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How do you take an emotional, hormonal, bleeding, feeling, sweating, lactating woman and lock her up in a Barbie without causing lasting damage?

You can’t.

There will be damage.

The damage will be profound and lasting.

It will haunt us for generations.

We no longer need patriarchy to keep women disempowered. The patriarchy has been fully internalized. Today, women are the strongest perpetrators of toxic disrespect toward the feminine.

Yes, I’ve said it before.

It is not the most popular stance in feminism.

But I own it.

We do it to ourselves now. We do our own policing. And we vigilantly watch our own daughters and other women, ready to pounce in judgment and criticism at the slightest imperfection.

Passed on from mothers to daughters—instead of the ancient wisdom of the feminine arts—is conditioned obedience and dependence on surface attractiveness. A life of our dreams is promised if we stay in line with a permanent plasticized smile on our faces, adorned with inflated lips and exaggerated lashes.

This is what separates us from our nature, forces us to live in untruths, creates so much suffering: the violence with which we berate ourselves. The way we put down other women. The way mothers try to control their daughters by projecting onto them their own inadequacies, perceived failures, and survival fears.

“You have three years left,” a female “friend” advised a 47-year-old woman. “After that—forget it,” she added.

A mother of a 30-something-year-old woman berates her for wanting to leave an unsatisfactory marriage by telling her “these are your hormones talking! Wake up! Who will need you when your ass sags? You’ll end up on the street!”

Women berating their teenage daughters for taking pleasure in food, unable to bear the fact that the girls are gaining weight and filling out their curves. The young women learn to hate their bodies and themselves, feeling guilty for enjoying pleasure.

Another woman in her 50s, whose husband has left her after decades together, has a falling out with her mother. The mother cannot forgive her daughter for the failure of her marriage and blames her for her inability to “keep” a man.

We condemn men for their inability to relate to us on a deeper level, yet our own relating to them still frequently remains superficial, based on calculation, manipulation, and fear, as well as judgment and criticism.

Of course, it is this judgment and criticism that we project onto our men and other women that speak the loudest of our own woundedness. Since I view our relationships as the mirrors of our inner terrain, to me, our blaming and projecting of our misery onto others is a clear sign of the war zone happening within. Any time we criticize externally, we criticize internally.

We dishonor the feminine within by judging, plucking, tucking, covering up, bleaching, cutting, starving, shaming, controlling, hating. Except, the self-hate is unconscious and most of us are not aware of these energetic dynamics, which is what compels us to point the blaming finger for our pain to the outside.

Working hard on being the good girls, as per our mothers’ conditioning, we repress any imperfections in ourselves. Our repressed feelings cause us much misery, but—disempowered— we hold others responsible for our state. Of low self-esteem, we take other people’s behavior personally, but would never voice our concerns in an open conversation. We’d rather secretly resent people and complain about them to others, trying to convince everyone of our unfair victim state.

Of course, I know what I am talking about. I was that mother and the daughter. I sacrificed all of me for the approval of people on whom I was conditioned to believe my well-being depended. I’ve sliced pieces of myself in order to satisfy some ever-elusive barometer of my worth as a woman. I’ve complimented my daughters on their looks and taught them to suppress the more unruly displays of their true wild and abundant nature.

All this abandoning of self, yet we suffer when the masculine does not show up for us.

The way to heal this split between the feminine and masculine starts within ourselves— reconnecting to our own bodies, reestablishing trust of our inner knowing, intuition, and the multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which our bodies communicate with us.

We are all so starved for affection, attention, and authentic connection, but we are focused on attracting it by focusing on the surface.

The surface is all we show, not realizing that when we do not communicate from our core, sharing our real and vulnerable selves, our relationships cannot become fulfilling. The absence of true connection further perpetuates our feeling unsafe in being our authentic selves. Fear of abandonment, fear of being not enough or too much, fear of rejection, and not belonging is what blocks our full self-expression. We are unable to embody what we cannot access: parts of ourselves that we have rejected and locked up.

Women were never taught that the most important relationship we need to cultivate is the one with ourselves.

We fight for equality and loudly demand to be respected, but we cannot expect others to do that which we are not willing to do for ourselves.

Let’s start by changing our toxic internal dialogue. Cultivate forgiveness and compassion for ourselves first. Face and heal our wounds. Accept the natural shapes of our bodies in full appreciation of the myriad of functions they perform to make our lives possible. Take up space. Respect ourselves enough to slow down the overdoing and listen in. Honor our needs before we become burnt out, ill, or depressed. Stop outsourcing love. Shift our mindset from scarcity to abundance.

It is always a profoundly moving experience for me when I witness women connecting with their inner little girl via somatic healing exercises I offer in my sessions. The tears that invariably come when I invite them to say “I am sorry” to themselves.

I have shed rivers of tears over the years in the process of reconnecting with my inner being, my life force that’s been snuffed out and silenced. Going beyond the locked doors and barbed wire to liberate my wild and exuberant nature was not easy. It was not fun. It did not produce quick results.

But through this work, I knew I was rearranging my DNA and liberating generations of my ancestors. Most importantly, I carved a passage to authentic self-expression for my own daughters.

Change begins with each one of us, as we dare to step out of the Barbie prison and let our liberated feeling bleeding crying nature flow.

I left the door open. And now you have the invitation.

Join me.

~

Contact me for a free introductory session to start reclaiming the fullness and safety of who you are.