How to Avoid the Negatives of Masculine and Feminine Energy

“Any strength taken to extreme becomes a negative.”

This wise aphorism captivated my students’ back when I trained corporate groups to understand their own and their teammates’ personality styles, so they could more effectively connect across those gaps, communicate, and work together. When I run Into those people decades later, they remember the principles I taught them, and that’s very rewarding!

Two examples: A dominant and risk tolerant personality serves a CEO well. But indulged to extremes those very strengths turn into liabilities: dictatorship and reckless risks.

The “steady, stable” personality type is a vital team player, but what is the extreme end of stable? Rigidity! So set in their ways that they can’t flex, adapt, and change with the situation.

When I evolved from corporate work into full time spiritual teaching and mentoring twenty years ago, I found that the handy mantra “any strength taken to extreme becomes a negative” applies to almost everything.

For the word negative you could substitute liability, weakness, or disadvantage.

Other than the subject of “toxic masculinity” there’s not much online about how “extremes become negatives” with masculine and feminine energies. To fill this gap I’ll share with you my four decades of observing this in action.

First I want to celebrate that feminine energy is valued increasingly more in the world, at least in civilized countries, softening and balancing the masculine energy. Progress may seem slow, but it’s happening.

More and more women are recognizing the exhaustion that results from having to always “go out and get it” (which is masculine.) They long to receive more just by attracting it and allowing it to come to them (that’s classic feminine.)

Women get worn down by the driven, uber-focused, mental, competitive ethos of the masculine world than men do. Women aren’t naturally built for it like men are, although many of of have adapted to it out of necessity. We had to if we wanted to thrive in the masculine business world.

Women (and occasionally men!) come to me to learn how to embody more of their feminine energy. They learn how to soften into emotions, stop letting the mind dominate so much of their energy, and move their energy down from their heads into their bodies.

As we balance our masculine and feminine energies, it’s helpful to realize that both masculine and feminine qualities can be taken to negative extremes.

I call if the positive and negative poles of masculine and feminine. Aim to avoid the negative poles of each energy, and grow toward the positive poles.

A few examples of how feminine energies can be positive or go to the negative extreme: