I was out to the Sari Sari store in my Purok. I’m currently living in the Philippines, kind of by accident, cause COVID-19 lock down happened. When I arrived in the Philippines, driving from Manila International Airport, to Downtown in Makati- the famous area among backpackers- also the red light district; looking around me, I appreciated what an establishment metro Manila was. After everything I heard about Manila, what I saw blew my expectations to the wayside. Another thing I also quickly understood was that I wouldn’t want to live in the Philippines, which I said out loud to people when I arrived- the irony is that I’ve now been here for almost a year. In my nature of traveling, the way I travel, unlike most backpackers, I’m not on any type of schedule nor do I have any predetermined plans for exactly when I want to leave or exactly where I want to go, hence why I’m accidentally living in the Philippines.

The Sari Sari is the little store out the window of someone’s house; reminds me of playing shop shop with my cousins when I was a girl. The Purok is the block within the Burangy, known in English, as your neighborhood. There are a few stores in our neighborhood but naturally I like the one closest to my place. The lady who owns this particular store asked me: “Eyna, what do you do, you’re looking so good these days”. Given that English, isn’t her first language, communication takes effort so I found it easier to just smile and say thank you, as it gets boring to always tell people my morning routine. If you really want to know what I’m doing, I can tell you I’ve been minding my own business. Literally building my business. I’ve been working on this business part time for the past two years, whilst volunteering and traveling around. It’s the first time I’ve been able to dedicate all my time to only the business.

Being able to be in the business this way, has shown me many more weaknesses when it comes to myself specifically regarding parts of myself I didn’t know existed and then there’s also what I know, or rather don’t know about business. I’ve always been a cleaner in my approach to work. A cleaner is someone you can trust as an employer to do exceptional work, all the time. They’re also someone who doesn’t bring their personal problems to work. As soon as they walk through the door, they step into their role and pride themselves on always delivering their best. We are all humans and so there will be times in everyone’s life where they can’t ignore what’s happening in their life and it spills over into their work- of course that’s happened to me. It’s very masculine to always be doing, and building and striving and achieving. Growing up in a culture where I always felt the need to struggle, fight and prove my worth to move ahead in life, I was also mostly always disconnected from my feminine power. Luckily I still had a more naive youth on my side which meant I gave my energy to this battle; living by expressing myself dominantly through masculine power. As I’ve grown and outgrown old thinking paradigms over the last two years and especially now, whilst developing in my business, I find myself reaching my threshold a lot faster when I’m mostly expressing myself in my masculine power, doing what cleaners do best, thereby not getting to honor my inner goddess. Mothers experience this best as they step into their role of primary caregiver to their new born babies.

Femininity, like masculinity has it’s ways of expression. As women, to express ourselves dominantly through feminine power means searching for ways to connect with our inherent nature that is creative, healing, receptive, open, nurturing, loving, understanding, compassionate, intuitive, wise, forgiving, harmonious and sensual. I couldn’t concisely articulate the desire I felt the first time I heard the call to adventure. That I was seeking for ways to connect to my femininity. All I knew was that I was searching for something outside the conditioning, I was exposed to so I could live a life as much connected to my feminine power as my overdeveloped in comparison, masculinity. Adventure had called my name for the first time when I was 19 and sent me packing from, South Africa, to the desert of, The United Arab Emirates. After a couple months it became apparent to me that I had a desire to be a Personal Trainer, and eventually setup my own online business and all the other things, us fitness people want and admire from the people we look up to on Social Media who have made it happen for themselves. It’s fair to say I took an extremely long way round to my goal and finally reached the beginnings of it only 4 short years later. I hadn’t fully embodied my feminine so the achiever human’s nature to reach a summit took over and breathlessly proclaimed; okay universe, what’s next!

I found myself working in a corporation that had strict policies and rules of how we, as employees could carry ourselves, which were largely the polar opposite of me as the person I had become. No colorful clothes, single colored shoes, hair a certain way- it was everything I am not. We all do things for security, and often times get comfortable when we shouldn’t. We can all push our destiny’s to the side for a while but what happens after a while? After a while of having to suppress my authentic self, I knew I couldn’t be living this life and be whole. The reason I left my home in the first place was to separate myself from predetermined social constructs set up to control my being. 24 at the time of realizing I had reached my threshold, of being extremely warn out from giving so much to what everyone else needed me to be. Doing the things which to me, felt was a part of what I needed to do, to get where I wanted to be. I now see it was all happening because I wasn’t nourishing who I needed to be for myself to keep growing and learning in ways that were facilitating the feminine power I longed to reconnect with.

We all have and must identify our individual ways of expressing the feminine power within. Being on an adventure is my epitome of feminine expression. When King Author’s knights went searching for the holy grail, each one decided to go into the forest at the point which he found darkest. When I decided to make the leap to leave corporate and start up for myself, I never knew I would find my bliss and expression of my femininity in adventure, because all those years I spent working “for the man” I was still predominantly in my masculine energy, I just looked more girly. It was a huge step from who I had been but it was still a path laid out to me, only scratching the surface of how much deeper I needed to go. When we step into the unknown, we are given the opportunity to create our own path. Along the way you learn to listen to your intuition, following the wisdom found in your past mistakes, or in the cosmos by being open to anything along the way where there is something there to assist us.

The first time I stepped into being receptive- beyond receiving a salary for the work I did and receiving help from friends, was when I started volunteering. I found myself in a position where, things hadn’t worked out with starting up for myself the way I had imagined. However I discovered I really love this nomadic, unattached life as well as that I wanted to take ownership of my goals by not letting them go by doing for everyone else instead of nurturing my potential as a trainer and understanding my other roles in life at a deeper level. After everything that had happened between leaving the city and losing my deal with my business, I needed to heal.

When we are going along in life in a way that’s clear to our greatest and highest good, a lot of magic happens and for me one of those magical things was locking eyes with a handsome, elder millennial, French, dude during our layover in Singapore, headed to Bali. We talked just long enough during the layover that we managed to exchange numbers and then bumped into each other, again on the way out of Denpasar International, where he offered to have his car drop me off at the hostel. Fast forward a few days we ended up meeting again in Canggu, where we got acquainted enough that he allowed me to stay at his place while I figured things out. We were both in the same frequency which was needing to figure things out. He started talking about volunteering and woofing and in the most extreme of cases if he really couldn’t figure things out, becoming a monk. I liked what he was saying and found myself an opportunity to volunteer at an animal shelter. A sanctuary in the South of Koh Samui, in the middle of the jungle.

I absolutely feel in love with temperate rain forests at this time and would go on to spend most of my time in Asia, closer to the jungle because it brought me so much healing. Being with the animals, who are so unconditionally loving was something I truly needed after losing such a huge part of my identity; the failure of my start up, as I had imagined. I started to understand the value of loving no matter what, and loving myself. If these animals who had just met me could do it, as someone who had spent 24 years with myself up to that point, I could learn something from them. [If anyone is interested in donating towards the sanctuary, please do check them out: Happy Tails Sanctuary Koh Samui]. Having this experience in my adventure set me up for being able to express my feminine power in unprecedented ways here after.

Right now, the world is going through changes which give us all an opportunity to awaken and step into our roles, or risk being left behind, possibly in the ugly wake of poverty this pandemic is facilitating. Being a South African, living in the Philippines, poverty is no stranger to me. I grew up privileged and my mom was able to afford giving me an upbringing which opened many of the doors I’ve walked through in my life. There are still many generational gaps I need to fill and healing those has been the full time job I’ve undertaken since I woke up when I was 19. I came down from an MDMA trip that started out well before it very quickly took a different turn. I’ve had many rock bottoms already or maybe I could classify them as death processes to be slightly less dramatic and maybe more romantic. Currently I’m making a study of myself to help me consciously harness my power.

We all have gone through things which give us our narrative of what’s going to happen to us. Although I did have this wonderful experience traveling from Thailand to Bali, back to Thailand, then Malaysia, a visa run to Singapore, then a detour through Thailand to get back to Malaysia (major visa issues in Singapore) where I had based myself for the second half of 2019, it wasn’t all rosy colored reality. There were times that were borderline dangerous- getting roofied, my phone breaking, not having a laptop or bank card for a while- to name a few. In all that I had other incredible experiences which is why I’m looking to those times for guidance. This COVID-19 era is probably some of the scariest times we’ve faced as a collective. In figuring it out, we sometimes must take some heavy hits. As Rocky Balboa said, it’s not about how hard you can hit but how hard you can get hit and keep going. This is the time where we need to look at our beliefs and ask ourselves where do these beliefs come from? It’s most crucial now because when we ask ourselves this question we give ourselves a chance to stop running that old programming unconsciously and rather run the processes we found from the those magic moments, consciously. This is where I discovered that in my journey, what helped me in all that was being divinely feminine.

Since I’m still running a business, I need to use parts of my masculine to get things done, so of course I ask: ‘universe, what’s next?’ Knowing that I want to be balanced in my masculine and feminine power, to enjoy these times and succeed, it means transferring the knowledge into wisdom of seeing that my adventure isn’t necessarily a physical one of moving place to place until it’s possible. When the opportunity comes I want to go because that’s my bliss and where I get to be most connected to the divine. Right now it’s using that power to overcome the fear and uncertainty I face minding my own business, which is an adventure every day!

We all need to find what makes us tick to keep us alive and going to get to the other side. It’s not always in the most obvious of places but what helped me find this was thinking about how I actually overcame those hard times, and more than that, which parts made it seem effortless in having everything flow to me. I had the beginners luck Paulo Coelho writes about in, The Alchemist; unconscious competence. I couldn’t understand what I was doing which differentiated times when I overcame things without that fighting, doing, masculine energy and finally when you see it you will know exactly what it was. Once you know what it was, you’ll need to dive deeper to understand what caused those behaviors and outcomes. There I found every answer I was searching for regarding the questions I had about those times. I really encourage you to do the same and not throw your hands up, even though they may be tied. We all have inside us the answers to the questions we seek. It may be that you just don’t have the proper tools, keys and thought processes to locate it. It’s our responsibility to elevate ourselves. When we don’t know what to do, we must learn about it and in this we can raise our perceived value. Do some research, talk to people who have different and even similar experiences so you feel more connected and less alone, plus give yourself a different perspective. Raising your perceived value of yourself goes back to separating yourself from dis empowering preconditioned thinking ingrained in you from your environment. When a flower doesn’t bloom, you don’t change the flower, you change the environment.

It’s not the end, it’s the end of how you used to do things, it’s time for a shift! The shift is in you learning how to bloom.