During a recent exchange with some business school friends, I was pleasantly surprised to find topics like yoga and meditation making their way into a conversation on entrepreneurship. Eight years ago when I started the LivingWise Project, I was always hesitant to share on these topics with my banker and lawyer friends. This, I believe is the real rise of the Feminine. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, some thoughts on the empowerment of the Feminine.
Diversity through a Yogic Lens
A question the corporate world is currently grappling with is whether having employment policies based on diversity markers threatens the responsibility of a business to hire the most talented. Does looking for differences make us more inclusive, or is that better achieved by looking ‘past’ differences at our shared goals and vision?
In Yoga philosophy, the ultimate aim is to move from the personal to the Universal. The yogic vision is an all-inclusive vision of life. This is not being blind to all differences and neither is it actively seeking out differences to include. Rather, it is celebrating the differences that exist as the natural diversity of life and knowing the value that each is capable of adding in its own way. Farmers know this when they rotate different species of crop on the same land. Diversity is already a built-in feature of life – the less prejudiced our vision, the more we can appreciate this and then inclusion is a natural consequence, rather than an imposition by policy.
Female vs. Feminine
This would be the real rise of the Feminine. As Yoga sees it, male and female are biological genders but masculine and feminine are energies that every individual carries. One may call it the head and heart or Yin and Yang. And so simply having a female leader does not mean that we have empowered the feminine because the female leader could even be more masculine in her approach than a male!
The Feminine expresses more evidently in art, aesthetics, emotion and spirituality. As an example, we may build a house using our masculine energy but it is our feminine energy that makes it a “home”. In Yoga, the masculine and feminine are represented as the sun and moon within our body and the goal is to bring them into balance.
The plight of Nature and animals on our planet are glaring signs that the feminine has been suppressed, as are dying native art forms and culture. Of course, women and minorities have not received equal opportunities in many societies and that should be urgently addressed. But the true win for humanity is when we move from hiring the female based on a check-the-box policy, to celebrating the Feminine in all its diverse implications.
