Not Two: You Contain Multitudes
The invitation to full expression, the trap of gender essentialism, and flattening as a defense against the unbearability of intimacy, and a capturing tool for political pendulums.
Live community call is today at 10 am pacific. Bring your questions and hot topics. Move, breathe, meditate and talk on living awake. See you soon!
Hello everyone,
How are you doing out there? I’m waking up on the moutaintop in a foot of pristine powder and bluebird skies, in awe at the beauty of this planet and her ecosystems. and grateful for a warm welcome back to Sky Haven, my son’s perch. I’ve been on fire inside in these last weeks, so much is coming clear, and I’ve been writing from the storm.
One of the big themes is on our tendency to flatten: She is like this. They are like that. This is what men are. This is what women are. This is who we bomb and why. These verdicts foreclose further looking. In the foreclosure there can be a certain kind of relief and completion, but there is rarely intimacy. Rarely connection. What looks like conviction is often just the relief of no longer having to look. What looks like ideology is often anxiety finding a container. Classification is the flight from intimacy. And intimacy, full presence with what actually is, in its unresolved and ungovernable particularity, is both the most terrifying and the most alive thing available to us.
Flattening is the shortcut we take to make the world bearable. When reality becomes too much, we tidy it and remove its dimensions. Fix it in place until it becomes manageable, nameable, something we can hold without being undone. It’s kind of like objectifying, but flattening has a different quality: taking a rich multidimensional being moving through space and time, always changing, always evolving, and pinning it in place, collapsing into one facet, and making a cartoon of it for our own comfort.
Over the next few weeks I am following this thread through varying territories where I see it showing up right now. Today is on the flattening misguidance of gender essentialism, in the context of the men’s movement and the neo-goddess traditions.
The TLDR on today’s essay on gender and being all of you:
The men’s movement and the neo-goddess world look like opposites. They’re the same instruction: become more of a fixed gendered essence.
The Shiva-Shakti teaching they both draw from doesn’t actually say that. Shiva and Shakti are one movement, not two poles. Awareness isn’t masculine. Radiance isn’t feminine.
Gender essentialism is, at root, a defense against contact — with the actual, specific, ungovernable person in front of you. The personal defense and the political project are the same anxiety running at different scales.
The gods and goddesses of the original traditions were never this narrow. Shiva carries Sati’s body across the world undone by grief. Kali slays demons.
Flattened archetypes get picked up and used by political movements.
Your soul — your jiva — is the irreducible specific thing you are, containing the full range of expressions, not essential gender qualities.
You can’t love an archetype. You can only love a jiva. Hiding behind gender essence blocks wholeness of expression.
The invitation is to both joyful fullness and increased capacity for ambiguity.
Read the full essay below.
Upcoming
3/26/26: The Willingness Teachings: Working with Resistance, Vasana and Karma Mala.
Your own willingness is the path, rather than any method, practice, or teacher. But you can’t force or manufacture willingness. When we are stuck and in resistance, here’s where to start. Single Session Online Live Course: $108.
4/2-5/26: Easter Medicine and Mysticism Retreat in Southern California.
Investigating Love, Death, Ambiguity and Rebirth. Register only after having a conversation to see if this is a fit.
Not Two: You Contain Multitudes
Every person wants the flow, the adornment, the beauty, the permission to be soft and luminous and tended. And every person wants the rawness, the potency, the self-responsibility, the clean ferocity of someone who knows what they stand for.
These are not gendered longings. They are human ones.
The tragedy of the polarity frame is that it splits this inheritance down a gender line and hands each side only half. The men’s movement — from David Deida to the broader and often quite toxic masculinity renaissance surging through culture and algorithm alike — teaches that men’s deepest nature is Shiva: sovereign, penetrating. The neo-goddess world teaches that women’s deepest nature is Shakti: flowing, receptive, embodied radiance. The cosmology suggests a map of what men are and what women are, presented as both spiritual truth and the solution to the current optionality and changing frames around gender, desire, and power.
The ancient and very profound teachings called Shiva-Shakti are deeply mischaracterized through these gender essentialist frames.
The role availability of the modern era can be exhausting in the breadth of its self-determination. In the effort of defining a self, it can be tempting to want to be handed a clearer shape to inhabit. Taking quizzes to know your type, or standing in the self-help aisle, reaching for something that will finally tell us who we are supposed to be. The old maps — oppressive as they were — were maps. Their dissolution left genuine disorientation amidst the freedom. How do I move through desire, through power, through relationship, without a script? When someone arrives with a framework, like the gendered teachings, that says here is your nature, here is how you move — that lands as relief. It lands as rest.
Here is what the tradition that originated this teaching actually says.
Notice something first, in your own experience right now: there is no moment when you are aware and then the awareness lights up. The knowing and its luminosity happen as one thing, with no interval between them. You cannot find the seam. The sheer seamlessness of consciousness and its own radiance, the way they are not two events but one: prakāśa-vimarśa, light-recognition. Not two qualities in relationship but the single nature of consciousness knowing itself.
Shiva and Shakti are not a polarity. They are a single movement of reality knowing itself. Shakti is not the feminine counterpart to a masculine Shiva. She is Shiva’s own self-luminosity, inseparable from what he already is. One nature, not two principles in relationship. Not the oscillation between two poles. The singular vibration of the one, present in everything, available to every nervous system, prior to every gender assignment.
Awareness is not masculine. Radiance is not feminine. These are appearances within consciousness, not properties of it. The full inheritance — the beauty and the rawness, the stillness and the ferocity, the flow and the structural power — belongs to every human being, because it is what every human being arises within.
The teaching can’t be conscripted to give you an identity to wear. It points through every image, every role, every fixed form, toward the singularity underneath.
Recently I watched a young man use the language of sacred masculine — the whole Shiva-Shakti polarity framework, the presence teaching, the idea of holding his edge before the feminine — to avoid feeling the specific woman in front of him. Her aliveness, her particularity, the sheer ungovernable realness of her was making him anxious in the way that actual presence always does. The masculinity framework gave him somewhere to stand that was not inside that anxiety. He could relate to the feminine — which is so much safer than relating to her.
The entire architecture of gender essentialism — the men’s movement, the goddess world, the polarity framework, the trad-wife aesthetic, the pronatalist agenda running beneath all of it — is, at the root, a defense against contact. Against the terrifying, ungovernable, annihilating experience of an actual other person. A specific other person who does not resolve into a type, who cannot be managed by a framework, who exceeds every category you bring to them and keeps exceeding it.
If she is Shakti and I am Shiva, I don’t have to feel her. Cosmology is a distance-making device.
And the political movement that needs women to be mothers and receivers and soft and tended is running the same operation at scale. Women who are legible — typed, categorized, assigned a nature — are women who can be managed and to whom others can hold a standard. Women who contain multitudes, who are specific and sovereign and unpredictable, who refuse to resolve into a type, are more challenging. Which is precisely what certain political projects cannot afford.
The personal defense and the political project are the same movement. The anxiety is the same anxiety. The framework is the same framework.
The content that thrives right now — algorithmically, commercially, and culturally — rewards fixed gender identity, complementary roles, and nostalgia for arrangements that delivered social stability at a specific cost. The men’s movement is extraordinarily algorithm-friendly: clear hierarchies, clear enemies, clear metrics of dominance. The trad-wife aesthetic photographs beautifully. The pronatalist agenda running through certain strands of both movements is not subtle if you look directly: return women to reproductive centrality, restore masculine authority as natural and sacred order. Add the insult that it’s a spiritual or godly project, and you even get to pull the human longings for meaning-making and belonging into the fuel tank.
The goddess world is more complicated, and I want to be precise because much of it is genuinely nourishing and politically conscious. But consider this: you do the retreat, you soften, you learn to receive, you regulate your nervous system, you become more beautiful and less threatening — and somehow, in the process, you have aligned to the market version of the sacred feminine and the political project of returning women to receptivity, the body, and the tending of immediate life, rather than the design of a world that works for all of life.
The gods and goddesses across all traditions are far more balanced than the contemporary market versions of either.
Artemis hunted alone in the mountains, wanting no company and no softness. Durga rode into battle. Kali danced on the chest of the defeated ego with her tongue out and her sword raised. The Morrígan — the Celtic goddess of fate and war — circled the battlefield as a crow, choosing who would live. Skadi strapped on her skis and moved through the winter mountains entirely on her own terms.
And the gods: Shiva himself is not only the sovereign — he is Nataraja, the cosmic dancer, and the ash-covered ascetic who sits in cremation grounds, and the one so undone by grief at Sati’s death that he carries her body across the world unable to put her down. Dionysus is ecstatic, boundary-dissolving, as likely to be found weeping as conquering. Osiris is dismembered. The Green Man dies into the earth every winter and is reborn. Coyote is a trickster who keeps getting it wrong. Apollo and Dionysus are not separate gods but the two faces of the same divine restlessness.
The original traditions held the full range in both directions — the fierce and the tender, the sovereign and the surrendered, the penetrating and the undone. What the contemporary market versions did, in both the men’s movement and the neo-goddess world, was curate. Each selected the expressions most useful for a particular identity product and left the rest on the shelf. Kali for your mad feelings but not your demon slaying. Shiva’s presence but not his grief.
When you fix an archetype — when you say this is what this energy means and this is who carries it — you make it available for capture, a flag carried by whoever picks it up. The warrior goddess energy was picked up by nationalism, by blood-and-soil rhetoric, by political machinery coopting the imagery of fierce feminine protection for its own ends. The men’s movement slides without friction into authoritarian aesthetics, sacred masculine as justification for hierarchy, for the strong man who restores order.
The tradition has a word for the individual soul in its full particularity: jiva. From the Sanskrit root meaning to live, to breathe — the living one. Not a type. Not an archetype. Not a gender assignment. This specific, irreducible, dynamic expression of the one consciousness — you, exactly as configured, with your complete and contradictory and magnificent range. The jiva is what remains when you subtract every category, every role, every inherited shape. And what remains is not emptiness but a startling aliveness. Particular. Unmistakable. Yours.
Walt Whitman knew it without the Sanskrit: I contain multitudes.
I was sitting in an airport recently, across from a collegiate women’s basketball team. Strong, spatially dominant, physically raw, regal. Fully Artemis. Definitely not simpering. Human variation within any gender is vastly greater than variation between genders. Essentialism takes the statistical tails and calls them the truth of the category. Everyone else becomes a deviation to correct. But the single movement of Shiva-Shakti produces infinite variation in form. Consciousness expressing in manifestation is not tending toward a type.
You contain multitudes. The warrior and the mystic. The one who weeps at beauty and the one who will not move. The architect and the dancer. The grandmother and the strategist. The woman in the floral crown drafting the legal brief. The man who tends the altar and holds the line. These are not integrations of opposites, not borrowings from the other gender’s column. They are the single movement expressing through the particular miracle of your jiva.
And here is what this means for love. You cannot love a Shakti or a Shiva. A Queen or a King. You cannot love an archetype. You can only love a jiva — this one, this specific impossible particular person, who contains multitudes you will spend a lifetime not fully knowing. The framework that types the beloved protects you from the overwhelming reality of them. It is a defense against the very contact that love requires.
Real intimacy — the kind that changes you, that asks everything — is only possible between two people who have stopped hiding behind their gender essence and shown up as the full, unresolved, excessive, sovereign thing they actually are. Two jivas meeting. Nothing managed. Nothing safely categorized.
What I want for all of us is the joy of the full story. The joy available right now, in this body, as this particular irreducible being — when you stop auditing yourself against a type and simply get curious about the whole of what is here.
In my own life, after decades as a productive asset in a system that valued output above almost everything else, the genuine and hard-won turn toward the sacred feminine was an amazing gift. The slowness, the beauty, the deep remembering of something that productivity culture had buried gave me back something essential. And still, my unique expression, even in the middle of all that beauty, is thoroughly sovereign and holds an energy that would cut you if you came close to harming those I was charged with caring for. This is jiva — the living, breathing, irreducible whole of what I actually am. The floral crown and the legal brief. The crystal bindi and the willingness to cut. The altar and the hunt. The capacity to be moved and the capacity to move unmovably. The softness and the sovereignty. The beauty and the rawness.
Facets of a jiva — a living, breathing, specific soul — so particular and alive that no system built on gender essence could have predicted you.
And the people who love you — who really love you — do not need you to be a type. They need you to be real. Overwhelmingly, dangerously, specifically real.
🌹Events 🌹Courses 🌹 Private Sessions
🌹Podcast 🌹 Books 🌹 Essays
Rosebud Woman 🌹 Radiant Farms 🌹Sundari Gardens
The Hawaii Tantra Festival starts March 27 on Big Island, Hawai’i. This is a small container for motivated learners and practitioners only. Apply here.
