lives a variety of different parts of our brains: thinking, analysing, rationalising, judging, criticising, etc.

If we stay unconscious to this inner powerhouse of energies we will find ourselves attacking or defending whomever challenges our inner status quo, we do not like to have values, we have built our lives on, questioned because it destabilises us and we find ourselves in a place of immense change and instability (often what doctors might call a midlife crisis).   There are many benefits to always living in our heads thinking our way through life - it gives us an air of control, goal setting, educational accolades, personal power, a level of understanding a somewhat chaotic set of variables that we call living, etc but like anything it comes at a cost when we become to far weighted in one direction.  

Today we’re looking at the part of that mentalised committee: The Inner Patriarch.

The Inner Patriarch, just like the outer patriarchy we live in, loves tradition, it rarely asks why are we still doing and thinking what we are thinking and doing and if asked will answer ‘because we’ve always done it that way’.  There is order yes, but it creates in us a brittle personal narrative that prevent us joining with the rest of humanity.

Patriarchy is not a term against men - think of it ex of gender and the idea that it’s a solid state and more as an energetic which lives buried deep often unconsciously in our inner ecosystems in varying degrees of clout.  It can be an extreme flavour of the yang energetic (masculine but non-gender specific: which when in balance gets us to the moon, advances cancer treatments etc) which embodies the Western principle of linear rational thought, its focus is on order, abstractions, and judgement from an above hierarchy.

Patriarchal thinking narrows and reduces our experience to one extreme of order and control. Both women and men have been taught through our culture and education to, at times unconsciously, push aside their discernment and sacrifice  their needs in order to fall in line with how they think they’re supposed to behave - and often those people end up in my consultation room wondering how they got there, when their dreams kept showing them the path of being somewhere else.

This dogma is instilled in us early in childhood: boys being taught that crying is synonymous with weakness, girls learn that assertiveness equals aggressiveness.  The archetype of the ‘madwoman’ gets left out of the room and made to sit on the naughty step until she ‘behaves’.

As adults, it manifests in other ways. In how women often shoulder their family’s emotional field (the invisible energetic of a household and the relationships therein). If a woman complains that she feels her partner is not connected to the rest of the family ie  energetically ‘present’ when physically there, she’s often told that she’s “imaging things, a drama queen, hysterical,” Eventually, “she believes it.” That’s patriarchal energy ingrained in her DNA right there.  Even childbirth, for all time has been done through a patriarchal model of stiff upper lip and ‘it’s no big deal’. And god forbid the woman who hates her new life as a mother, or resists her new born, for the massive change it brings both inside her and to her.  The patriarchy would respond women have always given birth, it’s natural, it’s the norm, tradition has always had it that way why are you being so difficult?  The problem then is directed at her, not with how she’s feeling.  She gets shut down, her inner patriarch builds and she finds herself gripped in guilt and self-loathing unable to speak to anyone ultimately wanting to end her life.

The inner patriarch shows when a woman resists telling a man she is dating that she wants a committed relationship for fear of scaring him off and being rejected. The patriarchal energy harms both men and women by forcing men to act like they don’t need relationships and women to act like they don’t need a sense of self.

It’s also the same energetic that has some women in the USA treating Trump’s pussy chasing and ballsy locker-room comments as ‘boys will be boys’ - but seriously, a man who seemingly doesn’t see women as people but walking sex toys, surely can’t run or lead a country these days?  But yes in the Patriarchal model, he’s the ideal candidate - ‘I’m in control and for me to be powerful I have to put others down and  make women in particular inferior to me’.

I see many clients in my consultation room with issues of self worth, disenfranchisement, feeling out on a limb, wanting to embrace more of the yin energetic (feminine non-gender) but unsure to what that looks like.  They come feeling out of sorts, that they are somehow to blame for where they find themselves, that they are doing something wrong.  When we start the work we find the internal system needs to be unpacked, cleared out, overhauled so that there’s space made for a more relevant energetic to be birthed based on who we are today not who we were when those energetics first came into being (usually in childhood in some way to save our lives/protect us).

I had a male client of about 50yrs of age who came for a few months’ of work: he explained he was head of a very large international company - could produce masses of proof of his material worth in the world.  But in his family dynamic his wife and children were complaining that he felt bossy, inflexible, dogmatic, always expecting high grades/successes of his kids, never asked about their emotional welfare, and didn’t ‘feel present or available’ to his family in a nurturing, embodied way.  We felt into the emotional impact of losing his mother unexpectedly in his late teens; his father, a bully, would beat him if his grades were low and generally his father never recovered from his wife's death and lived in an unreachable despair and depression.  His father taught him instead to be a King in the external world but neglected to teach him anything about the spiritual inner world of tenderness, loving-kindness, compassion, allowing feelings to be heard (not necessarily ‘fixed’), being  states vs doing states or what it was to live from a heart centred perspective. He was taught to block feelings and to treat vulnerability and emotions as a weakness. 

He was locked in an automative state, married with four kids living an abundantly full life, but on the inside feeling like a nomad on a long lonely desert crossing:  ungrounded, untethered, abandoned.  By slowly unpacking his system and getting under the bonnet we could untangle the wiring so he could begin to learn what it was to soften, relax, literally unwind and let his family in, as the beautiful individuals they were - Kings see their families as 'subjects needing their care rather than realising a family is also a place for them to lean into for emotional support.   His inner patriarch never let him take a day off work, never let him feel his emotional range, would criticise anyone who showed emotion as weakness.  The patriarch dislikes the fluidity of the emotional field because at a time in its life it saw it could not contain and control that and so it’s strategy is to cut feelings off - to not feel - if it had its way - never again.

One of the very best ways you could help yourself right now is to catch unconscious thoughts that go through your mind that are being said by your Inner Patriarch, here are some examples:

• if you refer to God or a religious deity as a man - Usually it’s a patriarchal model of a religious system that has fed you this line - it’s not true - you are king building

• if you treat ‘intellectual’ people in some ways ‘above’ you or if you devalue or override your own feelings and instead listen only to your thoughts daily

• If you find yourself not talking about feelings, energy, spiritual things or talking about them only with those people who will ‘understand you’ - you are discounting yourself and buying into a hierarchical model that is based on the patriarchy which tends to be believe ‘if you can’t see it it doesn’t exist’- that’s not true you only need to look to the world of science to see how close it is to the world of spirit these days especially in quantum physics

• if you find yourself apologising when you cry or feel tender (if you are owning your feelings and not expecting anyone to ‘save’ you in that moment, then do whatever you need to do without feeling a need to self-censor)

• if you find yourself waiting for ‘the boy’ to call you or text you as if he has the power base - he doesn’t, neither of you do - if you want a relationship then be on a relating platform not on a strategic, conditional,  inauthentic one

• if you find yourself waiting for the guy to say i like, love you - you’re giving away your powerbase to what you project is a king - he’s not - stop that.

• if you are a young mother and you apologise to your partner when your baby throws up on them

• if you have to ask your partner to be the child carer for the day from an apologetic stance your inner patriarch is damning you for having your own ‘free time’ as if some ‘bread-winner’ has more valuable than your emotional health

• if you are divorced and you feel overly responsible or guilty for your ex partner’s pain.   I have had female clients who have said to me literally as they open the door to their ex-partner an inner voice (now identified as the inner patriarch) is saying ‘what’s he doing out there?  why aren’t you preparing a meal for him? how could you have caused him so much pain!’

• if a man says to you something about your looks that feels sexually charged which feels as if he is almost blaming you for the reactions that are being stimulated in him.  I played Demetrius in A Midsummer’s night dream at school, I was 15yrs old.  After the performance a group of dads came up to me and said nothing of my acting but just said ‘wow you really steamed up our glasses’ - I wore baggy clothes and no make up for years after that event and completely internalised their shit because it was the 1970’s and women ‘should’ have felt ‘lucky’ to have the male gaze - that’s the inner patriarch building just there! 

• if you find women eye you up when you walk in a room as if you are about to ‘steal’ their men - that’s the inner patriarch scared of what a single female might do the institution of marriage

• if you feel aging now means you have to stand down from life -you only have to look at fairy tales and mythology to see that always a younger model is taken by the aging king as if eternal youth means we never have to feel pain and the reality of life and death - cut the bullshit - we don’t look at a tree or a flower as it ages and judge it as ugly…well then

• if you apologise to your partner for not wanting sex - how often in fact are you saying ‘sorry’ as you go about your day to anyone?

• if you feel you have to have anal sex to keep your partner happy yet you really don’t want to - you are overriding what you feel and complicit in setting up an uneven weighted relationship - you are creating a King and an unhealthy power base

• if you are waiting for a guy to sweep you off your feet so you can be ‘fully feminine’ and ‘soften’ etc again you are creating a King/princess power base that leads to unhappy ville soon after you’ve had your first child and you step into mother energy

• if you feel it’s ‘ok’ for your partner to watch porn but don’t feel comfortable in them doing it, or you go along with it for fear of them leaving - King building

• if you buy into the belief that men need sex otherwise they leave - King building

• if you believe that men’s work is more important than yours - King building

• if you believe that a man’s pleasure must come first - King building

• If you have never had an orgasm with your partner but always let them come and instead of saying anything you just put your needs last - King building

• if you’ve never let your partner see you masturbate - King building

• If you’ve never let your partner see you naked for fear of how they might judge you - you are already judging yourself as if you have to fit some patriarchal model - inner king building

• If you feel emotions are messy and not permitted - the patriarch thinks,  he doesn’t feel - King building 

• if you feel the creative arts is less of a profession than more of an institutional career eg. accountancy, law, banking - that’s your inner patriarch - King building

• if you feel you have to come out of yourself in order to ‘serve’ or ‘please’ another - King building

• if you’ve never had sex yet think you have to apologise to your partner or you think you are less than because you are a ‘virgin’ - King building - in fact how many times a person has had sex doesn’t mean they are any good/better at it than someone who hasn’t had sex!  Usually they are more complacent in fact and just imagine they are good because a woman hasn’t told them actually they aren’t - King building

• if you are at a dinner party say and you are asked what you do and you say with an apologising energy ‘I’m just a mother’ you have let down your entire sisterhood of mothering.  Equally if you say it with a punch you are doing that trying to prove your worth to the king.  Instead hold your ground, stay rooted, and  hold a softer power, be proud of what you are doing in the world.  You hold the spiritual gold in your family and no monetary gold can ever equate to that in value.  Once your truly own that mothering energetic you will feel you don’t even need to say what you do - asking what you do in the world is a King trying to throw their weight around

• in an argument if you feel you have to justify yourself you are shape shifting into the mentalised plane where you will never win as the patriarch has to be right and in doing that has to make you wrong.  Instead come into your heart and ask your partner to meet you there

• if you criticise how you look, what you’re wearing, or you find yourself doing things for your man out of some imbalance of power: my mother would always slap on lipstick when she knew my father was coming home and vacuum the hall as if the king had to have everything in order for her to be appreciated or seen.  There was no queen living in that house more a cinderella waiting to be invited to the ball.  King building

• if you feel you need to have a partner in order to be whole or accepted in life -buying into the myth of King or Kingdom building - at your own risk!

All of the above give nuances to how we can at times buy into this patriarchal model and perpetuate it.  To effect change we need to recognise our own inner patriarch and make friends with him as his sole existence is there to protect us from being criticised or judged from others in the outside world.  By connecting to him, by noticing what he tells us and we question it we already start to make a healthy relationship.  If we never change our inner world the outer world will just continue to perpetuate that.

In traditional healing models there is a point where there is an internal ‘Sacred Marriage’ - where our inner yang and yin (male and female energetics) become known and live in a balanced harmonic energetic.  There’s a chart below that gives the polarities between the yang and the yin.  Notice how far you are in either extremes and see if you can bring yourself into more balance so that say when you are doing your accounts you can bring in more yang and when you are making love you can drop into more yin - ie you practice having choice not letting these energetics push and pull you.

CHART BELOW ON YIN/YANG ENERGETICS - IF YOU GO TOO FAR IN EITHER DIRECTION UNCONSCIOUSLY WATCH OUT - YOU’LL PULL IN SOMETHING OR SOMEONE THAT IS INVITING YOU TO FIND YOUR CENTRE AGAIN.