Giving up on feminism to be a housewife... the path to true reclamation and empowerment?

A lot of women are abandoning the idea of feminism in an effort to reclaim their feminine essence. They say we've been sold a bill of lies when it comes to women's empowerment.

Is the path to true power in embracing traditional women's roles?

Just what exactly is happening in the collective that gives rise to these ideas and are they worth pursuing... is this the missing puzzle piece to how we become happier and more fulfilled? 

In this controversial episode we dive into the trad wife phenomenon, what true feminine embodiment is about, and how to reclaim our feminine essence. 

Listen below, or on any of your favorite platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio . You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.

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Podcast Transcript:

 Welcome to today's episode. What I want to talk about today is this trend that I see circulating and online feminine embodiment, and women's empowerment spaces recently, where there's this idea that feminism is somehow hurting women. And that we should abandon feminism in favor of more traditional women's roles. There's a traditional wife phenomenon.

That's part of this meaning women are now returning to and embracing the traditional role of homemaker and mother. There are full on Instagram accounts where women talk about giving up their nine to five and going back to being essentially barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And. They post tons of images showing how happy they are taking care of babies and baking bread, all this as a way to empowerment and reclamation of their feminine essence.

I recently saw a meme from an account called the feminist turned housewife that said this. Women used to be valued just by being women, our weakness and softness our femininity and nurturing nature was our value. Now women are valued only if they can compete in the workforce. Like men have sex, like men by their looks and sexual availability and producing capital. Femininity is about being masculinity is about doing. Women are now expected and encouraged to do instead of being, this is why more than ever, women are acting like men. Okay.

So. I need to back up for a minute before I criticize this and say two things. First, I'm sure this person is genuinely lovely and maybe we'd be friends if we met in real life. I don't believe this one post encompasses everything that she's about. Her message is certainly more complex than this. And in one sense, it's really unfair of me to take these words out of the greater context of who she is. Second.

I know that an online account is just an avatar. It's not reality. Reality is the layered and nuanced and multifaceted reality breeds and it's messy and complicated. We all know this, but it bears repeating. It's always good to remind ourselves that someone running a brand online, once us to see a certain image. So all that disclaimer, being said, I still need to call out this meme because it highlights this phenomenon that's happening in feminine spheres. And to be clear, my first reaction to this meme and the anti-feminist sentiment more generally is fuck that. This is incorrect on so many levels and we need to talk about it. And I don't mean that being a housewife, isn't a legitimate desire and pursuit. Women should absolutely be able to choose that.

And if that's what feels alive and exciting to you. You should definitely create that reality. I support you a hundred percent. What I mean is holding this as the solution to everything that ails women today is completely wrong. Holding this as the standard that we should all be aspiring to you in order to reclaim the feminine is at best unhelpful and at worst downright harmful. So stay with me here because I'm going to attempt to explain what I'm seeing and what this anti-feminist meme or sentiment that's going around is about. Y, I think it's present why it's incorrect and what we should be doing instead.

Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, there's this idea that's become really popular in the online world and new age circles. That feminism is harming women. And that the way to true empowerment and reclaiming our feminine essence lies and embracing traditional women's roles. Like the meme I shared said, women should be soft and nurturing.

We should not be doing that's for men. The arguments I'm seeing on this topic, stem from a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be in your feminine. This is what happens when you get your knowledge from Instagram soundbites. Your understanding only goes as far as feminine equals being masculine equals doing. And then you draw all kinds of extrapolations from that about how to practice or how to arrange your life. This being doing dichotomy is a gross oversimplification.

It's completely incorrect. Like the meme we started with femininity is about being masculinity is about doing. Women are now encouraged and expected to do instead of being, and then to say, well, that means that we should throw out feminism and return to being homemakers and traditional wives. Guys, I just can't face Palm hard enough with this shit. Even some brands with really huge followings are being very vocal about this.

They say we've been sold a false bill of goods with feminism. Things that were supposed to make us freer and give us more power. We're actually a trap. And the usual beliefs we adopt with feminism and women's empowerment are taking us farther away from truly being empowered. And what we want is women.

I want to say upfront that what I'm trying to argue here is that we have choice and agency about how we organize our sex lives, our work, our creativity, our relationships, our mothering, our lives in general.

It's not the women's shouldn't embrace traditional feminine roles or examine whether feminism is serving us. The problem I have with this anti-feminist sentiment is the way it's being held up as the way women's should be.

And one area I see held up as an example. Of how feminist movements have failed us is in relationships and sexuality. So central to this argument is birth control. Something that was supposed to free us from the burden and risk of pregnancy. And give us sexual liberation and freedom. These new age feminists argue that instead at the lead to the expectation of women having sex, like a man. Meaning there's an expectation or even a demand that we be promiscuous and sexually available. And that demand comes from men, but it also comes from women ourselves.

It's fueled by things like pornography, Tinder sex in the city style media, young women are being held to these standards and absorbed these aspirations that anti-feminist say don't serve us. And isn't what we really want.

So you can see where this argument comes from. If feminine means just being and not doing that requires a certain kind of relationship structure, where the man is providing and doing all the doing, which requires us as women to go back to more traditional sexual and relational values and that model we need a man to do and provide. And therefore we need to be sexual gatekeepers, guarding our sexuality so that men are compelled to commit and settle down. We need to stop fucking around and demand commitment, where we can be assured of a man's providership and fidelity. That he's going to stick around to ensure our safety and security. We also need a man to lead us sexually and initiate us into our fullness so that we can relax into our being. You can see where I'm going with this. There's actually a lot of shadow in this thinking.

There's a shadow of the maiden, which means not stepping into the fullness of our feminine power, but remaining this young cared for woman, a girl really. This is rejecting the Tinder version of women's liberation for something that's actually not less disempowering. It's not taking us into the fullness of feminine embodiment.

It's letting our inner maiden run the show. So we're essentially now talking about this idea that women aren't served by being free to have sex whenever. And with whomever we want. So some of this also comes from the evolutionary psychology world. That's where this idea was originally born. That women are more naturally sexually choosy and demure and reserved. Because reproduction is far more costly for females and we therefore have a biological imperative to secure a mate to provide for us while we're pregnant and caring for a newborn for, you know, the better part of a year, even more. Now I have a degree in evolutionary psychology.

So I'm familiar with these ideas and I've since abandoned many of these, but let's get into this for a minute. The theory goes that males are naturally more sexually promiscuous because they maximize their reproductive strategy by sowing their seed as broadly as possible. The more women they can impregnate.

The more likely their genes will make it into the next generation. And because they could theoretically impregnate multiple women every day. It makes sense for them to be players, essentially pursuing as many sex partners as possible. On the other hand, women can only get pregnant once every year or two, and it's very costly for us to do so.

It takes nine months to just data, baby. It takes a lots of nutritional stores to have a healthy pregnancy and a good milk supply. And during that time, we are less or even completely unable to provide for, or defend ourselves. And our young offspring. We essentially need the production and providership of a man to survive and have a viable pregnancy without which our genes wouldn't get into the next generation. So. The argument goes, women maximize their reproductive potential by finding one high-quality mate. And sticking with him.

So he'll protect her and provide for her. It sounds compelling. Seems to make sense, right? I mean, we've always been told that women want more commitment. We want to settle down while men want to sow their wild seeds. It seems to fit with the modern trope that it's women who drive monogamy and marriage, and that as women, we're lucky to find a good man.

Who's ready to settle down and commit. But is this true? Our men are naturally more promiscuous than women. Do women benefit more from monogamy than men? Is it actually more advantageous for women to find one mate and get him to commit? Like anything. I think the truth is actually more complex. There might be some elements of truth in the choosy female promiscuous male theory. But it's not the whole picture. There's actually some really interesting recent research and thinking on this topic that suggests females evolve to be just as promiscuous as males and that we are naturally predisposed to promiscuity dress like men, and that we also maximize our reproductive strategy with promiscuity, just like men. Wednesday Martin who has a PhD in anthropology wrote an entire, very interesting book on this called untrue. Y nearly everything we believe about women lost an infidelity is untrue.

I highly recommend reading this book. If you want to know more about this topic.

She points out that humans might be more like Bonobos than chimpanzees. And Bonobos are frisky as fuck.

There are some other books like Esther Pearl's meeting and captivity. Uh, Christopher Ryan's sex at Dawn also offers counterpoints to the idea that women are biologically predisposed to be more monogamous than men. At the end of the day, it's simply not supported by the actual evidence of looking at human anthropology. That might be true that in the west, our society is built around an idea of marriage and monogamy so much that we've institutionalized it and semen tid it in our minds.

And even in our legislation. But there are many examples of cultures around the world and throughout time, That didn't organize themselves in this way. One interesting thing that Wednesday points out is that there are cultures where women are promiscuous and marriage doesn't exist in the same way it does in Western culture. And in those cultures, the result is questionable per turn paternity, which means no one really knows who the father of the kids. Was, and that phenomenon actually tends to subdue masculine aggression.

It tends to create more community cohesion. If you think about it, if any child in the village might be your son or daughter, you're motivated to take care of and protect all the children.

The truth is monogamy is more of a result of the agricultural revolution and property ownership. The best way to secure property rights is to be certain of paternity. That's how you know who to pass your land and your wealth down to is to be sure that you're passing it down to your biological children. And the only way to be certain of paternity is to essentially own your woman's sexuality in her reproduction. When you look at it from this lens, marriage and monogamy doesn't seem quite as empowering. Now, this is not to say that I think everyone should be promiscuous and have multiple partners. Not at all. Just that this women are biologically monogamous is not baked into the reality of our, our genetic makeup, our biological makeup.

So when we're talking about the biological imperative and whether women are biologically and reproductively more inclined, To be choosy and to pursue monogamy than men. Uh, which seems to be one of those arguments I see from the anti-feminist on this topic, it's simply not true. But what about if we talk about emotionally and energetically and spiritually? Here's where things get even more complex.

I started to get a little carried away with all there is to say about this as I was preparing to record this episode, and maybe it deserves an episode all to itself. But essentially, I think there's some truth to the argument that many women do want more depth and intimacy in their relationships. And this isn't going to come from promiscuous Tinder sex. But what I want to underscore here is that it's not feminism or women's empowerment.

That's to blame for this. It's just simply not true that we'd be having deeper sex. If it wasn't for the feminist revolution. The argument that feminism was supposed to empower women and make us more liberated and free. But actually led to a culture of shallow promiscuous sex.

In that feminism may have been a contributing factor. But modern relating is a product of our culture. More generally. No one is arguably being served by this Tinder culture. It's not just women. It's not just that men somehow benefit from this, but women don't. To say that we're somehow worse off after earlier, earlier feminist movements and women's sexual liberation and birth control. This is ridiculous and completely untrue. There is no time period.

And the past couple thousand years where women were collectively better off than they are now, at least in the west. You could maybe point to some indigenous cultures that were matriarchal, for example, where women were better off without feminism. But for all intents and purposes, those of you who are listening to this right now, or a better off than any previous generation in your lineage. And that's partly because of feminism. Let's not forget that it was only a hundred years ago that women's still didn't have the right to vote in America.

Every generation is feminism advanced and evolved the situation for women a little more and in a different way. It's not the feminism is harming us. It's that our feminism naturally needs to evolve into a new and more full expression that serves everyone on a deeper level. And that progression depends on the waves of feminism that came before.

It. You can't run before you walk. You can't be an adults without going through an adolescence. So our feminism today needs to reflect and progress the values of a new generation. But these are values. We're only able to see and feel and express because we're standing on the shoulders of feminists before us who responded to their own times.

So I'm going to get much more into what's wrong with this anti-feminist sentiment and why it's happening in a moment. But first I want to touch on one more aspect of the meme that's going around, which is work and career.

So the argument is that our mother's feminist movement held up the values that women could do everything the same as men. That we could have it all. We could be the CEO, the surgeon, PhD. We could have kids and a marriage, but it's simply not true. We can't have it all without a high level of stress, burnout and operating in our masculine. Now. This is true.

Many women are very disconnected from their feminine essence. And some of that stems from this whole hustle culture of doing more, being productive all the time, linear forward movement thinking instead of feeling. But again, it's not that feminism is to blame and we should abandon it. It's that this previous wave of feminism where women did everything the same as men was likely a necessary step in a growing process. And something that now needs to evolve into a new version of feminism. Not even fourth wave feminism, but something beyond that, where we don't try to emulate men. And fit into the boxes of success they created, but we reclaim our feminine aspects as sources of power in their own.

Right. With our own versions of what success looks like. This is a systemic culture wide problem. It is not a problem of feminism and women's empowerment. It's not calling us into traditionally feminine roles. But it's calling us to evolve all the roles. To profit from what the feminine brings. It's asking us as a culture to stop devaluing typical women's work like caregiving, homemaking, childcare, community tending the healing arts. But not only that it's asking us to renegotiate our relationship with capitalism and productivity. It's not that being a CEO makes a woman quote, unquote, do too much and forces her to lose touch with her feminine. It's that the modern context of our profit driven culture, isn't really serving anyone to occupy those roles the way they traditionally have been. Telling women, they shouldn't want to take up a traditionally masculine role because they can't be in their feminine that way. Is not only false, but it creates even more layers of disconnect.

Armoring shame and hardness in the bodies of women. As they try to contort themselves into being good at being feminine. Which, as I said is a complete misunderstanding of the feminine and isn't something to aspire to anyway. To say that women were better off before they were told they could become surgeons or CEOs is utter bullshit. We are more free and more safe now than any previous time in Western history. Can we, and should we center different values in our feminism and in women's empowerment? Absolutely. Does that mean?

Going back to traditional feminine roles and expressions as the only way of being no fucking way. It means that each of us gets more choice and more agency. And therefore we get to take more responsibility for feeling what's right for us and how we want to live our lives. It means evolving our roles and institutions to allow us to reclaim feminine sources of power, rather than only try to emulate masculine power.

It's completely disempowering to say that feminine means being, and we should return to finding a man to provide for us so we can keep a home in 10 children. If that's what you deeply want, then that's amazing to have the ability to choose that. But what if you want to start a business or be a politician? I'm watching the Olympics right now.

And I find these female athletes so inspiring. I guarantee you they're doing a lot. Are you going to say someone like Simone Biles is doomed to fail at being feminine because she pursued her desire to be a world-class athlete. Fuck that. It's far more empowering to begin to think. How can I bring the full force of my feminine power to the work I want to do in the world or bring it alongside it. How can we evolve our institutions and political structures so that they nurture the web of life and all humans, not just women, instead of extracting from them. These are the questions I want to get us interested in.

Okay. So another anti-feminist argument that falls in the area of career. Is that the do it all boss, babe mentality of, I don't need a man. I'll do it. Myself is essentially forcing women to occupy the masculine pole more and more. Which also carries over into our intimate relationships because many women get stuck in those expressions and then don't know how to relax into flow states. From that place, we then emasculate men and we wonder where all the good men are.

This whole thing speaks to a crisis in masculinity. Just as much as there is one for women at the moment.

Many men are not sure how to meet women anymore because women are providing for themselves and leading themselves. So, what does it mean to embody a strong masculine presence in the modern context? But the solution is not men doing. And when and being, it's not just about men leading and women following. It's about men and women, both having the skill and capacity to flow back and forth between go and flow states as needed. Not only knowing how to do that, but also when to do that, training our bodies and our nervous systems to relax one pole and animate the other.

Now as women, when we're in a do it myself orientation. This is quite often a protective mechanism. How often do you find yourself with the men in your life? Be it the husband or a partner saying, you know what, I'll just handle it. Or feeling like you can't trust a man to hold you. Of course, we get into these protective safety patterns where we just do it all ourselves. When we've been let down or dropped by men in the past. But this is actually a way that we put up armor and harden ourselves to the point where we can't let love penetrate us. And what it's inviting us into is trust and a journey of healing with the masculine. Both our own inner masculine needs, healing and integration. As well as the masculine, external to us. And yet this journey to surrender and trust more deeply in the masculine. The journey to not do it all and do it all ourselves, but to rely on other people, especially men. Does not mean that we should let them do it all or that we should stop doing altogether. Okay.

So I think it's pretty clear that the idea of feminism harming women and a return to traditional feminine, feminine roles as the solution and path to reclamation of the feminine are, are just not true. But it is undeniable that these ideas are super compelling. They are taking hold in the collective consciousness in the zeitgeists and a powerful way. A lot of people are resonating with these ideas. And I think that really makes sense. I feel like everyone I speak to, which is mostly women because that's my audience, my clients, but also friends and family. Um, and men as well, everyone I speak to lately seems to be teetering on the edge of burnout.

Everyone is feeling the misalignment of our humanity with the demands of modern life. The more, we become attuned to our soft feeling animal bodies. To our energetic and emotional and subtle bodies. The more, we begin to understand that the way we're living is mismatched. It doesn't feel good the way we mostly live from our heads.

It doesn't feel good to be numb to, or, or ignoring the many other facets of ourselves, especially our feeling sensing bodies. We all want more pleasure. Connection. Sensuality. But our modern life has us rushing around distracted and numb. To the place where we can access those things. Our bodies.

Our culture, devalues poetry and art and myth and stories and music.

And our souls are starving because there are parts of us that can only be fed and spoken to through myth and art.

Our disconnection from our bodies is mirrored in the way we commodify and extract from nature in the earth. It's no real surprise that we do the same thing to our bodies as we do to the ecosystems around us. But our deep body and soul wisdom is reacting to our disconnection from our cyclical nature, our disconnection from the wildness within and without. Our disconnection from the lives of micro organisms, that number more in our guts than the cells in our bodies. Our disconnection to the macro movements of planets and galaxies in which we are spinning on our little space rock. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the religions that have predominated Western culture for the past centuries, which focused on transcending this base human experience and played a huge role in our disconnection from our bodies. In the context of all of this, it makes sense that we don't feel good. Of course we're sick in a toxic world. The idea that we should be instead of do, feels like a huge fucking relief. We're all tired.

We actually can't do it all the way. We've been functioning cutoff from our bodies, especially our lower bodies that leaves us dry and brittle. The idea that feminism is harming women. This is a symptom. Of our misalignment, the fact that this meme exists in the collective. Is a cry for relief to finally stop and rest. But what I want to make clear is that modern life is the problem.

Not feminism. But just like with feminism, there are many wonderful things that come along with modern life. The fact that I can speak to you on this podcast is a Marvel of modern technology. I'm super happy to have indoor plumbing. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water on either modern life or feminism. We simply need to evolve them along with emerging values and desires. Our roles are not institutions and the embodiment of the feminine need to evolve to reflect new paradigms. That doesn't mean glorifying, traditional feminine roles or making a religion out of a soundbite that the feminine equals being and the masculine equals doing that just isn't helpful to modern women.

It's not useful for the modern woman to think. Well, in order to reclaim my feminine essence, I should just be in my beingness. That's just more layers of imposition and unfreedom. This kind of thinking creates shame for anyone who has a desire to do things outside of traditional feminine roles. It's very reductive. Trying to press ourselves into a limited expression of the feminine is super counterproductive. It just walls off some of our life force energy and our desires and our passions instead of liberating us. It cages us.

It's just a different kind of cage. It's not useful to say if you're doing you're acting like a man and it's a gross misunderstanding of the feminine principle. Friends you can do from your feminine. And you can be from your masculine. In fact, one of the most being practices I can think of is seated meditation, where you sit still and empty out into pure consciousness.

This is literally embodying the masculine. This is one of the reasons I like to conceptualize this as go versus flow instead of masculine versus feminine. Because when we get into the practicalities of how people can use and apply these concepts to their actual lives. Go versus flow makes a lot of sense. What the feminine means. And how to connect with and embody the feminine. These are complex topics and there are different ways of defining what that means. But suffice to say, it's not just about being versus doing.

There are both go and flow aspects to the feminine.

I often hear from women that they want to be more in their feminine or they're too much in their masculine. And what they usually mean is that they want to be softer and more receptive. They want to be more sensual and feeling. They want to be less focused on pressurized productivity. That's so understandable. But it's a mis-characterization and misunderstanding of feminine and masculine. The feminine is not just passive being and feeling. The feminine is not always being submissive and led by the masculine. That's just outdated, 1950s housewife, bullshit repackaged in a modern spiritual context. I mean, fuck that women broke out of that paradigm for a reason.

Why would we want to recreate it? The feminine can be soft and receptive, but she can also be a powerful, active force. The feminine can also be dynamic and initiatory. Doing energy does not mean you are in the masculine. You can be in a dynamic, productive, doing energy and be deeply in your feminine. The feminine is an architectural concept has so many facets.

When I speak about it related to the body I'm referring to that ocean of sensation and emotion that's present inside each of us. Irrespective of our sex or gender identity. Mother. Nature's a beautiful example of the feminine. Mother nature represents that ever-changing often chaotic nonlinear, creative, but also destructive force of life itself. It's the jungle and the tsunami.

It's the winter flowing into spring. It's the seasons of life and the life of the seasons.

To complicate this discussion further. Different spiritual traditions actually have different concepts of what is feminine versus masculine. There's this idea of mother earth or a mother nature and father sky. That's a really common masculine, feminine mythology, but in ancient Egyptian tradition, the earth was male and the sky was female. In Taoism, they refer to yin and yang where yen is feminine and yang is masculine. And yin or feminine is the soft receptive force. Young is the dynamic active force. In Hinduism, we have Shiva is masculine and Shakti's the feminine where the masculine Sheba is the energy of pure divine consciousness. And shuck to use the dynamic life force energy.

In Western mysticism, the, her various terms for these forces. And the masculine is typically the more active or penetrating force. And the feminine is the receiving.

In all traditions. The main idea is that there's a union of two polarities that exist at every level of reality, including within each of us.

There's these two opposite forces of reality. That are infinitely, attracted and alert towards each other.

As I said, when we're talking about how to practically apply these concepts to our lives, it's probably more useful to think of these energies as go and flow instead of masculine and feminine. We all have access to the full spectrum of these energetic expressions. And it's not really helpful to think of the go energy as purely masculine and something we need to get away from to feel really good as women. We actually need healthy expressions and relationships with both. We can be in an over dominance of go. And a toxic relationship with our doing. To the exclusion of feeling creatively, alive. Being in our feeling sensing bodies. That's the general state of affairs that most people are in.

And this is what the anti-feminist trad wife meme is a backlash against most women. Actually, most humans are doing too much and feeling too little. But it's also possible to drift too far into the flow of things and get lost in this kind of dreamy, mysticism and feeling and not actually get anything done in the world.

You can ask me how I know. This is my predisposition. So, what I'm saying is we need access and capacity with both. Most of us do actually need to prioritize, getting more in touch with our flow energy because our culture prioritizes productive, linear, tangible, go energy. And a lot of us have lost the ability to be in our feelings, sensing, flowing bodies. Luckily, if you're a woman reading this, you're already embodied in the feminine. You might just have a desire to cultivate more sensitivity and awareness and attention on those flow aspects of yourself.

What most women want when they say they want to be more in the feminine. Is to feel fully alive in our bodies. Is to access our creative force and our sensuality. We want to feel more deeply across a greater range. We want to inhabit our bodies and ourselves on deeper levels. We might want access to more softness and receptivity. And a greater ability to open to life and to feeling. But most modern women don't want this at the expense of being a powerful and active force in the world. So, what do we do instead of raising pitchforks against feminism and holding up traditional women's roles as the paradigm of femininity? First of all, forget this idea that feminine is being a masculine is doing. Think about it in terms of go versus flow instead. Then you can decide where you might want to develop more skill and capacity.

Most women are already very skilled with go energy. We know how to get shit done. We're already moving in shaking sometimes to the detriment of our ability to access flow aspects of ourselves. And luckily these are skills that we can practice. So if we bring more focus and attention to cultivating the flow aspects, we naturally get more access to them. A lot of this is about embodiment learning, how to inhabit the sensing, feeling body more fully. And how to drop into our central bodies when the moment calls for it.

You don't have to quit being a creative powerhouse. In order to be soft and receptive to your lover. You just need to practice the skill of calling up that state in your body so you can access it more readily. If you don't want to be a creative powerhouse and you want to be a housewife, that's amazing too.

You should definitely do that. But just know that you don't have to do that in order to be embodied in your feminine or flow states. In fact, Just be aware that there's a lot of go and doing energy and mothering and housewifery. So if that's your path, you're probably going to need to cultivate your flow energies to. So embodiment practices where the energy and attention is coming down out of the head and into the body, into the heart and the belly and the hips. Are a good way to do this. Dance or non-linear movement, especially moving the hips and the legs because we see so much and we're just generally cut off and numb to these parts of our bodies. Any kind of creative practice, art painting, poetry, engaging with nature. Pleasure practices, sensuality rituals. These are all things that bring us more into our flow energies.

And when we do them regularly, we raise our baseline level of embodiment so that we're not coming from zero. We want to be in a flow state. So when we're with our lovers, for example, We're coming from maybe 40%. It's much easier to go from 40 to 80. Then say from zero to 60. So that way, when you end your Workday or let's say you finish running the kids around for the day. For example, and you want to be in a soft, receptive feeling state to connect with your lover. You can access that much more readily because it's practiced.

You might also think about this as expanding your range so we can tend to get stuck in a couple of expressions.

Like just the bad-ass boss, babe, or just the housewife. But there's so much more, we get to experience and express. And when we have more capacity to open our bodies to different states of feeling and expression. We can then be a fiery creative powerhouse or a playful bunny or the maiden or the femme fatale. We actually get to be more, not less. This is a big focus of my work.

So if you want to learn these skills, come to one of my embodiment classes, get on my email list to hear about upcoming opportunities to work with me.

So we also want to think about reorienting to more. Feminine go archetypes. Most of the archetypes of getting shit done and being powerful are masculine archetypes. You might think of the CEO in a suit and tie or the hero archetype or the warrior. Sometimes we see female portrayals of those things, but quite often they're just women doing it the same way a man would.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but let's widen our repertoire or what's possible in feminine archetypes where the feminine is again, a source of power in its own, right. Instead of just emulating masculine power. What gifts, what medicine might the wise woman or the sorceress? Or the high priestess or the Empress have to offer us on the journey of reclaiming power and getting shit done in the world.

Those typical arc archetypes of power and success.

Aren't exactly serving men either. There are other interesting masculine archetypes beyond the hero or the warrior. We just rarely see them portrayed in pop culture or held up as possibilities. But men can expand their range to, into archetypes, like the magician, the lover, or for example, the old gods like pan and di nicest where masculine archetypes were deeply connected with nature and creativity.

So also offer here that we get to redefine what it means to be successful in the world too. If we're talking about making things happen in the world and the way we're currently doing that is making us sick and burned out. Lots reoriented different paradigms of success. Rich white male CEO might not be a goal that resonates with us, but it doesn't mean that we opt out of making waves in the world entirely. It means we rewrite the rules to reflect our deepest held values and desires. The ones that nourish and tend our own bodies and souls, as well as the bodies and souls of our communities on the earth.

I have to also mention the necessity of resting and restoring from. Burnout. As I said before, the anti-feminist meme is in the I as a backlash against the modern burnout culture. We need to fix that and we need to rest. And we need to also recognize that cultivating our flow energies is very nourishing in and of itself. It can become a wellspring of fuel and resourcing when we're able to tap into more of our creative life force. We can use that energy in a medicinal way to counteract an over abundance of go state that can make the body very dry and crunchy.

I mentioned this already, too, but we need to heal our relationship with the masculine as well, both inner and outer.

And last thing I'll say is we need to get in touch with our desires, with our arrows and our creative life force. This is something that happens naturally on the journey of embodiment. Because as we get in touch with these deeper aspects of ourselves, many doors open to us within that reveal our deepest trues and our deepest held values and our desires and what turns us on. This is where we follow the path of what wants to move us. And what wants to move through us? When we're truly reclaiming the feminine and the birthright of our creative liveliness and our pleasure and the real power that lies in our bodies and hearts and souls. We don't need to follow a path that tells us what to do or how to do it. Our own hearts and wombs are the compass. We all have access to this wellspring of creative erotic life force. It's the force that gives rise to everything in the manifest universe. It's the force that draws the bees to the flowers and the tides to the moon and the sperm to the egg and lovers into ecstatic union. This is the evolutionary force of our desires. And what wants to be actualized through us and as us. The more, we embody that the more we have clarity about what we need and want to do. The more, we have access to the feminine and our own alive newness.

So, if you like what you're hearing here, if you've liked this discussion, please come find my work@embodiment-alchemy.com.

The link will be in the show notes. I have lots of free content on my website about feminine embodiment. As well as classes and group and private feminine embodiment programs.

And I hope you'll DM me on Instagram at Michelle and embodiment. And let me know how this landed for you. I love connecting with you there and I want to hear your thoughts. All right. Have a great week. Y'all until next time.