Feminine Energy and Intuition [Part 1]

The feminine aspect of our being is represented in martial arts by intuition. It is not that feminine means female, or that masculine means male. There is a great misunderstanding in this regard. Feminine energy tends towards an expression of energy which has a heightened sense of harmony about it, a little more sense of awareness in each movement. So its expression is to do with being receptive. Masculine expression of energy is powerful and destructive in its capability, and is very outward bound with little in the way of becoming receptive. According to the type of lifestyle, goals, and orientation f you energies, so will your tendencies become. Say you are very reflective and inward seeking, then this dimension will become more developed. If you are very physically active and practically orientated, then this tends to become the direction your energies take. There is no right or wrong, and it is a question of using the energies in the best way you know how. One way of looking at this is to decide in what proportion you develop each side of the coin, in other words how receptive and how outgoing you decide to be.

In general, feminine energy has to do with empathy, reading other people, and becoming receptive to others. In Martial Arts these things are also important, but usually overlooked. For example it is important to be able to instantly know what an attacker will do and what their intentions are. But it is easy to get caught up in what you will do to them before establishing their intentions towards you. With intuition, you know what to do automatically, much like a mother knows how to care for her child and what they need. This is an unspoken kind of knowledge. It is not that a mother needs to be taught to care, but at the same time there are some basic procedures for her to follow that may require some rudimentary training, such as how to hold the baby, or when it should sleep. This kind of understanding is an example of how the masculine works with the feminine. In other words, how logic, which is masculine, works with intuition, which is feminine. we will look at this as we go on. For a mother, learning isn’t difficult to grasp when the basic sense of caring and nurturance is there. It becomes unnecessarily complicated when the caring aspect, the feminine quality, is absent.

Intuition is not to be confused with the instinctive urge. With instinctive drives there is a powerful urge, like a rocket taking off, but without intelligent guidance, this is little more than a hard wired response. Acting without intelligence is a compulsive act, whereas with intuition you already know what Will happen and you act on this intelligent basis. with intuition, it is not that you know step by step, it is a case of understanding that there can be no flourishing without moving beyond logical outcomes. Logical minds cannot understand this. At the same time, you don’t need to understand how things were to see the value of them. There are also truths which have no basis in facts. For example, you might know that argueing with everybody who looks at you the wrong way is bound to cause problems. You don’t need to know exactly what problems, you just sense and know that this will lead nowhere. You might know this is true, whilst at the same time, from the logical perspective, you might be in the right in a given argument. Still you might consciously chose to decide against logic.

Giving up logic takes a certain level of experience and understanding, so this is why in martial arts you move from doing to non doing, or fullness to emptiness. First you learn the moves, then you forget them. Say you were a guitar virtuoso. You would need to practice for upwards of ten years in order to reach that point. You then play intuitively and light up the room. Even if you make mistakes, people become enraptured by the performance, and it lasts through the ages. So it’s not to be confused with carelessness, even though there is a sense of reckless abandon. This does not mean you stop practicing, only that your logic moves to a different level of intelligence, which includes logic in its rightful place supporting intuition, the feminine aspect. On the other hand, it is possible to beat back intuition with pure logic. This comes with certain consequences.

The masculine aspect has to do with analysis and division. In martial arts it has to do with conquest and beating others for glory. For instance, when you categorise someone as good or bad, that is a division caused by intellectual analysis. When people talk about the exact technical way of doing a martial arts move, this is the masculine intellect driving action. It is then a simple case of performing a good action, and not doing a bad technique. You then go and win a contest with assertive dominance. This is all to do with the masculine. When you include different ideas in a kind of diverse chaos, this is known as organised chaos, which is only possible if you drop all divisions and yet accept them at the same time. This is the feminine approach, which logically makes no sense. And yet, there is a certain logic to embracing everything as one and cultivating that within yourself so that it becomes an experienced reality.

So the feminine is a form of intuition which involves understanding a range of things and including them rather than separating them in terms of right and wrong. When this is the path you take, this is known as the feminine path, or the path of Yin, as opposed to Yang. Of course, the feminine need the masculine to function, the power of the masculine is that it provides the energy. The feminine is the expression of this energy. When somebody gets married, they might find their complimentary opposite in another person to complete themselves in their experience of life. Somewhere in the middle of this experience, they create something which is beyond their individual capabilities, and yet which is experienced as if it were themselves individually. This is essentially what happens when one finds the complimentary aspect within themselves, when the unify the masculine and feminine. In martial arts it is not that you treat them separately, it is that they unite and create something more. Nothing then remains except this new experience.

When a Mother raises a child, it is important for a mother to include the Childs needs as connected to their own, because if they think of their child in terms of just being bad or good, they might sometimes be supportive and sometimes not. In that case where the support is dependant on particular condition being met, this loosens the bond between mother and child. In the same way, if in your practice of martial arts you rely on your conduct and practice yielding some sort of result, you will only sometimes be motivated to practice in all likelihood. If you want to be motivated all the time regardless of what happens, it is a good idea to develop within yourself a form of receptivity rather than outward expression all the time.

When Adam and Eve decided to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, essentially this is saying that if you stop and get caught up in the results of your work, you stray from the process of creation itself. At the same time, God welcomed back Adam and Eve, even though he didn’t join them. In other words, if you divert from the path, this in no way suggests you won’t be able to get back on it, or even become a better disciple for it in the end. It’s saying that the path is open to all, but you have to raise yourself to it. Many disciples have left their masters because they thought themselves better than them, or they got tired of waiting around. There comes a point in the journey where the temptation is to take advantage of your new found powers. The Masters always knew this, so in many cases they welcomes them back even after bitter feuds. But the master never gets drawn down to that level, as they obviously know how it works.

In todays world, it is considered very bad to send people out without certainty in their minds. For example, in martial arts there is a right way to do a given technique, and a wrong way, according to scientific research. There are winners and losers. The feminine recognises no such boundaries or divisions. For example, the feminine energy acts intuitively and is supportive of the system whether or not you are a winner or loser in the eyes of others. When you think only in terms of conquest1, the feminine is not active. One who is always active in material achievement and conquest will not understand the feminine. I’m not talking about gender here, because you can be feminine in a male body, or masculine in a female body for example. This is understood in psychology, which divides various psychological traits into feminine and masculine regardless of gender.

Martial arts specifically, and society in general has been moving away from the feminine. The feminine is needed to inspire the masculine, so it is not a case of making everything equally masculine in terms of achievement and power. This will not balance out anything. Intellectually, the masculine has to do with analysis and division. We can analyse something, cut it open, look inside. But this will never satisfy life. In the example of the mother caring for a child, it is not that she is satisfied just because her child has achieved something. Experience has shown that the more you provide for the Childs material needs beyond a certain level, they just crave more genuine care and attention. So providing materially cannot be seen as an instrumental platform for further happiness. For the mother, this viewpoint of seeing the Childs achievements as instrumental is a short term solution. When there is no involvement in the Childs growth as a process, then there are moments of joy and happiness here and there without connection and mutual experience developed much.

By embracing the masculine, the process of martial arts can be broken down into various forms and techniques easily. At the same time, to see things practically ignores the whole life functioning through them, such as the kidneys, heart, and all the other organs. In the masculine styles, which are known as Yang, the organs are seen as instrumental to performance, rather than health. The feminine aspect sees the system in terms of health first and foremost. This is why in the martial arts industry there is an increasing demand for practical self defence rather than for any kind of well being or health benefits. From the practical perspective, it’s just nonsense to talk about well being or health, because from the point of view of the masculine, health is provided for by domination and increased activity. This is another way of looking at the masculine and feminine, one emphasises activity, and the other receptivity. One is about using up energy, and the other is about cultivating it.

Balance of the Masculine and Feminine

Is there a balance to be struck? The more traditional martial arts of Muay Thai, as well as other styles, have always rested on tradition. The feminine has been carefully and subtly woven into tradition so that it becomes part of the individual. This has involved respect for the feminine influence, for example the spiritual practices and meditative exercises, which in reality has nothing to do with being female or male. It is to do with the scope for developing the intuition, that dimension of the mind and intelligence which is above logical and analysis. As I was saying, there is a certain illogical logic to this.

In the example of Muay Thai, it is both practical and spiritual due to its emphasis on respect and hard training. There are other Japanese Styles, as well as South East Asian styles where this balance is struck. The hard training is as intense as it gets in martial arts. But traditionally, the fighter decided how they were going to apply it in the ring or in self defence. Today, in sports competitions, the trainer either makes the decisions, or the opponent is known in advance so that plans can be made early. This drastically impacts the fighters experience towards the masculine in a quest for dominance. In most sports martial arts, the traditions have been systematically undermined and uprooted in favour of sport rules. The appreciation for nuance and subjective performance has been replaced by objective scoring and black and white rules. It is impossible for any sense of feminine energy, which have been embodied in traditional forms, to exist in rigid structures of organisation.

References

1 https://intuitivemartialarts.com/2023/04/24/conquest-at-all-costs-drugs-and-the-evolution-of-martial-arts-part-1/ Conquest at all costs, part 1