Introduction

What would a new feminism created through the lens of integral theory look like, feel like, and be like, embodied by women? This is the question we posed to Willow Pearson, Diane Musho Hamilton, and Sofia Diaz, the leading women at Integral Institute, the research and educational organization founded by integral philosopher Ken Wilber. These three women have been working together to create seminars that teach Women’s Integral Life Practice, a holistic approach to women’s development. The first seminar debuted in fall 2005 on the heels of the Omega Institute’s Women & Power weekend conference. Since then, these three integral leaders have offered the seminar each fall.

Integral feminism is a work in progress, and these seminars are the first attempts to present what it might mean. Dubbed “the ultimate cross-training for women,” the seminars are designed to “engage you intellectually, physically, emotionally, interpersonally, and spiritually,” as the Integral Institute website explains. Through this integrated engagement with all dimensions of a woman’s life, their goal is to develop a new integral expression of the feminine that will balance the masculine tilt to our culture. An essential part of creating this balance is bringing forward the “feminine face of the Divine,” a spiritual grounding that they say will enable women to find their place within and beyond the religious traditions. As Pearson explains, “The Feminine is—She can’t be created; She can’t be destroyed. Women can be marginalized, women can be oppressed, women can be put down, but the Feminine herself is present in every situation. There would be no phenomena without Her.” Through providing women with an understanding of the Feminine Divine as essential to life itself, they hope to give women a deep sense of being at home in the Kosmos.

The seminars are the result of another integration: the coming together of the diverse talents and experiences of these three women. Willow Pearson is a practicing psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, a founding member of Integral Institute, and a faculty member at Naropa University. She is also a musician, composer, and performing artist. Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei has been a practitioner of Buddha-dharma for more than twenty years and holds a master’s degree in contemplative psychology from Naropa University. As a senior Zen student of Genpo Merzel Roshi, she serves as a facilitator of Big Mind, a process designed by Genpo Roshi to bring the insights of Zen meditation to Western audiences. Trained as a lawyer, she is also a mediator, group facilitator, and trainer in conflict resolution. Sofia Diaz has studied yoga intensively for more than twenty-three years and has apprenticed since 1982 with dance and music masters of the Balasaraswati lineage of Bharata Natyam. She teaches hatha yoga, sacred movement, and feminine spiritual practice, deriving her style of teaching and body philosophy from the South Indian temple arts and their accompanying scriptures.

WIE spoke with Pearson, Hamilton, and Diaz about their vision of integral feminism and how they are working with women in their seminars. After this initial conversation, we asked them: What is integral feminism, and why do you feel it is the next step for women on the leading edge? What follows are an excerpt from the interview, where Diaz discusses what the Feminine Principle is and the difficulty of capturing it in language, and written responses from Hamilton and Pearson to the questions we posed.

Sofia Diaz on the Feminine Principle

Any conversation about the Feminine Principle is going to come down to wrestling with the fact that we have a valuing of language that has come from a masculine perspective, whether it is expressed by a man or woman. Masculine means penetrative, functional—“Do something about it!” Whereas the Feminine Principle is being itself—literally the nourishment force of existence, because it is existence itself. Right now, there is a preference for masculine forms of information, and we are trying to break into that with a feminine sensibility. My personal motivation for this is actually suffering. There is a certain level of unanswerable suffering, a bodily felt reality that there’s something that hasn’t been addressed, something that doesn’t make the realization you once had present all the time. It has to do with a prioritization of information over the emotional and psychic health of embodiment. We want to help women cultivate a profound trust of the good, the true, and the beautiful that is inherent in a woman’s heart, to bring out the vulnerable part of us from which all our energy comes.

So we’re basically talking about something that is invisible because it is so present all the time. And it is important to make the distinction between the terms feminine, woman, and female. The Feminine is an aspect of existence that is independent of women. A more absolute definition would be that, relative to the Masculine Principle of absolute infinity, the Feminine Principle is everything that appears, everything that is noticed, even the noticer himself or herself. However, in terms of human embodiment, it is expressed as a woman’s body, because the Feminine is the receptive principle and the masculine is the penetrative principle. Our relationship to the Feminine is our relationship to embodiment.

Diane Musho Hamilton on “What is the Integral Feminine?”

Enlightenment knows no differences—no man, no woman, no gender, no sex, no self, and no other. In this context, the question “What is the Integral Feminine?” evokes immediately the sound of a Zen master shouting “Mu!” and the image of a female adept dropping suddenly to her knees in a gesture of spontaneous realization and gratitude.

Enlightenment knows no gender, yet it manifests in the body and mind of this woman practitioner. Enlightenment is empty of all particularity, and at the same time, it is the full unfolding of distinctions in the manifest realm, including feminine sensibilities. Enlightenment is not bound by time and space but, paradoxically, is realized through consciousness occurring in our time and place, in this culture, and under these conditions in which the question “What is the Integral Feminine?” comes up.

The Integral Feminine is awareness at the edge of evolution in the body and mind of a woman. You could say that she is a manifestation of evolutionary consciousness, embodying development with a particularly feminine flavor. To the extent that she is aware, to the extent that she learns and unfolds, she has the innate capacity to expand and open into greater and greater identification with all things. This unfolding requires her intention, devotion, and will, and she is ultimately an integral spiritual practitioner. As an integral practitioner, her most outstanding feature is the ability to take different perspectives on who and what she is, without being limited or constrained by them. In other words, the Integral Feminine is aware of herself arising in four quadrants of experience—the individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, and collective exterior. Using the integral map, she is able to take perspectives easily and fluidly, without becoming fixed, dogmatic, or demanding in her viewpoint, realizing that all perspectives are inextricably related and partial.

In her own private interior (upper left quadrant), for example, she is aware of sensations, thoughts, and feelings. She understands how her memories, beliefs, and conditioning shape the experience of who and what she is, including her experience of gender, and while she may identify with them, she does so lightly and fluidly, surrendering the grasping complications of ego and relaxing into the unconditioned space, the bliss and openness, that is her fundamental nature.

The Integral Feminine is fearless in exploring the psychological shadow side of her interior experience. Shadow work requires her to look directly at the aspects of her personality that are blocked from awareness and are projected out into the external world. Sometimes the shadow is directly related to the experience of gender and needs to be integrated into identification with being female. An example of this might be a certain compulsion to need to feel special, making excessive emotional demands of others, or feeling powerless in relationship to males.

Shifting focus to her individual exterior experience (upper right), this includes the reality of the body—physical, subtle, and causal. The Integral Feminine is highly connected to her feminine form and engages a body practice—dance, yoga, or chi gong—and she attends to the factual impacts of diet, substances, and medications on her body, brain, and nervous system. She is a student of energy, learning to cultivate and circulate it, and relates to her own sexuality, whether straight or gay, without shame or confusion. She is very conscious of her behavior generally, receiving feedback easily and adapting gracefully to situations and conditions.

In the interior of the collective (lower left), she is a sophisticated participant in relationship and culture. She is a good listener, a willing communicator, and she understands that good relationships require an ability to openly receive others in their similarities and differences. She also takes an interest in human history, the development of culture, and the place of women. She understands integral feminism, identifying the unique truth and value in each different school of feminism and weaving all of these insights into a larger metaposition that includes the different quadrant intuition of each of the schools. Thus, she has a sophisticated relationship to feminism, but she isn’t held hostage by dogmatic views about gender relations.

Moreover, her loyalty is to both sexes and to supporting men and women in manifesting more beautifully who they are. And sometimes she has the distinct experience that what she offers to others is uniquely feminine.

Finally, in the exterior of the collective (lower right), whether it is in her own local community and/or on a global scale, she advocates for laws, structures, and processes that are fair and just, treating women and men as equal players in the unfolding of human evolution and culture.

Enlightenment knows no gender, and yet it manifests in the body and mind of the Integral Feminine. Enlightenment is empty of all particularity, except that it includes masculine and feminine sensibilities. Enlightenment is not bound by time and space but is realized through feminine consciousness in all of her beauty and shadow qualities, in her simplicity and complexity, and in the perspectives that only awareness reflected through the body, speech, and mind of a woman can reveal.

Willow Pearson on the Integral Feminine/Feminism

“I am love, I am lovable, I am loved, and I love.” If there is an invocation of the Integral Feminine, this adaptation of a refrain with which yogini Sofia Diaz often closes her classes is that invocation. Through these words, the four faces of the Integral Feminine are called forth into the immediate awareness of the integral practitioner: “I am love” and “I am lovable” recognize who I am (our individual interior experience, or the upper left quadrant) in both an absolute and a relative sense. Who I am is none other than absolute love Herself. And who I am, in the relative sense, is a woman who is deeply worthy of love from the very start—in all of her confusion, all of her delusion, all of her magnificence, and all of her radiance. “I am loved” recognizes who I am connected to through mutual understanding and how compassion flows toward me and through me (our cultural experience, or the lower left quadrant). “I love” recognizes who I care for in the world, through devoted leadership and skillful service. I care, in ever-expanding orders of compassionate embrace, for both my own embodiment (the upper right quadrant) and the social and political landscape that I am a part of (the lower right quadrant). The Integral Feminine-in-action is an exemplar of integral feminism.

“I am love, I am lovable, I am loved, and I love.”

We are that Love. Not just when we feel happy, not just when we’re temporarily graced with health, not only when we find ourselves in relationship, or finally find ourselves by getting out of one. That Love is the very ground of our being, even when we feel like a raging thunderstorm that will never end or an impenetrable fortress of fog where the sun won’t shine through or a proverbial wet blanket. Even then, we are that Love. But there are many layers of confusion and delusion that can keep us from ?seeing and knowing that directly. As trainers at Integral Institute, we have designed a Women’s Integral Life Practice seminar. Practicing together in a circle of women, there is a quickening in cutting through delusion. In the company of women, we can be ruthlessly honest with one another. With less to prove and less to shy away from, we aren’t too proud to own our ignorance and our brilliance. There is more space. And inside that recognition, we discover that space is everywhere, with everyone.

In the company of women, it becomes a question of whether or not we are willing to fill that space with our fullness, with our freedom, with our most radiant selves. We don’t waste our time asking if meditation is really just a masculine practice for men; our deepest truth is that meditation is an expression of who we, as human beings, are. We are freedom. We know that embracing our feminine form in all of her sensuality and creativity is central to women’s practice. We are fullness. Meditation is an expression of who we are, just as are the sacred feminine arts of yoga, dance, and music. These practices are interlinked. Through the power of identification, valuation, and affirmation that comes from practicing among women, we are increasingly able to both deeply include and freely transcend our femaleness and other characteristics of our embodiment.

To embody this spectrum of Love takes practice. As integral practitioners we exercise mind, body, and spirit in self, culture, and nature. In our modules on spirit and shadow (upper left), we get to know the feminine face of the Divine and the feminine face of contraction/self-separation. In our yoga, movement, and sexuality modules on body as breath (upper right), we include and transcend our three bodies (gross, subtle, and causal). In our spirit-as-action modules (lower right), engaging ethics and social issues, we include and transcend agency and communion. We recognize that the Integral Feminine-in-action is inseparable from integral feminism. If the second-wave feminist understanding is the radical notion that women are people, integral feminism furthers this understanding by acknowledging that women are people, women are God, and women are nothing—no thing at all. Through the discipline and celebration of Women’s Integral Life Practice, we see into and through our many appearances, marveling at Her ephemeral, diaphanous beauty and brilliance in all its radiant display.