The Dance of Life

Rethinking How We See Masculine and Feminine

There’s a difference between understanding something conceptually and experiencing it viscerally. Between reading about polarity and being held inside of one.

This piece isn’t just about rethinking masculine and feminine. It’s about recognizing the deeper symbolic patterns that move beneath our cultural assumptions. The kind of recognition that doesn’t happen through debate or data, but through rhythm, image, and memory. What once seemed ordinary begins to pulse with meaning.

It may not be for everyone. But if you’ve ever felt the world speak through myth, motion, or metaphor, this might resonate.

There was a moment when I began experiencing what I now call symbolic clarity. It wasn’t that reality suddenly became mystical. It was more that it stopped feeling purely physical and started communicating through symbols: synchronicities, archetypes, cycles. A patterned language I could feel and recognize.

One night stands out. And it’s a moment that repeats itself.

Picture this: a full moon rising in the sky, soft sand squishing between your toes, and the air thrumming with the pulse of drums. It’s loud, rhythmic, and ancestral. I was at a beach drum circle with several dozen people. Most of the drummers were men, seated in a ring, laying down deep, steady rhythms. Inside that circle, mostly women danced, twirling, swaying, letting something move through them. And the moon? She watched silently, almost pulsing to her own rhythm as she traced her arc through the night.

At the time, I simply savored the moment. But looking back, I realize that image holds powerful symbolic meaning. The drummers were grounding the field—steady, directional, present. They were the anchor. The dancers moved within that field—expressive, alive, flowing. And above us, the moon mirrored it all in her slow, cyclical passage: constant change, return, renewal.

That night became a living metaphor. A symbol that revealed itself through experience.

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Reclaiming the Feminine in Motion

We’ve forgotten something essential: the feminine moves.

She’s not just receptive or passive, as many Western frameworks suggest. She is the mover, the transformer, the force that brings life into motion.

Over time, I’ve come to see the masculine as stillness, presence, steadiness; as the one who holds space. He offers a stable, unwavering foundation. The feminine is movement, change, expression—the one who flows through that space. She brings life into form and dissolves it again. Revealing and concealing.

Neither is superior. They’re complementary. Like inhale and exhale. Like beat and rhythm. One allows the other to be fully expressed.

And of course, these roles aren't literal or fixed. Women can drum. Men can dance. The point isn’t prescription, it’s pattern recognition. The symbolic archetypes show themselves in different ways, in different people, in different moments. But they remain legible if we know how to feel them.

The Feminine in Motion. Movement, rhythm, and radiant expression echo the ancient truth: the feminine doesn’t just receive, she animates. Photo by Joel Garcia

Last week, I happened to rewatch Michael Jackson’s music video They Don’t Care About Us, filmed in Salvador da Bahia with the iconic percussion ensemble Olodum. I hadn’t seen it in over twenty years, and it brought back a flood of memories: his music, Salvador, carnival, Olodum’s unmistakable sound. Good times.

And it struck me: my memory of Salvador, and especially of celebrating carnival there, is tied to the memory of Olodum’s drumbeat, the container they created that transcended performance. It was vibrational, communal, and profoundly uplifting as well as grounding.

Olodum is not only music and dance. It’s also a socio-cultural movement. Through their nonprofit, they teach Afro-Brazilian percussion, dance, and singing. They offer computer classes to underprivileged children. They host conferences on racial justice and support broader social development initiatives.

Symbolically, the masculine principle is tending a field from which creative feminine seeds sprout, and not just musically, but socially, economically, culturally, and even politically.

Of course, these aren’t perfect expressions. Every cultural form has contradictions. But in that moment, they carried something archetypal. The form may change. The rhythm remains.

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The Reframe

But I didn’t always see it this way.

I was taught that the masculine was the active force: the builder, the initiator, the doer. And the feminine? She was the responder: compliant, reflective, often secondary. I didn’t question it for a long time. It was just the water I swam in.

Then I encountered other frameworks—especially Trika Shaivism from Kashmir—and something in me began to reorient. In that tradition, movement isn’t masculine at all. Movement is Shakti, the vibrant feminine principle. Shiva, the masculine, is the spacious witness, the pure awareness that holds everything but does not move.

It’s she who animates. It’s she who dances.

There’s a word in that lineage that stayed with me: spanda. It means the subtle pulse at the heart of everything. That slight tremor. The breath before speech. The hum of becoming. That’s the feminine in motion.

Modern neuroscience even hints at this. One example is the salience network, which helps detect what matters and shifts attention into motion. It’s one way science is beginning to glimpse what ancient traditions have long intuited.

Interestingly, some physicists describe reality using the concept of the quantum wave, a field of potential that collapses into form when observed. I don’t confuse physics with metaphysics, but the resonance is striking. Spanda, like the quantum wave, suggests that behind every act of becoming is a field of possibility, waiting to move.

This movement isn’t linear. It follows a deeper rhythm. Tantric teachings call this krama (not to be confused with karma)—the unfolding sequence of life: birth, growth, decline, death, return. Over and over. The rhythm of breath, moon cycles, ocean tides, menstruation, memory. Not straight lines, but sacred spirals.

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Remembering What Lives Beneath

This is what I mean by reclaiming symbolic clarity. It’s not about creating new hierarchies or escaping into abstraction. It’s to remember what lives beneath the surface of culture, what we once knew before conditioning closed the door.

And yes, I’m aware that symbolic language, especially around gender, has been co-opted, distorted, and weaponized. But before these symbols were ideologies, they were rhythms.

This is a gesture toward recovering that original pulse.

Because when we restore the feminine symbolically, we also restore the masculine. Not as the controller, but as the anchor. The one who holds steady. The conscious witness. A grounded presence that allows life to move freely.

That, to me, is a richer and more rooted vision of masculinity.

And if this feels disorienting, I understand. My mind was shaped by the same cultural scripts. I still catch myself unpacking them. Sometimes I even ask: Why am I so drawn to all this?

But maybe that voice isn’t the clearest part of me.

Maybe it’s just the echo of a culture that distrusts intuition, discredits subtle patterns, and downplays the sacred.

What I trust now is this: perceiving symbols isn’t bypassing. Seeking symbolic clarity isn’t obsession. It’s memory. It’s the soul remembering how to truly see.

And when I sit again in a circle, under the full moon with drummers grounding and dancers swirling, I feel that memory come alive.

The rhythm holds the space.
The movement flows through the space.
And the dance of life continues.