Find Your Inner "Goddess" and Inner "God"

A man carrying an inner Goddess? A woman holding an inner God? To most of us that sounds off, maybe even backwards. It fits the way we tend to picture a person: one self, boxed in by gender, nationality, religion, culture. Other societies draw the picture differently. Consider the Winti people of Suriname in South America.

English gives us 'me', 'myself' and 'I'. Three words, nearly identical in meaning, none of them loaded with a distinct role or quality. The Winti language works otherwise. It offers several ways of naming the self, and each one reflects a particular way of understanding life. Running through all of it is a spiritual view in which a person's identity is woven together with the spirit world.

By that reckoning, any person, man or woman, contains their male self, their female self, their soul, their spirit or spirits, a spiritual father and a spiritual mother. Six selves for one body. A crowd. Yet walking through each of them shows how holding yourself in so many registers at once can open up room for growth you didn't know was there.

Start with the plain ones. A man's male self is his ordinary, daily self, the same 'I' and 'me' English hands us. For a woman, her female self plays that part.

The female self inside a man is where it gets less obvious. We might reach for the familiar phrase about a man's 'feminine side', but the Winti idea runs deeper than that. They treat the female self in a man as a distinct presence living within him, one that his physical body simply doesn't express. Everyone carries both a male and a female spiritual entity; one dominates, and that dominant one shows up as the sex you physically are. Acknowledging both inside yourself, on a spiritual level, lets a person feel bound up with all of humanity and speeds along their own development. Each gender carries its own qualities and attributes, and becoming fully yourself means locating every one of them within.

Soul comes up in everyday Winti conversation to signal depth of feeling. Say a man's friends ask him out for the evening and he answers 'I don't want to.' They'll keep pushing, trying to talk him round. But if he says 'my soul doesn't want to,' that closes the matter. The feeling runs past passing mood. His soul may be warning him off something that could go wrong, or simply telling him that going out isn't right for him just now. Reaching for the word 'soul' lets a Winti person separate the fleeting pull of a want from the quieter pressure of a genuine need and intuition.

For most of us, 'spirit' points to something external: ghosts, or the Holy Spirit. The Winti see people and spirits as strands of one connected web, each able to turn into the other and shape the other. Our conduct, in their view, can be moved by these spirits. Someone stuck with a temper they can't master might say, 'I have asked my spirits not to get so angry.' They've admitted the problem sits beyond their own control and have turned to higher powers for help in changing their life for the better.

The Spiritual Father resembles the notion of a Heavenly Father, though held in a far more personal way. Just as each of us has a biological father, each of us has a spiritual father, every one of them a distinct character. Winti people ask their own spiritual father for counsel and aim to please him through how they act.

The Spiritual Mother is the female counterpart, the Goddess. Here too, everyone has their own, a single spiritual mother who gives unconditional love, wisdom and help. What spiritual qualities the mother and father carry depends on the person. The individual works to please these spiritual parents by living out those same qualities, shaping themselves after their image. These two are the 'God' and 'Goddess' standing nearest to a person, the ones available for a personal relationship. Draw close to them, take on their spiritual attributes, and you can put their power to work directly in your own life.

You don't have to believe any of these are literally separate beings. Read them instead as psychological functions, as different corners of your own mind. Reaching into parts of yourself you never suspected were there can turn up fresh chances to grow. (Iman Mohiki)