Receiving
At no other time when I have sat down to write this blog have I had so much difficulty. I have been working with something deep but when I began to write about it, I ran into all the programming that we have had around this topic for millennia. At this point I have written two blogs and scrapped them both. I have had to come face to face with the fear that you may in fact misunderstand my point in talking about this at all. Although I hope that by coming at this from a different perspective that my intention may become clearer.
I want to talk about the masculine and the feminine but particularly about my relationship to the feminine.
To get started, I want to lay out a few things about this topic. The first is that this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality. We all have both masculine and feminine energies or traits or characteristics in each of us however most of us have a primary polarity. While listening to a podcast called Daring Deeply that covers this topic well, the hosts stated that you can determine your primary polarity by determining the polarity that you are most attracted to in someone else. So, a person who is attracted to people who have the characteristics of masculine polarity would have a primary polarity of feminine since energetically speaking opposite energies attract. I don’t know how this would work for those who are non-binary, I would be curious to see if these energetics show up in the same way or differently. I don’t know and I don’t claim to know.
Secondly, I can tell you that I was raised with messages such as “be self-sufficient”, “don’t depend on a man”, “in order to be successful you have to be like a man”, “follow in the footsteps of those who have succeeded before you, aka men”. All the messages that I received growing up while they had the best of intentions, they also had the effect of driving me away from my primary polarity of feminine and into a polarity of masculine.
As I began this year, my year of joy, I was committed to following my joy.
Following my joy has taken me more and more into my feminine and I have noticed a few things about being in my feminine. I have found that I am happier in my feminine, I am more relaxed and more joyful. And, as we have talked about in the past, when I am relaxed and happy, I have a much greater access to my intuitive gifts. I have also noticed that I am generally less stressed, I have noticed that my body relaxes when I am in my feminine and constricts when I am in my masculine. When I am in my masculine, my body feels like it is ready to go to battle.
Finally, one of the most important things that I have noticed is that being in my masculine exhausts me. Now don’t get me wrong, I see the value in my masculine, my masculine is with me every day and gets a tremendous number of things done that makes my life and my work infinitely better, however, I know that I can’t stay there. It depletes me if I stay there too long.
A few weeks ago, on my daily walk I was listening to the Daring Deeply podcast and the hosts, a masculine polarity man and a feminine polarity woman were talking about the traits of each. They described the masculine as the giving energy and the feminine as the receiving energy.
In that moment, I received flashbacks of my past relationships and how often I was in the role of giving and after a while my partners acquiesced to my giving and stopped trying to give in return. After all I wasn’t leaving them anything to give, they seemed to just naturally shift into receiving even though it wasn’t their primary polarity.
It was the natural energies balancing themselves out since two masculine energies are just going to battle each other and two feminine energies are just going to accomplish nothing. No wonder in my past relationships I would be told things like “but you don’t need me”.
It broke my heart to see my own part in driving my partners out of their primary polarity. I always needed them, and they never knew.
In my defense, I thought “but society has programmed me to try to conquer to be successful”. Then I realized something that was the missing puzzle piece. Society was telling me to be more masculine to succeed but in doing so I was losing access to the very powerful energies and traits of the feminine.
Was it possible that society had determined that the feminine was not powerful so to be powerful we have been trained to be masculine? What if society or feminine polarity people experienced the feminine as powerful? What if we knew the power of our own intuitive gifts? What if we knew the power of being? What if we knew the power of receiving?
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the feminist movement, the movement of women who made it possible for me to vote or own property or work outside the home. I would not change any of those things. The only thing that I am calling into question is whether we approach those things from the perspective of trying to be more infinitely male or if we can approach those things from being powerfully feminine.
As I walked, I started to ask myself, how do I receive?
I felt a wave of panic, did I even know how to receive? I wasn’t sure that I did but, on that day, I started asking myself questions. Where is my energy right now? If I found myself in my masculine, I asked myself if there was a way for me to come into whatever situation I was in from a state of being rather than doing? Was there a way for me to be in a state of receiving?
I have found creative ways of shifting back into my feminine throughout the day, even in my work and consequently I have had more access to my intuition, I have had more energy and I have been happier.
This topic runs deep, there is a lot of programming around it but for me diving into the deep end of this has sent me on a journey of seeing the feminine aspect of me as powerful in the first place and finding my own home within that feminine aspect again while I question when and how I utilize the gifts of the masculine.
Remember, my experience here is from my perspective as a primarily feminine polarity woman. You can find your own polarity and look at how this might show up for you in your life.
I hope these words and my own questions get you thinking or writing or both. Here are a few questions for you to ponder in your favorite journal or on your morning walk.
- How do I feel in my primary polarity?
- How powerful do I feel in my primary polarity?
- What are the gifts of my primary polarity?
- Do I need to change anything about how I experience my primary polarity?
I blog because I love the process of posing questions to myself, uncovering those deep answers in the power of the words, those unexpected answers that I found here. I love forcing myself to grow in this way.
If you want to question yourself, then subscribing to my email list will ensure you have an opportunity to do that. I blog about once a month so you will not receive a ton of emails from me, only what I hope to be the best questions that we can ask ourselves to be better tomorrow than we were today.
In love,
Renee
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