What is feminine power?

Is feminine power a gender-specific energy? Absolutely not. Feminine power exists in all genders and all of life.

Let’s explore feminine power through the ancient Taoist teachings on the polarizing energies of yin and yang.

Yin is the dark half of the symbol. Yin is the receptive, feminine energy of stillness, listening, patience, yielding, and contracting.

Yang is the light half of the symbol. Yang is an active, masculine energy of expansion, expressing discipline and focus towards innovation, manifestation, and growth.

Yin and yang are complementary creative energies. Together, in an interdependent relationship, they fuel dynamic cycles of creation: birth, death, and rebirth.

“Yin holds the fertile darkness of the unknown, and yang mobilizes energies into action. Together, they give rise to innovation and new creation.”

Every creative journey asks for yin receptivity

For example, let’s take a look at the process of starting a business, or a creative project. In my entrepreneurship journey, I’ve noticed that when it’s time to expand my offerings, I first experience a restlessness. This overflow of energy indicates that it’s time for change and evolution. When I sense creative energy or change brewing beneath the surface, I often feel a speedy energy that can be perceived in two ways depending on my state of mind: excitement or anxiety.

I will engage these activating energies through conceptual brainstorming and visioning, as an attempt to make meaning of the darting and speedy feelings of anxiety and excitement.

Eventually, I slow down and become magnetically drawn towards the receptive energies of yin. This feels like a gravitational pull down into the cave of incubation in preparation for birth, transformation, and new iterations. I don’t always welcome this tapping on my door, especially when I know it will ask me to let go of dreams, situations, or relationships that I may not be ready to part with. But nevertheless, it knocks — and sometimes impatiently blows my house down to get my attention! (I share more about this process here).

Slipping away from the ordinary world of familiarity and routine always catches me off guard. When this cycle of creative transformation perks up, I find myself descending into the murky, yet-to-be-defined space of the yin terrain. At this point, my visions and dreams are non-linear feelings. They’ve yet to take form and exist in a watery state of sensing only. This is when anxiety likes to pop in through fear of uncertainty. It gives rise to controlling thoughts, behaviors, and attempts to force clarity when it’s not yet time. I have to stay awake here so as not to get distracted by fear, or coerced into forcing decisions to avoid feeling the discomfort of not having clear answers yet. Forcing answers from fear never seems to be as efficient as it appears in the moment. Have you noticed?

Cultivating the yin energies of surrender and patience is critical at this juncture. I must find trust in a larger divine order of things and let go of all the ways I am trying to control the outcome. It’s important that I surrender back into listening, and following the clues along the path rather than forcing answers. This is how I’ve learned to navigate my creative journey. I can’t count how many times I’ve stunted a creation, just as it’s starting to germinate. I’ve bound it with too many fear-based conceptual ropes and knots in an attempt to end the suffering of uncertainty.

Yang puts our creation into action

Over time, as we nurture and listen to our growing idea, the yin phase gently leads way to a yang creative phase. Once the idea is taking shape, we’re naturally catalyzed into the yang expressions of clarity, decisiveness, and action steps.

Yang energy helps our creation manifest into its full expression. During this phase, our shift into action and manifestation may flow effortlessly without a glitch. But, if your journey is anything like mine, the yang phase has its own set of initiations and challenges. For example, after pitching our idea or project to others, we may feel vulnerable, afraid of being criticized, or we may feel the stakes of failure creep in and arrest our confidence and buoyancy. This is when we need allies, and the internal discipline to draw upon the masculine qualities of courage, wise risk-taking, and commitment to bring our project to full fruition.

This is the spiraling flow of engaging both feminine and masculine energies to evolve, innovate, and give birth to new ways of being or seeing reality.

We need yin and yang to create balance and to live wholeheartedly!

“The flow between taking action and surrendering into the unknown is the birthplace of innovation.”

What is the repression of feminine power?

Repression of feminine power is not only about the marginalization of women that has been occurring for thousands of years. The repression of feminine power is also about a collective energy imbalance and disharmony among masculine and feminine energies.

To start, I want to make a distinction between oppression and repression.

Oppression occurs by outsiders, by individual predators or dominating social groups, sometimes under the guise of governmental or religious authority, or through fear and shame-based messaging. Oppression may be overt or covert. Most commonly, it’s practiced through unfair domination, power-over tactics, bullying, harsh treatment, and mind-control techniques.
Repression is an inside job. It’s a form of self-restraining, withholding or subduing our authentic expression, desires, or true feelings, often due to shame, guilt, and unconscious protective mechanisms related to unresolved trauma and wounds.

Experiences of oppression commonly transform into personal repression through internalized voices of shame and unworthiness.

The patriarchy empire: Imbalanced masculine energies

We’ve been living in a patriarchal culture for centuries. What does that mean?

Personally, I see the patriarchy as the fall of certain masculine energies into distorted and severe imbalances.

The patriarchy empire is a system of thinking and beliefs built upon superiority, control, and exclusion. It’s based on fear, greed, and scarcity, rather than love and inclusion. And it maintains its power by reinforcing hierarchical structures and systems of dominance by amassing influence, wealth, and control. An obvious example of this is the segregation of social classes and discrimination against genders and races.

The patriarchy is about those in power fulfilling their personal agendas — regardless of impact on others.

The patriarchy is one of the primary reasons feminine powers have been oppressed by individuals and groups of people operating through imbalanced masculine energies. Subsequently, over centuries feminine powers have innocently become repressed inside of ourselves through social and cultural conditioning — often without knowing how we’re reinforcing our own prisons.

The patriarchal system has severed its access to compassionate and empathetic care for the whole. It has lost focus on the art of listening to the heart, practicing patience, and leaning into uncertainty as a doorway into infinite potential for creative innovation.

This extreme imbalance results in alienation and amnesia, such as forgetting our inherent interconnectedness and our embodied knowing that when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves.

“The patriarchy seeks to disrupt our sense of worthiness, self-trust, and authentic expression, resulting in a haze of feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and shame.”

When imbalanced masculine energy dominates feminine energy

The patriarchy is a distorted expression of masculine energies that has overshadowed our feminine nature, foregoing the balanced, harmonious eco-system needed for humanity and the planet to thrive.

When distorted masculine energies dominate feminine energies, there is an observable shift in the following behaviors:

hyper control at the expense of surrender and flow
excessive doing and striving over being, yielding, listening, and receiving
myopic linear analysis over whole systems thinking
anxiety-induced competition and urgency over collaboration and patience
obsessively fixing instead of pausing to assess how a challenge may be offering an opportunity to innovate, connect, and grow
compartmentalizing and stuffing emotions over leveraging emotional indicators as opportunities to reveal fractures in the system
separation and exclusion over connection and integration

The superpowers of balanced and healthy masculine energy

In contrast, healthy masculine energy is productive, generative, and supportive to the whole system.

Masculine energy offers essential contributions through its gifts of clarity, centeredness, focus, decision-making, logic, discipline, and grounded presence. These qualities break down chaos into order and seek to serve the whole.

For example, without scientists isolating the whole into parts to study and research disease, we wouldn’t have cures and treatments that support healing and recovery.

Healthy masculine traits include:

strength through gentleness
dignity, honesty, and diplomacy
confidence and courage
adventurousness
leading through inspired action
informed decisiveness
grounded wisdom
centeredness, focus, and discipline
creating supportive structures
commitment and accountability
partnering with feminine energies to create harmony, innovation and wholeness

The collective fear of feminine power

When we embody our life force and personal power, we become a wild and impactful force of nature — no different than an earthquake, blazing wildfire, or sweeping tsunami.

When we, as vulnerable human beings, reconnect to our sovereign and divine self, we are less likely to be manipulated or hoodwinked by external messages intended to disempower us. Our sovereign power poses a threat to those in positions of authority whose agenda is to condition and control the masses through fear and shame.

Yet some systems of oppression are so deeply embedded into social norms that it’s often a perilous journey to feel empowered and equal with such oppression. For some, the only form of freedom is one that comes from the inside-out. Those who are walking this path are paving the way for all of humanity.

Throughout history, there has been a drastic cost for the revolutionaries who expressed free-thinking, challenged the status quo, sought freedom from enslavement, shared innovative forms of creativity, or honed their spiritual power and psychic abilities to support healing. They were often ridiculed, shamed, or shunned from society.

Accessing our intuition, as a form of creative power, was once labeled as witchcraft. For centuries, people were ‘witch-hunted’ and hung or burned for sharpening their spiritual powers and intuition. It was common for persecutory tactics to be used by certain political and religious institutions to silence, punish, and eliminate these people entirely.

Becoming intimate with our authentic self, our sovereignty, and our subtle energy body has been called a sin. Our erotic power and sexual expression has been shamed and forbidden to express freely without dire consequences.

Over centuries, our embodied sexuality has been pushed far into the shadows through messages of shame and sin. This level of repression has become expressed in distorted, disempowering, and even violent ways.

Instead of celebrating our feminine power, the patriarchy has set out to kill and destroy the threatening expressions of it. As a result, many of us, despite our gender orientation, have been conditioned to diminish, ignore, and repress our feminine gifts.

“When we’re focused, balanced, and on-purpose, our creative energy spills forth as a catalytic agent of love, inclusivity, innovation, and evolution.”

How does the patriarchy perpetuate the repression of feminine power?

The patriarchy mentality represses feminine power through a system of power-over and domestication.

These ‘programs’ are communicated to us from inception, during our early development, and later, into our adult lives, as we’re raised inside the matrix of social and cultural conditioning.

Let’s take a quick look at these three influences: power-over, domestication, and the matrix of social and cultural conditioning.

POWER-OVER

Power-over is a global phenomenon of destructive and un-integrated forms of power. Whether we’re looking at governmental institutions, corporations, or social organizations, any systems built on structures of power-over are based on dominance.

These hierarchical structures seek to create conformity through polarization, shame, and fear. Power-over tactics often develop into acts of violence, greed, entitlement, discrimination, and war against each other and ourselves.

Sometimes, we have to dig deep to see how we’re slipping into power-over against ourselves and with others.

We know it’s power-over when agendas are enforced through non-consensual means. When boundaries are violated, trust and safety are shattered. On an interpersonal level, power-over can be expressed as aggressive and controlling or subtle sarcastic digs and passive-aggressive behaviors.

Learn more in Revolutionary Leadership: From Power-over to Power-with.

DOMESTICATION

The patriarchy seeks to keep us domesticated — to shut down and eliminate our wild, sovereign, and integrated self.

Over time, the matrix’s messages become hardened into our own belief systems, even when they don’t match our deeper desires and authentic yearnings.

To cope, we learn to compartmentalize aspects of ourselves that we feel ashamed of, or that don’t fit into these social and cultural expectations. Each time we banish a part of ourselves, we fragment from our wholeness.

This causes many of us to feel disconnected from our true self, passion, curiosity, playfulness, and wonder.

This wholeness is not limited to an identification with our self-images, but an intimate melding with the depths of stillness and wisdom that live within each one of us, regardless of our status, physical appearance, or perceived success in the material world.

The patriarchy wants us to forget the radiant treasure of who we truly are. In truth, our power innately beams from the depths of our whole being — not from what we own, do, or achieve.

Learn more in my article, What Is Domestication?

THE MATRIX OF SOCIAL & CULTURAL CONDITIONING

The matrix is the system of messaging that is reinforced through the media, the advertising industry, the entertainment industry, and political and religious institutions. From a very young age, we’re informed on who we “should be” in order to be valuable, successful, and worthy of love.

Every day, we’re bombarded by messages designed to induce shame, which drive us towards self-improvement campaigns to fix our perceived imperfections. Shame is a universal experience that leads us to feel unworthy, broken, and hopeless.

One way the matrix does its dirty work is by manipulating us to internalize messages of shame. For example, advertising propaganda preys on our insecurities — our pain points — as a strategy to convince us to seek externally for our value, power, and place in the world.

Over time, we unknowingly become the gatekeeper of our own prisons. The external oppressor becomes our very own inner critic, the internalized voice of “I should,” “I’m too much” or “I’m not enough.”

This is how domestication becomes reinforced from the inside-out and why the patriarchal tactics of the matrix lead to one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of disempowerment, manipulation, and misuse of power.

When we pay attention, we start to notice that the matrix’s messages permeate our reality — they’re everywhere! Seeing reality as it is, rather than being identified with the games, is how we begin to unraveling the trappings of domestication.

Learn more in Awakening to the Matrix of Social & Cultural Conditioning

When I repressed my feminine power to maintain credibility & keep my job

Do we sometimes repress our own feminine power to protect our livelihood or safety? Or to maintain credibility in a world dominated by imbalanced masculine energy? Yes, it happens all the time — but how and why?

Here’s one way I did it years ago.

During my corporate career as a business analyst, I was expected to maintain the status quo by ascribing to the unspoken rules of prioritizing the masculine attributes of logic, analysis, and an obsession with productivity, which often meant neglecting the emotional well-being and human dignity of the employees.

While I valued logic and reason, I equally valued leveraging my intuition and heart to problem-solve strategic and management issues. Yet, when I drew upon the feminine powers of empathy, curiosity, spacious listening, and attuning to the needs of the whole, my ideas were instantly minimized or stepped on.

In this billion-dollar company, the executives were identified with the values of the patriarchy. When I contributed ideas from my holistic approach, I was quickly given an eye roll by the rest of the team. Or, a condescending and dismissive messages that I was being “too soft” or irrationally concerned about the employees. ”They’re lucky to have a paycheck from all this overtime work,” they would add as a final stinger.

The executives were primarily focused on presenting the right numbers on their spreadsheets to maintain power, title, and status. Meanwhile, I watched hundreds of employees work overtime to meet unreasonable goals, causing burnout, health challenges, and emotional pain. The employees’ work stress often cracked the foundations of their marriages and home life. I tired to assert my vision, but as a 30-year old female, I didn’t have much weight.

I was devoted to leading from a system of wholeness. Initially, I pushed back against the executive team’s swift band-aid approaches, which diminished employee morale and trust. Their dominating tactics increased fear-based scarcity, gossip, passive-aggressive reactivity, and unhealthy competition.

These leaders didn’t seem to realize that treating their employees like indentured servants would backfire, and eventually, require more time and resources down the road to repair. I offered recommendations that would serve everyone, but was repeatedly redirected to focus on an outcome that would satisfy one executive’s personal agenda over the well-being of the whole system. I felt disillusioned and crushed.

After numerous rejections of my strategy, I learned that my feminine energy was not welcome. And because I needed my job to survive, I temporarily tucked these powers into the background — until I felt like I was literally dying inside. As time went by, going to work felt like living in a prison cell with my mouth taped shut and hands tied behind my back. Eventually, I made a radical life decision and left my corporate life behind to start my own business.

That was almost two decades ago, and the good news is that I’ve become a consultant for conscious leaders who have a desire to create corporate cultures that integrate both feminine and masculine superpowers. These are businesses and leaders who don’t uphold static systems of power-over. Instead, these cultures embrace blind spots and reactivity as a normal part of the human condition, and track how it influences their larger system. They employ values and tools to help each employee become more empowered and embodied — despite their messy human selves.

“I watch courageous leaders rewrite outdated scripts everyday, which directly impacts the way they lead, love, and grow with their cultures and in their personal lives.”

It’s happening all over the planet right — leaders are shifting from power-over to power-with models of leadership. They’re creating cultures that make room to integrate the various ways feminine powers have been repressed in larger systems through all genders.

Dismantling the patriarchy, from the inside-out

Humanity is going through a collective hero/heroine’s journey. We’re teetering on the edge of a mass liberation from the oppressing stronghold of the patriarchy’s grip on our minds, hearts, and souls.

In order to balance the powers on the planet, we need to resurrect and reclaim our feminine powers.

Each one of us has the power to contribute to a mass tipping point — a paradigm shift that can occur if humanity can raise its consciousness and choose a new way of operating.

This heroic path is what will yield the embodied power and love needed to liberate humanity from a disembodied existence based on fear, scarcity, and narcissism.

“Together, we can dismantle the patriarchy and liberate repressed feminine powers.”

It’s not our fault that we’ve been conditioned by our environment. To heal our greater systems, we need to acknowledge that the patriarchy is equally alive within us, each in our unique way.

To dismantle the patriarchy, we need to dismember it from the inside-out.

How does the patriarchy become reinforced within us and within our interpersonal dynamics?
How do we inadvertently domesticate ourselves and one another?

We have the choice to engage in the process of dis-identifying from our conditioning and break down the inner prison, so we can embody our integrated power, both feminine and masculine.

The Repression of Feminine Power & the Systemic Imbalance of Masculine Power