2017: Year Of The Woman

I am woman, hear me roar / In numbers too big to ignore / And I know too much to go back and pretend / ‘Cause I’ve heard it all before / And I’ve been down there on the floor / No one’s ever gonna keep me down again. – Helen Reddy’s #1 Grammy-winning song, “I Am Woman.”

Forty-five years later, those feminist lyrics from 1972  are flagrantly apropos as we near the end of 2017: Year Of The Woman. (The video above is a wonderful reminder / history lesson.)

The scales are tipping seismically. After protests and arrests, Saudi Arabian women can start their engines now that it’s finally legal for them to drive. In droves, women in entertainment are naming names about the abuse and harassment they’ve endured, inspiring positive change in workplaces globally. And the number one action movie champ this year? Wonder Woman, with director Patty Jenkins now the highest paid director in history;  just this past week Gal Gadot has stated she will only play ‘Wonder Woman’ in the sequel if producer Brett Ratner, who is accused of sexual misconduct, is completely removed from the franchise.

This is herstory in the making. And when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington DC – a female counterinauguration after President Trump took his office January 20th – countless more women and their supporters rallied with them across the world.

We are witnessing an ascension, and will continue to, as long pent up female discord is unleashed.

But why now? What played catalyst to the meteoric rise of female dominance now underway?

From a spiritual perspective we can look back to the evening of Tuesday November 8th, 2016. That night, Hillary Clinton lost her bid to become the first female US Presidency – to a man who, for countless people, is perfect figurehead for what is commonly believed by them to be all that’s wrong in the world.

And while even Donald Trump himself seemed shocked and stunned, Clinton’s defeat could be no other way. Her loss had to happen, to unleash the shock and anger and “enough is enough” within women that is now spurring a betterment shift towards a world nurtured by the matriarchy.

Greater than what Clinton alone could ever accomplish, this energy, borne a little less than a year ago, is the energy that creates worlds.

My Ottawa-based friend Stacey Broder is a writer and thought leader on the subject of masculine and feminine energy, helping people who feel disconnected move through that by understanding their energetic DNA; we each possess both male and female energy to some degree, she says.

Broder feels that a President Hillary Clinton, because she possesses more masculine energy than feminine – “like Athena in Greek mythology” – would not have broken the patriarchy the way we are seeing it shattered now. “We would have been satisfied that she / we broke a glass ceiling, but then it would have been business as usual.”

Instead, hear united women – and the men with higher, evolved, feminine energies who get it – roar. Clinton’s defeat takes us to the beginnings of the end of the patriarchy – a “we’re not going to take it anymore” era.

“This is the death of the masculine, a new age,” says Broder. “Patriarchy has been so indoctrinated in our society. We’ve lived and breathed it without knowing how insidious it has been to our lives. It’s been who we were and what we did.”

“What we need is a return to love,” I say to Broder in our gab session. “Which most of us have never had in our lives as dominant energy.”

“And do you know what the opposite of “patriarchy” is? Broder asks. “It’s not “matriarchy.” It’s what you just said: It’s love. The whole world needs healing, and the only way that is going to happen is from the nurturing loving energy of women and men with feminine energy. That’s what this entire year has been about.”