I’m lying on the beach – in the Cyprus sun. White sand, turquoise-blue sea. I close my eyes, listen to the rhythmic movements of the sea waves, feel gentle wind on my face. Just yesterday I heard myself thinking: I have arrived in my dream life. My future begins right now. Nothing has to be different any more. I live in a beautiful place, I am surrounded by kind-hearted people and I can pursue a job that makes both me and other people happy every day.
All of this comes to me all at once, combined with a feeling of bliss, deep gratitude and humility before life that it has given me so richly.
What actually brought me here, I ask myself silently. Was it my education, was it the years of investigative work with the criminal police, was it the strategies I developed and implemented again and again, was it the numbers, data, facts of my company?
Yes and no – because that alone certainly did not lead me to this place, to the place of my destiny. I could have done all that I have done to date in a completely different way and would certainly have ended up at a different point in my life. I might have remained a civil servant and still been in Berlin, from which I had long since been flooded with stimuli. All the things I have ever done, I have done out of conviction, with dedication, passion and love. Above all, I have often done things that seemed irrational from an objective point of view, but were completely in line with my intuition. Over the years, my results have proven me right time and again that I was on the right path, namely MY path. Even if this sometimes looked different from some points of view. So what was it that led me to my full potential and lasting fulfilment? Correct: the feminine principle. So not exclusively the “what” but more the “how”.
For me, the feminine principle encompasses the deep dimensions of intuition, feeling people and situations and giving away one’s own energies without expecting anything in return. For me, the feminine principle and femininity are the desire to make people happy, to bring communities together and to be able to put one’s own interests to the back in the sense of a common cause. Consideration, decency, access to one’s own inner world of experience, the ability to let things happen and to open up unbelievably creative inner spaces which, in connection with the outer world, can give rise to miracles. Creativity. Healing. Giving birth to the new.
These are just a few impulses I find today to explain what femininity means to me. Femininity that is present in all of us – both women and men – and yet we women are the ambassadors of femininity.
We should be able to agree on that. But: What does all this have to do with economic success, serious stability, orientation and lasting fulfilment? This connection is far from obvious.
That’s why it has taken me what feels like decades of my life to understand on a holistic level how the threads come together here. But once understood, it seems so clear and obvious to me that I can hardly understand how these insights could have remained outside my consciousness for so long. I’m sure many others feel the same way.
Femininity as a survival factor
Let’s start from the beginning: We humans are social beings and a species that differs from other species by these striking characteristics: We have the ability to feel multi-faceted emotions and we have a creative mind that can create, perceive and change worlds through our highly complex consciousness. Through our ability to communicate, we are able to exchange and connect with each other. At the same time, we can pass on knowledge from generation to generation and thus collectively evolve as the whole of humanity. In evolutionary terms, it is almost inconceivable what progress humans have achieved within a few centuries and have taken over dominance over all life forms on earth, measured against the existence of the earth.
If we look at it in its entirety, it is really hard to believe. We humans have our diversity of thought, our wealth of ideas and especially the male principle to thank for this. Because the male principle ensures that thoughts are implemented, houses are built, bridges are existent and aeroplanes are put into the air. The masculine principle, which structures, tackles, implements and at the same time safeguards, is one of the most important driving forces of human progress. At least on the surface – because the masculine principle produces results that are visible, measurable and tangible for all. It has been celebrated for centuries, and not without reason, and is reflected in almost all social structures and documented in history.
And yet this is only half the truth. Because part of the truth is also: without the feminine principle, the masculine would not exist at all. The feminine acts – as is its nature – predominantly nurturing, life-giving and continuity-oriented in the background, without taking itself seriously. These three perspectives alone are eye-opening, I think:
Biology
Because, let’s start with biology: women give birth to and shape all of humanity. Every single person on our planet was born to a woman and usually accompanied into life by her. One of the most important people in life for most of us is our mother. Regardless of whether we have or had a loving or a non-loving mother – she has a decisive influence on our value system, on our ability to bond, on our feeling for life and even on the course of our lives. This establishes a truly existentially supporting role of women for humanity.
Society
Let’s move on to the social role of women: In our own homes, it is still predominantly women who ensure that everyone is healthy and sufficiently satiated, provided for and emotionally nourished so that men and children can reach their full creative potential. Most women around the world still perform this role with a deep, inner self-evidence, the scope of which most of us are not even remotely aware of.
Working world
And finally, let’s look at the world of work: Here, too, women predominantly contribute to the survival of people by disproportionately choosing poorly paid jobs in the social sector.Both the care of old and severely impaired people, medical care as a nurse or caregiver and many other serving and supporting jobs often fall to women. Every person – whether woman or man – grows old, ill and often in need of care. Here, too, women contribute disproportionately often to the survival of people, without the value of these important tasks being even remotely recognised – socially, let alone by the women themselves.
Strictly speaking: Women, with their predominantly sacrificial role in the background, ensure the survival of humanity as a whole.
Femininity also means bonding ability
Equally, we can state at this point that we humans are social beings by nature and bonds are at the heart of our survival and health. We come into being through the bond of father and mother, we grow up within bonds and our survival even depends on the bond of our attachment figures to us in the first years of life. We experience separations as physical pain and loneliness even shortens life according to recent studies. Babies who are not touched and thus do not experience attachment die (the Nazis found this out with dubious methods, as we all know…). We may agree at this point that everything social, human and bonding is not a small side issue or an area that may end up on the sidelines, poorly paid, but that our bonding capacity – both the highly personal and our collective – actually ensures the survival of us all.
And, what is bonding capacity based on? That’s right. Predominantly by the feminine principle, which both men and women carry within them. Our bonds are shaped by feelings, by experience, by the expression and sharing of our inner world and the resulting behaviours, which in the best case promote togetherness and community. So this means that bonding only works with feelings.
Women and men have feelings equally, and yet how they deal with them is very different. While men often see their emotions as a nuisance and therefore often banish them from many areas of life, they interrupt their natural flow and are thus often confronted with aggression and anger in a rather one-sided way instead of their multifaceted nature. Women, on the other hand, are more willing to express their feelings, to verbalise them, to share them and to keep a continuous introspection. In intimate relationships and families, it is often women who are responsible for the peace and salvation of all involved. Often silently, without everyone even being aware of it. Women who are connected to their femininity often create the cohesion and well-being in families, groups or teams. They provide the warmth. In my opinion, this social aspect is still widely underestimated and yet it is precisely this aspect that leads to whole societies and systems benefiting from the contribution of women – not to say that it even ensures their survival. And this even without us even knowing it. At the same time, women are often exploited: structurally, emotionally, financially, sexually. After 20 years of working with women, I even have to say: precisely BECAUSE we all have not yet recognised the vital and valuable part of women – first and foremost the women themselves.
That’s why I think it’s long past time to wake up collectively. We may become aware of this right now and shape a new society. But that should only be a side note here, so as not to lead away from the topic. More on this elsewhere.
The feminine principle as a guarantee for success
This still doesn’t answer the question of what the feminine principle actually has to do with success and fulfilment. Right. The feminine principle establishes our access to our intuition and a kind of “higher knowledge” that largely eludes our cognitive thinking. Our subconscious mind grounds 80-90% of our perceptual capacity, while only 10-20% ends up in our thinking and understanding consciousness (iceberg model). So if we assume that the feminine makes use of the wisdom of the subconscious, then it is obvious that women often know and sense things that are beyond our understanding and words.
But now we have a problem: we live in a world that celebrates the masculine principle. Numbers, dates, facts count and everything that can be measured. Everything in the realm of feelings, which can be very fluid, tends to be ridiculed, trivialised or simply ignored. In the worst case, it is even interpreted as weakness. Yet it is precisely these social competencies, which make up our ability to bond, that allow us humans to survive on the one hand and to develop our abilities on the other. And this is precisely the key to success. For if we know, on the one hand, that our subconscious knows so much more than our thinking mind, then it is also obvious that, coupled with the wisdom of our intuition, much more well-founded and sustainable decisions can be made than purely “head decisions”. On the other hand, good relationships, networks and mutual trust are absolute success factors. Because when we have people around us with whom we are in trusting relationships, things become possible that we could not pay for with money alone or think up in our minds. And for that, “soft skills” are in demand. The decisive competitive advantage today has long been called: WE-Q instead of I-Q. And by that I don’t mean a purely factual approach to networks and connections, but one that is geared towards sympathy, trust and bonding. For it alone establishes genuine feelings of fulfilment and thus our quality of life.
In summary, then, we can state: Feelings belong to all people – to women as well as men – and therefore, in my view, they also urgently belong in our public life, in companies and in politics. Wherever realities of life are shaped for people, positive energies and humanity should prevail – which means as much as: Feelings are allowed and welcome.
And not just as a “commodity” and a means to an end. But as exactly what they are there for from the point of view of evolution: To connect us in a healthy and natural way, to create real belonging and connection. To enable exchange of experience, growth and information sharing. So behind all this – all the innovation in the world – the feminine principle is still largely unnoticed.
And this is what I have predominantly used to make my big and small life decisions, interact with people and build my projects, as I know now. Sometimes I have taken a new direction and at that moment had few arguments for my change of direction. Much later, however, they have miraculously opened up and proved to be absolutely right. I had known that it felt “right” and “coherent” for me. To this day, I can not only say that I stand fully behind everything I have ever decided, but that all my decisions and courses of action have also carried me exactly to where I want to be today. And that is right here, in this place. Into my full potential and also beyond material success into deep fulfilment. And, what is most beautiful about it: my heart’s mission also serves the well-being of many other people in whose lives I am allowed to make a real difference today. THAT is true success for me.
