This article is based on our podcast episode, Make Magic: How The Overactive Masculine Blocks Intuition. Listen to the full episode here.
Over the last 5,000 years, there has been a gradual and consistent shift to valuing masculine ways of living and interacting in the world. For many women in the U.S., this cultural conditioning has caused a deep wounding and fear of trusting our emotional worlds, intuition, and natural ability to receive and be supported. To be successful or considered beautiful, we need to have masculine bodies (angular, thin, small hips and thighs) and value our thoughts over emotions. Operating only in masculine energy not only causes us (all beings, not just women) to be imbalanced, but it results in shutting down our natural ability to connect with our intuition. Within feminine energy lies the ability to receive intuitive information, which allows us to tap into our inner knowing and spirit guides.
Wounded Feminine Energy
At psychic-conventions, many successful women come up to my booth for a reading. They may be raising children, in long-term relationships, changing careers or building businesses. Day after day, month after month, I noticed a pattern. All the women seemed to struggle with the same problem: They were incredibly sensitive and intuitive, but they didn't trust themselves. They identified as sensitive, and experienced an inner knowing, or a sixth sense, that helped them better understand people and the world around them. But this amazing gift, to sense and see at a higher level, was buried, and mistrusted under layers and layers of masculine energy. Each woman across from me had a deep emotional world, but this part seemed to sit far back inside them, like a shy student sitting in the last row of a classroom. When I validated this for many of them, tears would erupt, and this intuitive, shy place would make eye contact with me. And when many of these women opened their mouths to reply, I was blown away by their stories. Their intuitive, sensing, emotional capacities were considered weaknesses. And they were ashamed of them.
Over and over, many women discussed that to be successful, or taken seriously, or considered a "good mom" or "valuable partner", they had to learn how to strive to become a rational, thinking-based human. They had to learn how to be accomplished, produce, compete and be goal oriented. Mind over heart, thinking over feeling, the sun over the moon. Each woman felt a deep ache having to isolate this part of themselves to be successful. And each woman also held a secret longing, a desire to return to this valuable place for comfort and joy.
In both myself and the women who have sat across from me, I sensed a deep desire to return to this feminine place that allows us to value our intuitive knowing. For many of us, this is where our spiritual center lies.
Overactive Masculine Energy
Masculine energy is the producer, the space holder, the thinker, and the organizer. It makes lists, identifies tasks, sorts through things, and creates. It radiates, offers energy to others, and is typically more extroverted. It teaches us through doing, and we learn success and to trust our skills.
As more women have entered the workforce and applied for positions that were originally only created for men, they were squeezed into valuing their masculine traits over feminine traits to be considered equals. For women to be considered capable in a lot of industries, they had to harden. Being receptive, gentle, or emotional was considered weak, and it has shaped women to hide their intuitive, feminine energy to be considered valuable.
My entire life I hid my feminine energy to find success in a masculinized world. I worked three jobs in high school while taking college courses. After I graduated with my second master's degree, I had five jobs at one time. I pushed, and pushed, competing with myself, hardening myself, filling all my time with doing and producing. My emotional needs faded into the background, until my moon cycle shifted, and I began bleeding for two weeks straight every month. It was if my feminine energy was begging me to pay attention, demanding I get back in touch with my own natural rhythms of womanhood. When I finally got health tested by a naturopath, she turned to me and said my estrogen was dramatically low, and I was going through a mini menopause in my early 30s.
To live a balanced life, one in which we can easily receive spiritual information and trust our intuition, we must learn how to value our feminine energy. To hear spiritual information, we must be able to sit quietly and receive. When we sit quietly and drop deeply into our knowing, like climbing down a ladder, a spiritual language rises to meet us.
Connecting With the Spirit Signal
One of the questions I get asked often is, "How can I connect with my spirit guides and intuition?"
In a sentence, I tell people, "Stop reaching outward and let it in."
Intuition comes to us in many forms - feelings, sensations, images, art, poetry, music, song. Spiritual information works in non-linear ways, and we are programmed that we need to push ourselves to find the information rather than trusting that it is already inside of us. We must do less. Or simply, stop filling our receiving space with thoughts. We have become a society that is addicted to thinking and reaching outward for information rather than opening to it.
Think of it this way: our intuition is like a wi-fi channel. Spiritual information is all around us, and is trying to connect with us, but we must tune our wi-fi device to the spiritual signal so we can receive it. Many of us don't realize the signal is available because we are constantly tuned into a different channel. The password for the spiritual network is simply, receptivity. You must allow the signal to reach you. This requires curiosity and an open heart.
Listening > Doing
A couple of years ago, a very driven woman came in for a psychic reading. She was incredibly bright, engaged and on a mission to "increase her spiritual connection." Part of this improvement plan was developing her spiritual practice, but she felt stuck and disconnected.
When I asked her about her process, she listed dozens of activities. She spent hours learning her astrology chart, tarot cards, herbalism, etc. But, as we started digging deeper into her journey, she began to realize that she hadn't been listening to herself the entire time. She had learned great information along the way, but her spiritual path had been about striving and pushing herself to learn. She had never slowed down to ask her internal compass for advice. This was brand new to her. She had gotten used to operating in masculine energy, so she never slowed down enough to listen to her feminine energy.
Our society tells us that to develop ourselves, we must do things. This is true. And what is also true is going inward and listening deeply to your inner knowing will connect you to your spirit. When you learn to listen deeply, you began tapping into this Wi-Fi-signal, this inherent intuition that is always trying to reach you. I explained to her that if she felt pressured to learn things based on what a spiritual guru or teacher told her but didn't check in with herself to see if that felt like the right path, she was only completing things based on someone else. If you're not listening for it, you're not going to hear it.
Your Unique Energy Makeup
I don't believe that women should have more feminine energy, and men should have more masculine energy. Nor do I believe that there are two genders. There are lots of ways to identify, and we are shaped immensely by the people around us. Our masculine and feminine energy, the way we go outward and inward, should be based on feeling balanced and aligned. Not on other people.
My goal in pointing out the overactive masculine energy in our society, specifically from my experience working with hundreds of women, is that many women feel unbalanced. Due to our society's emphasis that operating in masculine energy is better, many women abandon their unique feminine essence, which often connects them with spiritual information.
Feminine energy doesn’t simply chill out and do nothing. It is the part of us that takes in nourishment and hears the message. It receives information and then gives this information to the masculine to react. We must have both a receiver and giver.
There is a secret longing in many women to value their emotional, artistic, fluid inner worlds, and to live from this authentic place.
I also want to flip this. There are a lot of men that have been forced by parents, society, and bigger cultural systems to operate primarily in their masculine energy. This has taught men that they cannot rest or receive. Men are pressured to always lead, assert, and compete, which has also caused immense resistance and denial of their own feminine essence. Again, we are made up of both. We need them both to live a balanced and wholistic life. Part of being a healthy man is embracing feminine energy.
Using Relationships to Balance Your Energy
I am a believer that being a healthy human means honoring both the masculine and feminine polarity in yourself. And getting clear on your imbalances. We're always trying to figure out how to be balanced to help our systems regulate. Hence, we may pick partners who have the exact energy as us because it feels safe, or seek partners that have the exact opposite, because we know we need more of their energy. Usually, we pick partners who can teach us and help us be more aligned energetically.
I've helped many couples see that through choosing a partner that is opposite to them, they are trying to fill their life with more of this energy. We also tend to pick partners that mirror our family systems and the energy patterns within them. Perhaps this is an unconscious healing tactic.
Conclusion
Don’t let overactive masculine energy stop you from connecting in with your spirit guides. Tap into your intuition by listening to yourself and trusting your intuition.
If you would like to develop these skills in yourself, I can help through a reading or one of my ongoing energy medicine programs where I teach you how to balance and work holistically with both of these energies in your body.