To be human is to traverse a lifetime of micro and macro initiations. Each one of us is a hero or heroine on a mysterious journey of pleasure, love, and connection, as well as states of fear, anxiety, separation, darkness, loss and heartbreak. Initiations are the path of evolution. They crack us open, break us down, leave us breathless and eventually, through their alchemy and transmutation, present us with our personal light and power.

No matter how liberated, embodied, and awake we are, our primal body is wired to fear the unknown. It’s a natural part of being human. In addition, we’re conditioned with a compulsion to manage our anxiety by fixing and forcing answers — often before we have all the information we need to move into aligned action. How do we accept the vulnerable experience of fearing the unknown? How do we trust our instincts and discern when we’re moving from fear or intuition?

Repression of feminine power is not only about the marginalization of women. The repression of feminine power is also about a collective energy imbalance and disharmony among masculine and feminine energies. Our feminine powers have been locked in cages for centuries. No matter our gender, we have the responsibility to liberate our feminine powers from the inside-out.

Feminine ways of being and leading are often ridiculed and diminished, even by those of us who want to embody them! To reclaim our feminine superpowers, we can begin by exploring how we welcome or exile feminine energy within ourselves and in others. This is why I’ve whittled down a focus for this article on eight feminine energy principles, and practical tips to identify and embody them.

Your brain is the mapmaker of your belief system. While our subconscious beliefs serve us to an extent, they also leave us with blind spots, such as outdated protection mechanisms. Becoming an integrated human being isn’t about erasing our adaptive strategies, but about expanding and updating responses that reflect who we are now.

Going down the rabbit hole of personal and collective trauma can invoke what some refer to as a dark night of the soul. The phrase “dark night of the soul” is used to describe what happens when the conceptual frameworks of our life, and the associated meaning we have attributed to it, fall apart. This collapse of “normal” can occur suddenly, or slowly over time, creating a dark and disorienting space inside.

I recently took a significant professional (and personal) leap when I launched my new business, Your Erotic Nature. I’m passionate about this because I know what becomes possible when we know how to access our creative life force of erotic aliveness.

How does the journey of wild salmon reflect the path of living an authentic life? The journey of the salmon is one of the most amazing phenomena in nature. How is it that after years in the sea, they can locate the exact stream in which they were born, and pursue their upstream return home?

How often do we sense a longing from deep within and find ourselves gently holding it like an exquisite hummingbird that startles us with her beauty as swiftly as she disappears? How often does it crack us open to something bigger that we sense, but don’t yet know as intimately as we would like to?

It is common to grasp towards something in an attempt to end the uncertainty. How do we discern the difference between when we’re grasping, and when we’re effortlessly drawn into action? How many of us have experienced the mystery unfold, and doors open, to presents a path we never could have imagined with our mind and intellectual analysis?

What does it mean when life, as you’ve known it, suddenly changes in a blink of an eye and you find yourself dropped into the desert and the unknown? Or maybe it happens so slowly that you wake up to realize everything in your life has been dying for months or maybe even years. However you find yourself here, you are now standing at the threshold of realizing that what was previously so important to you no longer holds its place on the trophy shelves.