The Inner Marriage

Description

How to integrate and evolve your inner masculine and feminine• Explains polarity work as a tool to heal trauma, become less judgmental, and develop a more integrated relationship with ourselves and others
• Explores 44 common traits of mature and immature masculine and feminine expressions, explaining how to evolve unhealthy expressions into healthy ones
• Offers simple yet profound methods for evolving your inner masculine and feminine, as well as healing the shadow
Within our body, mind, and soul, each of us has both masculine and feminine dynamics. Through polarity work, we can balance, evolve, and integrate the masculine and feminine within our personality, creating an inner marriage that in turn supports the release and transformation of trauma on the cellular, emotional, and soul levels.
In this practical guide, Elliott Saxby presents methods and exercises to apply polarity work as a tool in integrative and non-dual therapy to help you identify masculine and feminine traits within yourself, become less judgmental, and develop a more integrated relationship with yourself and others. He explains how emotional energy can affect you physically and spiritually and how understanding your inner masculine and inner feminine can help you evolve unhealthy expressions of polarity into healthy ones. He examines 11 common life experiences through the lens of mature and immature masculine and feminine expressions, providing 44 traits to identify within yourself and consciously choose to change. He then shows what evolving the masculine and feminine looks like, as well as depicting the shadow in immature masculine and feminine expressions. You can find beneficial solutions to nearly any emotional or relationship scenario if you consciously work with your mature and immature aspects and with the shadow.
Fusing ancient Vedic knowledge and Western psychology with Tantric and Taoist wisdom, Saxby offers simple yet profound methods for evolving your inner masculine and feminine, as well as healing the shadow, through applying universal laws of polarity, duality, and oneness and the laws of attraction, vibration, and resistance. He also explores sexuality and desire through polarity work and the need to re-align our physical, mental, and emotional bodies to generate power through sexuality.
As the author reveals, the more adept we become at integrating our inner masculine and feminine, at supporting our inner marriage, the more empowered and able we become to evolve our relationships not only with ourselves, but also with our partners, family, and friends. Elliott Saxby spent six years in an ecovillage before traveling to Asia, where he studied yoga, massage, and Taoist and Tantric practices. The founder of the School of Energetic Bodyworks, Elliott teaches and trains therapists in non-dual therapy and Kundalini bodywork around the world. From “Moving between the Masculine and the Feminine”
We all have an inner masculine and inner feminine which is not dependent on gender. Both our masculine and feminine have mature and immature expressions.

If our feminine is in her mature, then our immature masculine will try to bring her down through suppression, control and domination, and if our masculine is in his mature, then our immature feminine will try to bring him down by playing the victim, being the center of attention, gossiping, manipulating, blaming, and other immature feminine traits.

They can only rise up into their mature expressions together. To bring the immature masculine to his mature, we need to know the mature feminine within ourselves. And to bring the immature feminine to the mature feminine, we need the mature masculine within ourselves. This is very similar to raising children, in that:

• for a child to step into their mature feminine power, the child needs mature masculine presence within themselves and for this the child needs a model, someone they can take their masculine imprint from, generally a father figure;

• but equally important for a child to develop mature masculine presence within themselves, they need love from their mature feminine which they also need a model for, generally a mother figure.

Similarly, in our partnerships the same dynamic is going on. If we see our partner acting from their immature in an unhealthy way, then we need to embody the opposing mature trait, not the same one that they are in and not the opposing immature. By doing this as adults, we are able to take healthy mature imprints of masculinity and femininity (which we are subconsciously doing all of the time) from the people closest to us, in the same way that we hope children do through access to good role models. Thus, no matter our age, we are all constantly learning from and influencing each other whether we like it or not. Learning to use polarity and duality in our life, is learning to evolve our emotional dynamics and traits, so that nearly all our expressions are healthy.

Once we understand how to work with polarity, we no longer need to be afraid of it. Polarity, especially emotional polarity, can be difficult for some people as they create a black and white existence, becoming trapped in judgements of good and bad, right and wrong, happy or sad. The framework gives insights into our pain and suffering so that we can use them as a gift and tool for growth. The key to not becoming stuck in polarity is learning to use duality, learning to embody the masculine, and feminine traits and the polarities within them.

Common Traits
What we believe and feel in relation to what is masculine and what is feminine is our truth and no one should take this away from us or tell us that we are wrong. But for the purpose of learning to use the polarity framework traits have been identified as either masculine or feminine, mature or immature and arranged in a way to support you to see how emotional polarity and behavioral polarity can work, positively or negatively in numerous ways. The labelling is not intended to be definitive but to teach you how to work with the polarity framework in your own way with any and all emotional and behavioral traits that emerge throughout your life.

Our mature masculine is wisdom, intellect, knowledge, and cooperation. It is our safety, our boundaries, our yes and our no. It is discernment and the right application of free will.

Our mature feminine is everything that we enjoy about life. It is beauty, music, dancing, food, and language. It is everything that we can see, taste, touch, smell and hear. It is everything in creation, as well as diversity, empathy, and our intuition. It is our yes for life, a yes with no judgement, no comparison, or thought of good or bad. It is the complete expression and acceptance of all life.

Our immature self creates conflict, but it is this conflict that spurs us on and instigates change, transformation, and our deeper insights. When we can recognize the gifts within our conflict, we will grow, learn, and develop, whether enjoying the process or not. Our immature self lets us know when something is out of balance and needs attention. By cycling between our mature and immature self with awareness, we develop a healthy ego. A healthy ego makes life beautiful, while allowing us to acknowledge that it is not who we really are. While our unhealthy ego can still create feelings of joy, it is always perpetuating our sense of “separate self” through fear and suffering.

Our separate self is best described as: our experience of the world from the mind. Reacting to the world from memories and mental programming, creating fear, and opposition from greed and survival needs, or attacking others from these same places. As we gain more access to empathy, emotional intelligence, intuition, and a sense of the collective consciousness, we come to know that the separate self is a partial truth, not the truth.

Fundamentals of the Framework
If we feel we are in our immature feminine, bringing our masculine down, we need to stop and move into our mature masculine’s values and traits: looking at how we are not supporting our feminine. We need to ask questions like:

• What have I said yes to, that I should have said no to?

• Where have I crossed my own boundaries, or allowed someone else to do so?

• Where does my feminine not feel safe?

• What mental concepts or knowledge have I learned that I am not applying to life?

• And where am I not using discernment to choose the best outcome?

And if we feel our immature masculine is bringing our feminine down then we need to stop and start focusing on our mature feminine’s values and attributes in order to bring our masculine up:

• looking to see where inspiration, creativity, and diversity are lacking in our life?

• where we are failing to listen to our intuition?

• where we are not accepting ourselves enough?

• and why we are not feeling self-assured?
Masculine and Feminine Polarity work, or working with polarity and duality in its simplest form is about:

1. embodying the opposing mature pole, to bring the immature up;

2. making our immature healthy;

3. learning from, and transforming our shadows.

When we are able to work with the masculine and feminine polarities within ourselves, developing our ego, navigating between our inner and outer expressions, our mature and immature, and using our shadow as a tool for growth, we come closer to mastering duality.

Practical Examples
Example 1: Attention-Seeking
We are going to use the immature feminine’s attention-seeking as an example, believing that everything is about us, thus taking everything personally in a self-obsessed, self-absorbed and selfish way.

The immature feminine’s attention-seeking opposes the immature masculine’s arrogance. Relating this to taking everything personally, the masculine will be locked into his state of separation, reaffirming that he and his arrogant beliefs are the correct way. Generally speaking, the more arrogant we are, the more attention seeking we will be, whether we admit it or not.

To evolve the immature feminine’s attention-seeking to her healthy, mature expression of self-assurance, we need to embody the trait that opposes it in the mature masculine, which is humbleness.

To simply say, “stop seeking attention and then you will be self-assured,” is not so easy and is the same as saying, “stop being in your immature feminine and then you will automatically be in your mature feminine,” which is generally not true. We normally need to:

• do something;

• learn something;

• or change something to get there.

By becoming the mature humble masculine, we indirectly evolve the immature feminine from attention-seeking into self-assurance. We use both polarity and duality to change or evolve our situation and understanding. So, by stepping into our mature masculine and by being humble, we remove the need for attention-seeking in the feminine, as attention-seeking in the feminine is the lack of humbleness in the masculine.

This does not mean we become less feminine, and more masculine; it simply means that we become more self-assured, and humble.

Trying to change by not being something, is much more difficult, and almost impossible, compared to changing something by being something else. Similarly, Albert Einstein (German-born theoretical physicist, 1879 to 1955) said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

When we use the Masculine and Feminine Polarity Framework to create change, it is clearer to see what we need to do in each quadrant, and this generally is:

• Embody: the opposing mature.

• Evolve: into the mature, of that same polarity.

• Avoid: the opposing immature.

By taking the focus away from the immature quadrant that we are having trouble in, we have a much better chance of evolving it. So, in relation to our example above of attention seeking in the immature feminine:

• We embody: humbleness (the mature masculine), and all the other, mature masculine traits, that are a fit for us.

• We evolve: into self-assurance (the mature feminine).

• We avoid: arrogance (the immature masculine).

And by doing this, we indirectly stop seeking attention and move out of the immature feminine.

If this sounds complex, then please read it again with the Masculine and Feminine Polarity Work Maps, until it becomes clear. This abstract theory is important to learn. The specific traits and labels we assign help, but once we really understand the framework, we will start to apply it in our life without thinking. Our brain will automatically start to think in polarity and duality, healthy and unhealthy, mature and immature. We will indirectly move away from good and bad, right and wrong; you are this, and I am that, and similar judgements.

There are many and various methods out there to help us make changes and embody qualities within ourselves, including; emotional freedom tapping technique (EFT), self-hypnosis, and basic forms of breathwork. One of the simplest ways is to just start with an intention, write it down, say it to yourself in the morning, meditate on it. Go for a massage, to the gym, or a yoga class, and dedicate that session to your intention. Imagine your life once this intention is your reality.
The hard part is learning our lessons within the polarities that we are working with, as everyone’s journey is unique, and often, so are our lessons. It is not wise for other people to tell us exactly what our lessons are, as this robs us of our learning. We have to find the answers ourselves while being inspired by those around us, in the same way that I hope you will be inspired by this book, finding your own inner truth, and your own meanings from it.

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