While it is true, I am a doctor and I practice clinical medicine, I am convinced that a good percentage of the patterns of health and disease that we witness on a physical and biochemical level is constructed by our emotional and spiritual experiences in the world. I spend a lot of time with women and more particularly, with their pelvises. One thing I have come to know for certain is that we women hold A TON of emotion in our pelvises. When I start to do myo-fascial release work (Holistic Pelvic Care) on a woman’s hips, sacrum, or internally in her pelvic bowl, the emotions start to move. When I administer homeopathic drainage remedies to open the pelvis, look out! The earth is about to quiver. But wow! What do we do with that energy?
The center of our femininity, as women, is in our pelvises. This our center for creativity, for inspiration, for processing our world, for making sense of our experiences. The pelvis is the fountain of our feminine energy, our yin. The pelvis is also where we stuff things for storage that either we ourselves or our communities do not want to deal with. This act of stuffing suppresses our intuition, our creativity, and yes, even our fertility.
I have been dabbling in the written and spoken works of Danielle LaPorte, a fiery and cutting-edge coach, for the last year or so. This week she sent out an email that included this Audre Lorde quote:
“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.”
Danielle LaPorte goes on to ask about whether you ever thought about how being called “too emotional” might be an act of oppression. I hesitate to engage in dialogue about the oppressed vs. the oppressor because I think, at this point in history, we have all suffered from a paradigm that oppresses both men and women. (This article blew my mind- please read this one for the sake of all of our men: http://norasamaran.com/2016/02/11/the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture-2/ ) That said, she prompts us to “stop thinking and start feeling.” And with that feeling she notes a few possible experiences that may emerge: tenderness, sorrow, rage, power. I would add pain, joy, laughter, calm, a sense of opening…. These are some of the words women use when we start to open up the pelvic bowl.
Now, all of this opening up, this freeing of emotion, this release of our feminine energy is incredible! And truly, the feminine energy, whether you are a man or a woman, is an energy of expansion, of fluidity, of mystery, lack of predictability, and of deep emotion and creativity. We all contain this energy, however most of us have never learned what to do with it. It can be scary and feel unwieldy. Culturally, and truly on a global level for the last 2000 years, we have been instructed and even forced to cage this energy, to suppress it, and pretend it doesn’t exist. The more we stuff something down, the more foreign it feels, and the scarier it becomes. We have become afraid of the energy that is yin, that is feminine, that is Kali. Have we been oppressed? Yes, we have. We are warned against being too feminine, for fear of being violated or raped. “Don’t show your femininity, lest you be attacked.” This is true for men and women. The attack may look different, but there is still a threat to keep the feminine energy under wraps.
All of this said, we are seeing a rise of feminine energy. Storms are the earth’s creative feminine force. The exaggerated tidal patterns, the winds, the rains are all a reminder of the need for balance. Women are speaking of an increased awareness of who they are in their own bodies, noticing that keeping up in a men’s world is exhausting their system. They come to me and my colleagues wanting to restore health, and to explore and expand into their natural, God-given way of being in the world. I see a pattern of what is known as “yin deficiency” happening in nearly every woman’s body with whom I work in my clinic. It is an epidemic: we have lost touch with the feminine, the emotion, the passion. It is time to bring it back. We are ready.
Lastly, thank you to Danielle LaPorte who gave the outstanding instructions on re-engaging with our feminine, emotional side:
“You will feel your power, and you will direct it into the world. Notice I did not say, ‘let your power loose in the world’? No. Direct it. Because that is the respectful thing to do with that incredible, deeply feeling, intelligent heart of yours.”
This is the integration of Yin (the feminine, emotional power) and Yang (the focused, directed masculine). Let your feminine nature flow within you and expand from you, and be sure to give it instructions and direction on how it can nourish and enhance your life. This is your most powerful tool of transformation.
