You hear me talk a lot about discernment and choosing an emotionally healthy and empowered relationship partner (we have spent a whole month in The Sanctuary addressing the role of the father and the healthy masculine and I gave members a specific list of healthy masculine traits that helps them identify solid, masculine, grounded men. I can´t stress how important it is to learn to protect and honor your well-being by learning about the empowered masculine character traits, esp. if you haven´t received a healthy “blueprint” from your father).
This time I would like to dedicate the newsletter to ladies who are already in a committed relationship with a good and solid man and who want to keep deepening the connection and intimacy in their relationship through the art of being an open-hearted woman who is the keeper of the secrets of the heart and emotional depth of their union.
The woman truly is the guardian of the emotional openness, depth, and devotion in the relationship with the masculine. As we grow in our connection with our feminine essence and relearn to rest, communicate, and move from the place where we are receptive to our own heart and aware of our value and preciousness as women it not only nourishes our nervous system and body, but this practice starts restoring the flow of loving devotion in the union with your man as well.
I am going to mention instances that I see coming up for women that distort and harm the current of connection and love between them and their man and how you can instead hold yourself and open the places within your heart that want to shut down, disconnect or punish him. We can allow these moments to bring us closer to our partner and help us honor the differences that are ultimately designed to create polarity and the electromagnetic undercurrent of passion and healthy friction of the opposite poles that create life – the masculine and the feminine.
1. Honoring the masculine in your man by honoring your differences
One of the beautiful things about the work I do with women is that we create a space for them where it is safe to journey back to their heart and discover how they feel about their femininity. They get the chance to look at the stress responses that kept their bodies and minds hardened by the world and the relationship dynamics that taught them to self-abandon and to toughen up at the expense of forgetting how to soften, descend into their bodies and access their feminine wisdom.
Some women come to me frustrated by the relationship advice that is not working for them. A common thing that happens is that women use methods and strategies that we were not meant to operate within. You often hear me say that you cannot figure out your relationship or figure out how to change the relationship. As long as you are figuring it out or thinking about the way forward, you are in your mind, far away from the seat of your power as a woman – as love embodied – your heart and womb.
It is not only how you communicate or what you do differently that changes the current of connection; it is how you ARE when you are WITH him. How you are receiving his masculine soul and offerings.
The same way a masculine man is wired and energized by finding solutions, fixing (your) problems, overcoming challenges, building and creating projects that challenge his strength and hone his skills, our feminine bodies love to rest, receive, revel in life, want to be filled by life (whether it´s a conversation with a friend or colleague, chocolate, cuddling, a movie or decorating home) and need to be filled by love (through connection with our own heart and hearts of others).
One of the core needs of a man is to be respected. Even as women, we immediately lose attraction toward a man who does not have a backbone and who can´t be trusted or respected. If we have lost our way as a woman and we can´t find value within and value in our womanhood we will disregard his strengths that are meant to compliment ours and we will either compete with him or want to teach him better (teach him how to be more like us or how to be the version of him that we have in our mind).
An incredibly healing practice for the relationship is to learn about receiving him, and the ways he is trying to make your life easier fully; beyond your mind, by softening into your heart and allowing your feminine appreciation to make his provisions worthwhile. There are so many ways we can show our respect and appreciation and verbal communication is just one of them. Next time you feel grateful to be in a union with a good loving man drop into your body for a moment and notice all the ways it wants to express its joy and appreciation – maybe you simply look into his eyes with loving admiration, or you squeeze his arm while you pull yourself closer to his chest, or you give him a mischievous smile while you whisper to his ear – “I have the best man in the world.”
When we move into our body and move from the tenderness of our heart we are connecting with a wisdom that has no competitors in strategies or external advice. You know the best. You just want to trust the current of your devotion and your feminine body.
2. Manipulation vs. maturity
If you feel like you are “doing” all the things and yet you are not experiencing the closeness you crave, it is usually a combination of a couple of factors contributing to the underlying feeling of frustration and resentment.
One of them is that so many women are using the “tools” with a secret agenda of changing the man or making him do something. Your femininity as I teach it, is simply who you are at your core when you are free from any expectations and secret agendas and surrendered to life and your heart in the moment. At its core, femininity is complete freedom of expression – letting go of all restrictions around how we move our body, how we feel, and how we receive life and the masculine.
If love and connection came with strings attached when we were a child, in adulthood love often feels like a burden, it feels hard and it represents something we have to work hard for.
When we use our body, words or emotions to make a man do something, the undercurrent of manipulation and control throws us into the shadowlands of isolation and self-abandonment and it always backfires.
We are using our Self to control or (often subtly) manipulate. We are out of love and the pure transformational flow of connection is twisted and inverted and your man is going to feel it (often subconsciously) and rebel against it.
When we feel like we need to control, there are emotions arising in our body that we are afraid of receiving fully and staying with them in their entirety. In those moments we need to learn to move closer to our heart and listen in (with my clients we do heart-work, a practice of deep somatic work and the feminine art of descending into our heart and body and finding our own wisdom and answers).
There is so much that our heart wants to teach us. In the process of listening, we go through maturation. We let go of the agenda and we face the depths of our feminine soul. We become free and in our own freedom, we give our man the gift our removing the burden of our happiness from his shoulders. He gets to give you freely and not because if he doesn´t give to you, you are going to punish him by withholding your love and appreciation for who he is.
Before you do any kind of (inner) work ask yourself: Does this land in my body, does it feel true and set me free or am I doing it because I want him to change?
3. Softening and revealing vs. mothering
Our inner woman tends to be buried under years of stress-responses that show up in our relationships as mothering the man or scolding him into “good behavior”. It costs you your well-being and vitality because nothing sucks the life out of a woman faster than telling a man how to live his life or how to be a man (which ultimately on our end is codependency at its core). And nothing makes a man lose attraction faster than being treated like a little boy.
A good solid masculine man understands that he is meant to protect you and make your life easier by using his strength and resources. He is ready to offer his strength as a shield that allows you to stay soft and tender-hearted. He can feel his own devotion arising when you let him in and allow him to see how you are experiencing the world and how you are experiencing him. By revealing your heart he can feel the impact (whether it´s positive or negative) he has on you.
Oftentimes you don´t have to direct him with words, if there is a lot of built-up resentment or misunderstanding finding ways to communicate your preferences can be part of the restoration, but good men are sensitive to our body language and as you deepen into the practice of receiving your own emotions you are able to stand in front of him entirely immersed in your body and heart while still able to hold yourself without blaming or shaming him. You let him IN. You allow yourself to be SEEN.
In mothering, we are hiding how we feel as women using a false sense of control. In softening you let him into your world. Stripped to your core but strengthened by love for your own heart and drenched in your own preciousness. You give him a glimpse into your soul instead of the never-ending list of instructions that exhausts you both.
In The Sanctuary we practice this through somatic work and exercises and in my private mentorship I hold a space for you and guide you to a state of self-responsibility where you can safely communicate your needs and preferences and still let him into your world and heart without shutting down.
Masculine men are mesmerized by feminine openness, softness, and mature vulnerability, because they get to see how you are experiencing the world – in the way you move, in the way you look into his eyes, in the way you describe how the experience feels in your body – you as the feminine are the ultimate mystery to him. His experience of the world is simply different than yours and now you brought light and colors to his life with the gift of feminine sensuality and beingness. When you are receiving life fully and him fully in the present moment, his masculine brain is like – “Wait… What?… What has just happened?” Your gift of feminine presence takes him out of his masculine logical goal-oriented mind and he gets to see and experience the beauty and tenderness of your Soul and of the world that is worth fighting for, protecting, and providing for.
Playfulness and sensuality are experiences we get to cultivate every day and often our bodies need practice in these feminine realms since we have “inherited” different stress-responses around femininity from our mothers or primary caretakers that doesn´t let us be fully seen.
There is a library of resources on the body, needs, and feminine sensuality in The Sanctuary already and in the next weeks we will be covering femininity and different feminine arts, which is a truly exciting topic I love to teach about. The Sanctuary of a Feminine Woman is a membership portal with a monthly fee where you get to manage your subscription on monthly basis with no strings attached.
For ladies who are ready and desire to train with me one-on-one to deepen the connection in their relationship and receive private mentorship and coaching, I recommend filling out the application and learning more details about my programs.
