#41 How I Healed My Feminine Energy

This is the story of how I healed my feminine energy,  the different things  I did, and the practices I still use today.  My feminine energy awoke when I went through a big life transition (that happens to many of us!) and in looking for answers, I discovered how much I relied on my masculine energy and that I was not skilled in my feminine at all.  It has been a life-changing journey, and I hope that the things that I share will help you too 💜

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Transcript

So many of the women that I speak with inevitably end up asking me how do I heal my feminine energy? And it's a valid question for so many of us. When we start on the journey of connecting and deepening into our divine feminine energy, often we realise that our feminine energy is wounded or that we are not as skilled in our feminine as we could be to really step into that fullness of our expression and the full potential and possibility and radiance of who we are. And so I want to share with you in this episode how I healed and I am still healing my feminine energy. I don't think it's ever going to be a one and done deal because we are living in a world where the masculine is still valued above the feminine. We live in a world where we are encouraged to push and take action and use logic.


And so many of our feminine gifts aren't really valued, not by the world and sometimes not even by us. And so when I think about healing feminine energy, what it really means to me is not simply to heal, but to really discover and adopt a way of being, of living and moving in the world so that you honour your feminine energy. What happened with me, and this is incidentally what happens with so many women, is we reach a point where our inner wild woman wakes up. She calls to us and usually this is combined with a descent into the underworld, which only really means we enter into a place where we feel lost. We go into darkness within ourselves. This is where we meet the dark goddess. This is where we need to let go and let die, all of those things that aren't really who we are.

And when I speak of these things that aren't really who we are, what I mean is all the beliefs and the limitations that has been put upon us by the world, by society, by the culture, by the norms, the belief systems about our value, our place in the world, our right to speak, our right to be seen. And those belief systems are the things that keep us stuck within ourselves. It's the things that keep us small within ourselves, and we need to navigate the way out of there. Peer into the shadows to discover what is there. Not only the things that we reject and deny and hate about ourselves, for lack of a better word, because of the conditioning, but also those things that we don't even know is there those gifts that we are hiding from ourselves. My connection to my feminine energy really awoke and started blossoming with the birth of my first son.

This is interesting. It's not unusual, so many women experience that is when we go through a big transition in our lives, Maureen Murdoch speaks of this as one of the ways in which we descend into the underworld. And I was really catapulted into this very dark place where I started feeling resentful and I started feeling angry and I started feeling taken advantage of and worthless. And it was a terrible time. It was a terrible place to find myself in. But that was a necessary part of my journey because when I was there in that dark place, I needed to find a way out and I needed to find a way to really come back to myself because I felt as if I had lost myself. Physically, so in the outside world, it looked like I was still carrying on as normal, but I really felt disconnected from myself.


I felt disconnected from the world around me. My nervous system was in total fight or flight. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which I don't struggle with anymore, thank goodness. And I think, this is not any medical advice, this is just my opinion, I believe it was or it had to do with the fact that my nervous system was in such high alert for such a long time. So as I was searching for answers and looking for help, one of the concepts that I landed on was masculine and feminine energy and how we have this or these two essences that are alive inside of us at the same time, and it has nothing to do with our gender, but that so many of us don't have a connection to the feminine side. So we're very well developed and we were very strong in the masculine.


I know I certainly was, but the feminine was something that we've neglected. And when I started reading more about this, I had this deep resonance in me that said, yes, this is what's going on and this is my salvation. This is how I will get back to myself and this is how I will get back to wholeness. And so I started doing a lot of reading about this. I tried to find out everything that I could as we do, and I realised that there were certain things in my life that I was doing that I needed to change. These are the things that I did that supported me to come back to wholeness and to heal my feminine. The first thing that I did was I realised I had to come back into my body. I was so constricted and I was so tight. My nervous system was so in hyper alert.


I thought that I would start doing yoga because yoga would help me breathe properly and breathe deeper into myself. I never really liked yoga. I found yoga extremely boring and frustrating. Looking back now, I realise it's because when I had to become still enough and be present with myself and my breath in that stillness, in the poses in the yoga, I couldn't handle that. I couldn't be with myself. This was one of the first things that I did, is really to learn how to slow down and be with myself as opposed to doing these hardcore exercises where I would push myself to the edge really only to be able to feel.

Today. I'm a yoga convert. I also read a book during this time, and this is the second thing that I did to heal my feminine energy. This book was about the seasons of the year and how our feminine is related to the seasons, how we can see our own cycles in the seasons of the year, and how each season has a specific quality and that there's a way for us to live so that we can honour ourselves in the season of the year.

And so that's the second thing that I did is I started thinking of time as seasonal and cyclical. Instead of thinking of time as linear of always moving from point A to point B, it's a very masculine timeline, this linear timeline. But for the feminine, we are cyclical in nature. We are always moving in cycles. Even our menstrual cycles, whether you bleed or not, our hormones, we are always going through a cycle. And so this is a better way for us to operate. We are living in a linear world, but when we nourish that feminine, which is part of healing the feminine ,is really finding a way to be nourished and to be sustained within ourselves. When we nourish our feminine, when we follow and honour the seasons that we are in, not only the season of the year, but also the internal season. And this is actually a very helpful practise to do because it can remove a lot of the judgement that we have about not performing enough or being lazy or not being in the mood for everything.


When you start thinking of the cycles of the season that are running within you and the different areas in your life, what season you are in, that specific area in your life, then you start to relate to yourself differently because it's not black and white. The feminine is not black and white. There are so many nuances, and that's the unknown and that's uncomfortable, and that can also be a little bit scary because we love predictability. We find safety in predictability. Do this little exercise and think about the different areas of your life, whether it's your family, your career, your finances, your business, your friendship. And think about which season is it in. Spring where things are starting to blossom and things are starting to grow. Is it summer where you really start to see the fruits of your labour and it is very festive and the sun is bright and we all feel like partying?


Is it in autumn where you're really starting to harvest to reap the benefits of everything that you've worked on? Or is it in winter where things are dormant and things are really slow and new possibilities and growth is happening, but it's happening underneath where you can't see it. So it feels like not very much is going on, and it's a time where we retreat into ourselves. So that's the second tip that I can share with you. If you are on this journey to healing your feminine, start thinking of time in a cyclical seasonal way. Start relating to time in that way. Start relating to yourself in terms of where you are in your life in that way, and disconnect yourself from the linear, always from point A to point B. That's really helpful if you want to catch a bus at the right time or if you have a project deadline that you need to get to, but it's not really necessary for us to live in that way, there's a better way for us to live.


The next thing that I did is I really focused on surrendering, letting go of control, leaning back instead of always pushing forward and having to take action. And this was happening in my career, it was happening in my relationship, and this is part of being in our masculine drive where we are always pushing forward, where we are very controlling, where we need things to be in a certain way so that we can feel safe. My experience of that is when we don't have integration within between our inner masculine and feminine, when our inner masculine bullies our inner feminine because we haven't come into right relationship with her, then we don't feel safe. And when we don't feel safe on the inside, we try to create unconsciously or even consciously, we try to create safety in our outside world. And there's nothing wrong with it. It is normal.


It's how we are built to survive. This is what's going to happen. But on the back end of that is we start feeling resentful. We start having problems with our boundaries where we overextend our boundaries. We are too rigid, and then we feel guilty, and then we fall back into no boundaries. So our boundaries keep on doing this. We are not sovereign standing in our own truth when we don't feel safe within ourselves. Our masculine holds us so that we can be who we are so that our feminine is free to flow and express her truth. And so I think, this happened with me when I first discovered about the whole masculine feminine scenario and about these divine feminine energies. I was like, bad masculine, bad masculine. This must go away. I don't want this. I just want to be totally feminine because my masculine is just bad news.


And I think that happens to many of us is we have an overreaction. When we bring our energies into harmony, when we integrate our masculine with our feminine, it gives us that safety. We can use our masculine to do the heavy lifting while we are in our divine feminine power. So we lead with our feminine and the masculine is at our service. That is the way that I see it, and that is the way that I'm experiencing it in my life. Your truth might be different. When we are in this place where we can stand in our sovereign feminine power and our masculine can be in service to the feminine, then it's possible for us to let go control. Then it's possible for us to surrender. It's possible for us to lean back and to receive, to become open, to become soft in our feminine because we feel safe.


The next thing that I did and sounds like I did the step-by-step, there aren't steps. It happened like this. I'm just putting it in order so that it kind of makes sense. One of the other things that I did is I really started working with my inner child. I did healing around my father wound, around my mother wound and reclaimed that little part of me, that little girl within me that I never really mothered and nurtured as she needed and really came to love her and bring her back into my embrace. So many of us go through the world with our inner child, that part of us that really needs us to love them and to nurture them, and they're stuck away in a corner, not because we've done something wrong, but because this is how our lives turned out. Part of the healing journey is to bring our inner girl into love, to bring her back to us and to become the mother that she needs. To really step into our feminine maturity.

What happens when we don't do this is that our inner girl creates havoc. She's that wounded maiden that takes over in our life, and she gets triggered and she causes so much chaos. You don't want her to be at the driver's seat or the driving wheel- what's the expression?- of your life You want to be in your sovereign power, right? So we need to love her and bring her home to us. And this is what was such a big healing part of my own journey of my feminine to come back into wholeness. I've got a few more that I want to share with you. So one of the other things that I did to heal my feminine is I began to incorporate a morning and evening ritual that nourished and sustained me. What I used to do before, I've always been someone who enjoyed the idea of having a morning ritual because I believed that it helped us be productive and helped us get things done.


So adopting a morning ritual was never a problem for me, but it was the how that really wasn't nourishing and supportive. I can remember in those days, those dark days where I was really struggling to connect to myself and connect with my loved ones and feel myself when my nervous system was in high super alert. As I would wake up in the morning and like a machine, I would tick off the first power hour of my day where I did meditating and I did journaling and I did reading, and I probably threw in a few pushups as well. But I had this dedicated power hour and it was exhausting. And so on my feminine reclamation journey, on my feminine healing journey, I started incorporating practises that connected me to myself. Instead of going outwards and feeding my masculine as it were with information and doing, I started tapping inwards.


I started checking in with myself. How am I? How's my inner girl? How am I feeling? What do I need? I use my masculine to support me in terms of the structure and the predictability. It's a process that happens every day. It's a process that happens for a set amount of time. So my masculine is the container that holds this so that I can connect with my feminine first. And my experience is when we connect with our feminine first, it really allows us to stay in that space throughout the day. Then when we go into our masculine go- energy to get things done, we can do that, but we are able to come back to ourselves, our softness and our feminine easier. We don't stay stuck here in our minds and get all tight and all tense up. Something else that I started doing was I started living in alignment with my menstrual cycle.

I started tracking my cycle, and not only to know when I'm bleeding or when I'm ovulating, but really aligning my life with choosing my actions and my activities to where I am in my cycle. And so one of the biggest changes that I've created or brought into my life is that on the day of my period, I don't do much. And it's not because I'm helpless or I'm weak or I'm lazy. It's simply because I have learned over the years of working with my cycle is when we bleed, when we shed all of those parts of ourselves that are redundant that we don't need anymore, that's ready to be released, this is also a time for inward reflection. This is a time for being quiet by making sure that you take it easier and that you rest. You allow your power to build internally so that when you move out, you move into your inner spring with energy and enthusiasm and you have more drive and more availability throughout the month.


And then as you start going down into the luteal phase, which is the time just before your period, you can start slowing down again. It doesn't mean that you can't do certain things depending on where you are in your menstrual phase. The way that I see it, the way that I practise it is: this is how I resource myself. This is how I make sure that I am optimally aligned in my sovereign divine feminine power. I'm optimally aligned with my own energy cycles, which doesn't work on a 24/ 7/ 365 way. It works differently. And if I'm aligning myself with that, then it resources me and it makes me resilient. When I go and live and work and play and do what I have to do in the hyper-masculine, hyper-masculine, linear world, I'm doing it on my terms. 

The last thing that I want to share with you that for me was, and still is still now the foundational key. So if you came to me today and said, if I have to do one thing to heal my feminine, what is the one thing out of all of these things that you shared, what is the one thing that you will recommend to heal your feminine energy?


Then I will say it is to learn the skill of embodiment. Our feminine, our feeling flow is in the body. We need to descend. We need to come into our body. We need to get in touch with our inner felt sense, our embodied experience of life, because that is the truth. When we become sensitive to how we subtly respond to certain thoughts or to certain ideas or to certain experiences, it starts to give us data to inform us as to how to live, how to respond, how to decide, how to hold boundaries, whether a boundary is needed or not. We can only do that if we are connected into our bodies. At least I believe we can only do that if we are connected into our bodies. The world operates up here in the mind. And so for us to be balanced, we need to have both this and this, and even the thoughts that we think, the belief systems that we have, we can experience the truth of that in our bodies.


And so the skill of embodiment, which I learned when I did my training as a feminine embodiment coach, this has completely changed my life in terms of how I show up. Our bodies show us what we need to know when we are ready for that. It illuminates things in our world, but we have to be sensitive to that. And so when you learn the skill of embodiment, when you learn the skill of dropping into your body and moving what you are feeling, a few things happen. You become more sensitive to what is alive inside of you. You start regulating your nervous system. And this, for me was a big thing. Remember how I said in the beginning that my nervous system was like, eh, and if it wasn't eh, then it was completely frozen. And so when we start moving these frozen parts of ourselves, we start creating liberation inside.


And this allows our life force energy to come out. You can think of it as an iceberg that's inside of you. So you're stuck. There's this rock-hard iceberg inside of you. And doing embodiment starts to move this iceberg. Starts to wiggle this iceberg and starts to melt the sides so that it opens and creates space inside of you for you to step out of the shadows and to step into your light, to step into the fullest possibility of you. And this is how we become radiant. Something that comes from within. Our inner radiance. For me, embodiment is the process that opens, unlocks, and allows our inner radiance to shine through. So, here is a whole list of things that I shared with you today. I really hope that you found them helpful. I'm curious to hear where you are on your feminine embodiment journey, so you can so welcomely leave a comment for me down below.


Tell me what you thought about this episode. Tell me about which of these practises resonated the most with you. And as I said, I really hope that you found it helpful and insightful. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will speak to you next time. Bye.