So you want to radiate that inner, feminine je ne sais quoi in your life?

Well before you begin embracing all things you think are feminine, it’s really important to understand what authentic feminine energy is.

Feminine energy is often described as being compassionate, nurturing, soft, and able to surrender and receive. But real feminine energy is SO much more! The feminine side also encompasses passion, transformation, sensuality and the full spectrum of emotions (including the ugly parts)!

Here’s a list of just some of the myriad feminine traits you may come across …

Feminine energy traits

• Sensitive
• Intuitive
• Nurturing
• Receptive
• Empathetic
• Loving
• Compassionate
• Powerful
• Pleasure-filled
• Passionate
• Magnetic
• Sensual
• Sexual
• Rageful
• Fearsome
• Transformational
• Chaotic
• Wild
• Destructive

How to define feminine energy

The true feminine is impossible to describe in one word or sentence because she is an entire cycle of birth and creation to death and destruction. Feminine energy encompasses light and dark, love and fear, beauty and ugliness. She is youth and age. She is receptivity and she is force.

So real feminine energy has little to do with “femininity” as our popular culture, media, and advertising would lead you to believe. It’s not fluttering your eyelashes to seduce a man, having perfectly manicured nails, or being the one who cooperates, finding the peaceful route through a disagreement.

Real feminine power and energy could be found in your wildly unkempt hair, unwashed face, and your fierce and heartfelt “no”.

For a much deeper experience of the “deep feminine”, go and listen to the work of Oracular Poet Maya Luna.

How to increase feminine energy

Maybe you’re reaising now, how increasing the feminine energy in your life is more than just wearing the right clothes and cultivating receptivity?!

If you’re serious about this work, then know it’s a deeply personal process and not a walk in the park! Being someone who can radiate feminine energy will require you to strip back layers of conditioning and age-old beliefs about femininity. You’ll have to look deeply at your inner world, and probably face some confronting facts. But the rewards are worth it… not only personally, but for the collective too.

Know that when you do this work of reclaiming the feminine, you’re doing the work for generations of women who couldn’t. And also for women around the world who can’t.

So let’s begin…

1. Explore your conditioning around femininity

Exploring your conditioning around femininity is a great way to increase authentic feminine energy.

Write down a list of what you think femininity is, then ask yourself if each thing is true. If it is, why? Who told you so? Where did that belief come from?

As women, we’ve spent our entire lives receiving messages about how to be feminine, feel feminine, and look feminine. But for many of us, these messages go against our innate qualities and characteristics!

So to fit in and not get cast out by society, we learned to reject these parts of ourselves. Yet by rejecting these “unfeminine” traits and qualities in ourselves, and adopting what society, our families, our friends, and our cultures have told us is feminine, we have created a really distorted view of ourselves and the world.

It’s really important to look at your beliefs around femininity, the feminine, and what it is to “feel feminine” before blindly trying to tap into “feminine energy”. Because the feminine way of being that you’re seeking out could actually be at odds with the real you, and the real feminine within you.

Read this post next: 50 BEST Journal Prompts for Healing Feminine Energy

It is deep, deep work to strip back to the inner feminine, so go slowly. A good place to start is likely by looking at your own shadow…

2. Do your shadow work

It doesn’t matter how much “love and light” you’re seeking. Unless you’re spending time looking into your shadow, you’re not going to cultivate deep, true feminine traits and energy.

Everyone has a shadow side – this is the unconscious mind – the place where we put all the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected.

For women, shadow traits may look like:

• Being angry
• Ugliness
• Manipulation
• Being assertive
• Being disorganized
• Having “negative” emotions
• Having needs

Integrating your shadow is a powerful healing journey that is absolutely unavoidable if you want to cultivate feminine energy,

1. Explore your conditioning around femininity

Exploring your conditioning around femininity is a great way to increase authentic feminine energy.

Write down a list of what you think femininity is, then ask yourself if each thing is true. If it is, why? Who told you so? Where did that belief come from?

As women, we’ve spent our entire lives receiving messages about how to be feminine, feel feminine, and look feminine. But for many of us, these messages go against our innate qualities and characteristics!

So to fit in and not get cast out by society, we learned to reject these parts of ourselves. Yet by rejecting these “unfeminine” traits and qualities in ourselves, and adopting what society, our families, our friends, and our cultures have told us is feminine, we have created a really distorted view of ourselves and the world.

It’s really important to look at your beliefs around femininity, the feminine, and what it is to “feel feminine” before blindly trying to tap into “feminine energy”. Because the feminine way of being that you’re seeking out could actually be at odds with the real you, and the real feminine within you.

Read this post next: 50 BEST Journal Prompts for Healing Feminine Energy

It is deep, deep work to strip back to the inner feminine, so go slowly. A good place to start is likely by looking at your own shadow…

2. Do your shadow work

It doesn’t matter how much “love and light” you’re seeking. Unless you’re spending time looking into your shadow, you’re not going to cultivate deep, true feminine traits and energy.

Everyone has a shadow side – this is the unconscious mind – the place where we put all the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected.

For women, shadow traits may look like:

• Being angry
• Ugliness
• Manipulation
• Being assertive
• Being disorganized
• Having “negative” emotions
• Having needs

Integrating your shadow is a powerful healing journey that is absolutely unavoidable if you want to cultivate feminine energy,

3. Connect to nature

Spend time in nature, to soak up the frequency of divine feminine energy. Don’t wait until you feel burned out before turning to the great mother because she can teach you a LOT.

Nature will soothe and heal your nervous system, help regulate you through your internal process, and BIG deconditioning work. And she will teach you all about the life force energy that runs through our veins.

4. Be more creative

You can increase your feminine energy by aligning with your creativity. Make art, crafts, cook, weave, dance… try whatever artistic expression makes your creative side sing. When you cultivate your creative energy, you are aligning yourself with the life-giving force of the Universe. And this will naturally increase your feminine energies.

5. Increase your capacity to BE with your emotions

Many women are naturally deep feelers.

But, can you hold and fully feel your emotions, without either suppressing them when they’re uncomfortable or letting them suddenly explode when too much?

You can embody more feminine energy by learning to authentically connect with your emotions. Increase your capacity to BE with what you’re feeling, so you can listen, learn, and process them.

6. Practice embodiment and sensuality

If you want to increase feminine energy, you need somewhere for that energy to belong! And the feminine doesn’t belong in the mind.

She is embodied – she lives in your blood, flesh, and bones. She comes alive when you move, dance, and feel.

But most humans (both men and women) have been systematically disconnected from their bodies over centuries of living under patriarchal control. Re-awaken feminine energy in your life by inhabiting your own body more fully.

• Take a long walk barefoot
• Tune into your five senses
• Join a yoga class
• Savour delicious food
• Inhale the scent of a rose
• Touch your own body and get to know (and appreciate) her contours, textures, and shapes.

Closely connected to embodiment, sensuality is the pleasure that can be found in sensation.

Most of us have a deep desire for more sensuality, yet don’t quite know that’s what our inner yearning is.

Embracing sensuality by coming into contact with what we are feeling, sensing, and enjoying physically will increase the feminine flow of energy through your life.

7. Appreciate your body

Patriarchy wants you to dislike your body. This keeps you spending money on trying to improve, change, or manipulate it. But just like patriarchal femininity, the messages you receive about what a feminine body looks like are lies.

Your body is beautiful. She is divine. Cherish and love her.

8. Embrace your menstrual cycle

How do you feel about your menstrual cycle? Love it, or loathe it? (Again, your perception is likely closely tied to the conditioning you’ve received, so no judgment here).

As a woman who menstruates, every month your entire body moves through a sacred cycle of creation, growth, climax, descent, and death. Your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and body all mirror this incredible feminine blueprint.

So instead of stifling your feelings, numbing your pain, and dreading your blood, begin to awaken to the creative force you carry within.

9. Connect with the Moon

Connecting with the Moon is a powerful way to increase feminine energy because the Moon embodies the cyclical nature of every woman, from her darkness to her brightest light.

Set intentions at the new Moon, and hold a monthly Moon ritual at the full Moon. It’s easy to harness the divine feminine energy she offers.

10. Slow down and rest

Divine feminine energy cannot be rushed, yet most of us think we should be doing more, faster (am I right?!)

Slowing down is reclamation.

Resting is rebellion.

One of the best ways to cultivate feminine energy in your life is to slow down the pace, stop pushing forward, and BE in the moment.

11. Play!

Like pleasure, play is healing, yet SO underrated. It’s self care.. but more fun!

Try to find time to be free, uninhibited, light-hearted, and spontaneous. Let go of structure, self-awareness, and the need to be productive.

Play will enable a balance to be found, so that “masculine” impulses are kept in check. This will allow the spontaneous joys of the feminine to emerge in unexpected, unplanned ways!

12. Work with the Dark Feminine

Cultivating only the lighter, softer traits of the feminine, and rejecting any “darker” ones is NOT only doing half the work. It’s actually creating more imbalance.

Working with the dark feminine is a necessary aspect of this path. As daunting as it may be, especially if you have preconceptions around darkness and shadow, we need to embrace all aspects of the Goddess on this journey.

13. Explore your sexuality

You can’t increase the feminine energy in your life without a deep exploration of your sexuality.

For the majority of women, this either feels expansive and exciting or constricting and fear-inducing Because the fact is that growing up in the 21st century, many of us have trauma around our sexuality.

The truth about what sex and sexual energy actually are has been radically distorted over many centuries. The messages we’ve received as women are so far from the creative, erotic, sensual impulse that sex is all about.

So if you want to awaken feminine energy, it’s VITAL to explore your own sexuality. But doing this means peeling back the layers of conditioning that you’ve been fed since childhood.

Read next: Here’s What Your Moon Sign Says About Sex

14. Cultivate your intuition

You can connect to your feminine energy by cultivating your intuition.

Intuition is that inner voice (the voice of your highest self?) that more and more women are noticing, yet still unsure whether to trust.

Trust yourself!

Listening to your intuitive hunches will awaken even more of this powerful feminine force. Acting on your intuition will show the feminine that it’s safe to move through your life.

15. Cultivate healthy female relationships

Many women have a desperate need for healthy relationships with other like-minded women.

Yet instead of seeing other women as friends and allies, we do the polar opposite, because we’ve been conditioned to judge, criticize, gossip about, and compete with them.

Work hard to embrace the females in your life! Love them, cherish them, celebrate their wins, and dedicate spare time to building healthy, generous relationships with them.

Masculine and feminine energy compared…

Modern polarity teachings describe feminine and masculine energy as opposite forces that complement and depend on each other. Yet by defining the feminine as soft, surrendering, and open (and denying her any qualities of strength and force, for example), she becomes subordinate to the masculine.

Masculine energy is equal to feminine energy. Different, but equal in power and strength. So when working with feminine energy, it’s vital to recognize that masculine energy doesn’t have power over the feminine.

Our societies tend to hold masculine traits and masculine energy in high regard because THAT is what our systems are designed around. If you employ the masculine qualities of linearity, direction, stability, structure, productivity, predictability and logic, you succeed.

So from a very young age, most of us are conditioned to cultivate our masculine side, so that we fit in here. BUT neglecting (or distorting) our feminine side, to fit into this society hasn’t made most women whole or happy. This makes it so important to strip back the conditioning around feminine and masculine energy, to gain a more authentic understanding of what these two energies actually are.