I’m not one to focus on being broken (because I don’t believe anyone is), but there’s something that happens to many women that feels a lot like being broken. It can occur when they have children, get a divorce, burn out from a demanding job, get really ill, or more naturally when they hit late 30s/40s.
An unrest happens within that calls for a recalibration.
And unless you know what’s really happening, you can a) feel like you’re losing your shit and not really understand why or what to do about it, and b) the tools that you reach for to address it have the potential to cause more damage than good.
What is happening is a whisper for wholeness. A pursuit of integration.
You are being shown that something internal has been out of balance, and it’s time to restore your own natural state of being. (This is not the same as your usual way of being that you learned along the way.) And likely, your masculine has been in overdrive, and your feminine is under-nourished or acting out. (And your masculine is exhausted, and your feminine is pissed.)
But first, a clarification of what I mean when I say masculine and feminine. Whether man or woman (or non-binary), we all possess both energies, in varying proportions:
The masculine (or yang) energies represent doing, action-oriented, goal-focused, production, achievement.
The feminine (or yin) energies represent being, creation, feeling, life-force, intuition, nourishment, surrender.
When these energies are out of balance with the masculine getting more focus, we feel tired. Burnt out. Our adrenals suffer, we likely drink too much coffee, and then wind down with alcohol. We feel attached to the outcome more than enjoying the ride. We link our identity with what we achieve, or whether we win.
When these energies are out of balance with the feminine getting more focus, we feel unsupported, unstable, like we can’t get momentum. We are probably doing much less than we’d really like to, but feel frustrated at a lack of progress. We change our minds often, and can have the tendency to feel powerless. We second guess ourselves because this isn’t really the way most of the world functions.
The cold, hard truth.
Westernized women have become conditioned to fit in and compete by enhancing our own masculine qualities and underplaying our feminine qualities. To conform to the societal standards of production. To make people comfortable by not being so emotional. And in doing so, we are denying ourselves, and in the greater extreme, killing ourselves.
We need both.
The life-force, intuition, creating feminine needs the structure and support and production of the masculine. The feminine births the thing, the masculine comes forth to make sure it stays alive. The need is not one-sided. The masculine needs the feminine just as much as the feminine needs the masculine.
This is true for anything sustainable you are trying to create by yourself, or with others.
When these energies are balanced within ourselves, we can be unstoppable. Inspired, focused, nurtured, and sustainable.
The pendulum will swing.
In order to become fully integrated, where you understand and appreciate both your masculine and feminine, and have them represented in the right proportions for you, we often need to swing the pendulum one way or the other. It’s not always extreme, but the pendulum has to swing so that each part can see itself fully, and to heal the parts that have been locked away.
Think about it, if you’ve spent most of your life doing and achieving and ignoring your feelings, in order to be a person who can do and achieve and have feelings, you may need to put some attention on your feelings while you get it back in balance.
If you’ve been tired for a long time, it’s gonna take some time to recover from not being tired.
You’ll get to know new parts of yourself. You’ll get to find new ways to interact with yourself that feel so much more like you. You’ll find compassion and acceptance to replace the judgement and criticism.
Act like your life depends on it.
Acknowledging all of who you are, and living from that place, makes the outside reflection of that inevitable. Your life will line up with who you really are. It can’t not. This, in and of itself, is an incredible gift.
Here’s what I do know. If you hear the call to recalibrate – if you feel the nudge – and you choose not to listen, the recalibration will happen anyway, but likely way outside the bounds of your preferences.
When you choose it, you get to reap the full benefits. Full internal power. A sense of self you are proud of. Peace. Contentment. Freedom.
Are you feeling the call to recalibrate? Are you choosing it, or is it choosing you?