To all the men out there, all of you who have been working on your Divine Masculine self, either consciously or subconsciously, I wish to apologize to you. I have not met most of you, but this is still offered to all men.

I want to apologize for myself, and in a most humble way, for all women. Some women may not agree with what I am being guided to share but I hope many will.

I am sorry for all of the times I wished you thought and acted like a woman. I wanted you to be able to communicate your feelings with me and not escape to your Man-Cave, and was hurt and angry when you needed to disappear to mull your feelings over solo. I felt abandoned.

I’m sorry for the painful, cutting ways I spoke with you when I was feeling wounded, (ah … just about all of my life), by you as an individual and all of you as a species. It has felt many times as if you are another species, alien, to me at least. I suspect many women will agree with me on this.

I’m sorry for chasing you away by my directness, or worse, meanness, because I was so afraid and would not let you near me—the very tender, hurting core of me. My heart was so damaged I had to protect it from any vulnerability, from you ever getting too close to it.

I’m sorry for hitting you. A few of you. Not too hard. At least it did not feel too hard to me but I guess I don’t know my own strength. And I wasn’t even dating any of you when I did this. And I kicked one of you when I was eighteen, really hard. Growing up with four brothers, three older than I am, I guess I hadn’t yet learned I shouldn’t be physical like that with grown men, as a grown woman. You were not a brother and I had not grown up yet.

I’m sorry for venting my frustration at the world towards you because you’re a man. Frustration at a world that has been stacked against women for centuries and centuries. Frustration that we’re treated as sex objects, and need to be eye candy but to be more than that threatens the patriarchal systems so deeply entrenched in our culture.

It’s not your fault. You, as a person, did not set the events in place back in history which led to this time period of so much anger, pain, woundedness on the part of so many of us women, and on your part too. Those were other men who took up the swords and eventually guns, and took away our rights as women to worship on our own, do our own ceremonies for the Great Mystery and Great Mother, and more.

Those were other men who raped us, and tortured us, and burned many of us at the stake for being healers, for knowing the ways of the plants and their medicine and being powerful. For if any of us women were powerful and did not submit to our husband or the village men, or Christian henchmen, then we did not live very long. For many centuries.

I’m sorry for all of us, men and women, for the sordid history our culture has had—in mistreating people who are different, slavery, women as chattel and more. I’m sorry about the terrible human rights records etched through the centuries. I have not thought about how you, men, were subjugated also since there has only been room for one man at the top in the hierarchical system initiated a long, long time ago, and perpetuated since in just about every aspect of society. Odds are good you were not that one man.

You lived and worked under that one man and were in fear of how “the Man” would treat you, or judge you, or let go of you, or simply kill you. I have not thought about it from your angle until very recently. So when you came home to your wife or lover and “the Man” had dealt you some not very fair stuff, it’s easier for you to slip into your cave, I guess. Or easier for you to let your frustrations out at your family, I suppose. As hurtful as that was to your family.

Perhaps this is what led so many of you to rape your daughters, this sense of injustice from the rest of your lives and the need to have power over something, someone, since you had no power in the rest of your life?

For years, I wanted to play the victim and blame all of you. It was so cozy and safe to sit in my stories and make you all wrong. But I’ve been starting to understand how you’ve all been so hurt and repressed and, well, wounded by this patriarchal society. So very wounded. Not just me or other women. I don’t want to be a victim anymore. I want to own that we’ve all been in this together for a very long time and deeply hope and envision that the cycles and generations of wounding and pain can be healed. They don’t have to continue.

I’m sorry you were taught you could not cry or express your feelings honestly as a young boy. That you were taught to suppress your sorrow or hurt at the playground or at home. This has shut you off from me, from us women, too. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have taught you that, at least where I am in my life now. But it wasn’t under my control how our parents, teachers, and other adults spoke to you. Or how they modeled their behavior that taught you those unhealthy, stoic ways.

So many of you have turned to alcohol and drugs because of your inner pain. I’m sorry you’ve needed to escape there. This has hurt us even more. Both physically and emotionally.

I’m sorry for what the military has done to so many of you at such a young and vulnerable, vulnerable age. So many of you served either voluntarily or not, and have come home with ‘soldier’s heart.’ The wounds in your hearts are very hard to heal and we, as women, did not go through those horrors of war, most of us. We can’t know the sights you saw, or atrocities you might have done because you were told to, or atrocities you’ve been subjected to also. And you can’t tell us because it’s too painful to admit it to yourself in retrospect. I’m deeply sorry our world has been set up for you to be in those situations and to become a killing machine, or against all of which you previously valued.

And yes, it’s certainly very true many women’s hearts have been broken by watching their husbands, sons, lovers, fathers go off to battle and not come home. It is not that we have not deeply, deeply suffered. I just sense that ‘soldiers heart’ is a singularly heavy wounding and this helps explain why so many veterans are homeless on the streets. Partly, at least.

I know you’re not a machine. At least I’m learning this now at age fifty-four. I’m learning that you, so many of you, have such tender and broken hearts. And all the ways you’ve lashed out at us, women, or hurt us, violated us, sources from a terrible woundedness in our culture that taught you it was okay to gang up on a woman and assault her as a group because of your lust. Or date-rape her because she did not really fight you back. Or hit her because she spoke back.

I’m sorry for all the pain you’ve experienced because of the Dark/Shadow Feminine that resides within all of us women. Most of us have not even realized she resides within us but she can take us over at times and when that happens our behavior is downright ugly and hateful. This side of us wants to hurt others, both women and men, and will take no prisoners. And the Dark/Shadow Feminine is conniving, manipulative, resourceful and goes for blood. She’s scary. She scares me. But I’ve learned to identify her within me, and see the hurt that she has been sitting on, and heal that. For the most part. I, like you, am still a work in progress.

Some women live in their Dark/Shadow Feminine just about all the time. They deeply scare me. What especially terrifies me is how so many times these types of women are the most attractive, the most sexual, and are downright predatory and then take heads. Or hearts. With no remorse. I’m deeply sorry for all of you men, that you’ve experienced women such as this, for my sense is most of you have and they’ve scarred you for life. If not many lifetimes.

I’m sorry for the mothers who abandoned you in their desperation to find themselves or inability to cope with the emotional responsibilities of being a mother. I’m sorry for the mothers who were (and might still be) emotionally unbalanced and lashed out at you or whipped you or worse. I’m sorry for those of you whose mothers lived in their Dark/Shadow Feminine and used their powers to emasculate you with emotional torture and worse.

I’m sorry.

I’d like all of us to heal, to be able to feel our emotions and express them in healthy ways. I’d like all of us to understand that we as individuals are never going to see the world the same way. Or have the same gifts. I’d like us to be more patient with each other and learn how to truly listen well. Men and women are wired differently. We just are. I’d like us to better respect these differences. Understand them. I’d like women to not feel they need to become a man to survive in this world, especially the business world. I’d like men to truly respect women’s gifts in the workplace.

I’d like all of you men to feel safe enough to release your pain since it’s my sense that is at the root of much of your wounded hearts.

I’d like all of us to feel safe around each other. Safe enough to ask for a long hug and receive one with kindness and warmth behind it.

I’d like this a lot. Not just for me but for all of us.

To those of you men who have found the courage to heal, to work on your Divine Masculine and be authentic and cry when you need to, and really share from the heart, I have such respect for you. This helps you clear your wounded hearts and helps us see your hearts better. Please keep on doing it and showing other men you know, by your examples and sharings, for this is a beautiful path. A path of respect. A path for Real Men.

We women need you to be with us as we work to rediscover our Sacredness and our strengths. We don’t want to leave you behind or put you on a shelf while we do our work to discover our feminine powers of compassion, balance, voice and more. We want to heal this world and are finding the confidence to do so. We need you to be with us in this journey but we can’t do the work for you.

We need you in your fullest Divine Masculine to help birth this New World coming in, today. Just taking baby steps towards this would be such a gift to us and to yourselves. A huge gift. For us and for the next seven generations.

So, please forgive me for my part in the pain that’s been caused. I’m learning to love just about all of you. I’m still human and some of you, rather us, have done some horrific things to other people throughout history. Love toward men such as Hitler or Chinese leaders who are closing down Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, torturing monks and worse now—is tough for me, in this moment. Very tough. But I’m starting to see how the patriarchal systems based on fear could create such monsters, perhaps. I’m finding a little compassion for the men who got sucked in to those systems and went the path of darkness. A little.

Please forgive me. I’m sorry for my part in this deeply troubled world. I’m trying to heal my little corner of it, at least.

Thank you. I love you.

– mare

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