Dear Richard,

In my session with you today you asked me, "What female qualities are you suppressing?” My answer came in three dreams and a torrent of insights.

I dreamed that I had to take my children to therapy or some kind of doctor because there was something wrong with them and there we discovered that my sister and I were witches. In another dream my skull was broken in pieces and I knew it was very important to glue it back...even the smallest part could not be left out...it needed to come together with the whole. In a further dream I knew I was suppressing tenderness.

I am suppressing the quality of tenderness and the ability to be gentle towards myself and others... to be soft and patient. I am suppressing the quality of patience...sometimes it gets overshadowed by the pull or energy to get things done. I am suppressing the quality of taking the other in, without wanting to better them or change them... taking them really in just as they are, this also applies to myself and to situations. I am suppressing the gift of really listening to Life or the other... sometimes it gets obstructed by the impulse of telling people what needs to be done. I am suppressing the big part of me that loves to hug, to say loving nicknames, to hug, to caress others. When I make love I am suppressing the enjoyment of foreplay... it almost always gets lost in favor of the urge to come to climax and get it over with.

Richard's reply:

This is not a woman's world. It is a man's world. For so long now the male qualities, the baser male qualities, have predominated. The world is not peaceful and it has not been at peace for a long time. The world is combative, conflictual, it is power-based. When the basis of the world is power it cannot be love. There cannot be love. Love is not really acceptable. When love is not acceptable then neither is acceptance. When acceptance is not present neither is tenderness.

The world, this world, the modern-day world, is so dominated by base male principles that there is no place and no context for a woman to express her naturalness, to be herself truly, and to live into the mysteries of true womanhood.

Your first dream: I dreamed that I had to take my children to therapy or some kind of doctor because there was something wrong with them and there we discovered that my sister and I were witches.

The doctor is the patripsych. The patripsych represents that part of men and women who in the modern day have taken in (or introjected) the male principles of domination and power. We measure our attitude, our success or failure, our performance and our lives against the gauge, the judgment, of the patripsych. He is the dominant one, the embodiment of our collective and individual fears. The child (or children in the dream) is the promise, that part of you that is not yet grown, that harbors your potential. She is brought before the patripsych and it is because there is something wrong. The judge is the patripsych, who decides what's right and wrong, the dictator of morality, the one who tells you how to be and subordinates you to his will. The children are wrong and you and your sister are witches. Witchy energy is feared by the patriarchy, because it is the embodiment of woman's mysteries. Witch energy and attributes are the ones we so desperately need in the world today. Witches are the rebels against the patriarchy and against the patripsych in each and every one of us.

Your next dream: In another dream my skull was broken in pieces and I knew it was very important to glue it back...even the smallest part could not be left out...it needed to come together with the whole.

The broken skull symbolizes the male mind, the egoistic mind of separation and division. In this analytical, separative mind everything that is whole must be broken. Look at the world today, look around you, division is everywhere in the world of the patriarchy: religion against religion, gender against gender, race against race, men against women, mind against body, and so on. This is not the natural way of relationship, of acceptance and confluence. In order to reassemble the parts of the whole, the female principle which is innately all-inclusive, accepting, and preserving of harmony and co-existence must include everything and all, even the smallest parts, nothing can be left out, since all is a part of the whole. It is this very wholeness that we hope in time can heal the world, bring together our parts in all their diversity and variety, accepted and included, to create a future of mutual tolerance, cooperation, and lasting world peace.

The last dream: In a further dream I knew I was suppressing tenderness.

All the female qualities, deepest nurturing and life-preserving traits and behaviors are suppressed in the culture, in our inner and outer worlds. It takes great courage to stand against this tide of inner and outer destruction and say, in effect, I will be true... to gentleness, to love, to true caring and warmth, to compassion, to nurture and nourishing and extend kindness to all my fellow life forms, my brothers and my sisters, to animals and life forms that are in distress, discomfort and fear and suffering. Perhaps the word—and it is a mighty word, a strong word—that summarizes all this so well is... tenderness... [to be continued next week]