I’m posting a copy of an email I’ve just sent to a coaching client, about opening to the power and basic sanity of the feminine voice:

Here’s what came to me, and it was in response to what you said about feeling that you are not being as loving in this situation as you would like to be. And also what you said about feeling that what is evolving for you in this relationship is a mirror for something more universal, something that is happening for many women.

I feel that there is a desparate need for the voice of women, the heart of women, to emerge and be heard in the world right now. And it is a voice that has been deeply supressed for thousands of years on our planet. I know many men who are also feeling this way, and looking for ways to support the women they know in acknowledging and following a radically different kind of intelligence. Stephen Lewis, the envoy at the U.N. who has been dealing with the Aids crisis in Africa, is one of these men. He speaks with great passion about how differently things would have gone in Africa, if the women there had been in charge.

I experience a strong and beautiful feminine energy in your presence. And I think what is awakening in you right now is the awareness that this feminine way of being is not loving in the way we have been taught. Compassion can be soft and sweet, but it can also be fierce and wild. We need both sides, one without the other is only half. It seems to me that it is the fierce compassion that is emerging in you right now, and I know from my own experience, how difficult it can be to open to that. Fierce compassion says “No” when it needs to say ‘No,’ it draws very strong boundaries, and it even destroys, instead of nurturing, when that is what is being called for.

I guess what i want to say is, “You don’t have to be loving. You just have to be fully and freely yourself--that is where the healing is, that is where the awakening is, beyond all of our ideas about love, into a radical experience of integrity and deep honesty about what is actually working for us..”