What is Feminine Practice & Why You Should Do It
In this episode, I’m sharing more about my personal journey and how my perspective on feminine practice has evolved over the years.
We chat about:
What happens when you learn to attune to subtle sensations
How your practice helps you have better boundaries
How to access more pleasure and aliveness through the body
Why cathartic release is not sustainable
Why devotion to a feminine practice is vital to birthing a more beautiful world
Both practical and mystical aspects of a feminine practice
Resources:“Wild Mercy” by Mirabai Star
Listen above, or on any of your favorite platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio . You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.
Want a space to practice in 2024? I’m gathering a coven of women who are creatives and visionaries, and I want you with us! It’s called Wild Sacraments, and it’s a space to receive support and mentorship as you dream, deepen, and unfold. It’s a space to be held in your journey to offer your gifts to the world. Click here to find out more.
Podcast Transcript:
Hey, my loves.
Hi. So, welcome to another one of our full moon chats here in the Feminine Mystery School, where we talk about all things embodiment and living from your feminine essence. For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Michelle. I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and a certified non-linear movement method facilitator certified by McKayla Bone, hence Steve James in their body of work. I am also an embodiment teacher and coach with the School of Embodied Arts, and I want to talk to you today about why we practice.
So, when I first started coaching, I was teaching a movement practice. I was giving my clients a home study movement practice I call Sensual Flow. It's very similar to the non-linear movement method. And you know, a couple of years ago, I used to be a little bit more lax about the need for practice. I used to kind of give this to clients and feel like, well, if this works for you and if you really want to do it, then that's great. I encourage that. But if you aren't really into the idea of this—I know it's a bit weird, a bit out of the ordinary, not a normal seated meditation practice—so it might feel a bit weird as you're getting started. Yeah, if it's not for you, I totally get it.
Over these last years, as I've deepened into my own practice and my own embodiment and mastery with this particular practice, it has just become more clear to me how important this really is for us to be doing. So, I wanted to drop in here today for our full moon chat this month and share some of the reasons why we engage with this practice. What are we getting from this? What is it doing in a practical sense? And I want to share a little bit—I'm going to share some practical things here at the top of this talk, and then towards the end, I want to drop in my little mystical perspective, my personal take on what this is about and what we're up to here as feminine practitioners.
So, the number one thing that we're doing, particularly when we first begin to engage with this non-linear movement practice—and in case you're not familiar with what this practice is, it's essentially a meditative practice where you're moving what you feel. So, your eyes are closed, your awareness is focused inside the body. You're picking up on the internal felt sense, and you're allowing your body to move as what you're feeling. You're just following the currents of sensation that are arising in your body. That's the basics. Of course, we can get a lot broader with the definition and what's going on here, but that's the bird's eye view of what this practice is in case you aren't familiar with it.
So, when you first start engaging with this practice, and probably the foundation of why we engage with this practice, is to build sensitivity in the body. This is so important because our modern world is desensitizing. There's just hyperstimulation coming at us from all directions through our phones, noise, if you live in a city, social media, hyper palatable foods. Like our children, there's just sensation coming at us all the time, and when that happens, our nervous systems, our bodies tend to kind of turn down the sensitivity that's happening because it's like, whoa, that's a lot. Let me turn that down a bit so that I can manage what's coming at me a little bit more.
Over time, we get into this habit or pattern where we actually become desensitized to what we're feeling inside and to the stimulation that's coming at us. So, building sensitivity to the body is one of the really foundational things that this practice does. As you're turning down the volume on the external stimulation and sensation that's coming in, you can begin to attune to the more subtle currents of the body and lay those neural pathways for sensitizing yourself and having a greater awareness of the internal felt sense of what's happening in your own body, of what you're feeling.
There are a lot of benefits to having more sensitivity in your body. Pretty much everything else I'm going to talk about benefits from greater sensitivity, but just to draw out a couple of things that are specifically related to being more sensitive in your body: having more awareness of the present moment sensation that you're feeling and being able to digest and move through those things as they arise. This ease contributes directly to the second thing I want to talk about, which is a better ability to sense and hold your own boundaries.
Holding boundaries actually depends on sensitivity in the body. If you can't feel if something is not right for you, it's going to be very hard to know where there needs to be a boundary, and it's going to be very hard in a moment-to-moment basis to know if something is a yes or a no for you. We all get into these situations where something is happening, and maybe we have a little bit of an awareness that, hmm, something doesn't feel right. But we might not notice or realize until hours or days later, even after you've already left the meeting at work or your boyfriend's house, that a boundary was really being crossed for you, that something was happening that didn't feel good, that was dishonoring yourself in some way.
Having more real-time sensitivity to what's happening allows you to have a clearer sense of your boundaries and when something is not feeling right to you. It also helps you, in terms of boundaries as well, to have a greater grounded awareness of self and other. So many boundary issues and problems have to do with what's yours and what's mine, and being able to sense where I end and where you begin, and where there might be space in between us is critical to being able to unwind some of these boundary patterns where it's really about, "Is this yours? Is this mine?"
The third thing I want to talk about is this practice allows us to cultivate more of an orientation towards your own inner experience. The world is really set up to teach us and habituate us to orient towards things that are outside of us: other people, authority figures, institutions, the culture, the over culture, pop culture, media, things like that. We're taught to be oriented outwards, to be looking outwards to see how do I make sense of what's happening, what meaning is this making, how am I supposed to feel about this, how am I supposed to react to this? We're in this habituated pattern of constantly looking outside for the answers, looking outside for how to be oriented towards the world, towards what's true.
This practice teaches you and is a visceral, direct experience of being able to muscle that awareness, that orientation back and turn it towards your own inner experience. In my opinion, in the time we live in right now when discernment is more important and potentially more challenging than ever, being able to hear our own voice of inner wisdom, our own inner truth, is critical. Being able to orient towards the world based on what's true, what we know deeply to be true, our own values, and how we want to be moving through the world, what we want to be holding as an orientation to the world.
So, that's a big reason to engage with this practice. We have to practice turning that orientation back inwards because most of the time
we're looking outwards. Nobody can come and do this for us. We have to create the time and take the responsibility for practicing, for actually spending the time orienting towards our own truth, our own inner experience.
The next thing I want to talk about is greater pleasure and aliveness, of course. The more that you're able to feel your body, the more you're able to feel yourself, the more you're able to experience richer sensation, more pleasure, and just a greater sense of your own aliveness instead of a sense of moving through the world in a numb state or just a bit of disconnection, needing a lot of stimulation to feel something, to feel alive and to feel pleasure. Being able to attune to those more subtle currents of aliveness and pleasure in the body and becoming more sensitive to that gives you a greater access and range of pleasure where you don't always have to be having something super hyper-stimulating coming towards you. You can actually go deeper into these really subtle currents, and it broadens your range for the pleasure and aliveness that you're able to experience.
The last practical thing I want to talk about is unwinding trauma in the body. Our bodies, our nervous systems, have an intelligence that is outside of our conscious awareness, outside of our thinking directive mind. You know this because your heart beats and your eyes blink, and your digestion happens without you having to do anything about that, without you having to think about it. The body has a wisdom and intelligence all its own, and the body actually knows what to do with trauma and tension patterns in the physical body. If we allow the body a chance to move in an intuitive way and to unwind at its own pace, the body will take care of those things in many cases on its own.
And a lot of times when there is trauma or frozen tension in the body, we get into these kind of tension patterns where things are stuck, where things are not moving, and our life force actually can't really flow with ease through the body. It gets jammed up. So part of this, you know, being in a non-linear movement really works with the nervous system in a certain way to allow the body to gently unwind at its own pace, without pushing anything, without having to dredge something up like might happen in certain healing modalities, without having to go into an acute type of situation to deal with anything that's there.
It allows the body's natural intelligence to really, really gently unwind those things. And you know, we're such a culture that is focused on peak experiences. We're so focused on like the Tony Robbins experience where you go to the three-day weekend workshop and have this super high vibe thing that happens and you're hopped up on all these neurochemicals and endorphins and everything that's happening.
That's not sustainable, though. What happens in this practice is actually you may not feel something happen. You may not feel like a huge release. Sometimes that does happen. Sometimes something will pop or release and you'll feel a release or a relief as something unwinds or leaves.
But generally speaking, it's much more gentle than that. It's much more subtle and potentially even like you might not even notice that something is happening. I personally have had the experience where I didn't have a huge release around something, but over time just kind of notice like, wow, that thing is not bothering me anymore.
Or that thing hasn't come up in a really long time. And just kind of noticing that those tension patterns are gently melting. They're gently unwinding in the body. So those are just some of the really tangible reasons that we engage with this practice, that this, and I really would invite you into a daily practice with this non-linear movement.
Even if it's just for a couple of minutes a day. It's really better actually to do little and often, to have touchpoints more frequently, even if they're smaller than it is to like, every two weeks do three or four hours on a Saturday or something. It's really better to actually have these smaller deposits because that's what's really going to build these patterns in your nervous system where these things can just load up more naturally, more easily.
So, I want to move into sharing a little bit of the more mystical, esoteric aspects of practice with you, and of what we're up to here as feminine practitioners and what it means to be a feminine practitioner. And I want to read something to you. There's this really gorgeous book called Wild Mercy by Mirabai Starr.
It's just such a beautiful book about feminine mysticism, feminine spirituality, and I just happened to pick it up. I read it a couple of years ago, and I just happened to pick it up the other day, and I flipped open to this passage. And I just want to read some of this to you because this passage, to me, is just really poetry, honestly, about what, to me, is kind of the heart of the essence of why we might want to be devoted to feminine practice.
So, I'm just taking a section from a larger passage here. So it might seem a little abrupt getting started, but you long ago relinquished your need for cosmic order and personal control. You welcome unknowingness, which is why seemingly ordinary moments like moonrises and lovemaking undo you. The veil has been pulled back.
Everything feels inexhaustibly holy. This is not what they taught you in the church of your childhood. Your soul has
been formed in the forge of life's losses, galvanized in the crucible of community, fertilized by the rain of relationship, blessed by your intimacy with Mother Earth. You have glimpsed the face of the divine where you least expected it, and this is why you cultivate practice.
The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the holy mystery you once called God, the mystery follows you back out into the world. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle.
So you sit down to practice not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless beloved, but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness in the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself.
This is no easy practice, yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder.
I just want to offer that to you because I just think it's such a beautiful lens to view practicing and the way that I see what we're up to here. So as feminine practitioners, we really are in a certain devotional orientation towards moving through the world in a different way, towards embodying a different set of values for our lives, for our children, for our communities, and for this planet.
And our practice is really what brings this orientation, these values alive in our bodies so that we become walking channels of this on the earth. And I really believe that the more beautiful world that we all want to see for our children, we birth that onto the planet through our own bodies. First, it takes our personal practice.
It takes bringing these codes alive in our own bodies before we can birth them into the collective, before we can literally walk these codes onto the earth through how we are being and our feminine practice, our feminine devotion towards the orientation, towards these values and towards, you know, the more beautiful world that we want to be creating and experiencing on this planet.
It really does come alive in our own bodies first, and it really does take a direct experience and self-responsibility to actually be living and embodying. So literally bringing these things alive in our bodies in order to create it on the planet, in order to create it in the collective. And, you know, our practice really is what sets us apart from the academic study and understanding of these ideas and ideals.
It's what takes us out of the visionary realm, out of this kind of upper chakra orientation towards, oh yes, these beautiful ideals and visions that we have, and really brings it down, brings it down into this lower chakra, this more feminine—the belly, the womb, the sacral, the root, the earth, the body, the blood and guts, the bone, the dirt, the soil.
It's what brings that really down into the material. And really, our heart is kind of the balance point between these upper and lower. And the heart, the awakened heart, is kind of what I see as the transmitter, the magnetic resonance that takes the amalgamation of this vision and this embodiment and beams it out into the world.
So our practice is really what takes us from the realms of being somebody who understands and has great ideas and visions, and talking about it, and writing about it, and reading about it, to somebody who's actually practicing—a practitioner, somebody who's actually bringing these things alive in the body and really orienting in a visceral way towards this new paradigm, these new paradigms that we really desperately need on this planet.
And, you know, we're in such a time of transition right now on this planet. We're in such a field of potentiality, a catalyzing field of potentiality where, and it's really quite a feminine space. It really, really, quite a lot of feminine medicine is needed during this time from my perspective because we really are walking a sort of void right now where old structures, old ways of thinking, old ways of being in the world are dissolving, are dying, and the new has yet to fully be born.
We're kind of in this unknown void of chaos, which is a very feminine space to be in. You know, the feminine is the one who understands and has the grace and the fluidity to walk through these really liminal and chaotic and unknown spaces, like, you know, like Persephone descending into the underworld and being able to ascend back out again.
This is really such a mythic and mystical feminine space and feminine journey. So, you know, the fact that we are here on the planet at this time, during this time of catalyzing transformation, to me is just really exciting. It's really, there's a lot of potentiality here and a lot of opportunity.
You know, I'm always saying this isn't the only medicine that our planet needs, certainly, but this is medicine that our planet needs—this feminine medicine, this feminine practice, this devotion to bringing alive in our bodies the orientation and the values that we want to be creating and birthing onto this planet.
So I hope that you're also inspired. I imagine that you wouldn't be here with me in my spaces if you weren't also inspired by this. So I'm gonna leave you with that. Would love to hear what questions you have on any of this, any sharing that you have, how any of this landed for you and made you feel, and please come practice with us on Sunday.
So I am now teaching biweekly embodiment classes where we have an opportunity to come together in community, which also, when you practice in a group, it also amplifies your practice, which is really cool. You don't have to interact on camera, you can just show up with your camera off in your PJs and practice with us.
I guide and facilitate the process the whole way, and it really is just about you having the space to engage with your own inner processes and to be guided and have space held for you. So I'm doing that every other Sunday, so please come and practice with us. I would love to see you there. There's a link in the description below.
So, happy Full Moon. Sending all of you so much love out into the ether, out into the cosmos.