When I decided to write about the embodied feminine four weeks ago, I thought the process was relatively simple. After all, my life style is pretty balanced. I live a quiet life. I farm. I cook. I care for my land. I do yoga. I meditate. I socialize. I take art classes that attract my fancy. I already engage in my yin and feminine…or so I thought. And yet consciously diving into a more embodied sense of my own femininity surprised me in more ways than I could ever have imagined. Be forewarned if you feel called to enter into your own untapped stores of conscious femininity. Something new is inevitable going to arise.
Here is what I’ve learned so far:
Empowerment happens in deep knowing, not loud action.
Being absolutely clear and coherent creates boundaries without a need for fight or words.
Differentiation and individuality can happen while simultaneously feeling deep connection.
The unexpected can simply happen.
Digesting the senses is kind of like being a breatharian that also enjoys food.
Emotions are like google maps for the heart and soul.
Self value is built through existence not accomplishment.
Acting on intuition without questioning it creates trust.
The unknown feminine as a companion to everyday life is terrifying!
The simple act of being can become nourishing. Sit still. Wait. It will come.
The feeling of flow in the body is a sensual form of self care.
The support that exists in the universe is bigger than a tiny human brain can imagine.
All this after four weeks. I am now completely hooked into discovering my everyday feminine.
I am pretty sure it is obvious to anyone who is observing the power in the world right now that its just a little bit…imbalanced. You can use other words to describe what’s going on that are more incendiary and disconnected but does that really help anything? Does talking about what’s going on, separating the self from reality, or reacting in intense forms of separation really support anything but the imbalanced power? Today I am focusing on one aspect of the solution - embodying into your femininity as an everyday truth.
When we react to imbalances in the system through the system itself we create change that is accepted by the system.
When we embrace culture through culture, we plant a seed for slow change.
When we go against culture to express our human self as truth, we risk social ostracism.
One of the super powers of femininity is its ability to differentiate without contest. This is because the essence of the divine feminine is compassionate acceptance. Right now the world at large is too merged with the imbalanced masculine (greed, power, wealth and all distortions of the masculine) to understand that what has to change internally is not to attack but to accept with an answering power of connection.
Think of the phrase “fighting fire with fire.” When life gets scary, our human inclination is to react with the same energy that is scaring is. Community is found in acts of separation. Blaming, hating, judging, feeling superior, not tolerating, avoiding, feeling confused…the lower self grabs on to pretty much anything it can when society does not feel stable. The impulse to react within the known has to shift into a willingness to swim into the depths of mystery. Only in the differentiated unknown can we find a sustainable solution.
Yes there are problems within patriarchal paradigms. Women need to find their voice. The weak and underprivileged need to stop being oppressed. I have literally never heard someone talk about any of these topics without embracing the masculine. Fighting against men or intolerance. Identify as a feminist. Judge the oppressors. Identify the self in polarity. The known safety of the masculine continues to control our reactions and interactions.
The energy of the masculine is what we know. It’s mostly yang with a little bit of yin. There’s value in push, the outward flow into action. It exists all around us as the currency for our culture, our society, our basic needs, our work, our way to relate. We are raised in masculine constructs and taught to behave in the masculine. Our structures are prevalently masculine. It is the role of the masculine to contain the feminine in a safe way and allow the feminine to flourish under its being. Control has taken over.
The energy of the feminine is not lacking in our lives, it’s just not as easily accessible. It’s yin with a bit of yang. It is discovered in stillness and depth. It yields while also staying true to what it is. The feminine is abundance through the current of loving compassion. Femininity is presence without action, emotion with flow, clarity through acceptance. Femininity needs the boundaries of masculinity just as much as masculinity needs the clarity of femininity. One does not exist without the other. Our structures allow for femininity but tapping into it does take a conscious disconnection from what is comfortable.
The Nature of Femininity
The divine feminine has a specific energetic that is very different than the male. It is found in the yin, the depths of darkness and water, the flow of abundant life and creation. But remember the symbol of the tai ji, the grand ultimate. Within the yin there is yang and within the yang there is yin. To be feminie is to trust the masculine, to rely on it, to rightfully use its nature, to allow flow between the two dynamic forces.
陰 yīn
The Chinese character yin depicts the shady side of a hill. Cosmologically, yin is synonymous in its characteristics with 道 dào (the way) , in that it is the soft, receptive, and quiescent aspect of life. In humans, our storehouse of primordial yin is the ocean out of which all of our manifestations in life are drawn. Yin is the basis of the bones and the nervous system, which may be thought of as deriving their strength and integrity from our primordial source ... Yin comprises the physical substrate of the body.
Lonny Jarrett - Nourishing Destiny
Because of how effortlessly available so many of our social constructs are, the feminine has to get loud for us to yield to it. The masculine supersedes our default way of being and the feminine occasionally overpowers it. Anyone who has either experienced the process of natural childbirth or natural death has witnessed the power of the divine feminine. The waiting. The terror. The unknown arising. The beauty incarnating. While it is easier to open to the vast power of the feminine in the midst of great transitions, it is also terrifying.
Is our culture imbalance calling loud enough to invite you into choosing transition?
Are people ready to start to bring true feminine energy into their every day lives?
I’m not sure. What do you think? I think it’s time to embrace a leap of faith.
Emergence of self through shadow always creates something new.
New experiences are how shadow mending is verified. In relation to the world at large right now I wonder if something new is growing within the obvious repeating patterns of war and hatred. Doing shadow work means creating embodied change. The unfamiliar can only arise through recognition. I’m questing…is the everyday feminine already awakening? We as a species may be expecting something more profound, more grand than the simple invitation to embrace into the nature of stasis.
Who among us is ready to bear the foundation for actual lifestyle change is the world’s current uprising of shadow? The world simply needs more people to hold a cornerstone of support for human evolution. Those who feel called may have to be to alone for awhile to awaken those who can’t make the shift. Feminine power needs to be uprooted from our own psyches and embraced as more than a want and more than a masculine overlay. Femininity has to become a right. A need. A way of being. Only through this will we discover embodied equilibrium.
Take note here that I said PEOPLE. Not women. We have two currents in our body and you can consider them however you feel comfortable philosophically - light/dark, yin/yang, divine/evil, and what else? Male/female. The power imbalances we are seeing in the outside world directly reflect our own inability to balance power currents in our own bodies, in our relationships, in our work, and in our lives. The effects of these imbalances are merely rippling outward to affect society, culture, jobs, politics, lifestyle, relationships. The world needs to acknowledge that wholeness is not actually based in duality but rather our ability to create connection from separation.
The feminine is not perfect. It is an aspect of the fractioned whole. Imbalanced feminine power would be a different kind of toxicity if left to run unhindered. The movement that the shadow is seeking is a return to a state of connection, not another imbalance asserting itself as the answer. Femininity is not about winning. It is about being. It thrives in expressing. It is grounded in deep knowing. It is slowness in a fast world. It has compassion for hatred. It is security within insecurity. It’s the spiral that is asking you to wind itself into your life.
The thread that makes this whole dynamic difficult is that masculine energetics have overtaken what we believe to be structured reality. Can you imagine a doctor simply telling you “I don’t know” and sitting with you in the discomfort of that? Could you have patience for a teacher who asks you to find the solution to a problem without telling you how to find the answer? Would you trust a boss you asked you to motivate inside yourself without giving you a deadline? Who would you be without people in power telling you who you are?
We are more comfortable letting the feminine in as SHOULDS in our lives. Structures and facts are the foundation for how everything functions in the world. Many of us know that the answer to balance is in the feminine but choosing it feels so dissonant to real life that we just give up and succumb to what is easiest. This is not a victim statement in my mind. This is a simple surrendering to the current of the real. It is succumbing to what is accessible.
Embodying feminine currents in life is going to feel like work. It is understandably terrifying. It will feel like giving up, breaking down, losing at first. If it wasn’t so scary, more people would be doing it already. My question for you is, can you be good enough here and simply try without expectation? Can you let your feminine arise without an agenda?
Any state of balance you can find for yourself is leading you to healing the rift.
We spend a large percentage of our day in the imbalanced masculine field of yang, push, struggle, fight, act, engage, do. Simply being on a screen is draining. To actively come into balance, you have to actively seek and embrace the everyday feminine. Eventually you will get comfortable enough with it to let it leak into who you want to be as an everyday self instead of who you think you SHOULD be.
Embodying the feminine in theory isn’t work but…every had a baby? I think for now we all just need to admit that it needs to be a bit hard. It should feel against the grain. It won’t feel natural and easy to let the energy of the feminine run as a balanced current in our bodies. The masculine is what we know. It’s how we’ve been not simply raised but how we’ve conditioned to engage with life. Our self identity is so wrapped up in masculine energetics that we cannot just undo years of training. We need the masculine but with less overdrive.
Beware the Trap of Idealization
Idealizing the feminine will make the everyday feminine harder to embody. Our everyday flawed human selves can practice engaging in feminine currents. Femininity can destroy just as much as it can create. Balance is never going to come through the destruction of the other, but through acceptance of the other in a field of universal understanding. We live in a world where the mix of dual energy exists to give us clarity on what wholeness feels like. Too much of one is just as diseased as too much of the other. Every person’s balance has to be uniquely discovered and expressed. Letting go of expectation and allowing ourselves to curiously explore the energetic of the feminine is part of how to heal the rift we currently have within us and around us.
My personal idealized feminine is Amma. Here is this deeply embodied feminine heart of a woman who travels the world giving free hugs! It does not matter who you are, what you’ve done, or how you show up. Amma freely embraces you with all of her loving soul. Here’s the thing. I have a husband, children, a dog, cats, farm animals. If I embraced that kind of being all the time my chickens would live in my kitchen and my children would have never moved out. I personally would struggle with that much giving because receiving is a life lesson for me. To know Amma exists and humans have that potential is deeply grounding for my faith in humanity. But I can’t be her. I have to be me and me is going to be type A sometimes and overly controlling other times and disconnected at points. I’m not a saint. I’m just a human trying to find balance in the life I lead.
I remember years ago I idealized communal living. I wanted to step out of the money making system and live in a world where communities of people cared about each other and let go of the exhausting striving for money and success that we consider the threshold to cross in growing up. The community living experiment, for me, was an epic failure. Ironically it was because all the people I was trying to do it with were raised as capitalists and no matter how hard we tried none of us could get out of the “me” mentality enough to actually nourish the whole. Decades later I live in a country that understands the value of the “we” and the “me.” I found a structure that represents balance. It took awhile. I had to both step out of my idealism and also embrace truths of human nature. I didn’t need to reinvent anything. I simply needed to expand my seeking.
Committing to the Everyday Feminine
Now that you’ve read my theoretical thoughts. Let’s move into the actual practice of embodying the feminine as a lifestyle. Remember. There’s no need to invent anything. Merely expand your seeking.
All of those lurking shoulds come into play here. Get familiar with your own. Here is a list to consider.
I should use social media less.
I should slow down.
I should not base my self worth on what I do but rather who I am.
I should be better at not losing myself to other people.
I should know who I am.
I should trust my emotions and let them guide me.
I should meditate.
I should think less.
I should be more present with my loved ones or my children.
I should be more loving.
I should receive support better.
I should feel abundant.
I should be more sensual.
I should embrace being vulnerable.
I should be more creative.
I should trust my intuition.
We all do actually have feminine energy lurking in us waiting to be assimilated in our daily life, our work, our self identity, and in our relationships. The feminine has been conditioned out of our default way of being. Healing modalities and concepts tend to embrace the feminine because being out of balance is the source of so many of our emotional and physical dis-eases. To rediscover our femininity, we have to step towards engaging in trying out the shoulds that work for us until they become natural for us.
To consciously step out of the flow of life into the deeper you involves a rebirth, a redefine, a rework, an exploration. Maybe you don’t like to meditate but you love laying down on the ground in the sun, listening to insects and birds. That could be your practice. Perhaps you like to stare into your phone for hours of every day not thinking. Experiment with thought free time without the phone. A tendency to freak out emotionally but not have emotions when “functioning” could be a sign that your doorway into the feminine is to let yourself have your every day emotions. Do you see why I write that the doorway into your own unique feminine has to be discovered by you and no one can tell you how to do it? It is as complicated as you are.
As you start to embody the everyday feminine, your lifestyle is going to change. What you define as your work is going to shift. Who you are and how you express yourself will become something previously undiscovered. What noruishes you is going to be different. Needs will be re-identified. Life as you know it will change. You will be more free to be your whole self.
The everyday feminine is going to feel outside of social norms. For instance, crying in public or at work. Can you imagine feeling safe enough with your emotional state to express and not suppress? Notice right now what restrictions your brain is already coming up with to justify NOT doing this. This is your conditioning into the masculine structure of being. Embracing the feminine is a subtle act of revolution - to allow space for a balanced sense of self to become part of the cultural real.
Consider the journey I am inviting you to adopt through the following poem:
Yang-Yin Poem
By Kate Lightstone
The fighter in me taught me to fight
Taught me to hang on when the Sun was too hot
the fields too dry
the water too little
The fighter in me taught me not to let things lay;
to pick up sharp, broken pieces
and handle them with grace
so that I may piece together a reflection
I understand
The warrior in me showed me that I can defend this temple
a fortress impenetrable
that can stand on her own
no you many not hold my hand
no you may not help
I can do it
I can do it
My fighter grew tired
pushing walls out around me
so far out that eventually a beautiful moat appeared
that no friend nor fiend could wade through
I grew lonely
the warrior tired of pushing
my fighter tired of the fight
my soul so thrust in overdrive
I recognized no part of me
I grew silent
the warrior grew sleepy, body forced into rest
and in that space
small stirrings of my womb began to whisper
I could fight no longer
but I could write
I could fight no longer
but I could sing
I could push and climb and scrap no more
but I could lift paint to a canvas and my voice to a note
and begin to pour a soft kind of salve onto the walls I had so steadfastly built
And when I believed I was losing sight of the Self that I knew
painting the walls with softness
A thousand tiny flowers pressed up gently through the soil
where I’d waged my last battles and whispered:
“Give us a chance to grow”
What could I build when I was not fighting?
What could I grow when I was not tearing down?
What could I unleash into the world that would heal more wounds
than any walls could have prevented?
I did not know.
And so the flowers whispered on:
What if you were soft?
What if were gentle with yourself
the way you are with children
What if you gave that little you
a chance to grow?
what would you know?
And so I did what scared me most —
I lowered my bridge
crossed the moat of my own making
and walked out towards what I had avoided for as long as I could remember:
Companionship
Exposure
Connection
I will always have a warrior’s spirit
in my nature
in my blood
But I now choose to create from my experience
a path for teaching
no walls of mud
Although at times I try to hide
within the confines of my fears
I choose move forward
open by choice
guided by womb-stirrings
growing at the borderlands of love
I show up here
I am here
I am here
Eventually we all will be called into the feminine. It is present all around us and supports our presence on this planet. Perhaps you already know of a practice that brings you into your feminine being. Maybe you want to play and explore your way into having more. Trust yourself. Find your path. Create more balance. The world needs your presence.
Meditative Offerings
I am giving you two meditations to facilitate tapping into female energy. The first will allow you to feel into your feminine with the safety of the masculine binding it. The other will allow you to feel into your imbalanced feminine without boundaries.
Here is a meditation into flow with balance. For this meditation you will need to be lying down. Feel free to add some zest to it by being outside on the ground or as close as you can get to it.
For the second meditation, sit in cross legged position or a chair with a straight back. You need to have access to your full body as a sensational being.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to share, comment, and like this post if it speaks to you.
There have been several times at work where I’ve made an effort to push through a project or problem, and the way the pieces fell I really could have sat back and done nothing and gotten the same result! My seeking is to fond clarity and inner knowing about when it’s necessary to move and when it’s not.