46: Are You Stuck In Masculine Go Energy?

Do you ever feel like you’ve got everything in hand, but secretly, you feel nothing at all? You’re getting things done, and you are showing up.  Your productivity is through the roof … but inside, you feel like you have flatlined?  

Go energy isn’t bad. We need it. It gets things done. It keeps life moving forward. But when it's the only mode you know how to live in is when things start to break down. If you never lift your foot off the pedal, eventually something’s going to crash.

In this episode, we’re talking about what’s really happening when you’re stuck in constant go mode (it’s also often referred to as “masculine doing”).  I also dive into why it most likely has everything to do with your nervous system and safety.  

Tune in to discover why you might feel like you can’t rest (even when you want to), and the deeper connection between overdrive and emotional safety.

Get the full show notes, transcript and more information here: 

https://tertiariegler.com/stuck-in-go-mode/

📩 Join the conversation:

• DM me your biggest insight! https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/
• Email me via my website https://tertiariegler.com/contact/

➡️Watch Free Training Your Burnout Exit Strategy: The 5 Step Path to More Energy, More Money & More Self-Expression - Without Burning It All Down

🎙️ Follow Beyond Burnout for Driven Women so you never miss an episode!

🎧 Loved this episode? Please leave a rating and review and share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

Transcript

If you clicked this episode, chances are that you are feeling the cost of living in go mode all the time. And maybe you're even wondering if you are too much in your masculine doing energy. So this is what I hear from women again and again. They say I feel like I am constantly busy, everything is getting done, but I feel flat, I feel disconnected. I don't even know what to do with myself when I rest. If you hear yourself in this, then today's episode is for you. I am Tertia, and this is beyond burnout for Driven Woman. If you're the kind of woman who gets things done, but you secretly feel numb, tense, or like you're barely holding it together, you are not alone. This podcast is where we untangle the burnout cycle and drop out of our heads and back into our bodies so you can finally come home to the woman you are and start living in a way that feels good, not just productive. Let's begin. So the topic of masculine doing energy has come up in my field a few times over the last week. And so I need to talk about it. And I want to start by getting really clear on what I mean when I say stuck in masculine doing. Because I feel this phrase gets tossed around a lot in coaching spaces. And honestly, it's not always so helpful. There's a lot of misconception I feel that can potentially cling to this phrase. So when women say this, what they're usually talking about is that they are living in a state of constant doing, constant pushing, constant planning, and constant achieving. And it's not about being masculine in a gendered sense, right? It's more about operating from your more masculine energy aspects, those aspects that are more action oriented, more outcome driven, more linear, more logical and more structured. So it looks like getting things done and being efficient, being organized, being logical, leading with your head, being structured. And this is so necessary in today's life, right? We need to be able to have access to these power outputs of ours, but it becomes draining when that is the only mode that you are operating from. So nowadays I prefer to use the terms go and flow instead of masculine and feminine. And I learned this from my teacher, Michaela Boehm, who's the creator of Non Linear Movement method and I'm trained in non linear movement. Problem that I experienced before is that masculine and feminine is gendered. So we use it as labels to refer to something. And it's always helpful when we have labels to make sense of things, right? That's how we make sense of things in the world. But when we speak about masculine and feminine, what I often see is that it assumes it's a binary, it's an either or. But what we need to understand is that these energy aspects, these expressions of our energy lives on a spectrum and it is dynamic. Also, when we simply refer to the terms masculine energy, feminine energy, it implies that there is a clean division. Like, you can label explicitly what is masculine and you can label explicitly what is feminine, but that doesn't actually happen like that in our lived experience. It doesn't happen like that in life. I've had experiences before with clients where they get stuck in trying to figure out when they do something, am I in my masculine when I do this, am I in my feminine when I do this? And the risk with trying to categorize and label like that is that it puts a lot of pressure on you to be more feminine. We put pressure on ourselves to be more feminine. And I'm putting that in quotation marks and that kind of just puts us in another box. I see also on social media that feminine energy can be stereotyped. It is so limiting the way that the feminine is sometimes expressed on social media. There's only one flavor of the feminine that, that seems to be the. The preferred flavor, right? And often the masculine is portrayed as the villain. So I prefer to use Go and Flow because to me, they're not so emotionally layered. They don't have so many attachments. And to me, Go and flow has a truer, energetic expression of the movement. Like go has an expression of moving forward and direction. And flow to me has an expression of moving wider and deeper and being more softer rather than structured. So my view of Go and Flow is that we need access to both in order to have a fulfilling and a meaningful life. You're not going to flip between the two modes. It's not about toggling switches. I want you to think of yourself as a whole ecosystem of energies and rhythms and intelligences and instincts and responses and impulses. And you are fluid, you are non linear, and you are complex, and you are beautifully contradictory. And that's how it should be. So. So having too much access to your go or to your flow, neither one is better than the other, but when one dominates, that's when things starting to feel wonky and you can start to feel lopsided for too much flow. You can be floating around and it's like you don't have an anchor. And I want to point out that this is quite normal. Once we start reclaiming this flow essence, we can easily veer over too much to the flow side. It happened to me when I started the practice of feminine embodiment and I had to find my personal balance. And I feel that's quite normal where we begin to negotiate within ourselves what is right for us. On the other hand, if you have too much go, you could burn out. So when your go is in overdrive, it can lead to burnout. Right? But not all burnout is caused by your go being in overdrive. At the least, what happens to you with your go being in overdrive is that your life starts feeling empty. You feel dry, you feel brittle, it feels like you have flatlined. I call that standing with only one foot in your own life. So externally, it looks like you have it all together and you have all these successes and you tickle the boxes, but inside it feels like something is missing. When your go is in overdrive, it drives you and it's like you are a puppet being run by your own internal patterns. So it's not the go energy itself that's the problem. It's when you are stuck there and you don't have access to the other parts of yourself that it becomes wonky. So what does it look like if you are stuck in your go? It could look like hyper independence. Right. A theme that I negotiated a lot in my life and that I had to work through and heal with is this theme of I've got it, where you don't want anybody to see how you're struggling even when you're drowning. The I've got it is your default and you avoid feeling your emotions and you might even end up feeling numb or disconnected. So you don't want to rely on anyone. You rather do it yourself and just get it done. And it actually doesn't feel safe to rely on others. Right. It feels risky. So you are carrying this invisible load and you're holding it all together. And at this point, I also just want to mention that it could potentially be, and I want to recognize that, that you might be in a season of your life where it is your time to hold all of those things together. You might have a small family where you need to take care of them. You're carrying the mental load, you're carrying the emotional load, you're carrying all the invisible labor. And if this is the case, I think it's extra important for you to make sure that you are resourced and to begin to see where you can make changes that supporting you. All right, so that's not necessarily a sign of hyper Dependence. It might just be a season of life that you are in. You might also, if you are over reliant on this go energy or stuck in go mode, you might be always switched on. It's like you don't even know where your off button is. And even when you're resting or when you're supposed to rest, you always mentally doing, you always busy up in your head. You're unable to switch off without distraction, right? You need to scroll or binge, watch TV or do something in order to be able to switch off. You can't just be with yourself because that stillness makes you squirmy. And the, the challenge with that is that you say that you want to rest. You yearn for that ability to switch off, but the moment that you stop, you start feeling fidgety. You might even feel guilty. And there's this push pull conflict that's happening internally all the time. You also might experience that you end up measuring your worth by your output, by what you produce, by how productive you've been in a day. When you come to the end of your day, unless you have achieved your goals, you feel like your day didn't have any meaning. So you feel good when you're very productive. And again when you're resting or you're not doing something, there's this low grade feeling of guilt or discomfort and you feel like you should always be doing more, right? Whatever you're doing is not enough. Something else that might even be part of this is that you find you don't cry easily. You don't even have time to feel overwhelmed, right? You've got it all set together and you keep yourself so busy and buttoned up and you've shut down your feelings completely. You might also, and this is the third aspect that I see come to the fore when we are stuck in this go mode, is that we are disconnected from what we want, right? You don't know what you want anymore. Because being in go mode the way that you have been and having your awareness pointed outwards and forwards, you've lost touch with what is true for you on the inside, right? You've lost touch with what lights you up. You might even feel resentful or drained or flat. And you look at your life and you think like, what is this about? I have all of this, but I don't feel anything. And then that's followed up by guilt for not being grateful for everything that you have, right? So you're doing all of the right things, but you have lost your spark and you can't remember the last time that you felt alive. You don't even know what it feels like anymore to feel truly alive. So there's this deep disconnection from our own life force, energy, our own vitality, our desires and even our intuition. So this is where we, we are so reliant on using our mind and our logic to make decisions and to use that to follow through, that we disregard that small little internal voice and those small nudges that come up. In fact, they are so soft and subtle that we've often, we don't even know how to hear them anymore. We've lost that skill of hearing our own inner voice and our own inner wisdom. It doesn't matter if you can count yourself in only one of these categories or all three of these categories, or maybe even categories that I didn't mention. The thing is that there is a cost to living this way. And that inner voice just becomes louder and says, there has to be another way. So if you are nodding along to any of this, I want you to know that you are. First of all, you're in very good company. And there's nothing that you have been doing wrong and there's nothing about you that needs to be fixed. You are not broken. The reason that you are stuck in your go overdrive is because it is keeping you safe. There's a reason why you are stuck there. And that reason has to do with safety. And can you see that? If we try and figure out on the level of the mind, why am I stuck in go overdrive, or we try and bring in new habits like doing more self care or doing more alone or quiet time, or changing my diet or doing more exercise, going for more walks. If we try and add on to what is there, it's not addressing the root cause, which is the issue of safety. Whatever it is that's going on inside that is causing your nervous system to shift gears into this overdrive pattern for you to feel safe. It's the job of your nervous system to keep you safe, to survive, to multiply and to survive. I'm pausing myself here. I don't know if you can hear the rain on the roof. It sounds beautiful on my side, but I hope that it's not interfering with the recording to keep you safe. That is its job. That's why we are still on the earth after how many thousands of years, right? We have a nervous system that keeps us safe. And often the things that our nervous system learns that will keep us safe doesn't support us in being the woman who we are to be. So we might have learned that it's safer to be doing than to be feeling, or it's safer to stay in control than being vulnerable, or it's safer to over deliver and put the walls up than letting people in, or to risk asking for too much or to risk not being enough. And our world that we live in, our hyper masculine world, also teaches us, it conditions us that there is value in output, there's value in productivity. And so it's so easy to start avoiding those feelings that feel overwhelming, that are dismissed by others or that aren't welcomed by others. And in the process, we are erecting this emotional armor around ourselves which keeps us stuck in overdrive. So so many women find themselves in an experience like this. When you live in a state of constant doing, it's often because your nervous system is in survival mode. And I think we might mistake being in survival mode often to mean that it is just this freaked out, kind of flat out panicked, chaotic kind of state. But it could also be more of a functional freeze kind where you still showing up, you're still performing, you're still checking all the boxes, but you don't feel like yourself anymore. You feel flat, you feel disconnected. And somewhere deep in your bones, you know that there's another way. And this is usually when women find me in my world. The shift comes from relating differently to yourself. So I am all about helping you bring the whole of yourself back online. Reclaiming all of those parts of you that got exiled in burnout, especially your flow parts, that softness, the slowness, the. The pleasure, the vitality, the creativity, the intuition. You need to become more of you. That is the antidote to getting unstuck from being in your masculine doing. Go energy. You need to become more of you. All of you noticing which parts of you are leading and who. Which part of you are unskilled and which parts of you are offline and who do you want to be? How can you bring all of those parts of you that makes you a fully expressed woman? How can you bring all parts of that online? And that requires a sensitivity to your body and your internal world. You cannot do this kind of awareness from the level of the mind because then it just stays a thought process. We need to actually embody it. By coming into your body, by dropping down into the deep truth of you, into the depth of you, you create safety within. This is how you begin to create that internal safety that your nervous system needs to get out of survive mode so that you can begin to thrive. And I did a whole episode about creating inner safety. It's episode number three and I'm linking it for you in the show notes as well. So I want to share a story with you about a client of mine, very successful on the outside. She owned, well, owns. She still owns a real estate business. So this is a very masculine, very fast paced kind of industry. And she was very sharp, she was very driven, she was very experienced. She got things done right. And when you looked at her life, you'd see that she had done everything right. She raised a beautiful girl. She was strong, she was organized, she was in control. But she had no idea what she wanted anymore or who she wanted to be. And she didn't know how to change that. So the outside looked perfect, but inside she felt just flat. And when she came to me, she said, I think I need to be more feminine. But what she actually meant was, I want to feel like myself again. And when we began working together, we didn't focus on making her more feminine or activating her feminine energy. We focused on helping her rebuild her relationship with herself. So she started noticing her patterns. She became clearer on what she actually needed, how she wanted to show up. And she began softening. And it was remarkable to see the transformation of how she went out of overdrive and started coming back into her body. And with her permission, I want to share a part of what she wrote to me recently. Hi, Tertia. I wanted to take the time to express my gratitude for helping me connect to my inner divine self. I've had an awakening of my purest form. I realize your guidance helped catapult this experience into action. I have many rituals that I do daily, and one is the flow, movement, practice that you taught me. This is a tool that I use that helps me feel the presence of source within me and is something I cherish daily. And that's the shift that I'm talking about. It's a shift from being disconnected from herself, her truth, her life force, her vitality, to a deep connection with herself, a new relationship with herself, where she stopped abandoning herself. If you have been living in go mode and you have the sense of there has to be more, you're craving something softer, more, deeper. It's not something that you need to go and find somewhere that part of you isn't gone. It's just waiting for you to land in her. She's waiting for you to land in her. And there's nothing wrong with you if you have been in overdrive. Because this is how you've learned to survive. And you've been doing a very good job with that up until now. But now it's time for something different. And you don't have to become anyone else. You just have to become more of you. And you can do that by learning to drop down into your body, into your truth, so that you can start living from that place. What would be different in your life when you did that? That's a final question that I want to leave you with. What would be different in your life if you started living from the truth of who you are, from your whole self, and you brought your whole self online? If this episode landed for you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who would benefit, someone who would find it valuable, someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to explore this more deeply, head back to episode three. Go and listen to how to Cultivate Inner Safety. Because that is what makes all the difference. We begin by creating that internal safety so that we can be safe to be ourselves. And in that way, we are not controlled like puppets by our patterns. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll speak to you in the next one.