Giving the Unknown a Home

Three women explore the qualities of the feminine together, to consider its significance for our times. In the process, they encounter the qualities of the masculine. Two beings appear in the conversation between Joan Sleigh, Laura Liska, and Gilda Bartel and reveal how they belong together, essentially and inextricably, in human beings.

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Gilda: In your work with groups and social projects, what might you consider to be a typical feminine quality that is especially needed today?

Joan: In my experience, a feminine quality makes sure that the surrounding atmosphere is conducive to what we’re doing, to what we’re trying to shape today in this conversation. I do it for the simple reason that I can’t do it any other way. I hold the feminine within me. I carry that in my being, and I embody it. That means in my work with people and groups, I’m always aware of the whole situation—seeing the detail and the atmosphere, the emergent space, being inclusive, and ensuring that people don’t get left out. If I’m chairing a meeting, I always ask one of my colleagues to help me, to check that I’m not missing the beat, not missing something that wants to be said. I think those are all feminine qualities.

Another feminine quality is stepping back and allowing a process to happen, even if I would do it differently. It means participating in somebody else’s process without interfering: letting the process be and being part of it, not stepping out of it but not stepping into the center either. That’s quite new for me—holding a space which is not my space and yet still holding and standing witness to somebody else’s process.

Laura: Why do you think we consider these qualities “feminine?”

Joan: I think it has to do with not needing to stand in one’s ego. But it’s not stepping out of one’s ego or sidelining one’s initiative or directionality. It’s not stepping away from giving direction, and it’s not stepping in to initiate something—it’s more like expanding through that into something greater. It asks: what else is there apart from my impulse and what I can do?

Why is that feminine? I don’t know, except I have an image of the womb that creates a space which can hold much more than one dimensionality. I think we are all multidimensional, and I think we can embody that. And I don’t mean women, I mean the feminine. Many men living in masculine bodies have feminine aspects, particularly in their souls. So it’s not just female or woman—it’s like a quality of expanded selfhood.

Laura: The capacity or desire to hold the space, to accommodate, to notice how people are feeling, to keep it harmonious—as a feminine quality—is this natural to women? Or is this something we strive for and have to learn, whether we’re a woman or not?

Joan: That’s an interesting question because what is natural? Is it the ancestral heritage I’m born with? I’m born with very little, I think. I develop and shape who I am. I’m born with never-ending potential, but I embody and am shaped by my surroundings and experiences. So, I was definitely born with the potential for the feminine, but not with the capacity of it. The capacity has developed through my lived experience, through being a single mother of four children, through living in Camphill, through holding difficult assumptions and biases, through living in troublesome social situations here in South Africa which are very diverse and dramatic at times, and through needing to hold space and to create spaces of safety and inclusion.

Sacred Hospitality

Gilda: In Europe, I think we still characterize this feminine quality as just being about women and feelings and wanting to “talk about our feelings.” But the Earth is dying, the social processes are spoiled, and no one trusts each other: we need something different. Our society doesn’t value this feminine quality. A consciousness of why we would need it hasn’t been developed yet. Why is that?

Joan: The world of organizations and businesses knows that we can’t sustain the systems we have constructed. A maximum-profit economy can’t work anymore. Even sustainability is outdated: we know we can’t sustain, for example, the way we have exploited natural resources without replenishing them. We need a radical change in paradigm and mindset. There’s a lot of work being done now in the social realm towards creating conversational spaces. A conversational space is more than a space of dialogue: it’s a space of sacred hospitality, where people can feel empowered to find their voice and also allow something to speak through them. Does this add to your question of why women can’t find their voice, and it’s put down to wanting to express their feelings?

In our culture, we are expected to be stable and capable and to achieve and produce whatever we have signed up to do. We’re expected to be accountable, and we expect that of ourselves, don’t we? Well, maybe in Europe and in the West, mental health is not as dire as it is in other places. The mental health issues in South Africa are huge. Everybody talks about being traumatized, and everything is traumatizing or threatening. Fear, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addictive behaviour are rampant. It’s very difficult to hold sovereignty, to maintain inner calm, and spaces where we can think and dialogue without feeling rattled and stressed. I see that with my students. Lots of young people here are hypersensitive and fragile. They are looking for something new; they bring new creative capacities, but at the same time, they struggle to hold themselves in their bodies, minds, and presence.

Gilda: So, do we need to appreciate the feminine more? Is it necessary to develop a concept of the feminine? Or is it already part of the change to not ask for that any longer but to come into the doing of it?

Joan: The analytical, scientific attempt to find meaning, to have all the information, to denote the definition of everything—to define what is feminine and what is not—isn’t that all part of an old mindset? It’s important to seek meaning and information, but that’s only the beginning, the basis of things. The feminine mind needs to step in and say, “That was the framework. Now comes the integration, which means living within it.” We all need to stand in and hold the unknown. Is the feminine aspect better able to hold that tension? Can we sustain ourselves within the discomfort and troublesome realities of life? We’ve got to be daring and troublesome ourselves.

Laura: Wild and wicked?

Joan: (laughing) Wild and wicked and beautiful! You know, we’ve caused all this habitat destruction through the way we are misusing the resources of the natural world. We need to create outer sacred spaces: a forest or an untouched meadow, like they do at the Goetheanum. They don’t mow everything there; they create habitats for protecting plants and insects and birds. I believe we also need to design and facilitate such soul-spiritual spaces. In our society, we’ve got habitat destruction in the soul and spiritual meeting places.

Living with these wild, wicked, and beautiful life forces, that’s nature. That’s life! And life is unpredictable and difficult to grasp. And it is beautiful and abundant. The feminine is like a life force, and that’s key for our time. We’ve got to immerse ourselves in life. We’ve got to become gentle, open, and intuitive. And we’ve got to realize: I can’t do this on my own. As long as you and I are still saying, “You’ve got to recognize what I can bring and give me space, so I can be who I am,” we are still stuck in the physical, the visible. Potential and abundance lie in the living substance of processes, of rhythms, cycles, and continuous transformation. We call these the etheric forces. There, we mingle with totally other beings, other thoughts, other dimensions, and other means. The world can’t do without these anymore. Ask your daughters and sons—they know. Some of the new generation are fragile and confused and struggling to hold structure or accountability or live up to our expectations, but they are longing and striving and open for other dimensions. How do we not interrupt their process but frame and hold a stable space where they can struggle until they find their direction?

A Different Kind of Participation

Laura: So, an aspect of the feminine is what our bodies know to do, as women, when making babies. I’m not saying that feminine qualities are for women, but that there’s a body-level wisdom and understanding of what it means to make space, hold the uncertain, and nurture the unknown. Isn’t this in the Earth herself? But if we are going to embody and engage the feminine ourselves, with conscious awareness, then we need to appreciate these feminine qualities in context—they don’t exist in isolation or abstraction but in relationship. Where do we find them in the world? I guess that most of us long for a sense of belonging and participation, a sense of being welcomed and appreciated. Our outer world has plenty of standards that acknowledge and value people based on action and achievement. Stepping back and holding space—is this a different kind of participation? Do we value it as much as our activities in the world of achievement?

Joan: Yes, the feminine needs to be recognized. It needs to be honoured and given space. If we’re living in that unpredictable life dimension where we don’t know how things will turn out, then there needs to be space for deceleration to hold the unknown. And that isn’t the case, for instance, in most of our meetings where we’ve got deadlines, got to finish this, got to decide and accomplish that. We actually need to say “Slow down! Let’s stop for a moment and breathe. Let’s listen to what is really wanted and needed.” That means turning it around and opening it up, so it’s not just one-directional.

Gilda: But it happens. Sometimes there is a deadline, and I feel like I need to be the one to push to get it done. Sometimes I need to be the mother and make sure the homework is finished, make dinner, and get everyone in bed. Am I—are we—allowed to live these feminine qualities, in daily life?

Joan: The resilience that you talk about when managing a dozen things at the same time sounds like crisis management. Who’s holding the responsibility? When the fire hits the forest, we all respond. In most indigenous African traditions, the women do the physical work. They cook the food, till the soil, plant the vegetables, gather the fruit, and so on. And the men go hunting. It’s a completely different mode of action and interaction. So, in a way, holding space also provides the possibility of multi-tasking or crisis management—the agility to respond to multiple demands.

Laura: Does this call on a new capacity—a different level of awareness? Not just “get it done” or just “stop and listen to what’s wanted”, but a discernment of whether to go with one or the other at any moment. So I’m no longer being “feminine” or “masculine,” I’m the movement, the flexibility that allows and integrates both qualities? That would mean we absolutely need both, that the masculine and the feminine are essential and inseparable, in the world outside us as well as within each of us.

Gilda: That would also mean having a connection on both a “vertical” and a “horizontal” horizon. If I can still breathe in the chaotic situation, which is simply the life-creating processes, it opens up a sphere of potential for the spiritual to create into our daily life and biographical age.

Joan: I wonder whether it’s possible for a mature feminine, a Sophia being, to live in both at the same time. In other words, to manage a situation without losing the inner calm and connectedness which makes it possible to breathe through the chaos—to manage a crisis without becoming part of the crisis? I don’t know if that’s possible, but I like to imagine that it is.

Threshold Thinking

Joan: In my leadership development studies, I came across something called “Threshold Concepts.” There are research papers on integrative, complex thinking that describe threshold concepts or threshold thinking as integrated, unpredictable, irreversible, and troublesome. I believe these are feminine qualities, and when you start thinking like that, you can’t go back—you can’t go back to simplistic thinking. It’s irreversible, like a kind of birth process. Could this be part of developing that different level of awareness, the kind of expanded focus that you suggested?

Laura: What does this threshold thinking look like?

Joan: Rudolf Steiner’s way of thinking offers numerous examples. One of these is his motif of the free human being. In writing about Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, Andrew Welburn said, “the human being knows that he can do and suffer—what, he knows not till he tries.” That’s a threshold thought reflecting Steiner’s thinking. It takes you straight into a meta dimension which, I believe, can be grasped with feminine qualities. It’s integrative, troublesome, irreversible, and unpredictable, as well as beautiful and wild.

Laura: That’s wonderful. It seems that poetry is threshold thinking.

Gilda: Twilight is also a threshold. I’m not quite awake yet, or still dreaming, but I already have a consciousness of something, and I am able to give space and hold what I might not know yet, but which arrives at that threshold moment. Is it possible that threshold thinking is Sophia thinking? Sophia as a feminine being, able to create the “body” for consciousness of what is appearing: an idea or an image of something. It’s a process of incarnating. But if threshold thoughts are Sophia thoughts, what would be the masculine complement?

Joan: These are beautiful thoughts and questions. It seems that Anthroposophy is based primarily on the impulse of Michael, but always in relation to the universal cosmic being of Christ. What is Michaelic thinking? And how might Sophianic and Michaelic thinking work together? It’s interesting and inspiring to hear you describe it: it seems that going through twilight or through poetry with Sophia thinking-feeling is akin to an incarnating or birth process. It’s asking to manifest, and it can only become real through an embodied experience. Michael doesn’t incarnate. Michael gazes and witnesses with earnest intention and participation from a space beyond visible reality. He isn’t wild like women. He’s a silent, yet fully engaged observer—a witness. If that’s the transformed masculine, it doesn’t incarnate, it doesn’t embody, but it holds context, purpose, and potential. It’s like our higher self, which doesn’t incarnate. Does it hold the context, purpose, and potential of what we might one day be?

In this sense, one part carries the principle of creation—holding and embracing the unknown. Fear can be an integral part of the process of creating: coming through the twilight into an unknown and as yet unimaginable future. We can do and suffer, what for, we don’t know, until we try. That’s will, that’s engagement, that’s creation. It’s a continuous creating. And how might we describe the other part: light, wisdom, being-ness?

Laura: Truth? A penetrating gaze that illuminates or shines forth what’s true? Sophia is in the wild, the embracing, and the generative. Michael is in the stillness and the witnessing. Warmth and light?

Gilda: That we can talk about Sophia at all is only possible because someone is outside—a woman or a man—gazing at her. There must be a consciousness of what is possible for the ‘I’: the possibility of realizing that I am realizing, of looking at myself, even in my Sophia qualities. It’s an authority within me that I can go to and be able to look from the outside.

Joan: I understand this as a quality of the consciousness soul: the possibility of stepping out of myself, separating a part of myself from myself, to look, observe, and perceive another part of myself. That “separating within oneself” quality is apparently quite new. If we’re seeing that as a masculine quality of the soul, then it is separating out, but only so that it can be appreciated as being an integral part. So in a way, we’re coming back to the comment that, actually, we need both; we cannot separate them. Creating and reflecting—Sophia and Michael together—could this be what we are doing? We can’t go out and change the world. We can’t even go out and give advice because any change today needs to be personal, free, and from the inside out. For this, we need others to witness our actions and perceptions. And I believe we also need to host the Michaelic and Sophianic beings within our hearts—another form of sacred hospitality.

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This article is part of a series of conversations that explore qualities of the feminine to bring them into greater conscious awareness and to consider how they might help in addressing the needs of our current world situations.

Joan Sleigh was born and raised in a Camphill community in South Africa. She was a member of the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach (2013-2020) and leader of the World Social Initiative Forum (WSIF). With a background in Waldorf education and teaching, Joan currently consults in teacher training, adult self-development, and authentic leadership practices. She co-founded OASA, the Online Academy for Social Art, and is the managing director for the Centre for Creative Education in Cape Town.

Illustrations by Sibylle Reichel
Sibylle Reichel is a field researcher specializing in dialogue. As an artist, she creates prints and drawings on freely chosen themes or employs graphic recording techniques to visualize the thought processes emerging from group discussions, lectures, and academic texts. Her exploration of how in-between spaces are created and designed brings her career full circle, reconnecting her with her foundational training as an architect. More at Sibylle Reichel.