Feminism, Ecology & Holistic Healing
(from the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients - Jan 2000)

The feminine principle in nature is essential to our understanding of healing, of becoming whole. If we are to heal ourselves and our mother earth, we must reclaim that part of humanity represented by the feminine principle and integrate it so that we might become fully human, and therefore whole.

This principle is firmly rooted not only in myth and metaphore, but in biology and psychology, as well. Both male and female elements must be present in order to recreate ourcelves, physically. Carl Jung postulated the anima and the animus as the personification of man's unconsciuos and the masculin nature of a woman's. This phsychological bisexuality is a reflection of the biological fact that it is the larger number of male (or female) genes which is the decisive factor in the determination of sex..

He said:"The animus and the anima shoulf function as a bridge leading to the images of the collective unconscious" Robert Ornstein, in The Psychology of Consciousness (1972) states that the two hemispheres of the crebral cortex have distinctly different functions. The left hemisphere is predominantly involved with analytic, verbal and mathematical functions. Its mode of operation is primarily linear.

The right hemisphere is specialized for sythesis, orientation in space, creativity and is more wholistic and relational. The Taoists of ancient China developed the symbol of Yin and Yang to represent the archetypal poles of nature, representing the masculin and feminine energies.

Though polar opposites their interaction brings about harmony, or wholeness. The Chinese see the vital energy itself as being represented by the dynamic interplay of the two essential forces, a concept shared now by modern physisists such as Miels Bohr'd theory of "complementarity". It is in the denial and denegration of the feminine principle that we have brought ourselves to the brink of destruction of the earth and our natural environment.

We rape the earth with incensitive indifference, pollute and poison our air and water as though man could recreate them. There is no denying the consequences of one sided linear thinking: in the call for more double-blind studies; in the use of animals for research; in the rapacious onslaught on the remaining rain forests of the planet, with their irreplaceable ecology; in the systematic and ruthless pursuit of profit at the expense of health; in the patriarchical justice system which is unwilling to protect woman children; in the institutionalization of concentrated power and priviledge.

Our interdependence and interrelatedness with our environment has been well understood for many decades now and yet this destructive energy has been allowed to continue without abate. Ecology requires a feminist perspective to reveal the interconnected roots of misogyny and hatred of nature. The poet Adrienne Rich has written:" We have been percieved for too many centuries as pure nature, exploited and raped like the earth it is precisely this culture and its political institutions which have split us..in so doing it has also split itself from life; becoming the death culture of quantification, abstraction and the will to power which has reached its most defined destructiveness in this century.

" Our society has become too Yang, too rational, male and aggressive; to achieve a state of dynamic balance the feminine element must be integrated. Rather than continuing to support a mechanistic, fragmented world view, we must change our perception.

Irene Alleger, Editor