How Getting into My Feminine Energy Healed My Body
It wasn’t what the doctor ordered
I was a good girl. I did everything the doctors said. I dutifully took the prescribed medications. I did treatments that made me violently ill because I was told it was the only way to heal. I did this for years. But I still didn’t get well.
Then I did whatever the integrative doctors said. Then whatever the healers said. I got better but not well.
Concurrent with trying to heal my body from multiple tick-borne diseases (including Lyme disease) was an intense journey of self-discovery sparked by my desire to find love.
Though this desire may seem back-burner when you’re seriously ill, leaning into it is what put me on the path that ended up healing my body. And my path turned out to be a spiritual one. It was one foot in front of the other, stumbling in the dark but believing in a light at the end.
I was introduced to metaphysics by a dating coach. I learned about the masculine and feminine energies, energies contained within each of us irrespective of gender.
For most of my life, I had been operating in my masculine energy because that’s what society values (and devalues feminine energy). I discovered that this thing, femininity, that I had always dismissed as weakness and repressive was actually an untapped strength. And healing to tap into.
Receiving
It started with practicing “receiving” on dates. I let men open doors for me. I accepted their compliments. When a man paid, I gave up the disingenuous fake-out towards my purse and relieved myself of the age-old anxiety that sexual favors were expected in exchange (thanks to my dating coach’s insistence that “he gets the gift of your radiance”).
At first, it felt counterintuitive. I had my radiance on lockdown for so long, so I wouldn’t be taken advantage of or abused. I was also used to giving because, you know, I was a good person. But when you’re dealing with a health crisis, it’s not the time to give much less over-give. I had to teach myself that just by the virtue of my being I was worthy to receive.
The Feminine is about being and the masculine is about doing. As my body was forcing me to slow down and quit my job, I really had no choice in the matter. I had to give up my addiction to productivity and value something else in myself instead. Why not start to value my radiance?
I was still doing Type A yoga at the time. Long vigorous classes, heated rooms. At the end of a popular yoga class I frequented, the teacher would sing and chant and the whole room would join in. I would lie in Savasana totally spent, and then started to stay there when it was time to rise. I let the singing wash over me. I start to envision the hundred-ish people in the room chanting for me, for my healing. I lay there and received that. And it did something.
Healing is something to receive, not something to do. Even if you’re taking medication, you’re receiving it. There’s nothing to do but allow the meds to work their magic.
Receiving help, instead of trying to give it, was also a big lesson for me. When if not when you’re drastically ill is the time to get help? Denying help when you need it is toxic masculinity — for all genders. I began asking for help getting to doctors’ appointments and getting groceries.
I also stopped doing Type A yoga and started doing yin yoga, the feminine counterpart to yang vinyasa classes. At first, yin made me restless. I wasn’t doing anything! It felt like just stretching. But to recover, “just stretching” turned out to be what my body needed. The body simply cannot heal when it’s in flight, fight, or freeze.
Yin yoga not only helped me relax, so my body could rest and repair in its parasympathetic state, but it was also a gateway to start nurturing myself. Nurturing is a feminine value, and it doesn’t have to be outward. I needed to turn my feminine energy on myself and love myself as if I were my own child. I started using affirmations to speak gentle, supportive words to myself.
These feminine qualities — receiving, nurturing, and love — weren’t just niceties but essential to my physical survival.
Expressing
The Feminine is also about community and connection. I joined a pole-dancing studio for women that was held in a dimly red-lit room with shiny 25-foot tall poles. Still sick, being in my body was often the last place I wanted to be. But I wanted to dive deeper into my feminine energy, and this studio focused on feminine embodiment as well as helping women get in touch with their erotic bodies.
“Emote-ability” belongs to the feminine, according to this dance philosophy. As I progressed to more advanced classes, I learned an erotic body language to express my full range of emotions instead of suppressing them. I also learned to get out of my head and into my body (the embodiment part). Instead of enhancing my symptoms, getting into my body while I danced diminished and sometimes eradicated them. This was not what the doctor ordered.
For the first couple years of dancing, I mostly raged in my seven-inch stripper heels to Eminem songs as my female classmates cheered me on from the sidelines. I also cried on the floor as the room held my raw grief. I danced in fishnets, thongs, strappy S&M gear, sweatpants — anything that made me feel sexy. Why? Because I discovered that feeling sexy feels good.
There is no question in my mind that expressing buried emotion, especially rage, helped my body heal. This was not something I could do in therapy. It had to physically release from my body where it had been stored wordlessly. At the same time, I was also plugging into pleasure and my own erotic power. This made me feel alive and overflowing with well-being, even when “sick.”
Ultimately this is what the Feminine offers: life and energy. I discovered a different kind of strength in that pole studio — a softer one. I experienced moments of true empowerment because I was no longer cutting myself off from my emotions, dissociating from my body, or shutting down my sexuality.
I was free.
Surrendering
The highest expression of receiving is a state of surrender. In the words of Gabby Bernstein, surrender is not giving up but giving over.
Like most of my spiritual lessons, I learned to surrender the hard way. When the illness affected me neurologically (for a time, I struggled to compose a simple email or would get lost a few blocks from my apartment), it enhanced my right-brain function. In Leonard Shlain’s book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, he writes how the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for intuition among other nonverbal language such as images, emotion, “being” and a holistic mode. (He would know, he was a brain surgeon.) He also attributes right-brain function to feminine values.
For me, the experience of losing cognitive function was absolutely terrifying but also opened me up to a part of myself (or my brain) that I would otherwise dismiss. Intuition. Higher knowing. The unshakeable awareness of higher forces at play. I started giving over.
But I did give up on doctors. The latest, an osteopath who was treating me with herbal supplements, had disappeared without warning on a leave of absence in the middle of my treatment and without a return date. I took a leap of faith and stopped taking his pills which weren’t working anyway. My body didn’t want any more pills and was physically rejecting them all, both prescription medications and herbal supplements.
I decided to listen to my body and its wisdom, even though I was entering uncharted territory. Feminine intuition is the greatest gift that women are talked out of, or over, so early in life. Or burned at the stake for in past lives.
I didn’t get worse when I stopped seeking outside of myself for healing. I got better, though it was a very gradual process.
I did a lot of deep inner work some call “shadow work”. I started praying, which is a verbal act of surrender. Not all my practices of surrender were spiritual. Watching Lana Del Rey’s music video “Ride” on repeat in bed was one such practice.
Surrender is a radical state of openness where you have given up control. I found that being in this ultra-feminine state was actually incredibly nourishing, and I deeply desired to reside there. To soften, unguarded and unafraid.
One day, surrender looked like lying on the beach in the sun — Savasana on a beach towel — soaking up the golden pleasure of sun on my skin. In this deep relaxation, off topic, I received guidance for the next right step in my healing.
And I became my own healer.
Reclaiming
In my twenties, I thought it was oppressive and borderline misogynistic when yoga instructors counseled not practicing yoga on my “moon” (aka period).
But now, for me, it’s self-honoring to not exercise — or do much at all — when I bleed. In my twenties, I suffered for years from amenorrhea (not getting my period) due to disordered eating and over-exercising. That was participating in my own oppression.
For people who menstruate and identify as female, our hormonal cycle is not like adult males. We have something called the “infradian rhythm” as I learned from Alisa Vitti’s well-researched book In the Flo. Most of us are completely divorced from the fluctuating phases of our menstrual cycle (there are four in a 28-ish day cycle, each with different nutrient, social, sexual, and exercise needs). Vitti chronicles how ignoring this biological rhythm can have serious health consequences for women.
But it wasn’t the science that really empowered me to fully reclaim my feminine energy. It was history. I started reading scholarly books on prehistoric goddess veneration that “dominated” human culture for millennia. This knowledge was new to me, just like learning about my infradian rhythm. It had simply been left out of my education.
One night, I was reading The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler and came across a passage on the historical context of the biblical Adam and Eve story. The serpent was an ancient, enduring symbol of the Goddess. The Church co-opted it, among other sacred feminine symbols, and turned it into something evil to usurp the power of goddess-worshiping cultures that still survived in the early days of Christianity.
I sobbed when I realized that Eve was just listening to the Goddess whispering in her ear, not suckered by a snake.
This realization, among others — like the relentless punishment and persecution of any remnants of the divine feminine and feminine power that continued on into the witch hunts and today’s ridicule of women like Gwyneth Paltrow — was majorly activating for me.
Something clicked. No wonder it felt so impossible and terrifying to live truly as feminine because it had been tortured, raped, and murdered out of women systematically for millennia. I had internalized this. My body followed suit. I’m always haunted by the statistic that 80 percent of autoimmune diseases are suffered by women.
If the Feminine was elevated again, it would not only be safe for me to be true to my feminine identity but I could also thrive living as my full self.
In my experience, healing accelerates when we’re finally being true to ourselves and not shutting down any parts of ourselves. For me, being feminine is true to my nature. For another woman, maybe identifying as masculine is correct. Maybe for a man, stopping brutalizing his feminine energy will bring him the healing he’s been after.
It’s about discovering what’s actually true for you, and the journey back to yourself can take time.
“No stone unturned,” counseled my beloved psychiatrist a few despairing years into what ended up being a decade-long journey to regain my health. I was no longer on her drugs either.
I’m not sure why my path was one where I had to leave doctors and treatments behind and unturn stones that were way off the beaten path. And be my own cure.
It’s not an easy path: a lot of outside voices and internalized voices will make you wrong for it. But sometimes you just have to be stronger and braver than you really are.
Maybe the purpose of it all was to tell you, like my psychiatrist told me, there’s always a way. Whatever it is that you’re healing, doesn’t have to be physical, healing is always possible. Even when what you’re living with feels unlivable. Even if you don’t know what your way is yet — and it’s not mine — you have to keep stumbling along until you find it.
Let your intuition, which belongs to the Feminine, be your guide.
