Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,
where moth and rust consume,
and thieves break in and steal;
but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven...
For where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.
- Mathew 6:19-21

Gender healing work is not quite what it first appears to be. Delving deeply into this work inevitably takes people on an inner journey, and, if they follow it far enough, they are ultimately led into an awakening of an expansive, all-encompassing love. This is called in some traditions an encounter with the Beloved - a mystical form of love. It is where gender reconciliation work ultimately leads, but it's rarely what people are seeking when they enter into it. Gender reconciliation work could thus be likened to certain spiritual or mystical paths in which novices are coaxed onto the path by "veils of attraction" that draw them in through a kind of divine seduction, and only later do they discover what the path is really about.

In our experience, people come to gender reconciliation work with many different motivations. Some are seeking to heal from past wounds, others are hoping to deepen their professional work as clinical therapists or clergy or educators, and still others hope to become trained as facilitators themselves. Whatever their initial motivation, if people remain engaged in gender reconciliation work over time, their relationship to the work evolves as they discover its deeper layers.

The spiritual process behind gender reconciliation work bears some similarity to the trickster tradition of Sufi mystical lore. Unsuspecting wayfarers are lured onto the path by whatever their own attachments or "hooks" happen to be. The "Beloved" catches them by these hooks and drags them along, and then proceeds to remove the hooks one by one. As the journey continues, the Beloved pursues the dismantling process quite beyond mere hooks, and begins to take the person apart - deconstructing their ego and very sense of self. Carried through to its fullest extent, all that remains of the person in the end is a radiant heart of love, with no blocks or impediments. Pursued over extended time, gender reconciliation work bears a resemblance to this process. In its highest manifestation it becomes a path whereby the self is gradually deconstructed - disabused of false desires and identifications - and what eventually emerges is a profound capacity for universal love.

There are moments in the course of gender healing work when the veils obscuring its deeper mystery are suddenly parted and the underlying omniscient presence of the Beloved, or Spirit, or Love - the force and radiance at the core of the work - is subtly revealed. In such moments there is an inexplicable energetic shift that touches everyone present, and people are moved beyond their usual selfish attachments into a selfless, universal compassion. Each time this happens something new is given to the work, and the people involved are uplifted and changed in some way - bonded together in a shared experience of divine love.

This may sound a bit dramatic, but the experience of it is very real, and is actually quite natural and inevitable under the right conditions. There are times when the reality of a collective alchemy is palpably operative, far beyond mere New Age jargon, and the community touches into collective mystery and transformation. When this happens, the uncanny presence of Spirit or Love works through the group or community. The love is reflected in each person in the group or community, and there are particular moments when everyone present becomes aware of and inwardly connected to this love at the same time. We call these moments "diamond points" - times when there is a conspicuous Presence, an awe, a magic that everyone participates in and which moves the entire group into a shared experience of the universal heart of love. Such experiences are part of the birthright of the collective human family - when the veil is lifted and we catch a glimpse of the spiritual fire that fuels this work from "behind the scenes" and pours forth warmth and healing and radiance into everyone present. It is the fire of a love that consumes the barriers and illusions that separate us, a love that transcends all the diverse personality interactions between specific individuals. It is a deep, universal love - transcendent and immanent, refined and substantive, nurturing and numinous.

In this chapter we attempt to capture a few of these radical and transformative moments in hopes of communicating something of the power and validity of the experience. Because these moments are actually accomplished in the collective, they are shared experiences that serve as a profound inspiration for what is possible in human community and society - a bright beacon for our troubled time. These are diamond points, moments of special grace or power that no one can claim responsibility for, yet in which the Divine is most apparent, the synchronicities most baffling, and the magic most dramatically afoot.

Meltdowns: The Power of the Collective Unconscious
One of the most challenging situations that arises in gender healing work is a particular type of crisis that precipitates a systemic breakdown in the entire group process. We dub these situations "meltdowns" because in those moments there is a complete deconstruction of the group process, which morphs spontaneously from one situation or context into an entirely different one. This shift can take place quite suddenly, often within less than a couple of minutes. The scene can transform from a warm and friendly circle of people sitting listening attentively to one another to a highly charged emotional cauldron of collective grieving and anguish. Although unpredictable and often cathartic, meltdowns are frequently junctures of exceptional healing potential and spiritual power. These moments constitute auspicious opportunities for a kind of collective metamorphosis around complex gender issues that can reach archetypal proportions.

The character of meltdown experiences is virtually impossible to describe in words. They are usually intense in the moment, lasting anywhere from a quarter hour to half a day or more. Afterwards there is often a transcendent or numinous quality that leaves everyone present feeling humbled and grateful, with a palpable sense of sacred integration between human and spiritual planes of consciousness. Meltdowns are never planned or orchestrated beforehand - they cannot be; rather, they emerge from spontaneous crises. They present a significant challenge to facilitators, who must respond in the moment to the unfolding situation with intrinsic courage, trust, and respect for what emerges - coupled with a triage approach to handling the practical needs that arise in the group. The process demands a high degree of faith, skill, and sensitivity on the part of the facilitators.

Feminine and Masculine Agony
One such meltdown happened early in the morning on the fourth day of a five-day event. One of the women, Anna, shared with the group a journal entry she had written upon waking up that morning in tears from a disturbing dream. Her journal entry took the form of a "letter" she had written to the group in response to her dream and to the work we had been doing over the preceding four days.

To Whom It May Concern: I know it is unreasonable to expect others to be more healed than myself and to be less needy. I know how difficult it is to come out of myself and reach toward another. I know I need a miracle. I know I can't heal my sense of destroyed self-image alone. I cannot look into the mirror and see beauty. I've been trained to see myself as an ugly, unwantable female. I've been trained to see myself as an empty shell of a woman who holds value only as one who can articulate ideas and hold forth as an intellect. My woman's body feels dead and empty. I've been without sexual touch, without profound intimate touch, for years on end. My husband exited our relationship for reasons that spoke to me of my profound inadequacy as a woman. I felt humiliated, emptied of my last hope to be found beautiful. I lived for all those years with a man who had essentially lied to himself about his capacity to find me attractive and alluring.

I notice that when I find myself "outside the conversation," so to speak, it all caves in, and I become the woman in my dream who wants to jump off the building. I'm left with the anxiety that I might jump, instead of patiently climbing down. I'm left with the fear that I might be too old before I get down, or too something - too unattractive anyway, too overbearing, too intense, too needy, too much, just plain too much. I'm so very frightened for myself, for the part of myself that wants out so badly that I'll jump.

I'm hyper-vigilant, not just to the thought of physical attack, but to the thought of emotional attack, to humiliation, to the frustration of rejection time and time again. I'm afraid of the shattering lack of presence in the eyes of any man, the moment when I see him move inside and say, "Oh, oh, she's for real. She wants something here. She wants contact..." And then the lies begin. What I've learned in the last four days is how clearly I speak my truth. When I said I never wanted to hear lies again, when I said I need male allies who can be courageously intimate, I was saying things that are true for me. I'm relieved to see that I still have integrity.

I believe that most of the violence in my life has been emotional, the violence of nonpresence and of rejection. I've wondered why I was so angry at my mother, why she was the one who earned my rage over the fact that I nearly drowned as a child. I know now. It was because she was my last hope in that moment, my last chance to be seen. But she was checked out in her own delight at being inside the beauty loop. When you're inside it's pretty easy to be indifferent to or impatient or afraid of the outsider. When you're outside - there's nothing. I understand why all of my writing is about being outside. I understand why I'm desperate. I understand why I woke up this morning in tears. I feel like I need someone as irreverent as Zorba the Greek, who loved the old village woman because he thought it was a shame for a woman to sleep alone.

If I could have what I really wanted out of this healing opportunity, out of this kind of workshop, I'd ask for sexual healing. I'd ask for someone to help me through by loving my body and caressing me. My estrangement is specific: I feel like a monster and I'm overwhelmed by my status, afraid I'm going to jump to my death before I find my way down, knowing that, given the choice, it's better to jump than to burn - with desire or in flames. I live in awe of my own capacity to survive emotionally in the isolation I've experienced.

I say my story: I was adopted. My birth mother was nineteen and in absolute terror and shame. I was unnamed for the first three weeks of my life and then placed in a family that was unprepared. I was jerked around emotionally all through my childhood, shamed for my precocious nature. My mother believed my need to experience sexuality was her failure. She campaigned to keep that from happening. It wasn't arbitrary. It wasn't accidental. It was a strategy under which I grew up and was imprinted. It was worse than sexual abuse.

I don't know if the "memories" I see in these altered states are "real." What I do know is real is that when I was six I was abused by a pimply, weird, teenaged boy who couldn't get girls his own age to pay attention to him, so he forced my hand over his penis. What I do know is I was twice violated in the cold light of a doctor's office. I don't need to know more because I know my brother told me if he looked like me, he'd hide under a bed; that my mother said if I didn't lose weight my life would be a failure; and that my father nicknamed my first boyfriend "Horrible." Those pieces are enough. The damage is real. The sense that I belong outside the dialogue is overwhelming, and each time a man pointedly pushes me outside that dialogue for fear that he might have to deal with my desire for connection in ways he can't easily do, I am repatterned to believe the messages of my family are true.

I know I have incredible gifts to offer. I know I have courage and wisdom and the capacity to provide healing, to provide inspiration, to provide insight. I know I am talented, articulate and insightful. I know my soul is visionary and intent on participating in the leadership of this moment, but I am dislodged from that power all too often. Too often I am reduced to the rabbit, the inadequate, the womanless woman. I cannot do my work alone. Without the constant courage of my brothers and sisters, I'll starve. I need all of you to come in from the conversation you leave me out of and see how you do it - and not just for me, but for every woman who isn't beautiful in ways that fit your picture. Or you'll lose me. I'll lose myself. The planet will lose me, and my piece of the work, which is elegantly beautiful, exquisitely special, will be lost to us all. I will perish.

I thought I was writing this to my friends, but I don't know if that's really where it belongs. I think it belongs with you, God. I think that's where I want to put this - at your feet. I am your child. I am the fruit of your vine, the branch of your tree.

A deep, pregnant silence filled the room as Anna unveiled the truth of her long-hidden pain. Many were wiping tears from their eyes as she spoke. A woman in the group began to respond slowly to Anna's story, but as she spoke her voice became shaky and she collapsed into sobbing. Her sobs touched off several other women in the group, who, one by one, began to wail, or quietly weep. A wave of anguish began to spread through the group, and within a minute or two, the entire group crossed over an invisible threshold and entered into a powerful cathartic release process. Various participants entered into states of deep grieving, while others offered them support, and a few assisted the facilitators in tending to what felt like a highly charged cauldron of purging and archetypal fire.

Anna's pain was not simply her own. Her story, although personal in detail, was at its emotional core so fundamentally and broadly recognizable that it was archetypal. It articulated what Eckhart Tolle has called the collective female pain-body. Anna's words carried tremendous power because they captured the flavor of oppression and pain that women have experienced for thousands of years.

The response to Anna was by no means limited to the women in the room. The men were deeply moved, many to tears. Some were filled with grief at the painful revelations, others were distressed by personal guilt or shame, still others felt anger at being trapped in the role of oppressor. Some had experienced similar oppression themselves. The men's tears expressed their solidarity and compassion in the face of this deep pain, borne for thousands of years by all human beings living in the shadow of gender oppression.

As the energies of this collective catharsis wended their way through the community, surges of emotion rose and fell in the room like huge waves at sea, breaking now in this person, next in that person - carrying the entire group on a wild and dramatic emotional ride. Small groups were huddled around the room tending to those most affected, and as one person would come out of their deep grieving process, another would start in. The energy seemed to rise up through one or more individuals, reach a peak, and then, as it was slowly subsiding, the energy would shift and rise up again to express itself through other individuals, repeating this same process of gut-wrenching ebb and flow. In this manner the energy seemed to visit itself upon almost everyone in the group.

It was well over an hour before these waves began to decrease in intensity and then slowly dissipate. Eventually, a remarkable peace settled into the room, and people reached out to one another in compassionate kindness and loving embrace. The presence in the room became one of exquisite peacefulness and safety - deeply nourishing, richly intimate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Keepin, Ph.D., President and Executive Director. Will co-founded the Satyana Institute in 1996, and has been developing its Power of Reconciliation work since the early 1990s. His training was originally in mathematical physics, and later in transpersonal psychology and eastern meditation disciplines. Will's professional background began in environmental science. He was research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna, Austria where he became a whistleblower in a major international scientific research project that was biased to favor nuclear power. He published a full expose of this project, as resident scholar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. He subsequently became Hewlett Fellow at Princeton University, then joined the Rocky Mountain Institute, and became consulting physicist to the Energy Foundation, whose founding documents he co-authored. Will's work on global warming and renewable energy influenced international environmental policy, and he presented testimony to the Parliaments of United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and the US House of Representatives.

Will has undergone intensive training in eastern spiritual traditions, and he began leading retreats in interfaith mysticism in India in 2003. He has facilitated many experiential workshops and taught graduate courses at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Holy Names College. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Master's degrees in East-West psychology and in physics, and he completed the three-year Grof Transpersonal Training. Will has published over 30 articles and book chapters, and served as consulting editor for ReVision. He is profiled in the book The Cultural Creatives, by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson (Harmony Books, 2000).

Cynthia Brix, M.Div, MA., is the Program Director for Satyana Institute, where she co-directs Satyana's the Power of Reconciliation project. In addition to her leadership with the healing work between men and women, she provides development support for the Maher project, an interfaith shelter and resource center for battered and destitute women and children located near Pune, India. She is the former Unitarian Universalist campus minister at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Fundamental to her worldview is the value of meditation and prayer which is infuse her activism and work in social justice, gender healing, and racial harmony. A long-time student of Eknath Easwaran's Passage Meditation, Cynthia has led meditation workshops at regional and national Unitarian Universalist conferences. She also co-chaired the Race Relations Committee for the City of Muncie, Indiana, and recently developed an interfaith, multi-ethnic program to help address racial tensions at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is currently leading spiritual-service pilgrimages to India and Italy for young adults.

Cynthia earned a master's of divinity from Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado (2006) and a double master's degree in wellness management and applied gerontology from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (1999).