Hello everybody, and welcome to episode 6 of the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Cat.
I'm Jen.
And in today's episode, we are going to talk all about the balance between masculine and
feminine energies, what that even means, and how we experience both within ourselves as
well as a collective society.
Before we dive in, we want to catch you up a little bit on our lives because we've had
a lot going on.
Yes, we have.
Right?
Jen just got back from leading her second retreat in Asheville, North Carolina.
Jen, you told me a little bit about it, but it just sounded magical.
I'm feeling so whole.
It was honestly beautiful.
One of my big dreams for this year, living in my car and kind of traveling the country,
I was like, I will make time to actually get to spread out this gift, all this fun, all
this spirituality I've picked up along the way.
And I really wanted to put out some yoga retreats, events, workshops, just actually stepping
into my leadership teaching side because I've been a little sponge of knowledge all these
years.
And the group that showed up was amazing.
I think we all got exactly what we needed.
And as I told them when they showed up, real magic happens when you gather with this intention
to release and surrender and also feel, connect.
It was so much good.
Dancing, we did so many meditations, so many awesome yogas, made flower crowns, so much.
And beyond that, Kat got freaking married for a second time.
Yeah, the official wedding.
She had that early elopement for the crazy yearly experience.
Yeah, so we had the elopement and this is our big celebration, Electric Forest themed.
And it was a long time in the making.
Kyle and I have been together for 10 years this year and it was just so special to celebrate
here in Colorado with all of our friends and our families who came all the way from Massachusetts.
It was truly the best day of our lives so far.
It looked so beautiful.
And Electric Forest themed, like, come on.
It's so cute.
It looked like a magical colorful dream.
There was a donkey.
Please go look on Kat's Instagram.
It's so cute.
Donkey, fire spinner, rave, just everything we could have imagined and more.
And I'm so proud of you for embracing that quirky kind of your own style and putting
it on the wedding, which yeah, really fits into our conversations a bit today.
Feeling like there's one right way for each thing and how that is not the case.
Exactly.
Really good tie in for today's theme.
So we wanted to start off by giving you all just a little bit of a breakdown with what
we mean when we talk about feminine energy versus masculine energy.
So I'll start with the feminine.
Traditionally feminine energy, we have both, right?
This is located on the left side of our bodies and it's the lunar side.
Some qualities that are associated with feminine energy are being receptive, being more passive
intuitive and turning your attention inward.
And when the feminine energies are balanced, you will experience unconditional love, understanding,
nurturing tenderness, creativity, lots of feelings, just that whole essence of flow,
ease, sensitivity, radiance and allowing.
So there's a lot of qualities, right?
And then the wounded feminine.
This is the other side of things because both masculine and feminine can be unhealed and
we've all experienced both sides of the coins.
So wounded feminine, this is victimhood.
This is feelings of powerlessness, weakness, being manipulated, codependent, over emotional,
over sensitive, really needy.
So that kind of energy.
Now on the other side of things, there's masculine energy.
And some of the qualities that are really closely associated with masculine energy are
being projective, outward, expansive, active and giving.
Some other qualities, just really neutral ones that are associated with masculine energy
are a sense of protection, boundaries, courage, discipline, being assertive, stability, confidence
and just like overall focus and responsibility.
Now the wounded masculine, this is the opposite of the wounded feminine.
So we said victim, this is abuse.
We talked about powerlessness.
This is abuse of power, dominance, aggression, control, sense of competitiveness, confrontational,
being overly critical or even avoidant.
So some pretty intense feelings.
And it's super important.
You have these qualities, which it's very important to kind of know what falls under
each side.
But it's very important that when we look at feminine and masculine, we're not talking
about gender.
We're really viewing that through the lens of being an energetic quality, that there's
these two energies that when they blend together, allow us to feel very balanced.
And I know that with all the fight we're having to do for gender equality and then even just
being able to step in and blend those two things, there's a lot of resistance to what
feminine is, what masculine is, and those boxes that we've have that label and put each
quality into one of those, it can feel very restrictive.
And we're really trying to break down the boxes of what feminine even was supposed to
look like and what masculine was supposed to look like externally.
But when we think of it inward and we think of that balance between both things as an
energy, that is a beautiful way to look at it.
So we really are trying to take away what that needs to look like externally because
it's going to look different for everybody.
So that's really important to preface.
But this topic, like learning about masculine and feminine or even yin and yang, that was
a huge part of my spiritual journey.
I thought for me that was one of the biggest things that showed me what I needed to work
on.
Especially before getting into spirituality and yoga and all of it, I thought I was this
very type A person.
I love to get things done.
I was a power through type of person.
I used to brag that I had only taken one day off in five years and that I always show up
to work.
I have this incredible work ethic.
I also saw my imbalance towards that more masculine and yang, always wanting my exercises
to be really worth it.
I went really hard when I was going to exercise.
If I was going to move my body, it better be worth it.
I better burn enough calories.
I wanted it to be worth my time.
I always process things very logically.
I used to say, I don't really cry a lot.
I don't really have a lot of emotions very much.
I just can keep it together more.
All these little things I used to brag on, even saying that I'd rather hang out with
guys, that I get along with them better.
It's all these terrible things to justify my real strong imbalance towards my masculine
side of myself.
I thought the feminine side, any of that emotional receptiveness, that intuitive side, it appeared
to me to be weaker.
I really fought to justify that other side of myself.
It makes so much sense that the feminine energies are just suppressed when there's both wounded
feminine and wooden masculine.
Who's going to come on top in a situation of one who feels powerless and one who feels
a need to obtain power?
That's what we've seen historically in society and obviously still today, but it wasn't always
this way.
We have been conditioned to see it this way.
It starts at a really young age.
It's kind of sad when we think about it, but it goes all the way back to elementary school.
Think of all the competitions that we were a part of.
They were kind of fun, but there was always a winner and there was always a loser.
That's a very masculine quality.
And nowadays when we hear about competitions where there's multiple winners or no winners
at all, we hear people saying, oh, what is this?
The pacification of America.
That is the wounded masculine speaking.
And even having to always show up for school.
Yeah, there's this like, it was just such a, you better show up, you better be consistent,
you better be here every day.
Still not really honoring this like, maybe I'm going to fluctuate a little in how I can
perform, what I can do.
Maybe I'm sick today and I need to lay on the couch and be sick and not get other sicks.
Yeah, and God forbid you have too many sick days.
Right, right.
It's just really wild to look back and think about how school starts to train us so young
to really live in this masculine way.
So even thinking about crying, crying in school, you learn really young that the kids who cry
are the weak ones and that it's not appropriate to cry in class or else you'll be seen that
way.
Be emotionally consistent in school, sit, behave.
Fake it till you make it.
And those are also the first classes that are cut.
So we talked about how creativity is a natural feminine quality.
All of those subjects like art class, like music, theater, those are the first that are
cut when schools need to make budget cuts.
It's not the maths, the sciences, even though many people make their careers in the arts
and they may not have experienced that if their school wasn't able to provide.
Same thing with pay.
Art teachers, anything in the arts, pay is not good.
Even health, something that has somewhere along the lines been slated as a feminine
industry, probably because it's seen as caring about people and the emotions and the nurturing
behind that.
But the health industry, a lot of people, like yoga teachers, we don't make a ton of
money at all.
Especially when you compare that to the really masculine, heavy industries like data, science,
math, where are they working much harder?
I'd argue no.
Just a different skill set and we're saying that that is worth more monetary wise.
Yeah.
Yeah, these presets go so far back and maybe you don't fall more into the masculine side,
but if we do look at our more recent history, the masculine, that active, goal oriented,
push forward, strive to achieve, all of that has been the root of how we're trained from
a very young age, going through our school years and then leading into immediately going
to college, feeling like that's the right trajectory.
That is huge.
We look back on a lot of movements that have tried to blend this, any pushback on this
standard way of doing things.
We look at the women's movement where they were originally really pushed to be in the
same spaces as men.
This is looking more at a gender side of things, but when a lot of females try to push into
the men's workplace, there was so much resistance and you look at that movement and how it got
advertised in the news and in newspapers and it was the women are going crazy.
There's these wild, evil women trying to do all this stuff and they're so emotional.
It was labeled so ugly and poor and luckily there's still been these amazing, badass women
in history that have been able to hold against that and say this isn't fair and that we should
be able to be in the same spaces together.
It might have not even been, it could have been a more masculine female that even pushed
into breaking some of those masculine norms.
This is very much a blend of energies, but collectively they made women very small and
stay in that box of feminine and they made men very large and in that box of masculine.
You really saw that as a standard in relationships and in the workplace, but the second women
started getting louder and wanting to break those boxes and say I don't want to stay at
home all the time.
I want to embrace more of an active, more heavy working side.
That was where some of the masculine did blend for that and then a lot of the masculine got
very offended and that unhealed masculine really tried to push back.
We look at our history and this constant battle back and forth and I'm really proud to see
this stuff all kind of blending and starting to get a little less boxed in and a little
more open.
I had a friend that I talked to, she identifies as she her and is way more in tune with her
feminine side compared to me who's always felt like very much embracing my masculine
side more than my feminine.
She really likes to be in relationships where she's with a very masculine heavy person,
someone that'll kind of tell her more what to do, push her a little bit more.
That to her feels very balanced.
That could be the case in some relationships where we look externally to kind of match
that imbalance that we have in our own lives versus trying to maybe balance it a little
more in ourselves first.
Yeah, it's healthy.
We need both like you're saying and oftentimes when we say we look externally for things,
let's look down upon, but I think this is one place where it can actually be really
healthy and nursing.
We were talking a little bit before about how we see this in ourselves and our relationships.
I was sharing a little bit about how in my relationship with my husband Kyle, he hates
when I do this, but I always say, oh, my little cancer.
He is way more in tune and in touch with his emotions than I am and it's a gift.
It's not anything to be ashamed of or looked down upon, although the wounded masculine,
I'm sure would make him feel maybe a little embarrassed that I'm even sharing this about
him because they're supposed to be tough and unemotional and all that.
But it's beautiful because he's taught me so much more about feminine energy in that
regard and we're able to have much more productive conversations because he's able to guide us
there in terms of me doing something that upset him and why and getting me to see his
side and be more open in that way.
Yeah, and I'm in the exact same relationship balance.
No shock there.
Me and Kat's lives parallels to the end.
But literally, yeah, Danny, who I'm married to, is such a more feminine charged guy and
for me, I've had to learn a ton on balancing that feminine side of myself to not only make
sure I'm not riding off of this power within our relationship, but also embracing his strength
and allowing us to mirror each other and where we're missing and lacking some of that balance
between that feminine and masculine side.
And on a side note, two things that I just have blown my mind on this spiritual journey
as I looked at these two things being more of an energy than necessarily gender norm,
labels, all the bullshit that it's turned into.
As I got into astrology, which is a whole other fun thing I could go on and on about,
you actually have placements in that soul blueprint, that initial moment you took your
first breath.
There is really placements that lean more into Yang.
I looked in my birth chart and I have eight masculine placements and two feminine, and
Danny has eight feminine placements, two masculine placements.
Balance.
So it's so worth noting that it wasn't putting these labels on him, but it was kind of his
preset to begin with.
And although we're both working on blending those two and ourselves so that we can be
more present for each other, it is very noted that that was in the stars from the beginning
of the journey.
I need you to check out our charts too, because I have to know this now if we're like the
same exact as you two or what eye balance is.
I know.
I will die.
I'm sure.
Honestly, watch it be.
Yeah.
Right?
And thinking about that too, the whole traditional going back in time where the traditional
gender roles were very prevalent and it's all society new.
Men were expected to be the decision makers, be the one who would provide, and the women
would be home and care for the children.
Those were very stark differences to our blended society now of where we all understand that
we are both and we can be both and that we shouldn't conform to different ideologies
that don't feel aligned.
So those whole quotes of like, oh, she wears the pants in that relationship and kind of
looking down on someone in that way, that is out.
That's gone.
Same with the whole, she's the woman.
She's the breadwinner and kind of looking down on the man for that.
No, that's not a thing anymore.
You've got to shove that stuff down no more.
Yeah, shove that down.
No place for that here.
And we are transcending, blending both energies and even thinking back to ancient times.
This is not a foreign concept.
We're along the lines, we got really convoluted and we shifted to really, really just siloing
people from feminine to masculine.
But thinking back to ancient Greece, I'm Greek, so I'd have to throw this in.
100% I would.
But it was a very even blend of masculine and feminine energies and it was a very successful
society.
We look to them to be leaders of the arts and the sciences.
Path and theater, astrology and democracy.
So cool to see what came of that time when the focus and importance was even on both.
Yeah.
And I'll take it back to my background a little bit too.
I grew up in the Christian church and this is a huge issue you see in the church.
There's really a big pull in that the man is supposed to be in charge of the household,
that he can make all the decisions.
There's even a lot of people that still believe women shouldn't be pastors.
I've even seen that, which is so cringe.
But I remember growing up that all the sides that embrace my more fluidness, my trust in
this inner knowing, my sensuality, my ability to move my body really freely, which we'll
go into as being some of the homework.
But I was so scared to do all of that because I really did feel and equate it to my evil
side, my more sinful side.
I would drop something on the ground and pick it up all carefully, making sure I didn't
move my body certain ways.
I really started believing in my mind that my body had rules it was supposed to follow.
And so I think that's why all of this was such a huge mind blowing thing to me is that
I really started just going into the energy that I thought was stronger and safer and
more reliable.
And I lost so much connection to my intuition in the process, feeling like, yeah, there's
one logical way to do things.
And if I can just figure out all the rules to how everything works, then I will be good
to go, never causing a problem.
And it really was huge for me to realize how much I was repressing the side of myself from
the way I was raised and the way I was taught.
That was huge for me.
Yeah, if you look back, there are just countless examples for all of us and how we were conditioned
to believe that we were supposed to act a certain way.
When really, that wasn't what our intuition, what our guts were telling us that we wanted
to do.
For me personally, I really resonate with a lot of what you said, Jen, of course.
I was very similar in the way of, I remember telling Kyle even when we just started dating
in college, like, oh yeah, I don't cry.
I just don't cry.
I'm not an emotional person.
Yes, I am.
We're so proud of it.
Oh, I've repressed so much.
Isn't that great?
Right?
It's a compliment, a badge of honor that I wear when really that was just masculine
energy in me trying to prove that I was strong.
That I didn't need to be soft for whatever reason.
That I was tough.
I could handle things.
I could take care of myself, be an independent woman while I could still do all of that and
cry.
Yes.
Yep.
So good.
And I have to say, as many, I love to talk about theories on this, but we look at our
current today and we see all these gender norms being blended.
We see gender fluidity.
I am pumped to see all of this because I really believe that we are shifting back into, yeah,
maybe what was very ancient knowledge that was understood and somewhere along the way
we really lost it.
But this rise of healers, intuitives, witches, all this brought up of the spiritual side
of ourselves is really bringing back that divine feminine.
I think as that meets where we already are collectively, where the masculine has already
taken us in the last 100 years at least, even more, we look at those blends and if we can
keep moving forward with embracing the divine feminine, really staying in that divine masculine
and taking that unhealed side of both and dropping it, I think we can really shift what
this world and reality looks like.
Yeah.
I so agree.
I think it really all goes down to just staying open and being keen on learning because that's
like the one best quality I think a person can have is being a learner and being open
and not putting up those walls.
It can be really hard to do when there's something deep inside you that says, this feels wrong
or gets really defensive and jumps up, but it's questioning that and just still listening
and being open.
I have a really special relationship with my dad and I really applaud him on being good
at just that, at being open and wanting to learn even when it feels uncomfortable to
him.
I have one of my cousins came out as transgender and she's amazing.
It was in the family, of course, something that I talked about with my dad because when
it came out, it was new.
It hadn't happened in our family before, no one had ever come out as somewhere else
on the gender spectrum other than just cisgender.
It was a first and my dad asked me some questions about it, not in a harsh way or insulting
way, but in a way that he was actually curious.
I remember just explaining to him how gender is fluid, like we've been saying, and how
there's a whole spectrum, a whole range in which people can fall and someone might fall
right in the middle even and not identify with one, which we now know is non-binary.
You can be born into one, but actually feel the other.
I just remember this blowing his mind.
So cute.
Bryce, little sweet little boomer.
Thank you.
We need those.
Such pouring concept.
I think the more that we can educate our parents, each other, and just stay open, the better
we will all be and rise together.
Amen.
Yes, yes.
So a little homework just to wrap us up.
If you feel like you do fall more into that feminine, so that intuitive, fluid, empathetic,
sensual, receptive, nurturing side, one of the beautiful ways to start balancing a little
bit more masculine energy, inviting more of that in, creating an inner fire with exercise,
feeling like that you find that fiery type of movement, creating challenges and goals
for yourself.
So really setting out what you need to do, when you need to do it, becoming a little
more constructive in the way you do things.
Power yoga is an awesome way.
Yoga in general is very much blending both energies, but especially if you know you fall
into that slower pace, like adding in that more maybe vinyasa style or power style yoga.
And then really letting yourself step into leadership.
Leadership is a huge way to step into more of that divine masculine.
And then we'll go vice versa.
If you fall more into masculine, like me and Kat in our original imbalance, where you're
more structured, strong, goal-oriented, stable, logical.
My real homework for me has been diving more into my intuition.
So dancing intuitively, really making myself listen more instead of feeling like I have
it all right and really staying in that more receptive state.
Adding in yin yoga practices, connecting with groups of women, or getting into an intuitive
space where you set that intention on diving into feeling more.
Yoga retreats, wink, wink.
Really letting yourself create just to create.
I think the biggest reason we've fallen away from the divine feminine is because creativity
has been seen as this thing you're either good at or bad at.
So finding that flow state, just putting stuff out there, knowing that when you're creating
and you're tuned into that, you lose track of time and you lose track of this need to
have it be for a deeper reason.
You're letting yourself play and just dive in.
Yes.
Amen to that, sister.
Yes.
Homework given, all kinds of fun stuff.
We're so thankful you guys joined us for another beautiful topic.
We will talk to you soon.
Yes.
Please let us know if you have any questions and feedback.
We'd love to hear it all and just keep the conversation going.
So we'll see you all next week.
Bye, guys.
Bye.