BWM - Big White Male

I just had a huge a-ha!

I was speaking my spiritual focus out loud, and added a few words to it repetively.

I CULTIVATE COMPASSION FOR MONEY AND MYSELF.  I HEAL THE SPLIT WITH MONEY and myself (just added.)  I ENGAGE DIRECTLY WITH MONEY and myself.  I BECOME A SIGNIFICANT INCOME ALLOWER.

Oh my god, money and myself.  How are they the same?  How does money reflect me?  How is money me? Is money me? Are they connected?  Money as a mirror for me?  Really?

Literally moments before I had the thought that I split from money when I got married.  I split from the masculine because I no longer had to carry it in me.  I was now married to it. Masculine became external.  I split from money, power, and the masculine in me when I married Steve, the external masculine.

I stopped making money, earning money, generating money when I got married.

OK.  Got that.

How is money me?  I was so glad to get away from it.  Money had been so mean, bullying and arrogant.  How does that reflect me?

Oh...it is that part of me that criticizes me, sabotages me, tells me how wrong, stupid and bad I am.  It is my inner bully, my most vicious saboteur.

When I got married, I married into the illusion that I was now so loved by another that I would no longer have to deal with the inner critics and berating inner voices.  I was now so loved that I wouldn't have to deal with the inner bully.  My husband would take care him...and me.

I had earned and saved enough money before I got married to travel and work in England for a year, travel and work in Australia for a half year, and work at a yoga retreat center in Montana for 6 months.  I always had enough to do what I wanted to do and to manifest my dreams.  It was pretty simple before I got married.

Then, I got married.  I stopped earning money.  I gave away my masculine power to earn money.  I gave it away, just like that without even realizing it. I gave it away unconsciously.  I gave it away out of buying into crazy, archaic, disempowering beliefs about how marriage is supposed to be and who I am supposed to be as a "wife."

I gave away and split from that part of myself that was not only masculine, but also the critical, vicious, arrogant masculine the Big White Male in me that loved to keep me small, safe and inferior.

I grew up around BWMs.  I went to college with lots of them.  It seems that the places I have chosen to be have lots of BWMs.  I have learned over the years how to navigate around them.  I stay quiet, wary, alert, and for the most part, invisible. Their energy is very familiar to me.  I find them self centered, shallow, single minded, arrogant, not intelligent, disconnected, heartless.  They are partiers and players, who live as though life is one big game or party and the next conquest.  They reflect the worst of the masculine attributes.  They are willing to go to war, to start wars, to act superior, to use people, to use (up) people and resources.

When I was first married, I found Women's Reality - An Emerging Female System by Anne Wilson Shaef.  I was so excited.  I found a book that spoke what I was feeling and what was my intuitive truth.  Yes, yes, yes.  I shared my enthusiasm with Steve, who immediately reacted to Schaef's descriptions of the White Male System.  He took it as a personal attack.  After all, he is a white male.  My response to his reaction - I shut down.  I put the book away and eventually got rid of it.  I couldn't ever read it again.  Steve was right and I was wrong.  (Notice the either/or split here.)   The craziness here is that Steve may be white and he may be male, but he is not a Big White Male.  I couldn't have, wouldn't have been with him or married him if he was.  Still, the White Male System is the water he swims in as a white male.

I am really struck by that I have been looking at these issues now for well over 20 years.  You can put stuff away, repress it, hide it, dismiss it, and yet...if it is truly a part of you to explore, to wrestle with, to engage with, to come to terms with, to integrate, you will...at some point, somehow.  We think that we can control these things, but one thing I've learned is that our soul's mission is bigger and stronger than we are!  If you close one door, then guess what...another window opens.

(I have edited this post and there is a section on this writing taken out.  Suffice it for now that I am honoring a request from the heart to edit this, and at some point soon, will re-write this section.  For now, I have just deleted it.)

Yet it took that BWM energy to be the catalyst for me.  I am curious why that energy and how does it relate to money?

BWM energy is money, for me.  It is what is familiar and what I grew up around.  I am attracted to it and repulsed by it at the same time. Push - pull.  The split.

There is the preppy, East Coast,  Middlebury side of me.  There is, as much as I hate to admit it.  There he is.  I have chosen to reject that side of me, and focus on the spiritual, Boulder, granola, organic foods, Colorado side of me.  Either - or.  How do I love, accept and have compassion for the BWM side of me?  Really?  How do I heal the split with him?  How do I engage directly with him?

I get kind of a sick feeling in my throat as I sit with this.  Yet this is the crux of it.  Without him, I cannot and will not be able to generate income, receive income, earn income, allow income.  It's that simple.  So I need him.  Damn it.  I need him.

And he needs me for his own healing.

It's a two way street.

Sitting with the questions. OK.  My intention is to cultivate compassion and acceptance for Money and myself, to heal the split with Money and myself, and to engage directly with money and myself.  Ah ho.

Thank you.

Suseya!
Sahara