Last month, October 24 was Global Oneness Day, an online event created by Humanity’s Team and growing larger with each passing year. Speakers such as Jean Houston and Riane Eisler talked of a renaissance of oneness consciousness all over the planet and of historically suppressed feminine energy emerging through both women and men. The world balance is shifting from otherness to inclusion; from power over to power within, shared with all peoples. The time of the goddess has come.

In the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the goddess was often invoked in the form of Gaia, or Mother Earth, and the divine feminine, whose power and presence had been written out of patriarchal religions. We looked to heretofore-disregarded female attributes such as emotion, intuition, compassion, tenderness, and unconditional love as those that would help to heal the violence and separation of a male-dominated paradigm. We envisioned a transformation in consciousness itself, from either/or to both/and—the end of battling opposites. Our visions and voices were often ridiculed and undermined, but slowly shifts began to take place.

Today, we are seeing a new wave of awareness sweeping through the world. Both men and women are acknowledging the importance of female energy, infused with gentleness and empathy instead of dominance and hierarchy. Yet the soft but powerful divine feminine is an energetic essence not to be underestimated in its ability to shatter obstacles and redefine so-called human nature. Look at Diana Nyad, who at 64 years of age defied skeptics and swam 103 miles from Cuba to Florida in 53 hours, after multiple failed attempts. Her mantra, “find a way,” was pure goddess. Then there’s 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban because she spoke out against banning education for girls in Pakistan. After a miraculous recovery, she continued her activism, including addressing the United Nations on education for all children in July of this year. Again, goddess energy personified.

Many new thought leaders are also challenging old limitations in their visions of what is possible for women and men. Thirty-five-year-old spiritual catalyst Panache Desai (who often refers to himself humorously as a “goddess in disguise”) speaks of the necessity for addressing shadow aspects of the patriarchy that we have internalized (need for control, “better than” attitudes, intimidation/bullying), so that we can embrace the divine feminine and come into masculine/feminine balance and harmony within ourselves. Strength combined with compassion in each person. Whole human beings meeting whole human beings on equal footing and experiencing oneness. This is the long-held dream, being expressed and embodied by men as well as women in this post-2012 era.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an exceptionally vivid dream of an old abandoned church being torn down by a demolition crew and the steeple toppling into my back yard, crashing into an altar of crystals, stones, and tapestries I had created there. I rushed into the yard, only to find a young man in a dancer’s leotard with a colorful scarf around his neck carefully picking up pieces of crystals and placing them on the grass. Could there be a more obvious symbolic representation of the fall of patriarchy, the end of all previous paradigms, and the birth of something entirely new, with only small crystalline reflections of our inner shining souls to guide us? What is on the horizon is unlike anything that has come before. We are truly standing on the edge of greatness: the full flowering of our authentic selves, unpolarized, unlimited, and free. May the all-encompassing love of the goddess open our hearts to infinite possibility and global oneness.