When Dana asked me to write about my experience as a man with the Divine Feminine, I was thrilled, then nervous as a chicken passing through the shadow of an axe. Like a lot of men I know, I’m the product of centuries of negative imprinting. We’ve been taught to be brutal, determined, silent, and emotionally unavailable. For me, it’s been a long, painful, and exhilarating process to even begin to unlearn such training, and I have only been able to do so with the powerful guidance of a woman who embodies the Divine Feminine.

She demands nothing less than absolute devotion. I’ve had to learn how to listen, to love as meditation, to give her what she wants, not what I think she wants.

Time and again in my ongoing training, I’m reminded of an ancient story in which a good king is charged by a conqueror to discover what it is that a woman truly desires. He is given a year to find the answer or forfeit his lands and life. Relentlessly, the king travels the world interviewing everyone he meets. People tell him that a woman most wants money, power, love, or solitude. The king knows in his heart that none of these are correct, and he approaches his foe’s castle with a feeling of hopelessness. But on his last night on the road, he meets a hideous looking woman who promises to tell him the correct answer if he’ll promise to grant her wish. The king agrees, of course, and the hag (who will soon become a beautiful woman) tells him the correct answer. A woman wants her will to have its way.

When that happens, beauty awakens and men are liberated from their evil intentions. Working towards this awareness, I wrote this poem.

If Only Men Truly Listened

If only men truly listened
To everything their women say.

I said, if only men truly listened
To everything their women say,

Maybe they’d be liberated
From the heartbreaking way

Their fathers distanced
Themselves from a woman’s eye

That watched and waited
Patiently with hardly a sigh

For any sign that he’d awakened
To her power and majesty,

Like falling to his knees, humbled,
Then looking up at her to pray.