If you have ever felt the urge to withdraw from your life, felt like you were forever stuck or that you want to “burn it all down”, you are not alone.
Welcome to the void.
The void is that quiet, and often very uncomfortable space between the death of the old and the rebirth of the new.
It's where the seeds of change gestate, waiting for the right moment to emerge.
The void can manifest as an absence of inspiration, a lack of movement, or even as a sense of nothingness.
A very simplified definition would be that the void encompasses cycles of feeling stuck, disconnected from your desired self, or facing moments of uncertainty.
This discomfort we feel in the void is a call to navigate and embrace it.
In this episode we delve into the art of rebirth, exploring how to navigate the space between death and the emergence of something new. I share:
- Taking our cue from Mother Nature as she continuously cycles
- How our hypermasculine world implies being in the void is wrong
- The discomfort we experience from shedding old identities
- How to be more resourced as you navigate the void yourself
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Hi, and welcome to the Untamed and Embodied Show. I'm your host, Tertia Riegler feminine embodiment coach, and here to help you cultivate a life of radiance, everyday pleasure and unapologetic self-expression. Join me every week as I share how you can tap into your feminine flow so you can come home to yourself and live your life from a place of inner freedom and aliveness.
Hello, hello, and a very warm welcome back to an all brand new season of the Untamed and Embodied Show. I am delighted to be back and I'm so happy to welcome you here as well. I wanted to kick off this season of the podcast to talk specifically about something which has been quite prevalent in my life. If you are a regular listener to the show, then you would've noticed that I took a little break. I'm now on the other side of this quiet time that I experienced, and I want to share with you some of the takeaways and insights that I bring from this time with the hope and intention that it might illuminate some areas in your life where you may be going through something similar and allow you to take a different perspective and view of this. So I have been feeling myself pulling back from the way that I expressed so around social media, around even here on the podcast and on my YouTube channel.
I felt myself pulling back and I went through stages of wanting to burn it all down and just starting over. But if you have ever burned things down in your life, you know that it takes a lot to start building up again. I have some tools and resources available to me now, specifically skills that I've discovered through the art of embodiment that has allowed me to navigate this urge of burning it all down to the ground and rather come from a more resourced place from where I can move forward and create what it is that I desire to create in the world. So I really hope that what I'm going to share with you will help you. So this is what I call navigating the void, this desire to burn things down. It may also be cycles of feeling completely stuck and you don't see a way out or you don't know where to from here.
You just know that what it is that you have that is no longer who you desire to be. So the void may show up in different ways, and sometimes the void may feel quite big and all encompassing, and other times the void might only be like a little dip in the road. So to me, the void is that space between death and the rebirth. This is when there's something new which is about to emerge. There's something which is ripe and ready to come out, but it's not yet the right time. It still needs some nourishment, some cultivation, some more grounding, some more sustenance in order to emerge in order to rebirth. And in this space, this luminal space where it's waiting and drawing this sustenance and inspiration and creativity in order to be birthed into something new. What that may feel like to us walking in the real world is it may feel like an absence of feeling.
It may feel like an absence of movement. It may feel like an absence of inspiration or an absence of creativity. So it feels like a nothingness and the discomfort that comes from this nothingness. This is what we need to learn how to navigate and travel with if we want to be proficient surface of this void. And so this space of nothingness, this void that we experience between the death and the rebirth, this is not necessarily always so clearly defined. We might find ourselves in this death and rebirth spaces at different phases in our life, at different times in our life. And I believe that the discomfort that comes from experiencing this is because of the dying off of all of those parts of us that we no longer require. So it's all of the beliefs that don't resonate true for us anymore. It's all of the perspectives that we have in life that may be turned on their head.
It may be our old identities that die off. I like to think of identities as capes that we wear or coats that we wear. And as we continue to evolve as humans, as we continue to grow and move closer to our truth, we may find that these coats become a little tight across the shoulders. Maybe the buttons won't do up as comfortably as they did before. So there comes a time where we need to discard this coat. And if this was a coat that you have been carrying with you for many years and it has been almost a treasured part of your collection, it can be very painful to put this coat down and to change it for something else. And especially if you don't know what is next, if you don't know what your next coat or cape is going to look like, you might hold the desire or the wish or the yearning for a different kind of look in your heart, but you don't know yet for sure what that looks like.
And so when we have to navigate this unknown, this darkness of not already seeing the finish line, that can be very uncomfortable. We like certainty. Our survival brains has been programmed for many, many, many thousands of years to always make sure that we know the outcome. And whenever there is an uncertainty that lies in front and we can't see clearly what the outcome is, it does fill us with a sense of discomfort. It fills us with a sense of disease. It can trigger our nervous systems, it can make us feel unsafe. And this I feel amplifies the discomfort that we experience when we are navigating this void. When you are feeling unsafe, it is very challenging to feel resourced at the same time. Those are two distinct experiences that we hold in our body, which I certainly haven't been able to bring together. The tension of feeling unsafe and the experience or the knowing of feeling resourced.
And then I think a third reason why the discomfort really shows up when we are in this void space is because our survival brain, again, has been programmed to move. We need to always be moving because that also keeps us safe. If you stay stuck for too long in one place, then that saber-tooth tiger might just jump on you. And this drive to always be moving, I feel that this is really also playing out in the world today in this hyper-masculine world that we all live into and that we all have to survive in and that we all have to make a living in is we have to always keep on moving. This is what we get told. This is how we get programmed. This is what we believe. This is what we see everyone else in our lives do. And so we believe that this is the truth.
We have to always keep on moving. And then whenever it is that we encounter the space of an absence of inspiration or an absence of creativity or an absence of feeling, an absence of movement, we believe that there is something wrong with us. We think that the problem lies with us and we need to do something to fix that. And so this teaching of the void is something which has gotten lost over the ages. Our modern world doesn't really allow for that stillness. Productivity is king, and the bigger our output, the higher our worth. What I sometimes wonder about is this urge to burn it all down if that is not simply another driver of taking action, of creating at least some movement. And when you burn everything down, you know what is on the other side, right? You know that it means you have to start over.
And that is less of an unknown than just surfing the absence in the void. So if you have recognised the void and this cycle of death and rebirth play out in your life as well, I want to share with you now three insights which may support you to have a better understanding and awareness around how this cycle plays out in our lives and why this may happen. And the very first insight that I want to share with you, or the very first insight that I want to offer you is that this death rebirth cycle is part of the bigger cycles at large. We just have to look at mother nature to see this play out. Looking to mother nature can be so helpful when we begin to navigate these more tender and uncomfortable experiences that we have when we start living more aware and awake and more conscious.
And if we look at how in the wintertime, everything starts dying off, everything starts slowing down. And there's a time in the winter where it seems like nothing happens, nothing's happening, everything just seems dead. There's no movement, there's no growth, there's nothing. And yet only a small while later you'll start seeing little buds coming out on the trees. You'll start seeing small little shoots pushing through the soil. And it's almost as if something has come out of nothing. But Mother Nature needs this time to rest. She needs this time to pull back and gather all her strength because creating and birthing something new into the world does take a lot of energy. It does ask a lot of us to create and push and move something forward in the world. And so we have to be well-resourced in order to do that. We have to be well rested.
Now in the world that we live in, most of us have been really well-trained in believing that we need to be always switched on. Like that antelope that's always moving because if it stands still, the lion is going to eat it. We always have to be moving. And the only times that we really allow ourselves to pause or to slow down is when we get sick, when there has been an accident or some other kind of tragedy. And even then, and I know this is true for me, maybe this is also true for you. Even when we are forced to slow down in this, we try to get back as quickly as possible. We try to get back to the way things were as quickly as possible. So we really believe in this linear timeline that the patriarchy has pushed upon us, this linear timeline that says we have to move from point A to point B.
We have to move in a straight line and we have to move in a slight upwards angle, better not move down. We have to always move upwards and onwards. Keep your chin up, keep your positive vibes high and keep on moving. Whatever you do can really take some tender and in intentional work to begin to dismantle these internal systems that we carry around about being always switched on and being always productive. And then the third insight that I want to offer is that the void is also necessary for our personal growth. I see that as we enter into this void, we get pulled into the underworld, which is the domain of the dark goddess. And in this space, in this discomfort, we get to face those parts of ourselves, those beliefs and those identities, those cloaks that we use to carry. We get to face that and we get to decide if this is who we still want to be.
And I'm curious as I'm talking about this, just notice if this brings up any discomfort or unease or a strange feeling inside of you, and not so to judge, but just simply as a new layer of insight and awareness into your own psyche. And so just like mother nature dies, as her leaves fall off the trees and she goes into stillness to cultivate the strength and the energy to be reborn again, so do part of ourselves die off. And I think the beauty and magic in this death rebirth cycle is I'm sure that if it was up to us to go into the cycle voluntarily, I doubt that anybody would be doing that. It takes an immense amount of courage to face off with those parts of you that you are ready to let go of. It takes an immense amount of courage to face off with those parts of you that you have rejected for a big part of your life.
And it also takes an immense amount of courage to take care of yourself and tend to yourself amidst the tension that you might experience because of the conditioning that being in the void means that something is wrong and you need to fix it. And so this brings me to the final part of our conversation today, and I want to share with you three ideas of how you may support yourself if you are finding yourself in this absence, this space of nothingness, if you feel withdrawn from the world and if you have been battling with the idea that it means something is wrong. So the first idea that I want to offer is to surrender. Oh, and I know this is a tough one. I feel that maybe we need to redefine what our definition of surrender is. To me, surrender used to mean that I give up, that I give over, that I lie down, and I just take whatever comes my way.
And of course, that's not the true definition of surrender as I see now. The way that I see surrender now is that I stop fighting what is, and I allow it and I welcome the experience of it because this makes me more resourced. This is where my strength lies. Maybe you have also been very well trained in fighting and trying to control everything, but I feel that if we try to control, if we keep on fighting the inevitable such as the void, it makes it more painful. We put up the shield of resistance. And I know in my body if I feel into that, it feels very brittle and it feels very non wielding. Whereas in the act of surrendering, the softening allows for a different dynamic to emerge. The second idea that I want to offer is that you need to have patience with yourself.
Or rather, I invite you to have patience with yourself. If you're anything like me, you may have the habit of pushing yourself really hard, and it may even have led to success in a certain paradigm that ascribes to a more masculine way of being in the world. But this creates an imbalance. And we again, as feminine essence beings, when we give too much emphasis to our masculine go energy, our performing energy, our production, organising, making things happen, energy, it skews us, it pulls us out of balance. And by having patience with yourself that you are not moving forward, that you are not organised, that you are not making things happen, but instead, you are sitting in the space of not knowing you, sitting in the space of moving so much slower than what you think you should. And you might even experience doubts and self judgments and comparison as you look at everyone else and see how they are moving forward. And you are still back here stuck. Have patience with yourself and just feel for a moment into that. If you could just have a tiny little bit more patience with yourself, what would change?
And then finally, and this is my best idea to offer you, is to have an embodiment practise of some sort to help you move that energy, to help you move the discomfort and to help you as a result of moving this energy and moving the discomfort. It helps you to create more space. It expands your capacity to be able to hold more, so it makes you more resourceful. And there are different kinds of embodiment practises that you can try on for yourself. I always suggest that you experiment. We are all different bodies, so we all have different things that work for us. We all have different preferences and likes and dislikes. So experiment with whatever works best for you. Some things that you can try is journaling, walking in nature, or even doing something like a moving meditation. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I absolutely love my moving meditation.
Since I learned doing that in my feminine embodiment coach training, it has become my go-to tool. And I've been experimenting myself with different lengths of practises and how often I do that. Right now I'm really delighting in longer practises. So I've been practising a few times a week, two to three times a week, and I take a 40 minute practise, and I find that really allows me to drop in. And this is, I feel a key tool to fall back on whenever you are in this liminal space of discomfort and the space of not knowing. And even if the space is one of I just need to burn things down so that I can at least have something or feel something, then perhaps just pausing and doing some embodied movement practises around that will help alleviate the pressure. So I have a very delicious audio experience that I would love to gift you.
I'm going to leave a link for you down in the show notes and you can go and download it from our website. It's called The Whole Woman Audio Experience. And this is really offering and a journey into your darkness to go and discover the treasures that are there. And I hope that when you listen to it, you love it as much as what I loved making it for you. So as we end this podcast, I want to say thank you very much for tuning in. Maybe this is also the spot to share some updates as to what you can be expecting. From my side, I feel for the time being, and this is something that emerged from my own time in the void, my focus and my energy is going to be here on the podcast. This is really the way in which I desire to be communicating with you.
I'm thinking about bringing in some guest speakers, some guest interviews. I think that's going to be really delicious. But right now, I feel that there are a few solo episodes that want to come out. So I haven't figured out yet what this podcast is going to look like, and it doesn't really matter because right now my intention is just to connect again with you. This also means that I won't be making long form YouTube videos anymore. So if you are not following me on Instagram, then you can go and follow me on tertiary regular embodiment. I'll also link that for you in the show notes. Or better yet, you can get on my newsletter and this way you can stay completely up to date as to what is happening and where you can track down my movements. So I really, really hope that you found this episode helpful and that it is going to support you wherever you are in your death rebirth cycle right now.
And I would love to hear from you. So you can send me a message on Instagram, send me a direct message, or you can send me an email. I'm also going to link my email address or leave my email address for you in the show notes. So this brings us to the end. Thanks again for tuning in and I will speak to you soon. Bye now. Alright, Queens. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you listening to it, as it helps more people find us. Thank you so much for joining me today.