“It’s gotten to a point, where…”
I tell her, pausing to close my eyes and my hand over my heart. Sit bones softening into the hard wooden bench under me. Shoulders dropping. Breath slowing. My body becomes visibly loose.
“... I can just drop down into her. Right into my womb, I can melt into that bowl, and my whole body and brain just release, and relax.”
The summer night is warm, and much more frivolous than we are. The yellow of car lights turn our sidewalk table a golden color, 90’s R&B blasts from inside which sounds cheap and twangy against the vulnerable fragility and candidness of our convo over cold with warm, if battered, souls.
“The moment she started talking about meditating from the womb, something clicked for me. I knew exactly what that meant, and exactly where to go, and my whole body, heart and soul knew exactly what to do when I go into there: surrender. The moment I go in, everything becomes soft, and juicy, and let's go. That anxious grip I have on everything,” I say, lifting my hands in trembling fists to my chest, “ - my life, my relationship, my job, it all relaxes and I can feel my heartbeat slow down. It’s the space for me.”
In a deep tone she gives me a reassuring, interested “mmm” response, not as if she feels the described sensation herself, but more as if she understands the described sensation. Like its instinctual, familiar, ingrained. She senses the spaceful ease I’ve now given to my interaction with the now moment, with myself. The air around us changes. The sexy music inside feels even more inauthentic and forced.
After the many books, the many podcasts, the many groups and classes, I’ve come to know this energetic shift as what I lovingly refer to as Embodied Feminine Divine. A returning to, and awakening of, the divine feminine presence with me and within all beings, especially women. I’m no expert of it, nor do I think anyone could be given its infinite nature, but I am a practitioner. An avid one.
Embodying the Divine Feminine is what has deepened my meditation practice like nothing else. Healed decade long emotional wounds. Relieved constant anxiety and worry. Enhanced my sensuality, sexual experiences and pleasure. Made me feel more beautiful. Increased my self respect, self worth, and creativity. Made life in general easier, more fun, and incredibly more abundant.
To get here was no easy road for an overly productive, people-pleasing perfectionist like me, addicted to earning love. My relationships in every area of life were plagued by masculine tendencies to do, give, offer, perform, fix. In work I took on longer hours, harder shifts, projects beyond my capacity and availability for too little or no money. In dating I chose partners who couldn’t take care of themselves, so that I could caretake and be needed (un-abandonable), caring for them more than I cared for myself. In my family, I overcommitted to tasks in order to be helpful and earn my space in the tribe, changed my personality to fit in, hid the best parts of myself in order not to be judged or rejected. Only to find myself returning from family trips more depleted, and confused as to who I was and what worth I brought to the table other than helpfulness.
I first began studying Divine Feminine by accident, spurred by the book Women Who Run With Wolves, a veritable handbook-via-folklore as to how to unleash one’s wild feminine power, prowess and creativity. I don’t mean artistic creativity, although it’s that too. I mean creativity at it’s most fundamental: creating and sustaining human life, the death-life-death cycle of menstruation, and even the ‘tiny death’, le petit mort, of sexual intimacy.
Anyone feeling called to this kind of self exploration: relaxing their masculine energetic tendencies to be codependent or seek validation from others, fix or people please, is likely already hooked by the idea of finally letting go and returning to the easeful, joyful, in-flow and receiving feminine nature. I’d hate to weigh down anyone else’s journey with a framework of my own path, and would rather your’s be wild, innate, messy, and led by intuition as it should be. It is meant to be your own dark night of the soul; any wisdom will be found through your own teachers and tribulations. But if you are still clinging to the powerful illusion that masculine “doing” energy is the answer to your woes, here is a checklist to see if fostering your own divine feminine nature instead might be more helpful:
You find yourself in relationships unfulfilling, fixer-upper relationships or settling
You are turned to (too often) in order to console others but can’t turn to those same people for your own needs
You feel inhibited, self censored, anxious, or always on guard
You are depleted from too much responsibility, often while others do less than their share
You put others on a pedestal
You have codependent behaviors
You desire more effortlessness, fun and joy in your life
You crave more appreciation from yourself
You long to feel beautiful, sexy or sensual
You are competitive with other women, or compare yourself and judge yourself as less valuable than other women
The masculine part of us wants to take these problems and find solutions; thus our people pleasing or perfectionism kicks in. But the feminine desires the opposite: to be instead of do. To allow, to release, to express. And most importantly, to receive. As the feminine does to create life itself, we create new energies within us by accepting and liberating our divine feminine right to receive. I don’t mean only receiving gifts or love. I mean also receiving ourselves. Our fullest expressions of emotion and art, our truest being. We receive our own praise for exactly who and what we are, how we look, how we move in the world. It is the practice of not fixing, not solving, not forcing, but instead surrendering to the truth of ourselves, with our only action being that of enjoying ourselves. For example the masculine in us might take our trauma into therapy to ‘do the work’, which is vital and brave. But we bypass completion of the healing process by not also integrating our feminine: feeling our feelings entirely in order to free ourselves from them. Expressing the truth of our desires, disappointments and pains that occurred within the trauma. And blossoming like a flower into a new, nourished version of ourselves.
Is it your turn? Is your heart, womb, soul, or creative self beckoning you to open the door and allow them to be in your company? To get to know each other? Is your body hungry for connection? Does your throat chakra itch to be relaxed and allowed to speak its truth? Do you simply want to be able to look in the mirror and mean it when you say “you are beautiful.”
The path unfolds uniquely for each of us. But mine began with books. Here are my favorites. Happy healing:
Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
The Wild Woman's Way by Michaela Boehm
Dance of the Dissonant Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
Wild Feminine by Tami Lynn Kent
F*ck Like A Goddess by Alexandra Roxo
