Talk offered by teachers Laura O’Loughlin and Sebene Salassie during a two-day retreat at Brooklyn Zen Center. The retreat, Reclaiming the Feminine in Our Practice, included silent and relational practices in stillness and in movement to explore the impact of patriarchy on our bodies, minds and hearts and what it means to reclaim the feminine in our practice and in our sanghas.

To start, [we need to] make this distinction between the sacred feminine and what we might call the social feminine. The sacred feminine we’re talking about is all of us, regardless of gender. It’s archetypal, it’s energetic – these are elemental qualities. The social feminine is something that is affected by the sacred feminine but it’s really the social phenomena of gender and, particularly, the relationship of women and female-identified people with what is the feminine.