Healing From The Wounds Of Patriarchy with Peter Berry

So much has come up with the Me Too Movement and women speaking up. More and more men are also speaking up about their own wounds and their own experiences with sexual violation and the things that they’ve gone through as well. In the healing process, we don’t make each other male and female villains, victims or victimizers, and create a further divide. We heal in a way that can bring us back together in partnership and equality. Peter is passionate about supporting women to heal from the wounds of patriarchy. He is the co-founder and partner at Juicy Sacred Living along with his wife, Licia, and focuses on creating partnership and equality and creating sacred union on earth. That means supporting people to practice partnership both internally and in relationships by taking those seemingly opposing energies, or feminine and masculine energy, and bringing them into a connection.

Listen to the podcast here:

Healing From The Wounds Of Patriarchy with Peter Berry

Our guest is Peter Berry. Welcome, Peter.

Thank you for having me, Debra.

I’m excited to have you in the show. Peter is going to talk to us about how he helps women heal from the wounds of the patriarchy. Peter is our first male guest on Self-Care for the Soul Podcast.

I am truly honored. Thank you.

I’m honored to have you as our guest. Peter Berry is an artist and a business person. He is the Cofounder and Partner at Juicy Sacred Living along with his wife, Licia. Licia Berry has been on the show before. She’s also a part of the While We Were Silent Project that we’ve been doing and she has her own incredible project that she’s birthed as well. Peter is passionate about supporting women to heal from the wounds of the patriarchy. His work in healing the masculine focuses on creating partnership and equality and creating sacred union on Earth, which is the marriage of opposites along with his wife, Licia.

They are committed to supporting people to practice partnership both internally and in relationships. We’ve been having so much coming up with the #MeTooMovement and women speaking up, more and more men are also speaking up about their own wounds and their own experiences with sexual violation and the things that they’ve gone through as well. A passion that I share with you and Licia is that in this healing process that we don’t make each other male and female villains, victims, victimizers and create a further divide. We do heal in a way that can bring us back together in partnership and equality. I greatly appreciate where you’re coming from and what you’re doing. I honor you for that. I thank you for being here to share that with us.

Thank you also for being an agent of bringing people together. We’re in a time of such divide that it is a breath of fresh air to find people who want to bring us together despite our differences and our wounds. Maybe it’s because of them that we can come together.

It’s because of them that we can come together in an even a closer way. In your words, as a male, how do you define the patriarchy?

The historical context for it is so far back. Full disclosure, it took me a long time to even understand that I was in a patriarchy. As a white man in America who have financial means, not one of the one-percenters or anything like that, but not certainly not struggling. I’m at the top of the privilege bubble. It took me a long time to even realize that I was walking around in a bubble. It was my amazing wife, Licia, who is like a search light in the dark. She finds the things that need to be healed and helps to heal them. She helped me to understand that I was in this bubble.

SCS 27 | Wounds Of Patriarchy — Wounds Of Patriarchy: As a white man in America who has financial means, not one of the one-percenters but certainly not struggling, I’m at the top of the privilege bubble.

I’m an artist and a businessperson and I played lots of different roles. My moment of privilege, which led to my understanding of patriarchy and it’s interesting to see how that works, I was sitting in Tallahassee, Florida in my sales manager’s company car. It was a little sports car, an Acura, in a nice suit with a nice pair of sunglasses on and looking at my smartphone. This young, black guy walking down the street, looked in the car and down at me and he was like, “That’s the man.” That was the look that’s dismissing me. I’ve been wondering who the man is. I looked up at him and I was like, “What?” I looked in the mirror, “I am the man.”

Despite my yearning to not be the man, I am in some ways, defined by who I am in ways that I don’t understand. In ways that allow me to move through the world differently than you or a man of color or woman of color. I can’t explain what that is because I only know my experience. The patriarchy is the same way. I believe that the patriarchy started with the advent of writing and the time of agriculture when we stopped relying on our right brains, the connective more feminine part. By feminine, I don’t mean a male or female, I mean that energy type. We moved into our left brain, which is the logical, discerning, seeking separation, and defining things part. If you’re keeping records of sheep, you can’t just say there’s a glob a sheep because you don’t know if any of them are missing. When you say, “I’ve got 25 sheep,” then you count it and there are only 24, you know there’s a problem.

As we moved into agriculture, animal husbandry and cities, it became more complex. We started dismissing the feminine. We’re at the apex of that. In fact, I would say we’re at the last gasps of the patriarchy, but the patriarchy is a condition of our culture being so male centric and dismissive of women. It’s so pervasive unless you tune in and start to look for all the little and major ways that women are dismissed and men are exalted. It’s like being a fish swimming in water. It’s the environment we live in until you look at it. Without my wife, who, in our 32 years of committed relationship and working at, has challenged me on things that I wouldn’t have challenged myself, I wouldn’t be able to sit here and even talk about the patriarchy.

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A lot of women have also been conditioned by living in this patriarchy. A lot of women will say, “I can be a strong woman in the world. I can hold my own in the corporate world. I can make it. I can challenge the patriarchy.” In so many ways, rather than becoming a strong woman, we’re becoming a strong male playing in the patriarchy. Can you give an example of what that would even look like to you? Let’s say we’re in the last gasping breath of the patriarchy. What does it look like for us to coexist in something that’s not a patriarchy?

I would love to answer that in a way that is grounded but unfortunately, we would have to go back to some pre-civilization type cultures, some hunter-gatherer type cultures where the feminine energy and the masculine energy were both revered. Father Sky and Mother Earth, that feeling of being connected to both of them, not just being sky-focused. When we look at all the major religions, it’s all about escaping, the Big Father in the sky, the Sun God and we forget about the Mother Earth who supports us. If we went back and looked at some of the cultures that we in America would be used to seeing like Plain Indians, maybe the Lakota, have a very strong tradition of honoring both men and women and the input of both informing a unified whole. The work that Licia and I are doing is about how do we take those seemingly opposing energies or feminine and masculine energy and bring them into that Yin Yang of connection. Where they’re seamlessly intertwined and the needs of the individual are met, not being the masculine but informed by the wisdom of the whole, which is the feminine.

Being concerned with both self and others. Unfortunately, the patriarchy is a wounded masculine that seeks to dominate, control and is more concerned with the self than the whole. Either way, if you’re only concerned about the whole and not the self, that’s out of balance. It’s about bringing that partnership where we both coexist equally. In a world like that, we would see people using their intuition to inform their decision-making and their outward action. We would see a more equitable mix of leadership of men and women. We would see boards of directors that would have equal numbers of men and women. We would see religious leaders being women as well.

Right now, if you look at the top levels of government, religion and culture, as we’re seeing with the Harvey Weinstein case, how men have risen to the top because the deck is stacked in our favor, that if we got to a culture where things were evened out, then we’d be able to have women who could act as women instead of as men in women’s bodies rising to the top because that’s what happened.

When you say women acting as women, I can hear people’s bells going off because how many times have we been told as women, “Act like a lady?” That’s one of the things I’m passionate about helping women to understand what it means to acts like a woman as opposed to the things that we’ve been told, which are so damaging. You mentioned this patriarchy stemming from the wounding of the male. Can you say more about what a healed male looks like and how a healed male might operate in this thing that has been the patriarchy that could help to bring things into balance? Contrast that with the wounded male because we’ve been swimming in the soup for so long that don’t even recognize the wounds versus what the healing would look like.

Masculine energy is typically more expressed in men, but we both carry masculine and feminine energy. Wounded masculine energy is that energy that is not connected to understanding what’s good for the whole. It’s not checking in with that, “Is this action I’m going to take good for everybody involved?” Wounded masculine is about, “It’s just good for me.” That’s lying, cheating, stealing, rape and pillage, all of those things that are power over other people. To move into a partnered environment, we have to be willing to share power.

If we’re willing to share power, that means we have to recognize people as equal to us. People who don’t look like us, speak like us, and don’t have the same background as us, we have to recognize that each person has value. When I say that we’re in the last gasp of the patriarchy, we have a president who can only respect people who look like him. In fact, he is so self-referential that the mirror is the only place where he sees something that makes sense to him. You can’t even see it in his advisers that he picks for himself. That’s that singular focus of “Me, me, me” that is unpartnered with the rest of the world. That partnership and understanding that we are all valuable and we all bring different strengths are so important.

I do give credit to our President for being so extreme in that it has brought so much up into our faces that we can’t deny the schism that we’ve been living in. We have a wounded masculine, we have a wounded feminine, and they’re trying to coexist in a screwed-up world. Everybody’s trying to get by as best we can. It’s come up into our faces in such a strong way that this is not a way that we want to live. It’s not a way to survive. It’s not a way that is respectful of either male or female.

I want to jump back to something that I said because I realized I’ve hit a trigger point probably when I talked about women acting as women.

Let’s hear from the male perspective. What do you mean by that?

I want to shift the paradigm that we have right now because boys and girls can do exactly the same thing in a classroom. A boy is called assertive and a girl is called bossy because there’s a cultural expectation that girls are supposed to act in a demure, subjugated way. Unfortunately, what that means is through that process of growing up in that and being a part of that culture is that women don’t know how to be assertive from a feminine point of view because that’s not what our culture allows us to do.

It’s hard to lead from that perspective of concern for the whole. The leaders who do that usually are seen as weak and indecisive. Instead of looking at them as understanding that the power of all and the power of the team is bigger than the power of any one person. That the wisdom of the whole is smarter than the wisdom of one person. The future, I hope, is that all people can act from their feminine as well as their masculine. If a man and a woman act in exactly the same way, they’re seen in exactly the same way as leading from the same place, not as inappropriate for one inappropriate for the other.

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You mentioned that men and women can do the same thing in a classroom and be perceived in different ways. As someone who came up in math and science as my degrees, I was in college in the Honors Math Program getting the math degree. I was told several times that women aren’t good at math and yet I would have the highest or the second highest grade in the class. I had one teacher at the end of the semester who apologized to me. There were two women in the class of about 25 or 30 people. He’s looked at both of us at the first day of class and he said, “Women typically don’t do well in these classes.” It was a non-Euclidean advanced geometry class and it was fun. At the beginning of the class he said, “Women don’t do good in these classes.” We’re like, “Hide and watch.” I had the highest grade in the class and she has the second highest grade in the class. He was the only one, who at the end of the semester, on our last day, gave a public apology to the two of us in front of the class.

I had grades knocked down for crazy stuff. Even when my numeric grade was well into A’s, I was given a lower grade because of class participation style. It’s the same thing was in the pay of corporate America. My pay was way less than the men I worked with. I know you focus mostly on helping people in relationship to have a Juicy Sacred Living and find that balance, equality, and appreciation for each other. Do you see that as rippling out into our culture, society, classrooms and corporations?

I do. I want to clarify something because it’s important. The work that Licia and I do is like a triangle. At the bottom, although we both work with men and women, Licia primarily works with women because that creates safety for women to feel like they’re heard. Sometimes having a man, even someone who’s open, accepting, and conscious. I work primarily with men in healing the masculine within them because that’s my way of working within the system to start to change the patriarchy. The work we do together is in partnership and that partnership starts internally. Having partnership of the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine within ourselves, and then expressing that with our partners in teams or corporations, it doesn’t matter what the group is.

Anytime there are people gathered under a single intention, we can work with that group to calibrate the energetic structure of that team. As part of my work, I also work with small businesses as a virtual sales manager and my goal is creating an evolved economy where everybody is valued in every transaction is good for everybody in the process. I’m working on inside the patriarchy in a sense, not to subvert it, but to shift the eye. To make us understand that we are swimming in the water we don’t even know is there. Just like the fish, it probably doesn’t know it’s in water until you pull it into the air and it goes, “What’s that?”

I bet that in those environments where you’re working with sales teams that your people are having amazing results.

They are because they’d show up in a different way on a sales call. They’re not devaluing the people that they don’t see as unimportant in the sales process. The old sales model is, “Go find the decision maker and hammer them until they say yes or no.” Mine is to create collaboration and partnership and to learn how to be a benefit to the people that you’re serving.

It’s creating a holistic environment where there’s a win-win on all levels. That’s huge. You and Licia are going to be a part of an event that we’re doing called Hear Me Roar. That is an event for women. It’s about finding our voices, healing our past, speaking our truth and activating our power. You are going to be our male representative of the patriarchy who is here to help us feel safe. What do you see as your major role as that of women?

I have not posted anything under #MeToo because it’s too important that women claim the #MeTooMovement, but I’m a sexual abuse survivor as a very young child. I understand the wounding that comes from the unpartnered of masculine, that wounded masculine, that aggressor who takes what he wants. That past helped me focus in on what my real superpower is as a human being. My superpower is holding unconditional love, holding space and being loved. I have been in groups of women who have been traumatized by men. My presence in being there to witness them, to hold that space of unconditional love, and to represent for the men who are good people is healing. That’s my purpose. That’s what I bring them. I have the capacity to hold other people’s pain kindly and gently and let them own it without trying to diminish it or having them hold onto it longer than they need to. Sometimes just being witnessed by someone who holds spaces is transformative. I’m hoping that I can do that.

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When you’ve been abused by a male, it destroys trust so they can paint a lot of pictures on men. To have that someone who represents, you are obviously a man and you can represent that, “Not all men are bad. There is an opportunity for you to move into trust and have a safe relationship with a man.” You and Licia can model the way that your relationship works, communications work, and how you honor and respect each other. It gives the psyche a new picture to hold onto that maybe a lot of women have not experienced before. We see it sometimes in the movies, but movies are all about drama. You don’t get it there either.

One thing that I’ve heard from women is it helps them to recalibrate to the idea that there might be somebody who they can be safe with. To hear some language that is safe and to see a man acting in ways that are loving and kind can build a different model. That’s so important for any of us, for me to heal the masculine within me because I come from a culture of wounded masculine. I carry that in me, so I have to be conscious of that all the time. There are men I modeled after. I watched men who are kind, gentle and can hold space.

Dr. Wayne Dyer was a good example of that. Ram Dass, in his way, he’s a little funny and he had his own quirks, but there were parts of that holding space and being okay being the projection screen to. I don’t take it personally if women get upset with me. I used to because I was attached to my identity as a man. A lot of men get caught in that. When a woman says, “I’m angry at a man because of.” We think it’s about us, even when we haven’t done anything. I can be the projection screen and shed or reflect love back instead of fight back.

You talk about the fish not knowing that it’s swimming in water until you take it out of the water and it tries to breathe air. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not. When a woman has been swimming in that ocean of toxic masculinity, growing up with abuse, and growing up with not the feeling that an ability to trust men and then you take her out of that water into a different space where she can breathe differently, it’s going to have an impact. I want to stay that Peter is in the group, While We Were Silent.

We have a Facebook group that’s awesome and very active. Initially, we had men and women there. There’s so much stuff that was coming up for the women that I was hearing more and more people say they just didn’t feel safe, they wanted to shut down and leave the group. We had only mostly women in there and a few men. What we did was we invited the men to join Peters’ group.

It’s called Sons of Earth with Peter Berry on Facebook. It’s a closed group. Just request to be added, tell me that you saw this episode, and I’ll be happy to bring you in.

Peter is helping the men to heal their wounded masculine and to discover their truth in the same way that we are doing that for the women in the While We Were Silent group. The same way that now we’re going to be coming together and initially a women’s only conference in the Hear Me Roar Conference. I have a feeling this is going to be something that we’ll be doing more of. Peter, any last words that you want to leave our men and women? Maybe you want to give a word to the men and a word for the women?

For the men, this is a very challenging time because we’re not used to being taught or asked or expected to grow in the ways that we’re being expected to grow now. We have been told that it wasn’t safe to be emotionally vulnerable, soft, or gentle. We have to do that now. We have to be willing to step into that. For women, your strength is so powerful. You are the life givers of this planet. Without you, there is no human race. For all the men who think they’re tough, “I can’t do childbirth. I wouldn’t want to do childbirth,” and then to give life to that child after you’ve done that, that strength comes from that feminine connection to all that is. Please lead from that.

Something I know in my own personal experiences, for us, as a species, to get where we want to go, the feminine leads the way because. The feminine is that place of pure potential before anything happens. When the feminine leads the way, the masculine is then safe to be a partnered masculine, paying attention to the wisdom for all. If we all can change our focus, men and women, and stop looking in the mirror, but look in the mirror while we’re seeing the rest of the world and recognize that everything that we do impact everyone around us. We have to treat other people the way we want to be treated. It’s so simple and allows people to express themselves as who they are, then we will get what we want to go.

Our world is a brighter place for having you in it.

I feel the same way about you and all the work you’re doing.

Thank you. I’m glad that we’re coming together to do some work.

I’m so excited about it.

It’s awesome. It feels so good and so right. To work with you and Licia in this way and our friend, Nancy, that’s going to be working with us on this first event, I’m over the moon. Peter, for people to learn more about you and what you’re doing, your website is JuicySacredLiving.com, correct?

Yes. That’s where you’ll find the work that Licia and I are doing together. If you’re interested in working with either of us, individually, it has links to that as well. It’s a focal point for the work that we do.

You could find information about what Peter and Licia are doing there. You can find links to their individual work. Since I’ve been mentioning the event that we’re both doing, you can find that at HearMeRoarConference.com. Thank you so much, Peter.

Thank you, Debra. It’s been a pleasure.

It was a pleasure for me too. Everybody, thanks for reading. Please check out Peter’s website. If you are a male that is wanting of healing for your heart on any level, please check out Peter’s Facebook group, Sons of Earth with Peter Berry. Thanks so much.

About Peter Berry

Peter Berry is an Artist and Businessperson, Co-Founder and Partner at Juicy Sacred Living, along with his wife, Licia. Peter is passionate about supporting women to heal from the wounds of Patriarchy. His work in healing the masculine focuses on creating partnership and equality, and creating Sacred Union on Earth, The Marriage of Opposites, with his wife Licia. They are committed to supporting people to practice of partnership both internally and in relationships.