About Kelly Brogan

KELLY BROGAN, MD, is a holistic psychiatrist, author of the New York Times Bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own, Own Your Self, the children’s book, A Time For Rain, and co-editor of the landmark textbook Integrative Therapies for Depression.

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By Kelly Brogan, MD and Louise Kuo Habakus. The original post can be found here.

Cars were at a 12 minute standstill and the traffic light repeatedly cycled green to red. In the streets, throngs of sign-toting New Yorkers were giving voice to their passion. There were tears and profanity. The waves of protesters streamed endlessly. “F**K TRUMP” was the choice mantra of this movement. The perplexed Nepalese driver turned and said in his broken English, “Why is dese womens mad? I know what woman is. Hillary has not even little kindly heart. She is no woman.”

The Candidate Archetypes

If we can zoom out and dispassionately examine the leading characters in this near-Shakespearean drama, we observe that there is a unique alchemy at play here. For the first time in US history, we have the Democratic Party — perceived as a heart-centered ideology — aligned with a female candidate, and the Republican Party — perceived as cold, self-interested pragmatists — aligned with not just a male candidate, but a caricature of rapacious patriarchy.

With the help of mainstream media’s carefully curated and theatrical representation of reductionist platitudes, an expected voting majority was led down the yellow brick road to meet Oz; Oz, in this case, being the redemptive victory of the first-ever female president.

As the media showcased Trump’s unscripted and uncensored boorish behavior, we watched women rally. They donned pantsuits. They exhorted each other towards unity in indignation (“Wake TF up! He’s disgusting. He hates disabled people! He’ll be the end of us all.”). They assembled in places like Wellesley College, desperately eager to bear witness to the piercing of the glass ceiling and usher in a new era. We watched as leading female celebrities campaigned to seize this moment in history.

Women all over this country needed Hillary to be the redemptor. To heal us. To right the wrongs and to confer a power we have felt stripped from us.

It’s only natural that women would look to a woman to help lead us home.

What happens when, in our desperation for the solution to be simplified, we allow ourselves to be duped? When we can’t bear to scratch beneath the surface to recognize our projections and how we participate in our own co-option?

The Shackles of Old Feminism

Co-option? What? How?

Yes. It’s time to take a good hard look at a type of feminism that, practiced today, only serves to keep us indentured and arrested in our development as women.

Classical feminism is men versus women. It’s burning bras. It’s fighting for what’s ours. It’s throwing our lipstick away, gunning for every shred of external validation offered to men — from clothing to salary to parenting roles to frontline combat units. It’s “no thanks, I got the door for myself.” It’s even cultivating aggression and hate.

It may feel empowering. But when we engage feminism primarily from the masculine principle, it contributes further to our silent and chronic oppression.

Look at where playing the game has gotten us. One in four of us is medicated beyond any contact with our own souls, let alone our emotions or our psyches. We are neutered of our hormones, electively and passively, without true informed consent. We are placed in stirrups in our moment of awakening, strapped and commandeered by men (and women) who seek to control and dominate through fear. We shear off our breasts and slice out our ovaries and uteri (and vaccinate our babies) to be safe and smart according to industry-defined standards.

We have done this under the illusion of our sovereignty as we float more and more distantly away from creative power, from cosmic feminine energy, from the great divine mother of the Adi Shakti.

The Masculine Principle in Extremis

We know this old style of feminism because we’ve lived it.

So many of us women have been feminists in the masculine principle for years. Decades, actually. We have said “Anything you can do, I can do (better)…” We have looked for places to exercise force, totalitarian viewpoints, aggression, and righteousness through the lens of entitlements. We have seized on birth control as a woman’s right; the elective c-section as the empowered and civilized choice; and the cervical cancer, human papillomavirus Gardasil vaccine as a preventive boon for women everywhere.

This kind of feminism is evidence of women divested of our own divinity, giving our power away to the perceived opposition. It is Stockholm syndrome at its worst.

We must get this.

When a woman who puts aside her fierce grace, her deep nurturance, her unparalleled powers of intuition, and her unique potential to create a collective, she becomes trapped in her own masculine principle. This applies to many of us. But it is time to evolve.

The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Hillary Clinton represents our tendency to be appeased with exactly what keeps us imprisoned. She is not a feminist’s candidate though she may appear, in form, to be.

She is, in fact, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

What did that taxi driver mean by her absence of heart? Hillary is one, perhaps extreme example of the illusion of feminine progress, with all of her masculine principle foregrounded and her shadow elements festering beneath the surface.

There are many examples of this. Watch this video interview of one of the true activists on this planet as he lays that case bare. And also consider where you get your information.

A New Kind of Activism

If you’re new to activism, know that the source of and behind the information is the most powerful predictor of its potential to represent the truest story. Or, as Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

You won’t hear this true story from mainstream media. When we rely on the mainstream media for our news, we fail to see the strings pulling on the marionettes as we take in the show. We may absorb the platitudes of party politics and the triumphalism of Hillary’s gender-busting candidacy. But we fail to see the Story of Separation, the subterranean hate, and the old model of feminism that she also represents. Sometimes, it’s hard to even entertain the possibility that what we want to believe, and what is true may actually be in tense conflict.

To elect her because she has a vagina is a more aggressive act of sexism than it appears. It is a vote for stasis in this story, for the status quo. It is a vote for the world-destroying machine to which she is beholden. It’s why we women feel placated to have put a vaginal canal in the oval office. It’s the excitement and celebration of illusory gains while we drift farther away from our true prospects of healing.

The Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing

On the other hand, Trump is, indeed, a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

He is the crass womanizer, the ostentatious vulgarian, and the attention-seeking chauvinist. He is boastful, blunt, and rude… the embodiment of the patriarchal masculine exposed.

But the real gift in this moment in time is that we can look at what the unbalanced masculine is in a man and in a woman. And we can use this insight to reframe our expectations for what an empowered woman and national leader can and will be.

Maybe the system needs to fall apart so we can, together, begin to grow the tendrils of a new, better system to replace it.

In order to respond to this call to action, we need transparency. We can work with the wolf, particularly, if he is lone, without a pack of already deeply established industry and dynasty-level corporate and financial ties to Big Pharma, Big Chem, Big Ag, and Big Business. Think about how many liberties we have sacrificed in the name of “safety” — only to learn that the real danger lurks inside. That the fox is indeed guarding the hen-house. In many ways, the necessary change — environmental, consciousness, healing-based change — will come from the people, not from the president.

Here’s why we, and sacred activists like Bayo Akomolafe and Charles Eisenstein are saying that they felt this coming and that perhaps this needed to happen.

We all need to wake up. Sometimes Kali-esque destruction is a part of this process, and can catalyze the deepest forms of healing and regeneration. We need to activate the divine feminine to heal this planet.

Trump is something we can work with, push against, define ourselves through if we use the rupture of his election to ignite and channel latent energy. Sometimes the darkness reveals the path toward the light and invites more and more of us to walk it than would otherwise.

The Hurt is a Buried Treasure

The process that has been kicked off is one of a collective mourning. At the risk of generalization, those who are grieving today, wailing, and gnashing their teeth, are those whose hearts we need most enlivened to usher in the New Story. The grace in this is that people are now feeling.

As activists on behalf of women, families, and health freedom, we recognize this feeling because we have been peeking beneath the veil of the Mainstream Media narrative for collective decades.

We have felt what millions are feeling today, for a quite a long time.

It is, potentially, the first stage of true awakening to service to feel this deep ache inside. These emotions have been IN THERE all along, simmering and percolating and roiling. In our sisters, mothers, and aunts. In our girlfriends, wives, and daughters. The rage, the grief, the indignation, the rip roaring pissed off, seriously God dammit, I’m not taking it anymore, ENOUGH is ENOUGH line in the sand.

We’ve been sublimating these feelings for decades. We can count on two hands how many truly activated women we’ve walked this path with over the past several years.

After all, there’s been plenty of fuel to our fire. There are a lot of Establishment-engineered transgressions that could’ve woken all of us up. But many have been unaware or otherwise not set off by the knowledge that there is more to the story than meets the eye and a whole lot to be pissed about. We find ourselves in a place of seriously grave instability on this planet. It’s an instability that cuts to the core of all of our ecosystems from environmental to human to microbial. To begin with, we have:

So much is so wrong. We feel the pain of this inside and now maybe you do too, more consciously.

The anxiety, depression, and fear are palpable. We know that we are disconnected from something vital. Men and women alike have lost contact with the proverbial mother as we are divorced from our greater sense of recognition, safety, belonging, and love. We know this wound. It is a feminine wound. A community wound. A family wound.

But we also know, deep down that there is, indeed, a more beautiful world that we know is possible. And we look upon the tears and screams emerging today, in the wake of this election, with a feeling of expansive possibility for the women of the world.

The induced awakening of women nationwide will be a gift of acceleration to us as a planet. Trump is, perhaps, exactly what we need to wake women up to ourselves rather than to lead us to the celebration of our own continued captivity in a narrative that has no room for our divine feminine power.

Moving Into a New Feminism

It is time to move into the new feminism. Our feminism. The feminism that the world demands to heal today. It is not a warring posture, vaginas versus cocks. It’s not women who seek to mimic the dress, comportment, and energy of stereotypical men. It’s not the level playing field. It’s not “our turn.”

This new feminism takes a good hard look at our several thousand year history of divorce from community, matriarchy, and deep wisdom. It sees that our collective hurt must be owned and worked with and fully integrated for true healing. It understands that the most powerful force on this planet is a woman’s divine compass — a compass that only knows the feeling of the collective as one. It knows that we can shift out of our righteousness and into a place of core stability because we already have everything we need if we choose to trust it, feel it, and own it.

We women are working with the deepest powers of manifestation and creation known to this world. But we have given it away.

It’s time for a reclamation.

The reclamation is not a grabbing. It’s simply a radiating. It’s an energetic commitment to healing the self in service of healing the planet. Perhaps, as Regena Thomashauer says in her new book, we need to let our pussies (not our minds) lead the way out of victimhood and into radiance. Yes, this much maligned, abused, and despised part of us that we need only to reunite with as our most trusted connection to a power we have given away.

We must let the rage and pain move through us, come together in ritual, and then work creatively with the energy that only knows to see the other as self. To see each human as a cell in the greater organism. Uniquely, instructively essential.

Hillary has shown us what the old feminism looks like, mired in orthodox power structures, dogma, and non-integration. The new feminism is emboldened by possibilities herein. It is always curious and compelling, the gifts that pain and suffering will bring if we let them flow to the surface, swirl around, and transform us in the crucible of a heart-centered consciousness. If we do this, together… if we let the seeds planted by this election grow, they will yield the leaders, healers, and true earth-bound revolutionaries who will ready us for the New Story in ways that are not yet made apparent by the current binary system of options.

Perhaps the wolf in wolf’s clothing will inadvertently and even unintentionally heal the entire landscape.

Interested in more insights and tools to help you Own Your Self?

My newest book, Own Your Self, helps you discover the meaning behind your symptoms and your struggle as a way to reclaim your health and your Self. Click below to claim your copy today.

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