Living A Feminine Life
A client recently asked me what I meant about “awakening the Feminine.” To be feminine today is to be seen as silly, girly, dainty, soft...none of which are appreciated within a patriarchal society. When I looked up the word “feminine” in an online dictionary, I was treated to the following: “having qualities or an appearance traditionally associated with women, especially delicacy and prettiness.”
But truly living in the Feminine means embracing creativity, intuition, sensuality, and honoring a cyclical life. When we place these values at the forefront of our day, we are able to access a magnificent, gorgeous and nourishing power. By constantly repressing inherent human traits in order to fit into a society that devalues them, we are subject to burnout, depression, anxiety, health issues and insomnia. It’s time for a reclamation of the qualities that define femininity, but before we can embrace and find power in these traits, we need to identify and awaken them.
First, a note on the use of the terms “feminine, masculine, women, men.” The very idea of femininity is a social construct and is dependent on a gender binary that treats men and masculinity as different and opposite of women and femininity. We are increasingly aware of the fluidity of gender across a wide spectrum and I want to be careful of limiting the term “femininity” to mean “women.” Referring to feminine values does not equal referring to female bodies. As Glennon Doyle writes in Untamed, “Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs - beliefs that have become mandates. Human qualities are not gendered.”
But it would be naive to simply pretend things are the way we want them to become - that personality traits or qualities stereotypically assigned to women haven’t also been disparaged in society. Indeed, it is more acceptable for women to display stereotypically masculine traits than it is for men to show any sign of femininity. In a society where maleness is valued more than femaleness, men willing to embrace femininity threaten the idea of male superiority. Until we can get to a point where feminine qualities are understood and appreciated as human qualities, and are valued equally for both men and women, we’ll never achieve gender equality. So I present the following as Feminine values as qualities that are applicable to all, regardless of gender identity.
Creativity
Feminine energy delights in creativity, where new ideas and objects are created. Women’s bodies have the extraordinary power to create, birth and sustain a new little human life, which could be considered the ultimate creative act! We enter life as children full of creative ideas and imagination delighting in our expanding vocabulary to help voice our extraordinary visions. Just look at the art projects in any kindergarten classroom - monsters as big as buildings, unicorns with cotton candy tales, tiny superheroes capable of taking down the most wicked of foes.
Unfortunately, our sense of childlike wonder and creative energy gets stamped out in adolescence and adulthood as we are told in messages both subtle and direct, “What you create doesn’t provide value. There’s no time for you to sit around and dream, there’s work to be done. This idea isn’t good enough. You don’t really have it in you to be creative.”
And so as we follow the rules, dutifully attend to the tasks at hand, and our creative voice grows quieter and quieter. Occasionally we have the opportunity to flex our creative muscles, maybe on a project at work, or in our own home, or designing a child’s birthday party. But these opportunities often come with a painful story of the messages of our youth. “I’m just not the creative type,” you think. “Other people are creative, but that’s not me.”
How do we tap into this creative energy again, when we have spent years denying its existence? What kind of results might we see when we allow the play of creativity to flow through us?
Intuition
Similar to creativity, young children are very intuitive, until our culture tells them to ignore that inner voice. Indiginous societies revered the intuitive voice we all possess, creating rituals and circles that provided council based on powerful intuition. But our modern culture values the rational, the proven, the scientific facts. We’ve learned to talk ourselves out of the hunches and the gut feelings we experience - “That idea will never work.”
The Feminine is very good as sitting with the unknown, developing the ability to intuit and understand things that aren’t able to be validated via the scientific method. This understanding comes first in the form of our menstrual cycle and ability to bear children. Living in the unknown comes natural to the feminine, as it isn’t immediately obvious when ovulation occurs, when the monthly bleed will begin, when conception has happened, when a baby will be born, when menopause will happen, and so on.
Reclaiming our ability to intuit, and to trust that intuition is a foundational step to awakening the feminine energy..
Sensuality
Sensuality is too often confused with sexuality. Both can offer pleasure, but sensuality is more about experiencing the world through our physical senses - sight, smell, taste, touch, sound. Sexuality relates to the act of sex, and while that may be a sensual experience, they aren’t a requirement of each other. I’m sure we’ve all experienced sex without being totally present in our bodies.
Audre Lorde creates a distinction between the erotic and sexuality in her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by defining the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our living, our work, our lives.” I believe sensuality acts in the same way, as an honoring of the essential lifeforce in women that starts with noticing the physical body.
You can read my blog The Body Is Always Giving Feedback for more information on how to pay attention to your body’s signals. Start by checking in with your body all day long. Touch your arms or torso and do some gentle movement when you wake up. Pause throughout and ask “body, what do you need now? Thirsty? A little rest? A short walk outside? A massage? An orgasm? Food?” When emotions arise, notice how they manifest in your body. There’s a reason we say “I just feel it in my gut.” Your body knows, sometimes even before your thoughts have caught up. Listen to your body’s reaction first, whether it’s a project at work, an invitation to lunch, a request for sex.
Cycle
All of us honor some element of the cycle in our lives. We recognize that when the sun is up we are meant to be awake, and at night we are allowed to sleep and rest. Gardeners understand planting seeds in the spring and harvesting in the fall. Every month we watch the moon wax and wane. But a cyclical life is truly the core essence of the Feminine. Masculine energy is linear and turns off and on easily. Feminine energy ebbs and flows, moves inward and outward, and takes a longer time to warm up and cool down.
Of course, the most obvious example of a Feminine cycle is the menstrual cycle. Living with an understanding and an appreciation of your own menstrual cycle can be one of the most powerful practices to awaken and reclaim the Feminine. It allows us to Recognize that we move through periods of being inward and outward, being reflective and expressive. I am highly indebted to the work being done by Alexandria Pope and Sjani in Wild Power
Everything discussed in this post can be invoked by honoring a cyclical life. When we learn to have reverence and live within the cyclical nature of a feminine life, we are able to more easily tap into stores of creativity, intuition and sensuality.
