I’m going to dive off the bizarre topic of my sudden urge to rewatch “Sex and the City” this week…not because I’m so fascinated by the TV program but from the perspective of the lay quantum historian that I always tend to be on the quiet. I’m quite fascinated by the subject material (and its not so “fluffy” as you might think…the scripts are often pretty astute and invariably amusing) of this long-running series from the point of view of when it occurred and why, at the time, I so strongly connected with it…and now the revisit. I’m going to add, there’s not one iota of the intellectual (or even spiritual!) snob in me to trip me up or determine (that word again…) whether I “should or should not” talk about such piffle. As ever, I’m just wide open and curious as to what brought me back here, and what it tells me about myself and my relationship with “the feminine” over the last two to three decades, which has been a seminal time for that long displaced aspect to start singing its song more loudly in our world.

Because, let’s not forget when that program (and likely others like it) was devised right on top of the turn of the millennium, on the fast-flowing tail winds of the eighth wave activating (for that quantum holographic reference point, search for all my other tagged posts on Dr Carl Calleman’s “Nine Waves of `Creation” book and theory). If, and I believe it did, the feminine aspect came more healthily “back” into the picture of our three-dimensional reality, after eons of cultural alienation, during the 90s and into the millennium, what would it look like on our TV sets; would it look a lot like this homage to handbags and sexual liberation? And how did I respond to it at the time, what did I find so relatable?

Well, at that time I found it hugely relatable. I was the same age-group as its four main female characters….and whilst I was considerably less driven by multiple sexual conquests or Manolo shoes, I had this in common with them….a trait I notice across all of the revisited episodes…sheer, almost feral, determination.

Whatever the situation back then, I brought that very quality to its table…vascilating wildly from the abject trivial to the life-dependent yet it was all the same, I was the most determined person I knew to the point it almost defined me (perhaps in its way, it still does…the core material of this blog as I have waded my way through the subsequent years of bewildering health challenges).

In fact, I really needed it, being the stage of my life when I “had” to be much more career-minded, money focused, social and seen. Over the time phase I was watching S&TC I threw a big wedding, had a child, got divorced, ran a small business, changed jobs more than once, worked for a big corporate, dressed to kill, bought and sold houses, shopped till I dropped, went out (a lot) to restaurants, bars and parties…and all that stuff. All the time, strongly suspecting that none of us were doing these things the way they had been done in the 60s, 70s or even 80s, certainly not the way our mothers did it. We were doing it anew in some uniquely female-oriented way that shouted “I’m determined, get out of my way”. Whether it was the determination to get that “thing” we had our eye on or to survive post-divorce and against all the odds, it was always there, that word…that quality…and we weren’t dialling it down any more, as previous generations had. It was no longer gender suicide to show this quality off or lead with it, no longer this “behind every successful man there’s a determined woman…stood politely in the shadows” thing and I liked this reflected back at me by S&TC. It bolstered my own determination and drive, just when I most needed it. Perhaps I need it again now, hence my revisit!

The program is a giant waving flag to the reality that women have material desires and aspirations too and this isn’t wrong, we just go about it a different way compared to most men. Whether in pursuit of the next orgasm, a pair of shoes, a career progression or a brand new house, we have that intense desire burning holes in us and its allowed, its not flawed or counter feminine to be so. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is exactly feminine; we are that quality, even when a man feels it driving his own aspirations (lets remember that yin and yang are not gender unique but partnered aspects in all of us).

Let’s look at that word “determination” again. According to the Oxford dictionary, it’s “the quality that makes you continue trying to do something even when this is difficult” and it can be fierce, even dogged, holding on to the last. Then there is the word “determine” at its core – to set the intention for something to happen, from the root de – “off” plus “terminare” from terminus “end, limit”; to mark the end or boundary. Its like a way of declaring “enough is enough” to a situation as you set about making a new intention.

In a nutshell, this is what the feminine aspect was doing at that millenial juncture in our collective history, in all its forms and inside of us all, regardless of gender. Very good timing, since it was going to take a renaissance of sheer determination to get us through the next few decades, especially the times we are in now – so, back then we were just starting to cut our teeth for the main event yet to come.

If you boil down the plotline of most of the episodes, they pivot on the need to renegotiate the feminine’s relationship with the masculine. Not because it is all powerful and knowing (far from it, as shown) but because, without some sort of understanding arising between feminine “determination” and masculine “reality”, nothing much seems to change, whether that masculine aspect is played-out as a particular mate, a career ceiling or a rigid internal quality that undermines or seals off the most determined feminine flow.

Like a river that hits against a heavy rock fall, determination will still get there in the end, eroding away at the blockage, but that can take eons…or, with that uber-feminine quality that determination is so well-known for, it can find another way around, forge a brand new path, to continue its journey back to the sea. This is where we, collectively, are now…needing to adapt and forge new routes, to pick “determined and swift” over slowly chiselling away at the most obstinately resistant and sealed-off old ways, in order to get back to our collective wholeness. Women (as the embodiment of the feminine aspect in gender-expressed form) know how to do this; we were trained in it across all the thousands of years that we were met by so many intractable man-made obstacles!

We get there by setting off on that round-about route, doing it for ourselves, and never mind that curious others may notice us headed off in that direction and be inspired to try that route, or some other new route, themselves because we deviated…but, in our way, we become change makers, by example. Then we always got there in the end, because that’s just how derermined we are (we don’t stop till we drop), and now we remember this about ourselves we can set about doing that all the quicker, when we lean into our best qualities like never before (rather than bashing our heads repeatedly on piles of heavy boulders that have been trying to block our way for eons). Not by trying to be more masculine than the men (that never works out in the plotline…) but by doing what we do best…determining what has our most lit-up and sparkling attention held, thus realising what we most aspire to, then flowing towards it in a most determined way.

Those four women in the “story” get what they go after in the end, even when they have to do it for themselves until everyone else catches on. When they isolate their desire, that far-flung intention they want to go after, and screw all the obstacles, they get there, no apologies, a message I needed really needed to hear about, repeatedly, in my 30s (to undo all that cultural training of my childhood) and it delivered, in spadeloads.

One other thing that really can’t go unnoted…its about a group of women friends, all of them very different to one another, bonded together by virtue of their zest and quest for (their own particualar version of) authentic life. Its real, its gritty and yes their solidarity and acceptance of each other is palpable, through thick and thin. I used to know something like that, before health issues isolated me from all but the most stalwart and most friendships turned “virtual”. I’ve known what its like to have flesh-and-blood “drop everything” female friends show up on my doorstep or sweep me off somewhere in a crisis and I could use that back in my life at some point. You could say, I’m still determined to include it on my mental vision board for my future experience, even though its eluded me for so long.

Where does all that leave me today. I explored the same territory, during the same era, as those four women did…doing the liberated woman in a wine bar thing, the “career’, the clothes (the best dressed, if quirky, woman on my floor I was once told…and perhaps I did have a touch of the Sarah Jessica’s about me as I scooted around in my boho-vintage put togethers), the big mortgage, grabbing life by the balls and speaking my mind. What happened? Around 2007, it imploded (with my health…as it did for so many women of my generation, I notice…perhaps testament to how far we had leapt in such a short time!) and, “puff”, it all seemed to disappear overnight.

What does that say about those initial yin-yang renegotiations of the millennium? Well, inside this gal, its as though the feminine turned in on itself, which was necessary at the time of my collapse but is never a sustainable situation for a person wanting to remain viable in flesh and blood (the non-negotiable materials of 3D). It was as if I bagged up all my previous aspirations, like so many shoes I no longer had occasion to wear, and tried to forget about them. From now on, my determination was mostly acquisitioned for my health and my spiritual growth, for the next few years, so it became desperately inward looking and, in its way, went back underground unless you count my determination to share the fruits of my progress with the outside world through writing about it.

The result is an overly yin state (health that is fluid, to the point of highly unreliable in the outside world and a remarkable lack of commitment or structure relating to anything external) held up by as many yang circumstances as it takes to maintain a degree of predictability and routine. So, a collaboration of sorts…but true health only occurs when both yin and yang share the same house together, side by side, in matters both inward focussing and outward manifesting, both of which are important. Never mind whether you are introverted or extroverted, there are always ways we can put out into the world that don’t offend an introverted nature and I have come to realise just how important those are over the last couple of years of so (and am determined to develop them further).

For a long time, its as though I was waiting for outside circumstances to be better placed to meet my health restrictions before I stepped back out into them; now, I have learned something important…that we tend to do better when the yin and yang step out there together, as it were, hand-in-hand (a much more “ninth wave” way of approaching things too, rather than one “side” always waiting for the other to make the first move). Important to register that the ninth wave (search by tag to explore Dr Carl Calleman’s material about this quantum hollographic milestone) came onboard during the time I have been pulled back from the world; that too is just starting to get its feet under the table and is having its say. Put in more literal terms, rather than wait until I feel strong enough to meet the world “at my best”, I am starting to step out into the world a little more, just as I am, and notice how I feel stronger for making that effort to show up!

What I see, revisiting a series that transports me to another version of me, decades ago, is that I had a quality back then that was pretty awesome in its way; it saw me through such a lot and it was only just beginning to come out fully when it imploded…and now, well, its been in some sort of internal slow-cooker for a while but is ready to come out into daylight again, in ways that I don’t yet know the manifestation of, but I’m curious. Not shoes and job promotions this time, no, but perhaps something more materially viable, less abstract than of late. What came before feels like it was a rather “entertaining while it lasted” dress-rehearsal or honeymoon phase of something far more meaningful about to come up (not just for me but for all of us?) but I’m ready now, for a far more manifest expression of determination than just getting out of bed in the morning.

There is nothing wrong with having material aspirations (I would add, those that don’t actively harm the ecosystem), this is one of the misnomers of our time…one suggesting that it’s OK to need things to survive but not because you really want them for your own enjoyment. Reality is, we have to really want a materially better set of circumstances than we currently have in order to manifest them, and this is where the feminine comes in because “she” knows how to live by that. Wanting something beyond its puritanical “usefulness” is how we inspire the regeneration of the world on the principle of beauty as well as function. It’s how we value the arts…as we should…and include the magical, colourful, joyful and aspirational along with all our sheer determination for the viable future of this planet. And that’s also how we engage more people in the delivery of those dreams and get everyone on board with how we get there, in the most determined way, together.

Instead of turning inwards, in a survivalistic way (which is a chronic health situation in a nutshell…said by one who knows this from direct personal experience), we get drawn out of ourselves by such an aspirational intention for the future. It lights us up with a determined fire in our belly and, as such, is an ingredient that is very-much needed right now…both by me in my recovery process and by the world in its. So perhaps my little trip into what I smilingly think of as quantum holographic anthropology, revisiting the over-exagerated preoccupations of a whole generation of females via a series that has taken on the air of a comedy pastiche of its era (though its not that far off the mark…) has been a useful exercise in identifying this mislaid quality in me, and courting it back, if in a somewhat different format to the practice run of my earlier years.