Nourishing Yin

In this episode, I share about my sabbatical from my work, my descent into the darker realms, and what I've learned about nourishing my womb and building yin in this process. Living in a yang world, building yin is important for balance and health. Spirituality itself can be an upward movement, outward focused, yang experience. Feminine spirituality needs to be focused on nourishing yin in order for it to be sustainable for our bodies, our souls and energy. I explore and critique in this episode the societal focus and celebration solely on yang, outward, and love & light energy.....and I explore how we can honor the lunar, darker, feminine, descending energies in order to be balanced. I created a free class on yin cultivation teaching you all the lifestyle changes, diet, and practices I have used! It includes a 30 min womb nourishment deep void meditation. Dm me on Instagram @juilailarose "yin nourishment" to receive it!

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Word of the Womb Podcast. I am your host, Jelila Rose. And today I have a really special episode for you. I've been diving deep into the womb into this descent the past few months. And I've taken a bit of a break, a sabbatical, from my work. And it's really good to be back. So I'm excited to share with you some of my recent journey and how things have really changed in this podcast. So Yeah. Here we are. Here we are. I am now in Texas once again. And I feel more grounded in myself and my body than I have for quite some time. And it feels really good to be back in this place where I've really slowed down a lot. And heartbreak and grief and descent into the darker realms is really such a gift and such a humbling experience. And of course, I've known this and talked about this for years with my work in the feminine embodiment realms, and yet it's these spirals of the feminine teachings, right? That just take us deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper each time. And this one, wow, really took me. Really took me, and many of you know, and I've talked about it before, my journey with mental health and the experience of what felt like spiritual awakening, which can be called mania, which in Chinese traditional Chinese medicine was called excess heart fire, where I really exploded in this manic experience last August, and it was such an expanded state. I was in such a beautiful, expansive state. Yet it was excess heart fire, it was so much young energy. It was so much. Against all of the teachings of slowing down, softness, descent, and I've been through this before, right? It's these lessons of the cycles of the seasons of ascent and descent and learning to become in the center, learning to find the center. And as I was in that called an ascent, an expanded state, I was putting a lot of focus, energy on how to relax, how to, you know, I was managing it the best I could because I was also aware that it was a lot and that I needed to ground. Um but was definitely not successfully doing so enough, which I feel is due to the programming that somehow this was it. This was better than the descent. This was higher. This was better, this was it, this is what I wanted, this felt good, right? And the the programming about performing more and the dopamine hits of creating so much content and making viral videos and there was just so much reinforcement, societal and external reinforcement that this energy was better, and also so much programming around that that I found when I entered the contraction period, which began in December, the contraction period after that expanded state, which could have been seen, experienced as a depressive state. My energy was really low, and I didn't feel like I had a lot of ideas or output or external energy. There wasn't anything that could be seen or given me validation in the external world, so there was a lot of shame that I experienced that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't performing, that I wasn't um making money, that I needed to go rest and decompress and and be in the void, and and that I didn't have a way to support myself at that time and needed to stay with family and that brought up a lot. Right, and also I was able to have so much compassion for myself of all that I had just gone through in life, all of the changes and transition and heartbreak and mental health and this huge initiation that I'm in that I was deeply in of finding the center, finding the ground finding the yen. And something that I learned so much about throughout this time in the last year has been about the cultivation of the yen of how to do that, you know, when I was my expanded super young state, I was needing to learn about that, and especially when it went into a PTSD like state with the with the memories and it forced me into so beautifully a state where I was needing to rest, cultivate the yin. I learned so much about herbs in Chinese medicine, like the dragon bone and the oyster shell. And then going into the depressive state or the contracted state, it was a whole different initiation into that process. It was the descent, it was a descent deep into the yin. Because yin is a heavy energy, yin is energy of the void, of being internal, not external, not talking, not doing, not creating. It's heavy, it's deeply in the earth, and we have judged that so much as a culture, as a world for that to be depression, for that to be oh, something's wrong, for that to be we're not performing for the outer world, like what is happening, and I am I do feel so blessed that I did get to rest a lot in that period and be taken care of as far as being with family, and I still notice this pressure, so much pressure I was putting on myself to perform, to get out of the state, to go back to the manic state, to go back to to find God, to ascend out of this, to get together aside, and wanting to rush the process, wanting to get out of it, wanting to create, feeling like, oh, I'm not in my soul purpose, feeling so much pressure on performance, on soul purpose, on making certain levels of income. And it was so interesting to witness all that and find my worthiness, separate my self-worth from that, and to love myself in that place, to really, really love myself. So challenging. It's the greatest challenge, and so beautiful that I feel like I've found that now, that I've become more anchored in that now of really loving myself. I know I'm but I'm sure it'll always be a challenge, right? With the programming that's so alive in our culture and in all of us. To love ourselves in the descent, to love ourselves in the mess, and when we have nothing on the external realm to say to to attach our worth to, to get our validation from. But you just say, I am worthy because I am, I am worthy because I exist, because I am me. No matter what. So much beauty, so much power in that that I'm so grateful for. And really what I'm finding is there's still this need to cultivate the yin, to prioritize nourishment, food for the body, warm soups, electrolytes, hydration, to prioritize really good sleep, you know, no screens in the evening time, which I'm breaking that right now to record this podcast because the energy was alive, and so sometimes that's what it is. But as a general rule, right? Warm baths, not overdoing the exercise, the high-intensity workouts, the cardio, but slow walks, lots long walks, gentle strength training, not needing to push the body so hard. So essential for our health. All of those biohacking, you know, all the things that they say to do that people, it everyone's chasing to feel, it's all a chase for a high. These high-intensity workouts, you know, you get a high, you feel so good afterwards, but it's depleting the body, and it's increasing the cortisol, the stress hormone. So we already have a lot of stress, we already have a lot of young energy, and we're already depleted, as so many of us are. On a physical level, and in Chinese medicine they would call this, you know, depleting the qi, the energies in the kidneys, our essential essence in the kidneys, the life force. You know, cold plunges as well. Even I was doing Tima scalls for a while, and then I it was like, wow, I'm like really pushing myself. This feels not right. And that part of my mind, of the masculine mind, that's such a deep program around like push through, and this is good warrior strength training of the mind to control the mind, and I'm okay. When the body was saying no, and I found these like these really hot timascals really weren't actually the best thing for me right now. Gentle sauna sweats, yes, are great, but the really intense heat and sweating when the body is depleted of yen, it has trouble cooling itself down, has trouble removing heat, so there's already an excess heat there. The young energy, the heat, the tumor scales are really young energy, so much heat, so drying, so really depleting. And learning to really listen to the body to trust, to slow down. It's not weakness, it's not a sign of weakness, and everything in the masculine dominated culture has taught us that that's weakness. But yen is our ultimate strength. When we build yen is the body, yen is the blood, yen is the bones, yen is the density, it's that is strength in the physical form, and it's our container. Because what I found is that the reason I wasn't able to hold money, hold wealth, hold the higher frequency states I was going into with expansion, expanded state is because my yin was depleted, meaning there was no container to hold it. And so when that happens, we just burn out. We crash and we burn, we have these really high expanded states, and then the crash, it's up and down, it's you know high money months, push, push, push, and then crash. It's not sustainable. And so returning to the basics of what I've always learned, what I've always known, the beginning of the the work that I've done for five years, which has been the feminine embodiment work, slow embodied movement, slow embodied breath work, not the high intensity breath work, shooting out of the body, but staying in, listening to the body, womb meditation, slow womb massage, sensual movement, cultivating the yen with the sexual life force, circulating, cultivating, harvesting the sexual energy in the body through tantric practices. The void meditations that I guide, which is you know, similar to non-sleep deep rest or yoga nidra, where you're just going deep into the body. Deep into the body, feeling, sensing meditation, lying down, deep rest. Coming back to these practices was so nourishing in my manic and expanded state and and then the period of the the trauma PTSC and anxiety and is also so nourishing in the contracted state, in the descent, still just as needed, still just as necessary, because even when there's a tiredness, sluggishness, lower energy, that doesn't mean we need more yang, because that's what I thought at first. Like, okay, you know, naturally we go to that, right? Okay, coffee, uh, cardio running, workouts, things that like pump the body up when we feel uh slower and lower, right? But no, the yin is still depleted, we're still needing to nourish the yin. So it's a slower, longer process of building vital energy from the inside we're out rather than trying to go to the high intensity crash and burn kind of energy. Building the slow fire, sustainable energy that lasts. I noticed how I wanted to run away from it, how I wanted to have. Have the next spiritual hive. I wanted to go to Peru for a month and drink ayahuasca every single day and like have some awakening experience. That was like my dream. That was what I was heading towards in this past period. It was like, oh my gosh, I need to heal. I need to go out. I need to do something else. I need to all these things. I was going to um a Pentecostal church for a while. Uh because I was seeking, right? Trying to find God in this dark state that I was in. And also it was church free. Didn't have any financial resources to be going to any kind of ceremonies or paying for anything. And I knew Pentecostal churches were all about charismatic worship and and speaking in tongues and you know, these ecstatic altered states. So it was like, okay, great. And I was going and praising and um crying and having these beautiful holy experiences of the Holy Spirit. And it felt good. But it wasn't a quick fix. It wasn't shifting anything overnight. It wasn't changing things at the core level for me. Because ultimately it was the same thing. Trying to find something to fix when there was nothing wrong with me. I was just coming into balance and it was about accepting that and nourishing myself where I'm at. Doing the thing that I preach for myself, doing the thing that I'm guiding my clients into all the time, but embodying that for myself. So gorgeous. And it feels so good. And I'm so grateful to be learning this so I can share it with all of you even deeper and from an even more embodied place within myself. So I hope this can relate to anyone else out there. I hope this was helpful. I'm so happy to share my story. It feels so good to be in this space with all of you and getting to share so raw and vulnerably my real life and everything I'm going through in real time. So thank you all for listening. And yeah, this is the shift. This is a change. This is a rebirth. This is a big change for I feel like the word of the womb podcast. You know, it started when I was still in a more expanded high state, and you know, it was this lightning bolt of energy that I chose for the womb cover. And it was like word of the womb. And uh then I was really channeling that a lot in this expanded state of was always saying it was speaking a lot and speaking very fast and very loud, and it was this high-intensity frequency that was coming through, uh, which is so beautiful. Um, and I'm I'm not necessarily changing the art or anything. I love that lightning bolt of energy, but now we're we're grounding it in, and I'm I'm able to bring forth a more embodied um energy through that feels just really true and feels really good. So thank you all for witnessing my journey. And here we are. This is me, Jelila Rose. And you know, underneath the that lightning bolts of energy is a photo of me naked, heart open with the roses and on the earth and in these green and muted tones in the image, and I love that because it there's both. It feels like you know, there's this lightning bolt and of that young energy, and the yin was always there underneath that and here we are. So all right. So I don't know what's to come in this podcast, but I do want to be sharing more regularly. Now I feel like I'm I've entering this balanced state, this new reborn state after this long descent where I really uh took a long break from the podcast and from Instagram and from having offerings. And I'm really, really excited to be back and sharing my work from this new grounded state, uh, sharing new offerings coming soon, sharing here on the podcast. So yeah, stay tuned. Um and I'm really excited that yeah. I feel like the podcast is now gonna be really about this themes of living um from the womb, from from the yen, in this really balanced and honoring state of the yin and how we can uh nourish ourselves, sharing more of what I what I've learned during this time about deep nourishment and honoring of the womb and of the yin energy. So I'll see you next time. So good to be here. I love you all. Bye.