Episode 155 - The Feminine Is For All of Us
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Episode - 155 The Feminine Is For All of Us
00:02
Hello, beautiful, and welcome to the Come to your Senses podcast. I'm your host, award-winning certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed esthetician and enthusiastic foster dog mama to animals across the land, mary Lofgren. Here we explore how to bring more richness, radiance, peace and pleasure to our lives, homes and hearts through the joy of beauty, the wisdom of the body, the warmth of connection and the splendor of the senses. I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a poof and let's dive in. Glad you're here, pull up a poof and let's dive in. Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to Come to your Senses. I am so excited to be with you today.
01:04
It has been about eight weeks since we last sat together, heart to heart, mouth to ear, here on the podcast, and I have so much to tell you. So during this time where I took a break from podcasting, part of the reason I took a break was because I was traveling and so I expected to take two weeks and I ended up taking eight, and I ended up taking eight, and in part that was because I wanted to wait to podcast again until I had something meaningful to say. We are over 150 episodes and I was saying to a friend recently you know, I'm just kind of running out of ways to say slow the F down. And I reached a point and this happens as a creative and as an entrepreneur where the gas had left the tank not necessarily because of exhaustion or burnout, but almost a creative burnout. And so during this time I have been waddling and wandering through what my friend Kate Northrup calls the fertile void, and the topic of our conversation today is around feminine energy. Our conversation today is around feminine energy and I don't know about you, but when I think about feminine energy, often a woman on the beach with flowy garments comes to mind, kicking the water and catching raindrops or water drops in the sunshine, and it's this easy peasy kind of image, and that is one aspect of juicy and delicious feminine energy. There's also a side of feminine energy that, if we were to look at this from the perspective of the moon, is the dark unknown of feminine energy energy and the way that all creation originates in a place of darkness. And to liken this to my experience over the last few months, I've, like I said, gone through several cycles of this in my business, where I feel like I've run out of things to say, and usually that's because I have and I need to take time to listen to listen to myself and to listen to you.
03:37
So many of you have been so generous to fill out the community survey and share your thoughts and ideas and desires, and I'm so excited to say that, after the last few weeks of what often felt like wandering the desert alone, creative Spark has returned reignited and sharpened into a brilliant clarity that I'm so pumped to share with you over the next few episodes. So I want to start, before we go into our gems, by just sharing two announcements. One is that next week, on June 12th, I will be debuting a brand new secret garden that is based on your desires and suggestions, called the Come to your Senses Sanctuary. I'm going to restrain myself from describing my excitement because I don't think I would stop podcasting for the next two hours. All I can say is make sure to be back here next week, because you don't want to miss it. The second announcement is that, with this clarity that has descended around my work and the future direction of my company, one of the threads that weaves itself most abundantly through the work that I do is the thread of the beautiful, and so I created a complimentary audio collection called In Celebration of Beauty. It's a three-part collection where I share the unexpected power of beauty as a spiritual path and a tool of healing, wholeness and transformation. So you can learn more about that at schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash beautiful. I'll also put a link to that in the show notes below this episode, and in addition to the audios, which are just loaded with gems and they're each about 10 to 15 minutes they're not super long there's also journaling prompts and an opportunity to connect with me personally in the comments. So I would love to have you as a guest and participating in this conversation around beauty beyond the aesthetic Although, let's be honest, there's nothing wrong with the aesthetic either. Check that out at schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash beautiful.
06:29
And now let us dive into our gems on the feminine is for all of us. I'd love to begin with a story, as we often do here. Coming to our senses is coming back to a more body-based way of life, and stories have a way of inspiring us and settling into our consciousness in a way that's different than when we're just fed information. So snuggle up for story time, and if you're a listener to this podcast, you know that I grew up really Catholic, would go to Stations of the Cross for fun, was one of those people who went to Mass at 7 am, just getting it in before the school day, you know, and I loved it.
07:37
I loved the rituals, I loved the community, I loved the aromas and the ceremony. And there was this other side of going to church. You know, my parents were also very religious and so it was a big way in which we bonded as a family. And there was this other side that had a much sharper, more rigid edge, which I'm sure I don't need to tell you about what that feels like to be inside of organized religion and to notice that the curves of your being don't always fit inside the straight lines of the rules of how to fit in and how to be good and et cetera, et cetera.
08:29
And so, in addition to this church aspect of my young, budding, spiritual self, I also had a secret fairy godmother, and especially on rainy days. I grew up on a horse farm, so there was a lot of land and I would go out into the misty woods and I would find rocks and pebbles and I would scrawl messages onto rock faces in a secret language. And my fairy godmother was not the wish-granting, cinderella, fairy, dust kind of fairy godmother. My fairy godmother was tall, with dark hair, purple robes and a kind of Avalon-like wisdom. I don't know where I got this from, I can't say I read Mists of Avalon at age nine, but clearly there was some aspect of my being that yearned for a feminine experience of the divine. And when I say feminine, some of the things that I would associate with that fairy godmother is deep compassion, nurturance, beauty, justice, inclusion, creativity and abundance. You know, feminine energy to me is circular and it's flowing, and it's a state of being rather than a state of doing. When I would encounter this fairy godmother, I was sacred and everything around me was sacred. So the mist in the air from the rain was no longer just droplets of water, it was an enchanted curling curtain. The trees and the flowers and the animals were no longer just these externalized, inferior beings to me as a human, but they could talk to me in a language different than words and they possessed their own certain type of magic.
11:03
One of the roles I'm most proud of in my life is being goddess mother to a three and a half year old little angel, and just this past weekend I took her to the ballet with her mom to see her first ballet, and she was fussy and tired before we left to go and I said to her you know what, as we were getting ready because I've given her potion kits and I take her through this very enchanted approach to spiritual nurturance and well-being and I said you know what, just like we do potions with your star water and your paint colors, getting ready to go out is also a ritual and a magic spell. And I taught her about how we can tell a story with our garments and how brushing our hair is polishing our crown, and, oh my gosh, it was just so delicious and delightful. And so I share this piece about spirituality, because spirituality is very closely tied to our identity and it's common to associate, when we hear the words feminine energy, with thinking that the feminine is something available exclusive to women, that it's a way of becoming more girly. Blah, blah, blah. I'm sure you know what I mean. But a conversation that really interests me are the ways that feminine energy is made for all of us.
13:17
Humans could use a little more compassion, a little more nurturance, a little more room for beauty, healthy expression of emotion. Wouldn't it be refreshing if, rather than rushing through our decisions on autopilot day to day, we could make decisions from a deeply rooted and embodied, abundant place. Wouldn't it be amazing if we had nap stations in the workplace? You know, just the other day I was working and I was sprawled out on the floor like in a child's pose, but up on my elbows, looking at some papers and reflecting on all the times in corporate America and in offices where I just had to sit in an L shape in a chair for eight or nine hours a day or more, and where the only time I'd get up and walk would be like to go to lunch. And just the need for the body to be in motion and to be in flow and to be an expression, especially when being creative, and also to take breaks when we need it, like in a nap pod.
14:30
Would you agree that our world would benefit if there was more paid parental leave? If nurturing massages were covered by insurance insurance? If sexuality was absolved of shame and met with celebration as a normal and healthy aspect of our humanity, regardless of what our sexuality looks like, all the way on the spectrum from asexual to demisexual to homosexual to heterosexual and everything in between. If violence was met not with punishment but with an act of restoration for both victims and perpetrators, an act of restorative justice, if there were economic systems that put the needs and the dignity of the body and the planet first, before making a profit or in addition to making a profit. These are all examples of what I envision when we imagine a world where feminine energy is brought back into balance. And so bringing feminine energy back into balance is not making us more womanly, more girly, more femmy. It's about making us more whole as human beings. Making us more whole as human beings.
16:14
And so some other ways to think about these energies, outside of the language of feminine and masculine, are that feminine is that fluid, flowing, always moving, creative energy, what we, in feminine embodiment coaching, call our flow, whereas our masculine energy is our go, our drive, our thrust, for lack of a better word. You know, the feminine energy is the parts of us that just melt open to creativity and the flow of life, whereas the masculine energy takes that succulence of life force and pushes it out into the world, as our creations made manifest in creating this episode. My feminine is the unplanned use of the word thrust, the way that creativity flows through me and out of me, but the masculine is the microphone I speak into the editing of the episode, the delivery of it to you. This is just one example of some of these different textures that we experience when we compare feminine and masculine energy. And again, I want to just name that the goal is not to become wholly feminine, because there is a shadow side to that.
17:55
For sure, when I find myself in too much feminine energy or in an unhealthy expression of feminine energy, I feel really foggy and dissociated and unmotivated, I feel disempowered, I feel helplessness, I lack in boundaries, whereas when I'm too heavily in my masculine energy and this is an experience that, living in a patriarchy, many of us are, I would say, more familiar with is the experience of being unable to shut off one's brain, not knowing what to do with it, because we're so used to our identity and our sense of okayness, being attached to that dopamine hit than we get when we produce something. And so, obviously, this is a much bigger conversation than can be contained into these 20 delicious minutes, my loves. But for today I want to leave you with two questions to explore how these energies show up or don't show up in your life and in coaching. My mentor, jenna Ward, always says that a great coach is someone who asks great questions that open new doorways of awareness, and so the first is a question designed to illuminate areas where you may be lacking in some of that feminine nurturance and allowance and dancing with life, and that is to take a moment and either write or, just in this moment, think about your list of shoulds. I should make more money, I should be a better parent, I should have a different looking body, I should have my shit together more. You know all of these where we are ascribing our sense of rightness and belonging in the world to something externalized.
20:39
Maureen Murdoch, who wrote the book the Heroine's Journey, which was a feminine take on Joseph Campbell's book the Hero's Journey, says that the feminine journey is about going down deep into the soul, healing and reclaiming, while the masculine journey is up and out to spirit. So I love that distinction between spirit being that force greater than us, outside of us. You know, when we say our higher self, that natural human urge to grow and to develop and to reach, and that that is one aspect of the human experience sinking down until you hit the sea floor of, as Mary Oliver would say, the voice you recognize as your own, and that is what we might describe as this more feminine journey of going within. So, whereas that masculinized, externalized idea shows up in our shoulds, in our subconscious, a way to possibly counteract that is with another simple question, which is, after you name your should, following that with another question is that true? I should have children by this point in my life? Well, let's take that off the shelf for a moment. Is that true? Who says that's true? Do I think that's true?
22:40
Shoulds are kind of like bacteria, where bacteria can't survive. Well, certain forms of bacteria can't survive in the presence of oxygen, and I find that our shoulds often can't survive in the presence of curiosity. And so that's one prompt for exploring these energies and how they show up in your life, these energies and how they show up in your life. And the second prompt is to just take a scan around right now and notice where is the feminine in this moment. So when I look to the wallpaper in my office, I see the artistry of whoever created this wallpaper.
23:30
I feel the feminine in the pit sweat collecting underneath my underarms, because it's evidence of being alive, and the pulse of life force, and the way that, when I'm creative, my body heats up. I sense the feminine in the taste of coffee that's still on my tongue from my cup of coffee. And this exercise can be powerful because often and I see this all the time with my coaching clients is that we come to feminine energy with a masculine skill set, and so a client will be extremely eager to open to feminine energy. And you know, once again, because we are so well trained and well practiced in our thrust and are moving towards and dominance and really meritocracy of if I just work hard at this, I will master it, I will get it. And what I like about this exercise of just looking around and looking within to your own body, of just looking around and looking within to your own body, is that it is a receptive experience of feminine energy. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to go and seek it. Instead, you can just drink in what's already here.
25:05
And so, my beauties, I am so delighted to be back dancing between your eardrums. There are many more exciting tales and stories and luxurious listening salons to come, because next week, on June 12th, is when the wrought iron garden gates of the sanctuary open, and I am so excited to reveal this treasure with you. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time. If you enjoy this podcast, you'll be besotted by my new complimentary audio collection on the healing power of beauty as a spiritual path. These three audios take you on a journey of creativity, femininity, inspiration and delight. Head to the link below this episode or schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash beautiful to enrich your life from the inside out through the power and pleasure of beauty. Thank you.
00:00 / 26:35
Dear Ones,
When navigating change, my good friend Elizabeth often says, “To the NEW!”
That’s exactly the energy I bring you this fine day.
After a hiatus from podcasting and blogging I’m thrilled to announce that a breath of fresh air has blown through Come To Your Senses, refreshing, revitalizing and reinvigorating our next chapter!
A new intro & new music…
A new gold star offering…
A new sense of energy, clarity, and purpose…
…are all coming your way in today’s return episode, titled “The Feminine Is For All of Us.”
Hit play and let’s dive in.
With love,
Mary