Do you find yourself repeatedly drawn to men who drain your energy by demanding you pay lots of attention to their emotions? Perhaps your inner masculine nature wants its feelings nurtured, and you've dismissed it by assuming that behavior must be feminine. Do you find yourself in relationships with women who seek to control everything around them? Perhaps your inner feminine nature feels powerless, and you thought that power and control were masculine qualities. Do you find yourself always chasing after an idealized version of the opposite gender, and projecting those qualities onto each potential partner? Perhaps that ideal contains qualities of your inner nature of that gender, which is crying out for you to express.

Everyone has parts of themselves which are masculine, and everyone has parts of themselves that are feminine. Each individual expresses these parts of themselves differently. Learning to embrace that within you which is both masculine and feminine involves letting go of ideas that masculinity or femininity is in any way universal. Qualities of your masculine side may be qualities of my feminine side, and vice versa. Because we are all made of many parts, no two individuals have exactly the same expression of either gender. And so one must engage in a process of self-analysis, through introspection, meditation, conversation, and experimentation.

The inner and the outer reflect each other. Patterns in the inner form through encounters with the outer. We develop qualities within us partly by interacting with others who, when we are at an early age, represent archetypes more than people. Not your father but The Father. Not your best friend but The Best Friend. And we adjust who we are and how we express that in relation to these archetypes. The good news is, the patterns form both ways.

One of the most common problems people have, in my experience as a psychic, is finding harmony with people of a certain gender. If you believe the psychoanalytical standard, then you believe these issues stem from a person's relationship with their mother or their father. Perhaps that's true. Personally, I know my love for women and my preference for women as friends has more to do with my earliest relationships with my peers in school. The kinds of interactions I have always valued most involve deep conversations. As a child, that was easier to find if I played with the girls rather than the boys. The boys would push. The boys would shove. The girls would be peaceful.

Throughout my lifetime, I've been friends mostly with women and genderqueer femmes who present as women. And I spend a lot of time in circles where gender and issues around gender are discussed frequently. So I hear a lot of people talking about having issues and hangups around others in ways that have to do with gender. I, myself, have spent much of the past few years confronting and healing my hangups with both masculinity and femininity. And the one thing that has helped the most is looking inward.

When we heal that within us which is masculine and feminine, we find ourselves developing healthier relationships with others who express those qualities. When we accept these parts of ourselves for what they are, and allow them to be expressed authentically, we can create new patterns with others who express healthier versions of those qualities. And by letting go of past patterns, of judgment, and of rigidity around what masculinity and femininity are "supposed to be," we can find freedom and self-expression in new and profound ways.