WOMEN & SILENCE – 18 April 2011
Just recently a friend asked me my opinion about Ekhart Tolle’s work. She was finding it difficult to achieve the aims it sets, however simple these may be
. But there is nothing simple about us women. It made me realize that most spiritual leaders are men who teach silence and stillness. Wonderful, but… their ways often bring up feelings of invalidation and incapacity for women who are at odds to admit it without dishonoring themselves.
So, at the risk of being “stoned”… :
Ekhart Tolle’s message is universal but it does not take gender differences into account. It speaks to us directly of silence and the spaciousness of awareness beyond the chattering mind. In this path emotions are a disturbance. It reminds us of the best of Vedanta and Buddhism, modernized. But both of these traditions are male-oriented. We can follow them, of course, but to do so we, as women, pay a price — human sensitivity, emotional breadth, the sense of fulfillment…
Before we reach the level of true silence, men and women follow different paths that respond to our individual structures. Usually we do this naturally in the world. It is not so easy for woman to demand silence of herself and divorce this from the emotional flow we literally swim in. And I do not feel we ought to! We are emotionally polarized, men are mentally polarized. To choose one above the other is to judge the other as inferior.
It is time to listen and feel the Mother’s breath and follow the rivering course of the eternal Tao. Rather than being rules and methods, it is awareness WITHIN life, not through “doing” but through “experiencing” naturally. Humanity. I feel this is what the world needs now. To transcend our own humanity without embracing it is against everything the Mother (and Humanity) stands for.
We need to follow the path of life affirmation. The Feminine Principle speaks of attunement — falling in tune with life as the embracing, containing, gestating activity of perpetual motion. We fall into silence being ourselves. Once we have the knack of this, then we can share in a world of Oneness beyond gender. There Ekhart Tolle and the ways of the Mother-God are One.
Many might disagree with me, but I hope you can stand up there with me in the defense of harmony, beauty and the ebb and flow of life in the body and in the richness of emotional life. It is painful being a woman, but it is infinitely glorious to be at the Source of Life.
