Honouring Your Feminine Intelligence

Originally Posted May 21 2015

Okay, I’m not saying you can’t go through life and work and play like you husband, boyfriend or the partners in your firm at work, of course you can, but somewhere down the road it might be limiting, draining and or make you hate your job, or worse your life.

Like never before, women are getting hammered for their decisions about what they want out of their life. Do you want to “Lean In”, Lean out, or follow the beat of your own drum. All of us are waking up to the fact, that perhaps life can look way different than it ever has before, and maybe we can ask for and go after a life that is way bigger than we can currently conceive.

It’s just we have no models for what that looks like. We aren’t able to look to our mothers, their journey was important to allow us to get to where we are now, but we are capable of dreaming up and achieving more. But, we can’t do that by following the mode and rhythm of what’s been done before. Doing so is a surefire way of doing our bodies and minds a disservice.

Business, Lifestyle, Mothering, and Relationships that are propelled into a new level of existence require us to think out of the box, which may sound a little defeating and exhausting, as using our imagination has been somewhat stifled through our upbringing. For a long time our priorities have been diverted to more objective and measurable capacities, but getting it back is so much easier than you would expect.

The answer lies within. Everything you need is within you. Our bodies, create life, we create a future, evolution happens and realities come to be within our body. Our bodies are psychic as they hold a wisdom and an ability to allow what is to come.

And so, we have to allow ourselves to tap into this amazing resource. Here’s the catch, a woman’s body does not operate in one mode every day, all day. We work within cycles, in tune with nature and the moon, our hormones and our energy systems ebb and flow. Your male counterparts have fluctuations on a daily basis, their greater drive is measured over long periods of time. Like Years! While ours change dramatically over 28 days. Even if you’re not menstruating anymore we still have a rhythm that guides us day to day not year to year.

I thought it best to show this in a series of graphs. Plus it allows my inner science geek to come out a little bit. (Honouring that she has a place in this too.)

So here is our hormones in a normal 28 day cycle. If your cycle is slightly irregular, longer, shorter than these hormones will adjust to reflect that.

So to add another level to this,

In Chinese Medicine, we often view Estrogen as a yin quality hormone. Its nutritive, it’s the water, cool and reflective, a bit more still, if we were to separate estrogen and progesterone even further into masculine and feminine.

Estrogen would be considered more feminine and progesterone the masculine. Its more yang, its warmer, the fire that blazes, it’s more persistent there are fewer fluctuations in its release within the body when active.

Which makes sense, your FSH and Estrogen are nourishing your follicles to prepare for a possible egg that could be fertilized and become life. Your progesterone feeds and supports that egg to embryo and beyond if that intended cycle is meant to progress in that way. At the end of the 28 days, with no the progesterone retreats back into the yin to allow for that reflected and nourishing phase to begin again. That little bit of LH surge that happens just before you ovulate, consider that a spark that starts your engine and propels you into the next phase.

Now let’s look at some graphs of testosterone for men.

The reality is, I couldn’t find any graphs that show a months cycle because there isn’t one. There are fluctuations that occur within a day, which makes sense, we have this too. Times in the day when we are more productive, others when we could use a nap or do something a little more low key or sleep.

And then there is a graph for testosterone over the course of a man’s lifetime. Naturally there is a peak in a man’s hormones in to his 20’s and early 30’s as this is when they are asserting themselves and building their life, their future and they need this Yang Fire Intensity to hit the payment and make it happen. And then at about the age of 35, a healthy males testosterone declines at about 1% per year, (its this slow burn off into old age)This relationship is dramatically different to how women get a new shift per year and decade. I don't want to mislead you, women have testosterone as well and we do need it, we use it, but its not our driving force as we move through our lives. The purpose of illuminating these facts is that we are not the same, and to act and do as if we are doesn’t serve us, our health, our bodies or our intelligence.

I could say so much more about your cycle in relation to this stuff but lets move on to what this means for you when you are in your everyday life.

These hormones operate and drive the ship for your mind and body. At the beginning of your cycle you may notice that you want to be quieter, more reflective, decisions require more time to be made and when allowed you can tap into the rhythm of what comes next. Your deadline might need to be shifted in order for it to be truly authentic and aligned to whats important to you in that moment.

As you move into the second phase of your cycle there could be a burning intensity that allows you to get shit done. Your able to operate at a consistent level and attain traction to project into the future of your project, life, dream you name it, it’s limitless.

So what does this mean, as not all of us our entrepreneurs that can do what we want day to day. A lot of you exist in institutions that are heavily masculine and steeped in patriarchy. You can’t just not show up and do your job because you got your period. And the truth is I can’t give you a concrete answer. But what I do know, is that you have it within you to reveal your answer.

Women have this uncanny way of problem solving that is unmatched when they allow their true wisdom to come to light.

So breathe into it, nurture it when you have some free time and see what answers come forward. They might surprise you.

Not sure how to tap into this here are a few ideas to get you started.

Take regular “daily” time to breathe and journal

Dance it out. Even 5 minutes can shift perception of a situation

Move an emotion. Be open to the emotion that your holding onto around a decision or situation. Do you need to Cry, Shake, Get mad, Laugh your ass off?

Get a little woo woo, pull a card in a tarot deck and see what the message is, or pull off a book on your shelf and randomly open the page to read what it says.

Spend some time with your body, massage it, bathe it, touch yourself, allow yourself to be in your own company and let go.

Adorn yourself, get dressed up, put on make-up do your hair, it’s amazing what getting out your regular work clothes or yoga pants can do for tapping into your feminine energy.

XO Ashley