the creative feminine
The degree to which a society values the feminine reflects the degree to which it values creativity.
Our modern western civilization is a patriarchal one. It values the masculine, and almost entirely operates from the space of masculine energy. The feminine is forgotten, or regarded with contempt. We see the impact of this on our institutions, education system, religious spaces, the workforce, government, and so on.
When I say feminine and masculine, I’m not simply referring to women and men, respectively. I’m talking about entire energy systems associated with certain qualities, qualities that are meant to be balanced and integrated. They are not synonymous with gender. Every person has both feminine and masculine energy, though most people tend to lean more toward one than the other.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes spirituality, sensuality, and creativity as the triad that make up our vitality, our total life force. I wholly agree with this model and have adopted it as a foundation for my own life. I want to take it one step further and say that these three pillars also make up the essence of the feminine life force.
I might dare to say that the feminine IS vitality. It’s no surprise then that so many people today are struggling with a sense of purpose, meaning, and connection. The rates of loneliness, emptiness, depression, and anxiety are higher than ever before. It’s as if we’re deprived of oxygen in a particular area on an individual and collective level.
I can’t tell you the number of people (both in my personal and professional lives) who tell me they did everything that was expected of them - school, career, buying a house, marriage, kids, etc. - but they still feel the presence of a void that nothing seems to permanently fill. I myself was one of those people. I spent twenty-eight years of my life in school, training and specializing in clinical psychology. Once I finally finished my training, set up my private practice, and started working, I remember thinking, “Now what? This can’t be it.”
I felt, I knew, there was something missing in my life. God blessed me, and continues to bless me, with many wonderful mentors, guides, and teachers who helped me understand what was missing.
Because we live in a masculine society that associates the feminine with weakness and the masculine with strength, we are all socialized and conditioned to operate from an energetic space of masculinity. Half of our life expression, the feminine, is left unseen, unheard, unlived, and deeply misunderstood. Like all the women around me, I grew up very much in my masculine energy.
The masculine is focused outward, and derives worth from output and worldly achievements. Masculine values include leading, doing, being in the head instead of the body, action, structure, execution, achievement, and so on. I’m not saying masculine energy and its qualities are wrong or bad. They’re actually very important qualities, and there’s a time and place for them. But when the masculine dominates the entire system, the entire psyche, an entire society, it’s no longer a healthy and balanced system, psyche, and society.
My formal introduction to the realm of the feminine was through Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s book Women Who Run With the Wolves. I finished it in a little over a week, and I cried through it all. I devoured it as if I was starved, because I was starved, starved for the feminine energy force inside of me that was waiting to be seen, heard, lived, and understood for twenty eight years.
In her book, Dr. Estes discusses the Wild Woman archetype, and through myths and fairy tales, illustrates what it means to connect with and reclaim the feminine, particularly intuition and creativity. From here, I discovered her audio series The Dangerous Old Woman, which is composed of five audios that similarly center around womanhood, the feminine, intuition, creativity, and spirituality.
For a full list of my favorite books, you can download my free Fiction Book Guide and my free Nonfiction Book Guide.
The feminine is focused inward. The feminine does not derive its worth from outer, worldly achievements. The feminine has inherent value regardless of the outer world.
As I mentioned earlier, I consider the Three Pillars of Vitality to be synonymous with the Three Pillars of Femininity: spirituality, sensuality, and creativity. You can learn more about these pillars in my free e-guide, Rituals to Enhance Your Creative Life.
Within each of these pillars are encompassed additional qualities of intuition, learning, feeling, connection, empathy, compassion, consciousness, relation, vulnerability, pleasure, presence, stillness, standing in one’s truth, wisdom, discernment, slowing down, embodiment, and one of the most important, a relationship with the Divine.
Many of these values, qualities, and characteristics are absent, minimized, or even discouraged in our patriarchal society. Take intuition. People call it pseudoscience and are quick to dismiss it, which can be incredibly invalidating.
Or stillness and presence. Our society is all about “doing” and go go go. If you’re still, or you want to move at a slower pace, then you’re lazy, unmotivated, unproductive.
The Divine? We’ve never lived in a more secular age where a relationship with a Higher Power is completely disregarded and even ridiculed.
Similarly ridiculed are vulnerability, compassion, and empathy. The loneliness epidemic has never been worse, despite the unlimited range of access social media and the internet have given us.
I don’t intend for this to convey hopelessness. There are certainly mentors, guides, teachers, and communities that are emphasizing the importance of the feminine, and teaching us how to reclaim it. I myself have been blessed to be on this journey of coming home to my feminine, and have never felt more hopeful and connected to my divine purpose.
The issue remains, however, that on a grand societal scale, we are disconnected from the feminine. And the degree to which a society values the feminine reflects the degree to which it values creativity.
It’s clear then, where society stands on valuing creativity. While creativity is certainly present, it is not prioritized and encouraged the way other aspects of life are. It’s treated as a hobby or endeavor one occasionally dabbles in. It’s very often devalued in terms of its monetary potential. There’s a collective condescension toward taking a creative pursuit seriously and committing oneself to it. How society values creativity has a direct impact on how we value creativity. After all, the society we grow up in plays a significant role in our conditioning, programming, and socialization.
For most of us, it’s about unlearning this socialization, and rediscovering a relationship with our creative nature. You can start by taking my free Connect With Your Inner Creator Quiz to find out what creator type you are.
I say rediscovering our creative nature because most children are very much in touch with their creative life force, and become disconnected from it as they grow into adolescence and adulthood. Similarly, most children are connected to both their feminine and masculine energy systems, but become detached from their feminine essence as they grow up in a society that values the masculine.
So what does this mean? If we wish to reclaim our creative life force, then we must learn to reclaim and embody the feminine life force as well. They are one and the same. We must reclaim spirituality and sensuality alongside creativity, and all the qualities that come with them, in our inner and outer worlds. Through reclaiming spirituality, we nurture and tend to the relationship with our Creator. Through reclaiming sensuality, we learn to embody joy and pleasure in our senses through presence, slowness, and stillness. When we are in relation with the Divine, when we are present and embodied, we are deeply conscious of and connected to our inner selves, and therefore more receptive to our intuition, our inner voice, and our creative inklings. We can activate our creative life force and engage in creative expression.
If our society and overculture don’t value the feminine essence, then we create our own communities and culture that do. It’s a collective journey as much as it is an individual one.
If you’re struggling with your relationship to your creativity, then it’s worth evaluating your relationship with the feminine, and to spirituality and sensuality. Everyone’s journey on the creative path is different, but the landscape is similar. Sometimes, strengthening your lived experience in one area, such as sensuality, is enough to get your creative juices flowing. Everything in the feminine energy system is interconnected.
The collective unconscious of our modern society carries a wounded feminine essence. While we can’t change the entire collective, we can focus on changing ourselves and healing our own individual wounded feminine essence. And the fascinating part of this is that when you do your inner work, you are changing and healing the collective, because you are a part of it. When you learn to value the feminine, and therefore creativity, then you help society value it more as well. One degree more, one degree closer.
