Reconnecting With Your Feminine Energy
90. Reconnecting With Your Feminine Energy
Today, in this podcast episode, I’m going to stir things up a bit because lately I’ve seen a lot of love coaches telling you “You have to work on your feminine energy, you have to work on your yin to attract the right person, to make the person feel attracted to you or to attract a powerful man who wants to commit”.
And I wanted to give you my version of the story, which may not be the one of the majority. After all, it’s my podcast, so I own it. And I also wanted to give you my vision of the feminine, of the yin/yang polarities and above all why your feminine/yin energy is inevitably impacted in your relationships, in your romantic relationships. And finally what you can put in place to reconnect with your feminine, reconnect with your yin.
Feminine (Yin) and Masculine (Yang) Polarity
feminine, the yin, are the following:
- You have to embody your yin to attract a man
- If you have this feeling of being in a power struggle with your partner, work on your yin energy
- Or maybe you’ve heard, “If I reconnect with my yin, with my feminine, I’ll learn to receive, learn to receive from the other.
- The masculine polarity, it’s rather your sun part. It’s all the things you do that are oriented toward the outside. It’s your intellect part. It’s your disciplined part, it’s your expressive part. It’s the part that asserts itself. It’s the part that is more result-oriented, that needs to shine through its doing.
- The feminine polarity is rather a polarity of shadow. It’s something more cyclical, more oriented toward the inside. It’s the part of you that is connected to intuition, to feeling, it’s the part of you that also has a certain flexibility, a certain slowness, a certain calm, a certain grounding. It’s the part of you that is in softness, the part of you that shines through your presence, just through your being. And it’s also the part of you that is more process-oriented.
Careful, you can unbalance your masculine (yang) polarity either by unbalancing your yang energy but also by unbalancing your yin polarity. It goes both ways.
So the signs of imbalance of the masculine polarity:
- It will be someone who will have this feeling of being in hyper-action, of being in agitation, of having a hard time resting.
- Someone who will have this obsession with the goal, this obsession with results.
- Someone who may have distance, who may have coldness, who may need to be in competition, domination over others, who may abuse their authority, abuse their power, have a certain authoritarianism.
- Someone who has an imbalance of this masculine polarity may need to control, to demand a certain possessiveness, but more on the material and that confidence, in fact, in oneself, is really based on what we do. That is to say that if I don’t do, I don’t have this confidence.
- It shows up as difficulty taking action, procrastination, a certain passivity. We let things happen.
- Or this feeling of giving up easily, of scattering, of being confused, of lacking clarity.
- Someone who has an imbalance in the feminine polarity may also have this feeling of being quickly overwhelmed by emotions, of dramatizing, of having all these feelings amplified.
- Someone who has an imbalance in the feminine polarity may have a feeling of submission or of feeling like a victim and have at the same time a feeling of dependence on the other, but also almost the tendency to smother the other, precisely, through this need for connection.
- Someone who is in the feminine polarity has difficulty setting limits toward themselves, so discipline toward themselves, for example, or toward others.
- Someone who has an imbalance in this feminine energy will be in hyper-empathy, hyper-understanding, at the expense of themselves.
- Someone who has an imbalance in the feminine polarity will really go into possessiveness, in the relationship.
- And in fact, self-esteem will mainly depend on the opinion of others.
Feminine and Masculine Polarities in the Couple
Depending on your basic Yin/Yang balance, depending on what you’ve lived through in your past, potentially, it will micro-impact this balance and automatically, you will be attracted to your complement.
And so here, you may tell yourself, Sandy, you’re saying the same thing as the others. It means I have to balance my feminine if I’m a woman and then if I’m a man, I can balance my yang.
In fact it’s much more complex than that.
Of course if you take conscious actions to work on your feminine or work on your masculine, it will micro-impact your energy.
But what macro-impacts this energy? It’s something totally different.
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Your Past Inevitably Disrupts Your Yin Energy
And this is where your past has a much bigger impact than you might think on this feminine (yin) energy:
- What makes you record a love pattern? What makes this this life experience imprint itself in you/mark you? If you look at it from the angle of the autonomic nervous system, it’s roughly all the moments when you felt powerless in the face of a situation and you didn’t have the possibility to regulate yourself on your own and you didn’t have this possibility to co-regulate with someone else. So, basically, to sum up, it’s a situation where you felt vulnerable/without resources. And this vulnerability, needing others, that is more of a feminine energy (Yin). So inevitably, all the experiences you’ve lived in the past where you had this feeling of being vulnerable/needing others will impact your feminine energy. And that’s what can explain why, even if you’ve tried to cultivate your feminine energy by practicing more yin techniques, but you haven’t worked on your past, you don’t see results, it’s simply because you’ve done surface work. Because if your survival system has recorded that vulnerability/needing others was a danger you won’t really be able to connect to your feminine (yin) energy especially if you’ve developed protection mechanisms following these experiences. If you’ve developed the protection mechanism of freezing which can show up as submission in relationship, “I no longer have the power, I’m losing my power”, “I can’t manage to change the situation”, “I’m a victim of the situation”, it will create an even greater imbalance of your feminine energy. If, as in my case, you told yourself “No, but wait, that’s enough. Feminine energy is not what I want, it brings me nothing, so I’m going to go into my yang. I’m going to go into abuse of power. I’m going to go into domination. I’m going to go into doing. I’m going to go into control. I’m no longer going to let myself be controlled by the situation” it will be even harder to connect to your yin. In summary any experience where you were vulnerable, which inevitably created a love pattern, inevitably has an impact on your feminine energy.
- All the experiences in your past where you recorded that understanding the other, adapting to the other was somewhat of a condition for being loved. All the times you over-adapted, all the times you sacrificed yourself, all the times you forgot yourself for the other, where you weren’t aligned with yourself in order to be loved, to receive your parents’ love etc this also impacts your feminine (yin) energy. Because precisely, feminine energy is more in connection, it’s more flexible, it’s more in enveloping with others. And so inevitably, all these experiences you may have had of over-adaptation, of flexibility toward the other, will also have an impact on your feminine. And again, in this scenario, you can go into hyper-imbalance of the feminine polarity or tell yourself “No, now that’s enough, I’m doing the opposite and I’m going into my more masculine (yang) polarity”
- The third impact this can have, and here I’m talking for men and for women, is every time your past experiences gave you labels connected with feminine energy. So it can broaden in the wide sense to women, but also to all these yin qualities. And so, if I can give typical examples, if in the relationship, in fact, the one who was more in softness, in calm, for example, if you saw one of the two parents who was more in feminine energy, in softness, in calm, in introversion, etc, and that this person, in fact, received a lot of shouting, conflict, outside domination, well, you may have recorded an unconscious label for this feminine energy as feminine energy = disrespect, so either you will go into hyper-imbalance of the feminine (yin), or on the contrary try to embrace the other, masculine polarity. It can also be all the cases of the image of woman. If you are a woman and if you saw examples of women, for example, if you saw your mom sacrifice herself for the couple, always be in adaptation, in hyper-yin in terms of behavior, it will have an impact on you, on how you see the feminine or how you see this feminine energy in you. And again, either you will go in the same direction or the opposite effect. Another example, in fact, for men this time, is when you also put a rather negative label on yin. So, for example, if you have past experiences with the feminine and you had a hard time with hyper-possessiveness in the relationship, being overwhelmed by emotions, dramatization or amplified feelings. Well, if you saw this strong version of yin qualities, it can create the amalgam for a man that being in relationship with women (who by their cyclical hormonal makeup have more of a dominant yin) means it’s something heavy, something burdensome.
- And finally all the experiences that will dysregulate your autonomic nervous system, what does that do? It traps, it stores an emotion that has not been fully welcomed. And so it stores this unregulated emotion in your body. And what does that do? Often, it can have as an impact, precisely, this feeling that you don’t feel your limits, this feeling of being an emotional sponge toward others. I talk about it with Camille Tomat in episode 86. It can also give you this feeling that you’re quickly overwhelmed by your emotions. It can make you feel very quickly dysregulated, make you have an amplified feeling. And all these things, all these dysregulations of the autonomic nervous system will automatically have an impact on your yin.
All this to say that for me, the work of yin or of the feminine is really doing work on your past experiences.
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How to Reconnect With Your Feminine (Yin) Energy?
So now, you may say “OK, Sandy, I understand. It’s not enough to just make micro-adaptations, there’s big work to do on my past” so, how do you reconnect with this feminine energy?
For me, there are three levels:
- The first level is you with yourself.
- And inevitably the first step goes through work on your past. It also goes, for me at least, through work on your autonomic nervous system which, by definition, in fact, any dysregulation, for me, has an impact on your feminine energy.
- The second step is to accept yourself as a whole with your shadow side, that is to say with all this insecurity in you, this difficulty you may have in your daily life, with all the overreactions you may have, with all these amplified feelings you may have and accept it as a healing process. I talk about it in the episode on self-love in episode 58. Ultimately it’s as much accepting your light side as your shadow side that are part of you, that are you, that are the result of your past experiences and that you can little by little improve, understand better, but not in a war/optimization approach, but more an approach of “I accept myself totally. I totally understand that I’m doing my best currently and I’m working little by little on one piece after another.” It’s more this mindset. When you are in the “I want to control myself. I don’t want to have this part of me. I reject this part of me.” It’s not that way, at least in my view, that you will find this appeasement.
- The third step is to re-tame your needs. So dare to feel legitimate in your needs. Dare to feel legitimate in the insecurity you feel and start from that point.
And after reading level 1, maybe you can understand why, if you’ve tried to put in place more yin ways of acting, why it maybe hasn’t worked so far?
Because if you haven’t done this work on your past, if you haven’t worked on this acceptance of yourself first, the rebalancing of your feminine (yin) energy hasn’t been done, if I can put it that way.
- The second level, of course, is “enter into relationship with the other”.
- And of course, in fact, the idea in the relationship with the other, to work on your feminine energy, is to connect to your vulnerability. I like the recommendation of David Bradford and Carole Robbins in their book Connect (I talk about it in episode 84). They explain that we naturally have a level of vulnerability that we manage to express in a given context. With certain people, we’ll manage to talk about ourselves, talk about our feelings, talk about our intentions, talk about our doubts, our insecurities, talk about our pasts up to a certain level. They recommend adding 15% more, that is to say that depending on the person, depending on the context, to dare to say a little more than what we would feel comfortable saying, to see what happens on the other side, in the interaction with the other, how it is perceived and how we manage to dare, to reveal a part, maybe a bit less sunny, of ourselves. And it’s through this experience when we see that we manage to do it, that it will open or deepen the relationship with the other, that it will give us the confidence to go a little further in the relationship and that it will also give us the confidence that we can be ourselves, totally ourselves, with our shadow side in our relationship with others.
- The second thing is to manage to take back your power, so no longer going into over-adaptation and also not going into abuse of power. It’s, so to speak, to find this right balance between “I’m not in my imbalance of the feminine (yin) where I over-adapt, but I’m not going to compensate with an energy (yang) that is unbalanced, that is very much in abuse of power, control, domination.” It’s ultimately to find something in the middle where the person is in balanced yin, she is in her power, she is in certainty facing herself, she is in “I”. She manages to express her needs without having this need to crush the other.
- The third point of that is to create enough safety to be able to be yourself with the other. This notion of safety, I talk about it in episode 67 of the podcast. I always say, the goal of vulnerability is not to bare yourself and then wait for others to slap us. The goal is to choose in what framework and with whom we feel safe, we feel good in order to be able to open up, so that this experience of opening to vulnerability is something positive. And that requires having a framework of safety to be able to do it.
- The fourth point is learning to ask for safety. An episode that can help you more on this subject is episode 67 on external safety.
- And the last point is to stop this automatism of giving, of over-adapting, of being in hyper-understanding. And here, to rebalance this side of your feminine (yin) energy, it’s quite simple you just need to stop giving and learn to receive. If you have difficulty receiving or you have this feeling of giving too much without being able to stop, you can listen to episode 84 where I talk to you about the emotional bank account. It can have a negative connotation of an apothecary’s account, but it will allow you a rough evaluation of what the balance is in your relationship, in your couple, what may have unbalanced the relationship in this area and what you can do to change it.
- And there is a third level to reconnect with your feminine energy. For me, it’s the ultimate level, that of cultivating faith. Whether you are religious or not, what is faith ultimately? It’s believing that something is going to happen to you, even if you don’t have the proof yet now. So it asks you to believe in advance that something is going to happen. And that, in fact, asks you to believe that without doing anything or without changing, things can happen in your favor, things can be positive. It doesn’t mean you wait for everything to happen on your couch, but that you have this confidence, that you are enough for it to be able to happen to you, that it’s not excluded because you are the way you are. And to cultivate this faith, for me, it asks for several things:
- It asks you to become aware of all the times you received, where things happened to you, all the positive things that happened to you in order to cultivate this faith.
- And also to take on this confidence that you can be in relationship with others without necessarily being in a power dynamic, without necessarily having to forget yourself or sacrifice yourself. And for that, in fact, it asks you to accumulate enough proof to have this faith. So, all the times you were able to count on others, all the times you received from others, where you had this generosity from the other, all the times you were able to give just to the extent of what you wanted and no more, it’s all these acts that, accumulated and put together, will help you cultivate your faith and have this faith that you can be like this in relationship with others.
There you go, I hope you enjoyed this episode on feminine (yin) energy, I look forward to your feedback on this subject.
Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the subject and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book S’ouvrir à l’amour available in all bookstores.
And if you want to do the work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life, there’s the program Opening up to love. You can take the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporeal work to deprogram nervous system automatisms and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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