In the Balance | Masculine, Feminine, and the Forgotten Way

I woke up this morning tangled in thoughts, deep in the mires of my own psyche. I couldn’t stay asleep, so I sauntered out of bed, trying not to disturb my sleepy, snuggly cats, and quietly sat down in my office, purging my early morning download before it faded with the morning sun. The world feels upside down. There’s a growing tension, a cultural reckoning playing out before us—shadow fascism, identity politics, a deep divide that seems less about truth and more about control. And the more I sit with it, the more I see the same pattern over and over again.

Every struggle humanity has faced, every societal collapse, every existential crisis has stemmed from a failure to integrate opposites. Light and shadow. Masculine and feminine. Creation and destruction. Instead of finding balance, we pivot wildly between extremes, never settling long enough to understand what we’ve actually built or destroyed. The push for equity and inclusion is noble, necessary, and important work. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re not going about it in the healthiest, most constructive way. From what I can see, we’ve been clumsy, divisive, and often counterproductive—tearing at the very foundation of what we claim to be fighting for.

I think I understand why.

We have spent generations helping women integrate the masculine, but we have not extended the same grace to men. Instead, we have stripped them of their armor without offering a new way forward, demanding vulnerability while providing no sanctuary. But ancient wisdom, long forgotten, offers us a path—one we can reclaim through ritual, through tools, through the sacred mask. What we are witnessing isn’t progress. It’s a war between the toxic masculine and the toxic feminine because we have abandoned the divine. We are spiritual children trying to figure out how to be, but we’re too arrogant in our own ignorance to see that we’re trying to get there without doing the necessary preparation and planning.

We’re trying to eat soup with a fork and wondering why it’s not working.

But that’s often how rebirth begins—with the breakdown of what no longer works. And now, the stars seem to echo this reckoning. The current astrological climate—eclipses, retrogrades, and Neptune’s shift into Aries for the first time since 1861—is drenched in the language of change. These transits don’t just whisper transformation; they scream it. We are in a cosmic season of death and rebirth, where the old structures are being scorched to make room for something new. It’s uncomfortable, it’s messy, and it’s necessary. Astrology isn’t causing the upheaval—it’s reflecting it. Above and below, inner and outer, all mirrors. The collective evolution demands more than progress for the sake of progress. It asks for soul. For courage. For clarity.

The Integration We Haven’t Allowed

Masculine and feminine were never meant to be at war. They are meant to complement, to balance, to complete. We understand this when it comes to children. A child playing house doesn’t instinctively know how to be a parent—they hold the baby doll upside down, half-dressed, stirring imaginary soup on a plastic stove. And yet, we don’t scold them for getting it wrong. We guide them, show them, let them play until the motions become real, until instinct and skill align. But this alignment between instinct and skill is something nature already understands.

A wolf does not need to be taught how to hunt. A seed does not need guidance to grow into a tree. The closer a species is to the earth, the more intact its instincts remain. But us humans? We are the lost ones. The only creatures who forget how to be. The river does not question its path, the hawk does not doubt its wings. But humans? We stumble, we hesitate, we build walls between ourselves and nature, between ourselves and each other. And then we wonder why we feel so disconnected. This is why I honor the plants, the animals, the elements—because they remember what we have forgotten.

To quote Graham Hancock, we are a species with amnesia. He spoke of lost civilizations, but it applies just as deeply to spirituality—for the two are inextricably linked. Just as civilizations rise and fall, so too does our connection to the divine. We forget. And we must remember. We are both physical beings and spiritual ones, and integration takes lifetimes to master. We allow this grace for children. We do not allow it for ourselves. We have spent generations making space for women to step into their masculine—giving them room to fumble through strength, ambition, and external power.

And yet, we have not done the same for men.

Masks as Medicine

Women, even in our wounds, know how to gather. We know how to hold each other in grief, how to nurture, how to express. Men? Their bonding has always been masked—through action, through movement, through the unspoken. Shoulder to shoulder, not face to face.And yet, we expect them to know how to do what we do—to sit in a circle and expose their wounds, raw and open, without tools, without a threshold to cross, without protection.

But masks have always been medicine. Across cultures and time, they have been used as shields, as tools, as sacred objects of transformation. The Norse carved masks to embody warriors and gods. The Greeks used them in ritual theater, revealing truth through concealment. Native American, African, and Japanese traditions all hold the mask as a bridge between worlds—between the seen and the unseen, the self and the spirit, the conscious and the unknown.

A mask is not just concealment. It is transformation. In every ancient culture, masks have been used to step into something greater, to embody what we do not yet know how to express. For men who have been told to be strong, to be silent, to be untouchable—removing that armor all at once is unnatural. A mask allows them to step across the threshold. To practice vulnerability before standing bare. To try on emotions the way a warrior tries on his first set of armor. The irony is, when the mask is given sacred purpose, it stops being something to hide behind—it becomes something to grow into.

Men need a way in. A ritual, a tool, a structured passage into vulnerability. A physical mask—crafted by their own hands, imbued with meaning. Not to hide, but to protect. Not a barrier, but a candle to light the way through the shadow. A guide, a marker, a first step toward remembering what has been buried. One day, they won’t need it. One day, they’ll set it down. But at first, it gives them something to hold onto when stepping into the unknown.

The Art of Refinement

Michelangelo didn’t start the Pietà with fine tools—he took a hammer and chisel and struck the stone. The refinement came later. We are still in the hammer and chisel phase. Some voices, some figures, have already begun breaking the stone, forcing the conversation open, smashing through decades of silence. But now, it’s time to refine. It is better to stumble and make progress than to never try out of fear of failure.

This is where grace, compassion, and humility come in—not to excuse ignorance, but to recognize that all of us are still learning. We are all learning how to “adult” in one aspect of our lives or another. Individually, collectively. No one has it all figured out. Which is why we must reach across the divide and help each other—not stand apart and pick at the thorns while ignoring the rose. We are sculptors of a better future. But no masterpiece is shaped alone.

We start rough. We practice. We refine. We master.

We heal.