Healing Feminine Shame

Be agreeable.  Don't rock the boat.  Don't make a scene. For God's sake, be quiet.  Hide.  Don't show the cracks.  Hide them away under concealer, a smiling face, a tough veneer.  

Don't be 'too much.'  But be enough.  Just right.  Discount your own pleasure.  Don't have needs. It's such a fine line.  Tricky to navigate. Exhausting.  Demoralizing.  Dehumanizing.  

Sorry to tell you (and when I say you, I also mean me) but the Feminine is messy.  She's wild, imperfect, needy, emotional, irrational and blazing with fire.  She's been shut down, put in her place, told to be quiet, look pretty, be endlessly sacrificial and deny her own needs and pleasure.  

But she is emerging from a cocoon that has been in the metamorphic phase for eons.  The caterpillar crawled in years ago in preparation for its grand re-emergence.  But she is still so scared.  Being wild and free and imperfect and messy hasn't gone well for her in the past.

So she numbs herself to her own wildness.  She drinks, shops, perfects, binge eats, gets high and obsessively cleans.  She erases the lines on her face in the hopes that that will make her acceptable; loved; perfect.  She thinks everything will be 'normal' if she could just be Nigella in the kitchen and a porn star in the bedroom, all the while denying her own raging needs and desires.  

We ought to know by now that her wildness, her needs, her messiness is not simply going to go away.  It's persisted through every worldly attempt to quiet it, closet it and shame it.  

So what do we do with her?  Do we continue to shame her ourselves? Because we've come to equally brow beat and suppress our own feminine wildness and the wildness of other women. We do this through carefully crafted and curated social media posts and staged selfies that reek of a total disregard of authenticity. So really...what the hell do we do with her?

We might begin by getting to know her.  By sitting with her for a little while everyday.  By letting her out, fully and completely, bit by bit. This might look like not cleaning the house to within an inch of its life.  This might look like going into a forest and just breaking down.  Letting it out, completely.  The trees are sturdy enough and strong enough to take our wild and messy and unkempt nature. 

This isn't just self-improvement.  This is Soul Work.  This is the investigation of a lifetime.  What makes you come alive?  What doesn't light your fire but you persist in pretending that it does?  What do all of our attempts at smoothing and perfecting the outside really do to our wild and free insides?  

Is the job that you're spending the majority of your waking hours at really doing it for you?  Is it really feeding your Soul?  Do you hide your deepest feelings from your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your friends?  Do you enjoy the sex that you're having?  And if not, why?  Where have you put your own pleasure?  Do you speak up about what you need?  Want?  Where have you sacrificed and put your own needs and desires on the back burner?  

Is this what we want to model for our daughters?  Our sons?  That mom comes last (or sometimes not at all).

When self-love supersedes any need to be liked, respected or even loved, you'll step onto this path.  How can you not?  

The wild unpredictability of your Soul calls you.  She's been calling you back forever.  All she's asking is that you get unabashedly honest and dare to be real..real, wild and free.

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés


In love, joy & radiance,

Ann Jarvis
Intuitive Healer, Holistic Nutritionist & Metaphysical Teacher