Today, another spring equinox is upon us, a time when day and night are in balance as the Sun continues its northward journey. This natural event affords us an opportunity to look within and give ourselves an honest evaluation, made more so by the co-occurring “SuperMoon”. Are we going where we want to go or are we simply letting our past compulsions and conditioning push us down the same ocean current we have gone before, a current that leads to frustration and dissatisfaction?
One way to help us sail a new ship is to use natural events, like the equinox, as a springboard to a greater understanding into our human condition. During the spring and fall equinoxes, there is an opportunity to experience a balance between the masculine and the feminine. Life on earth is possible because of the Sun and the Moon. Without either of these, life as we know it would not exist. The Sun, with light-giving warmth from its rays, is universally understood as necessary for life.
However, the Moon, too, is thought to be responsible. According to current research (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/moon-life-tides/), the Moon’s effect on the earth’s tides allowed simple protonucleic acids to “wash up” onto rocks where salt concentrations were high enough to spark their combination and replication. The Sun gives light and warmth and provides the catalyst for life; the Moon nurtures and soothes life through the movement of earth’s oceans.
In spiritual traditions the world over, the Sun is associated with the masculine and the Moon with the feminine. The Sun initiates and protects while the Moon soothes the heat of the Sun and guides its light toward a life-sustaining, harmonious outcome. In the same way, the masculine quality initiates action, gives indiscriminately and protects. The feminine quality receives action, guides it with discrimination and nurtures it with compassion and love.
Both qualities are found in every object in the universe, in varying proportions. In the same way, the masculine and feminine qualities are found in each of us. If you identify as male, then fundamentally your nature is to act and protect. In the highest sense, this means you would tend to “do right action at the right time.” For one who identifies as female, their tendency is to receive and guide action, using it to nurture and pacify. However, as human beings still in the midst of spiritual evolution, the masculine and feminine qualities are often out of balance; ie., we tend to have too much of one and not enough of the other.
During the equinox, when night and day are balanced, the masculine and feminine qualities are naturally aligned and we can take advantage of this for our own benefit. During this time, watch how you approach the day, see if you can exemplify the two qualities within your own self. In truth, the qualities are simply another manifestation of the “opposites” that comprise the physical world. In the inner world, the two qualities merge and play together effortlessly. Though the body manifests these qualities in one way or another, who you really are is beyond the physical, beyond bodies and substance, you are Life, itself.
Though you may exist in a woman’s body, you can manifest the masculine as much as the feminine. If you exist in a man’s body, the reverse is true. For most of us, however, our masculine and feminine is not whole. A man with too little feminine/too much masculine may tend to be curt, aggressive, lack sensitivity and compassion, find it difficult to express his emotions. A woman with too little masculine/too much feminine will find it hard to “hold her own”, to be decisive and independent. Likewise, a man with too much feminine/too little masculine will be hesitant, unaware of what needs to be done, and listless. A woman with too much masculine/too little feminine will be too assertive, high strung and demanding.
During this spring equinox, watch yourself in your day to day activities. Take an honest inventory of yourself by watching how you interact with family, friends, coworkers and strangers. Our relationships act as powerful mirrors which reflect back to us our state of mind — good and bad. Where can you improve? What stood out as beneficial? In this way, you can take another step toward living harmoniously within your own life.