Have you ever felt a little bit off and you just weren’t sure why? Or you felt somehow disconnected from yourself and weren’t sure how to get back in touch? I know I have, and it can be really frustrating when you can’t quite put your finger on the problem. Earlier this year I was having this exact issue. I felt dulled, suppressed and small. I could tell I wasn’t okay but I didn’t know why.
After some major changes in my life occurred this summer, these feelings were magnified and I went on a self-help kick. One of the most helpful things I stumbled upon during my extensive online search sessions was a handful of Tony Robbins videos. For those of you who don’t know, Tony Robbins is an author, entrepreneur and life coach. He helps people improve their lives at the many conferences and events that he puts on for clients.
There was one video in particular in which Robbins counsels a woman who seems to have lost touch with her feminine energy. By the end of the 90-minute video, the woman’s entire outlook had changed as Robbins walked her through exercises to get back in touch with the energy she held in her core.
I was intrigued and continued to research this concept of energy to see if exercises like these could be of any help to me. Regardless of gender, there are two types of energy. You guessed it: masculine and feminine. The masculine energy is more focused on making things happen and accomplishing tasks. In short, the masculine energy is about doing.
The feminine, on the other hand, is more about being. Feminine energy is more focused on sharing and connecting with the world, and being understood and seen by others. Each of us has both of these energies within us, but there is always a dominant one. The interesting thing is that when people are stressed or scared, they will put on a “mask” of the opposite energy as a defense mechanism – which creates problems within ourselves and also in our relationships.
My dominant energy is feminine. I have always been an emotional and social being, even if sometimes I have trouble expressing myself in my words. I’ve always been extremely passionate about the things I care about and I feel most like myself when I have the opportunity to be creative and collaborative within a given scenario. I’m pretty positive and I like to make sure other people are happy, as well. All of these qualities come out of my core feminine energy and they feed it at the same time.
Earlier this year, when I felt “off,” I didn’t feel creative or passionate about anything. I felt like I was cut off from my social life and therefore had no one to share my emotions and thoughts with. Looking back, I was stressed about several aspects of my life, including my relationship and my living situation, and therefore I adopted a masculine mask.
I was all about making things happen –– I worked all day every day and when I came home, I dedicated myself to trying to help and take care of my then-boyfriend. After all, he was in a foreign country because of me, so I felt responsible for his problems. I tried to take care of his visa, I tried to get him jobs, I paid the rent and tried to figure out the accommodation, I did the housework and ran the errands. All of this left little to no time for me to work on personal creative endeavors or hang out with my friends. In other words, I adopted a get-it-done attitude and completely abandoned my feminine energy. And this made me unhappy.
After watching that Tony Robbins video I realized what the problem was. I needed to take steps to get back in touch with my femininity. But how? After some trial and error, I found a few things that worked for me.
Put a little more effort into your appearance
This might sound a bit superficial, but trust me! While I was wearing my masculine mask, I wore jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers every day. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these style choices. They just aren’t who I truly am. I was so lazy with my appearance, and because I knew I didn’t look my best, I felt insecure and this was reflected in my day-to-day interactions. I didn’t want to talk to people and I didn’t want to go out in public. But once I started to vary my wardrobe a bit and put more thought into the way I was presenting myself, my confidence shot up. I felt better interacting with people and I felt more in touch with my creativity. As a very visual person, expressing myself through clothes, hair, and makeup is a big part of how I feel about myself – and I finally started feeling like me again.
Consume art, music and literature by women
This is a big one for me. For the longest time, I listened to music exclusively made by men and didn’t make an effort to seek out any art forms produced by women. In my search for myself, I stumbled across and also re-discovered my love for several female-fronted bands (shoutout to CHVRCHES and Paramore) that helped me reconnect to myself and reminded me that women are strong and amazing in our own ways. I also borrowed a book entitled How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran from a friend and realized that certain things about women shouldn’t be taboo at all––they should be talked about in open, honest, and hilarious ways. These forms of art that I relate to on an energetic level reminded me that there was no reason for me to be hiding or masking the feminine energy within me.
Hang out with more girls
Spending your time with other women will basically force you to reconnect with your feminine energy. You will use your feminine energy to relate to other women on deeper levels and you will bring this out of each other. If you’re interested, I wrote an entire article on the importance of female friendships.
Lean back
This was the number one thing that every video I watched and every article I read mentioned to get in touch with your feminine energy. Like I mentioned above, the feminine is all about being and connecting, as opposed to the masculine which likes to take action to make things happen. This is especially important when it comes to relationships, both romantic and otherwise.
Leaning back means having patience and waiting for some things to come to you. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be proactive in creating opportunities for yourself––it just means you shouldn’t be chasing anyone who doesn’t see your value.
Let people come to you instead of the other way around. That guy doesn’t call you back after a first date? Don’t blow up his phone––reach out once and then give up. Friend ghosts you after you’ve tried several times to connect? Leave them alone. When people pull away our natural instinct is to lean forward to close that gap between us, but do your best to lean back instead. Give people some space to come back to you.
If they don’t come back to you after all, then they weren’t meant to be in your life for the long-term anyway. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn, but probably the most important throughout this entire process. Leaning back means letting things happen and not forcing anything, and this saves you a lot of time, energy and stress.
Learning to rebalance your energy is a difficult task, especially if your masculine mask has become your new normal. Since the mask is the defense mechanism, it’s scary to peel it off and reveal the vulnerability that lies underneath, but I promise you that it’s so worth it.
No matter which energy you have at your core, you will be much happier taking steps to reconnect with yourself, just like I was. As soon as I realized this disconnect and took these small steps to correct it, I found myself smiling more, and becoming more outgoing and positive in my daily life.
Reconnecting to your true energy will realign your perspective and transform your life in unexpected ways, and it’s worth putting in the work to get there.
