The dance between masculine and feminine is a natural, organic process that is happening even as this word are being read. In order to educate ourselves to understand and appreciate this dance, we must look very carefully at the increments of the continuum. Following the aikido metaphor, we ask „When I attack as uke, can I surrender my body to nage? Can I give myself as fully as possible to meet the situation?“ The real challenge is to suspend any ideas or perceived notions, to risk to being hurt, in order to gain extraordinary awareness in wich everything becomes pertinent and connected. In the moment of being we are fully absorbed and gathered into the power of the throw. Can we initiate the task? Can we move from the masculine and then suspend our ideas, surrender to not-knowing in the feminine realm, to see what kind of insight, experience, or child will come forth?

It takes training, courage, and concentration to stay right in the middle of the present. Instead, what frequently occurs is that we try to take back control of the situation and shift our attention into the future. The masculine intention, the desire to know, often overlays the feminine, the not-knowing, the mistery. The result is that the feminine aspect is cut short, or cut off altogether. A whole part of ourselves is lost, buried under knowledge. And so we lead half-lives, yearning for wholeness and satisfaction, often not understanding what is missing.

I believe that we can reclaim ourselves and learn do move back and forth between the mastery of the masculine and the mistery of the feminine. Through practice and patient training, we can become more familiar with subtleties and nuance of the dance. We can recognize the different ways of being while allowing ourselves to participate more fully. We want to develop the ability to be hard and sharp and then soft and open. When each possibility is available, both our intuition and our creative part, we can make a natural organic choice and shift in millisecond, Then in this dance anything is possible.

Wendy Palmer. The intuitive Body. Discovering the Wisdom of Conscious Embodyment and Aikido. P. 125-126.