What is Feminine Embodiment?
I’ve learned through my own experiences, and those of my community and clients, that more and more sensitive, soulful women are realizing that they’re no longer in alignment with hustling or holding as much as they have in the past in their careers and relationships.
We currently live during a time where society has embodied hyper-masculine traits: striving towards goals, focusing on future progression, with an energy of moving up and outward.
This results in most individuals – male, female or non-binary – valuing, practicing and living with these strongly developed masculine qualities and skills.
From this place, it’s easy for individuals (women and women-identifying in particular) to feel they are ‘too masculine’ or ‘not feminine enough’, when in reality, it’s rather that their inherent feminine skills of feeling and flowing are underdeveloped.
There is an element of understanding and embodying healthy masculine, however this masculine energy is easily brought into balance when the healthy feminine is developed and embodied.
Women are realizing that they want to receive more, soften and live more slowly. Yet still, they find themselves pulled into the grind of work, the dominant masculine energy in society, and in controlling & leading tendencies in their relationships. What they come up against are these deeply ingrained patriarchal patterns and subconscious programming held in their bodies.
These women have the awareness that something is off, and they’re now being called by their intuition to learn more about the feminine. They understand this new ideal way of being from a logical perspective, but they aren’t able to live it. They still act in the same ways without being conscious of it, or are inconsistent with how they practice and embody the feminine qualities as their normal way of being in the world.
As we consider this at the level of the individual, it’s key to remember that the feminine and masculine essence have nothing to do with your gender identity. Women are not only feminine and men only masculine. Every individual of every binary and non-binary identity contains both.
First, it requires an understanding of the inherent qualities of feminine energy:
Flow
Inward
Depth
Feeling
In contrast, the qualities of the inherent masculine energy are:
Go
Forward
Vision
Direction
The universal feminine/masculine reminds us of the natural wholeness that comes alive when both are in balance. It is ultimately what we’re being asked to develop in today’s society, to reach this balance. Striving forward with purpose is pointless if it's not coupled with the depth of love, radiance and beauty of the feminine. It is through the balanced existence of these aspects of character that one can cultivate balance, meaning and deeper inhabiting of self.
How does one embody the feminine essence, to naturally make it part of one’s authentic being? Embodying the experience of the feminine, in order to reach this balance of masculine and feminine qualities, requires four pillars that make this possible.
Pillars of Embodiment:
Awareness
It all starts here with awareness of what is going on inside of us. Awareness is presence, and also known as mindfulness. Without awareness, we aren’t being present in our body, and we automatically become less disembodied.
When our mind and body are in two different places, this is not being embodied. Meaning, when you are doing an embodied movement practice, or somatic experiencing, but your mind is elsewhere, thinking of your grocery list, your next to-do’s, this is not embodiment. Thoughts and distractions get in the way of awareness. This is where breath comes in to provide direction for awareness.
Breath
When we become conscious of the breath we automatically become conscious. Breath is life force, that allows to become anchored in our awareness and in our bodies. In this way breath is the vehicle of awareness. Deep breathing, nostril breathing, and breathwork are practices that support embodiment.
My favorite tool, breathwork, acts like a scrub brush, coming in to the body, specifically the torso, and scrubbing stuck emotions, frozen tension, and tightness to be released through the exhale. This is the reason I include breathwork in my 1:1 program. The breath helps you expand and take up more space with our authentic expression.
Movement
Movement allows you to free up frozen surface level tension and stress. It allows you to open the body more and feel. Embodied movement is different: it’s non-structured and centered around movement that arises from within. It’s not about following instructions or poses to hold, such as asanas.
Embodied movement is actually about letting your body take over, letting your feminine flow take the lead. Sensations within your body are always in flow, such as emotions, energies and thoughts, they are always moving and changing. There is no wrong or right way to do it. Movement allows you to express and deepen into sensation, welcoming them and liberating them.
Without embodied movement, emotions and sensations become constricted, repressed, and stagnant. Movement varies based on our emotional state we’re in, so some days it might feel more challenging, or more flowing, with small movements or big movements. Our breath and awareness into the body, allows us to move the body and feel the body from the inside.
Sound
Sound is the final pillar of embodiment and can be most vulnerable for us to express, as it’s raw and confronting. Sound is the vibrational essence of embodiment, and can be expressed through the exhale, during movement and unraveling in pain, anxiousness, or sadness. Sound and movement allow us to feel and sensitize ourselves to our inner felt sense. Including our vocal cords, this allows us to fully inhabit our body and our experience.
Feminine Embodiment
Becoming embodied in your natural feminine essence, is an integrative journey, involving the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional bodies to align. Through these pillars and accompanying practices, you’re able to unravel from conditioning, old stories, traumas, and core beliefs that are deeply held in the body. You’re able to embody the natural feminine instead with more flow, feeling, inwards direction, and depth, which allows the natural masculine energy space to show up in a balanced way, not in a dominant way. I hope this helps you understand that becoming embodied in your feminine is a journey, one that takes intention and practice to lead you towards wholeness.
This is the work I do with clients in my 1:1 program , which you can learn more about here.
xo Emily Grace
Source: The School of Embodied Arts
Want to dive deeper into learning feminine embodiment as a coach? Download a free curriculum - I am a proud affiliate for The School of Embodied Arts.
