When people talk about the feminine principle, many think only of women. But in systemic work the feminine principle is a quality that exists in every person: the ability to receive, nurture, feel and turn what has been received into life.
If you find it hard to receive help, love or money, if you exhaust yourself by giving, or if it is hard for you to relax and simply be, it may be worth looking at how the feminine principle lives in you. The same applies if you feel that the roles you play have become a burden: the role of daughter, mother, partner, professional.
This text draws on the books Codes of Love, Decoding the Soul and The Path of Healing and explains how the feminine principle is understood in systemic work and how it can be freed.
What the feminine principle is
The book Codes of Love describes two basic principles that intertwine in everything that exists. The masculine principle is the principle of consciousness and active impulse. The feminine principle is the principle of manifestation: the earth, life, creation. That is why the book calls woman the key to creating a new humanity, because her heart is the key.
The book describes the same relationship through the law of giving and receiving. The role of the masculine principle is to give the initial impulse, and the role of the feminine is to receive, transform and return what has been transformed. When this flow is free, life grows. When it is blocked, struggle, exhaustion and the feeling that there is never enough appear.
The book Decoding the Soul places particular emphasis on the fact that work on the feminine principle is not a question of gender. Releasing, maturing and growing the feminine principle is important for every person, because without it there is no inner harmony and balance.
How history and family shape the feminine principle
Decoding the Soul describes the history of women’s position as a continuous burden through the ages. From obedient housewives to workers in the industrial revolution, emancipation often merely shifted the burden instead of truly lifting it. Those roles and stigmas left deep traces in the collective unconscious.
At the level of the family, the way you live the feminine principle is most often shaped by your relationship with your mother and by the destinies of the women in your family. The book Codes of Love emphasises that no matter how far we run from our parents, we will repeat the same situations until we become aware of the basic model of the energetic relationship we formed with them. Those relationships show how the feminine and masculine principles manifest in our lives.
“Releasing the manifestation of the feminine principle often requires work on the different roles women take on in their own lives or in the lives of men.” (from the book Decoding the Soul)
Roles that become a burden
Daughter, mother, lover, sister, businesswoman: each of these roles carries cultural, social and family expectations. When one role develops at the expense of the others, or when roles come into conflict, inner tension arises. Codes of Love calls for an end to the division of the personality in which a director cannot be a homemaker, a mother cannot be a lover, and a woman cannot be an artist. The book sees this as an invitation to step out of insecurity and fear and to take responsibility for one’s own life.
Decoding the Soul also connects the feminine principle with our relationship to money. Money is described there as a manifestation of the feminine principle, as life energy, prosperity and fertility, qualities traditionally associated with the archetype of the Mother Goddess. That is why difficulties in receiving money are often recognised as a sign that the feminine principle in us is not yet free.
How the feminine principle is freed
The book Decoding the Soul offers a programme of systemic self-inquiry for releasing the feminine principle. These are sentences of conscious intention with which you pause, breathe and observe what appears in your body and thoughts. Some of them are:
- I want to become aware of the feminine principle in myself.
- I want to eliminate the obstacles to seeing the manifestations of the feminine principle in me.
- I want to harmonise all the feminine roles in myself: daughter, mother, lover, sister, businesswoman.
- I want to optimise the masculine and feminine principle in me.
- I want the Consciousness of the Heart to mature in me.
These sentences are not positive statements to be repeated until you believe them. They are focused attention: you choose to look at what has remained invisible until now. According to the book, this kind of self-inquiry helps you recognise your own emotional states and develop empathy towards feminine aspects, in yourself and in others.
The feminine and masculine principles together
Working on the feminine principle is not opposing the masculine. In the book The Path of Healing, through the story of Maca and Ljiljana, it is described that both principles are necessary for self-realisation. The feminine principle is energy, and the masculine turns it into direction, through will, creativity and awareness.
The goal is balance. When the feminine principle matures and connects with a mature masculine principle, life stops being a struggle between giving and receiving and becomes a flow. Codes of Love describes this as a state in which destiny becomes happiness in love and prosperity, and not a repetition of old roles.