Catherine, I wanted to let you know that your words: "I have been immersed so long in trying to survive in a patriarchy by taking on distortions of divine masculine energy and largely shutting down divine feminine energies" really resonated with me. In fact I could have written those words myself.

Your words in fact opened up a chasm of memories for me, things I've blocked, events I've disassociated. I crawled into the tub last night, turned off all the lights, and felt fractures of memories fall around me like confetti.

For so long now I've thought of myself as androgynous: part male, part female. I was sterile at 24 from a total hysterectomy, which launched me into menopause that in 1977 no one was talking about. I never grieved the loss of my womb because I had a very clear feeling that raising children was not what I incarnated this time to do. But it changed me in how I saw myself.

I don't know if younger women know what it was like to break out of the few choices women used to have:wife- mother, secretary, nurse, flight attendant, teacher. Careers like business, law, medicine, engineering were the bastion of males. When I started my business career in hospital medical/surgical sales for a very large company I was one of 2 women in a sales force of 200 men. The only other women in the company were secretaries. It was literally a man's world: a patriarchy. Sexual harassment wasn't even a term back then: it was the "normal" way women in the workforce were treated on a daily basis.

Catherine, I so understand your words: "my need to control in order to feel safe". Paradoxically, it has been my experience that even in the illusion of control we are not safe. I say this as a rape survivor. What I personally have learned is that safety is the in the seat of the soul.

Guess Helen, Catherine, and I qualify for "quasi-elders" of this circle :-)

love, tigger