Feminine energy is often associated with traits such as nurturing, compassion, and intuition. But in truth, feminine energy is SO much more than just these qualities! It’s a powerful force that can be harnessed by both women and men to bring greater depth, meaning and truth to their lives.
Many women today are passionate seekers of divine feminine energy.
And many more teachers and guides have also sprung up in response to this yearning. Sharing their steps on the divine feminine path and teaching a myriad of divine feminine practices, femininity has become BIG business.
But a lot of what’s being described as “feminine energy” in the world of personal development and spiritual growth is really something else: Patriarchal femininity.
What is patriarchal femininity?
Patriarchal femininity can be described as a set of societal expectations and norms that actually reinforce traditional gender roles, placing women in a subservient position to men.
It involves the idea that women should be passive, nurturing, emotional, and dependent on men for validation and protection.
Patriarchal femininity is femininity that’s defined by a narrow set of expectations, that are often unconsciously reinforced by other women.
It limits feminine traits to certain roles and behaviors that are ultimately harmful to women’s autonomy and agency. But on the surface, it’s made to look like the opposite is true.
Put like this, it’s something you’d actively avoid, right? But for many women who are seeking out the feminine, and looking for ways to activate and embody sacred feminine energies, this is exactly what they’re being taught.
To illustrate this, here’s what you’ll typically find online, around feminine energy meaning and characteristics –
Traits of Feminine Energy
- Empathy
- Sensitivity
- Intuition
- Nurturing
- Receptivity
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Love
- Softness
- Fluidity
- Healing
- Inward focus and family
- Compassion
- Patience
For contrast, here’s a list of masculine qualities and traits you’ll typically find on the internet…
Traits of Masculine Energy
- Assertiveness
- Independence
- Logical Thinking
- Competitiveness
- Leadership
- Structure
- Protection
- Linearity
Feminine Energy v Masculine Energy
Can you see the polarising nature of these lists of qualities and traits?! Are you seeing the very narrow definition of masculine and feminine energies they provide?
Now, I’m not saying that allocating these traits to the feminine is somehow incorrect. Feminine energy IS sensitive, intuitive, loving, healing and compassionate. But it’s also a LOT of other things too, things that may not seem as ‘soft’ and ‘appealing’ as the ones on the list…
Understanding Feminine Energy
Feminine energy is life force energy.
Think of mother nature and the huge spectrum of qualities that could describe her changing faces. She is a gentle summer breeze, and she is also a raging tornado.
She is a fluffy newborn lamb, and she is also a roaring tiger. As an expression of the divine feminine, the Great Mother doesn’t fit neatly into just one box, so why are we doing this with the feminine?
Defining Feminine Energy
The true feminine encompasses light and dark, love and fear, beauty and ugliness. She is youth and age. She is receptivity and she is force.
So as well as the traits listed above, feminine energy ALSO encompasses qualities and expressions such as:
- Sensuality
- Pleasure
- Passion
- Devotion
- Magic
- Anger
- Fearsomness
- Transformation
- Chaos
- Decay and death
What does feminine energy feel like?
True feminine energy feels like life but is experienced very differently from what our current dominant paradigm allows. It’s a state of presence. A truth you can touch, but only when you’re in intimate contact with the present moment.
It’s an embodied state, a meeting of spirit and matter. It’s almost indefinable. Fleeting, just this side of intangible, something born out of connection.
The Oracular Poet Maya Luna speaks of the “Deep Feminine Current”. I believe her work is the BEST description of pure feminine energy (as opposed to patriarchal femininity) that exists.
So feminine energy isn’t a term used to describe the qualities and characteristics associated with women. It’s not about gender. It exists out there in the world, in the moment, and in women and men too. Yes, a man may also embody and experience the power of feminine energy.
Yet there’s something about the physicality of women, with our cyclic natures and our connection to the Earth, our blood, and our bodies, that gives women the edge when it comes to embodying this kind of real feminine power.
Feel like your feminine energy is stuck?
Read this next: 25 Signs Your Feminine Energy is Blocked (and How to Overcome Them)
How to activate feminine energy
Activating feminine energy is a personal and individual process, it’s an ongoing journey!
TBH a lot of the work involves stripping away the layers of conditioning that most of us have picked over many generations of life on Earth. It’s not a quick fix.
For the curious, here’s a pretty comprehensive list of 20 ways you can begin to welcome this powerful frequency back into one and sacred life.
1. Connect to Mother Nature
Number 1. It has to be! Because nature is the home of divine feminine energy.
The more you commit your time and energy to her, by going to meet her where she’s at (that devoting time to sitting out in her wildest places) the more she will share her medicine with you. Nature IS sacred space. Her rhythms, seasons, patterns and cycles are the container you need to heal, transform and thrive.
2. Get embodied
Divine feminine energy lives in the body! But most humans (both men and women) have been systematically disconnected from their bodies over centuries of living under patriarchal control.
Getting more embodied needn’t be atending a yoga class! It can be a simple process of finding ways to feel grounded every day. Ways to pull your attention DOWN from the mind, into your body.
- Walk barefoot outside
- Tune into your five senses
- Spend time eating, and really savor your food
- Touch your own body and get to know (and appreciate) her contours, textures, and shapes.
Remember, reconnecting to your body means connecting to your physicality, AS she is. This means without judgment, criticism, berating or denying what is real for You! (And this can be SO hard to do, but absolutely liberating when you finally go there)
3. Embrace your sensuality
Closely connected to embodiment, sensuality is the pleasure that can be found in sensation.
Embracing sensuality by coming into contact with what we are feeling, can bring so much more feminine energy than just staying in our heads.
It’s SO simple, yet many of us are flying through life without ever stopping to “smell the roses”. We’re in desperate need of the pleasure that comes from slowing down to sense and feel our bodies, as they interact with our world.
4. Examine your conditioning around femininity
Nobody is immune to conditioning around what it is to be feminine, feel feminine, and look feminine.
Conditioning comes from culture, religion, media, schooling, family, friends… It is the idea that your female energy must manifest in a certain way, and if it doesn’t, then you’re somewhat less of a person.
It is deep, deep work to strip back to the inner feminine, so go slowly. A good place to start is likely by looking at your own shadow…
5. Do your shadow work
Everyone has a shadow side – a part of our unconscious mind, where we put all the parts of ourselves we have rejected. This usually happens totally unconsciously, and we all do it, so there’s nothing strange or wrong with having a shadow.
Because of the conditioning that pretty much all of us have received around the acceptable expressions of masculine and feminine energies (see those lists above!) the “unacceptable” parts are what’s in the shadow. For women, these traits may look like
- Anger
- Ugliness
- Manipulation
- Assertiveness
- Being disorganized
- Having needs
- … and many, many more personality traits and qualities
Peeking into the shadow, to uncover and reclaim what you find there is a powerful healing journey that can return far, far more than feminine energy alone!
New to shadow work?
This 13 day beginners shadow work program could be exactly what you need! Check out: The Honeyed Shadow
6. Fall (back) in love with your body
Your body isn’t what patriarchy tells you it is. And it doesn’t have to look like patriarchy tells you it should look.
Through modern marketing and our consumerist culture, Capitalism tells us at every turn that our bodies aren’t living up to some perfect ideal. The machine wants you to feel forever inadequate so you’ll buy the next wrinkle cream, anti-cellulite lotion, or push-up bra.
But this constant barrage creates (and reinforces) an internalized rejection of who you are, in this moment.
Fight it! YOU are enough!
**And if the rawest, most honest, and real YOU does wear a push-up bra then that’s totally okay! But unless you peel back the conditioning and find your genuine expression, how do you know who the real you is?
7. Dismantle internal systems of oppression
There is SO much material out there today on this subject. It’s big work. HUGE work.
Oppression is something we do to each other AND something we do to ourselves. It’s the result of centuries of false beliefs repeated over and over again until they become the systems that hold us. And we perpetuate those systems by feeding them, through our reliance on them.
It’s the work of everyone on the planet, but especially white men and women, as so much of the internalized oppression in these groups is unconscious, which makes it even more damaging.
The divine feminine sits at the intersection of countless vital issues in today’s world, from racism to sexism to climate change to ecocide.
Approaching all of these areas (using her principles) will awaken her in the world.
Do you want to use journaling to explore the feminine?
Read this post next – 50 Best Journal Prompts for Healing Feminine Energy
8. Slow down
The pace of our modern world is SO unrelenting, isn’t it?
The relentless pushing forward is a tool that keeps us from really being in the present. But feminine energy can’t be rushed. And it can’t be stopped. It exists in the here and now, which is really the infinite moment of existence.
9. Invite in the Dark Feminine
The feminine has many faces. Not all of them are “love and light”. As daunting as it may be, collectively we need to embrace all of them on this journey.
The dark feminine is a hugely necessary aspect of this spectrum of femininity that more and more women are discovering. Start spending time with her.
You can read all about dark feminine energy HERE.
10. Embrace your menstrual cycle
One of the simplest ways to activate the raw power of the divine feminine within, is by connecting to your menstrual cycle. As a menstruating woman, each month your entire body moves through a sacred cycle of growth, climax, descent, and death. Your emotions, sensations, and bodily functions mirror this incredible blueprint.
So instead of stifling your feelings, numbing your pain, and dreading your blood, awaken to the creative force you carry within!
New to tracking your menstrual cucle?
Read this post next – What’s the Difference Between the White Moon Cycle and the Red Moon Cycle?
11. Track the Moon
Another way to embrace cyclic living (great if you don’t have a menstrual cycle) is to track the Moon. Use a calendar or an app to track the Moon phases and signs. Note down any changes you feel, in your emotions, creative energy or physicality.
For more guidance on not just how to track the Moon, but what to actually DO with each phase and the energies it brings, download the e-book: How to Get Started with Sacred Cycles
You can integrate the power of the Moon further by holding a Moon ritual.
DIVE DEEPER:
12. Practice self-care
In all spiritual practices (and yes, activating the energy of the feminine is spiritual work!) taking care of yourself is essential.
Make time for yourself each day. Take a bubble bath, read a book, or do find your own way of making sure you feel good. Always try to treat yourself with kindness compassion, and self-love.
13. Explore your sexuality
What IS sexual energy? It’s almost certainly not what you were taught at school! Sexual energy is:
- Life force
- Creativity
- Eros
- It moves through everybody, and everyone has the right to express it too.
But sex and what sexual energy actually is has been radically distorted over the centuries, and today most people see sex through a very strange lens that’s clouded in shame, suppression, embarrassment and taboo; and at the other end of the scale, pornography, abuse and much, much worse.
It’s a mess. It’s so far from the creative, erotic, sensual impulse that sex is really all about.
You can begin to awaken the Divine Feminine by spending time exploring your own sexuality. But doing this really requires peeling back the layers of conditioning that we have all been fed since childhood. AND resisting the societal stereotypes and assumptions that are still rampant.
14. Awaken your intuition
Making decisions based on rational thought and logic tends to be favored by those with dominant masculine energies. And there’s nothing wrong with that!
But as a society, we need to find balance.
Intuition is that sixth sense, that inner voice that whispers the truth that you need to hear. But it’s another thing most people have forgotten about, as the connection to our deeper selves has been all but destroyed.
Re-awakening your intuition will give you BACK that direct line to the feminine side of the sacred.
15. Embrace your creativity
Everyone has a creative side.
Remember the creative power of nature? This is the frequency of the feminine. Many of the most truly feminine ones among us are also innately creative. And I’m not talking about creating a beautiful Instagram profile! True creative power is wild, untamed and unique, not stuffed into tiny squares.
16. Create ritual
Ritual is an antidote to the capitalist model.
Rituals are a way to connect back to the Earth, to ourselves and to the sacredness of life itself.
Gentle daily rituals will awaken and activate the sacred feminine because they are HER technology. They are HER methods. SO with ritual, you’ll not only reawaken her but integrate her too.
Start with a simple morning ritual, like lightinng a candle in honor of the Goddess, or speaking out an affirmation as you watch the Sun rise.
16. Use your voice
Women have been silenced for centuries.
This goes back to the burning times (and beyond) when women were called out as witches for not only their magic, but their daily work and practices.
So we learned not to speak. The pain and repercussions of this are still alive today, as the witch wound travels down the ancestral lines affecting modern women, even though most have NO idea why they just can’t seem to do certain things. Like:
- Speaking up when it matters
- Talking openly about their spirituality
- Voicing their hunches, intuitions, and feelings
- Putting a point across in front of others
- Defending themselves when threatened
Working with the throat chakra can help immensely. As can doing the deep ancestral healing work to uncover the root of your own witch wound stories.
17. Nurture relationships
The feminine is relational.
Feminine energy manifests through how we relate to others – other people beings, whether they’re rocks, trees, and flowers, or man-made buildings and structures.
But despite our deep desire for connection, most modern folks aren’t taught how to relate in intelligent or healthy ways. – instead, we tend to pick up the “how to-s” of relationships unconsciously, though what’s modelled to us (often not the best examples!)
18. Cultivate sisterhood
The sisterhood wound is another way that women have been harmed and continue to harm. Instead of seeing other women as allies, we judge them, criticise them, gossip about them, and/ or see them as our competition.
Work hard to avoid this, and instead build healthy, generous relationships with like minded women.
19. Balance your inner masculine
Feminine and masculine power can coexist within society. But a balance is needed.
Our culture tends to overvalue masculinity (or should that be toxic masculinity?) And at the same time, we’re becoming more aware of how damaging it can be to lose touch with a more feminine approach.
Many women feel burned out, exhausted, and dissatisfied from trying to keep up with a system that’s overly masculine, and not designed for our female needs.
YET we must still exist here. So abandoning any masculine traits just isn’t an option. But balance is.
20. Be your own best friend
The feminine has been suppressed, rejected, distorted and shamed for centuries. One of the most powerful ways to counter this is to fully BE with yourself, in love and acceptance.
Honor your needs, and give yourself time for your internal process to unfold.
Allow the spontaneous joys of existence to rise up in you, and be felt.
Spend time getting to know your inner self, through journaling, meditation, and deep self-inquiry.
The journey to activate and embody the frequency of the divine feminine is a LONG one. Connecting with other like-minded women can be a real game changer, so be sure to make the cultivation of real sisterhood a priority.
What is your next step? Share it in the comments below…
