Staying soft when life feels hard – an article for the woman who wants to cross over to the other side of hard times while staying connected to her softness, ease and pleasure.
~~~
If you have been following my work for a while, you’d know about my love for an ease-filled life. Every time I hear someone say things like that hard work is the key to success, or there’s no gain without pain, my heart so lovingly wants to remind them that ease (and pleasure) is always available for us, whenever and however we want.
Full transparency, I live in the same world as believers of the hustle culture and so I understand where this advice originates from.
Life can get really tricky sometimes. Even if we have all the support, all the luxuries of life, there are always going to be some days when life feels really hard.
So what do we do then?
In my lived experience, there are always two choices in front of us.
We can either fall into the hustle trap, using all our energy to push through, striving and exerting to somehow fix the problem on the outside.
Or we can stay soft when life feels hard and practice the life-giving art of surrender. Pausing to turn inwards and receive the medicine/message this tricky situation is here with, eventually reconnecting with the flow of our life.
I have come to learn that the more I practice the art of feminine embodiment, the more I naturally gravitate towards the second choice. Having lived most of my life making the first choice, nothing feels as good as the latter way of living- the ease-filled, feminine way of my living.
3 steps for staying soft when life feels hard
Here’s sharing with you three steps from my lived experience through which you can cross over to the other side of a challenge while staying connected to your softness, ease and flow.
This work is always inside out so you’ll notice that these steps follow the same map.
Step 1. Soften and surrender in your body.
When you find yourself in a hard moment, practice slowing down and consciously melting and softening into your presence – physical, mental, emotional and energetic- in any given order.
How I do it is- if I am standing up in that moment, I lean towards a supportive structure or sit down or lie down if I am at home. Then I loosen my jaw, my shoulders, my arms, my legs and slowly my whole body.
And then I melt my consciousness in my body surrendering to the present moment using the support of my breath. I pay attention to the flow of my breath and observe my sensations arising on or inside my body.
Next, I explore and choose a thread of pleasure anywhere within my body. Even when I am bawling in pain or feeling like the world would end for me in that moment, there’s always one feel good sensation that I can find and move deeper into the heart of.
The more I revel in the aliveness that thread of pleasure has for me, the more I feel better.
I start feeling held, supported, provided for and taken care of.
It feels surprising indeed, or rather used to, when I first started dealing with life’s hard moments like this.
I would notice how my pleasure and pain could co-exist and feel valid at the same time. The more I would stay connected to my body, connected to my heart, the more I would be able to surrender in the given moment and prepare myself to receive the medicine it had brought for me.
(If you’d like to become self-sufficient in this art of connecting with your sensual aliveness that’s pulsating in your body 24×7, 365 days a year, you can learn that with my Primal Feminine Moving Meditation, the Sensual Flow PFMM.)
Step 2. Express and liberate the hardness.
You must have noticed how when life feels hard, you can feel that there’s some sort of heaviness, constriction, or frozen energy that comes to the surface of your consciousness. It may be physical, a physical sensation that may feel like a knot in your body.
Or mental, like a lot of negativity that you feel in your thoughts. It could also feel emotional, where you feel hopeless and devoid of any faith towards things changing for you. Or it can be energetic wherein you can feel your energy being pulled down in form of a downward spiral that leaves you feeling exhausted and depleted.
Usually, the way we have been taught to do life is to ignore these constrictions, this frozen energy in our body and just march forward, pushing ourselves against the flow of our life.
Completely ignoring the message the present moment is here to deliver to us. And forcefully moving forward with life as if that constriction is meaningless.
This is how our toxic masculine systems encourage us to live life. And we all know what does that result in. Either what we were striving towards doesn’t feel as rewarding as we had thought it would. Or we end up burning ourselves out in this process eventually.
What no one tells us is that direction is important, but depth is integral to our intention of living a meaningful, richness filled life. And for that it’s imperative that once you have softened yourself in your body in any given hard moment, you express and liberate that feeling of hardness, of constriction, of pain from your body.
You’ll notice how every time you liberate a thread of frozen energy from your body when life feels hard, you discover a valuable insight about yourself, about that situation, about your own life that goes on to enrich your life in SO many ways.
(If you’d like to learn this art of embodied liberation, you may explore my Primal Feminine Moving meditation, the Liberate & Flow.)
Step 3. Self-source your next step.
After you’ve softened in the present moment and have liberated all the prominent constrictions and obstructions from your consciousness, you’ll notice how you’re now able to connect to your heart & to your intuition. You’re now feeling connected to the flow in your body and that in turn, connects you to the flow of life outside of you.
As you pay attention to your body’s knowings, the intuitive cues, you’re able to self-source your next action step with a calm mind and a peaceful heart.
More often than not, there’s an insight or two you gain about yourself as well. Something that guides you in your decisions around such difficult moments if they ever arise in future.
So here’s the thing, beauty. This feminine ease is a choice. Just like hustle is. What makes a softened life so much juicier is that when we learn to live life this way,
our devotion towards what we do replaces hard work.
our ease makes what we do so pleasurable.
And we learn to derive joy and fulfilment even in the most mundane occurrences of our life.
This applies to the way we date, to the way we play our leadership roles, to the way we interact in our social relationships and more.
Remember, no matter what your outside circumstances look like, this ease is always available for you. The more skilled you become at tuning into your inherent ease, softness and flow, the more of it you magnetise in your outer world.
journey deeper
And so, if you’re looking for a self-paced resource to learn how to stay connected with your softness when life meets you with a challenge, I invite you to explore my core feminine embodiment course, Your Magnetic Femininity.
This is a deeply transforming offering designed for the woman who wants to peel back the layers of her hyper-masculine conditioning and embody her naturally magnetic feminine nature in life, love and leadership.
Through the embodied wisdom shared in this offering, so many women from around the world are de-conditioning and de-armoring themselves so they can live a life that truly honors their sensitivities, their heart, their essence.
If you’d like to reconnect with the gifts of your femininity through this gentle yet powerful offering, here’s where you can learn more about it.
Embodying your feminine essence in love – an article for the woman who wants to learn the powerful skills of feminine embodiment in love and activate the laws of romantic polarity in her love life.
~~~
Embodiment means inhabiting all of ourselves. It is a way of being in which we are fully embodying all that we are in any given moment.
The feminine in feminine embodiment refers to the essence of feeling, flowing, sensing, receiving, surrendering to the process instead of trying to control the outcome. An essence that’s depth-oriented and not direction-oriented (masculine energy).
In the practical sense, feminine embodiment looks like living more in our body and less in our head. It looks like spiralling less in our thoughts and connecting more to our feelings.
It is about trusting that unlimited supply of wisdom our body offers us through its intuitions, nudges, cues throughout our lifetime.
A truly embodied woman derives her sense of self confidence, her sense of self worth and her sense of self belief from her inner wisdom that I like to call the Divine intelligence, that serves like an inner GPS guiding her on her path to a blissful and fulfilled life.
In fact, when a woman begins the process of embodying her feminine essence, it takes a beautiful spill on her love life too.
When connected with her feminine essence, she naturally becomes magnetic to a masculine man. By
flowing in her feminine energy,
practicing vulnerability with boundaries, and
staying deeply anchored in her worth,
she inspires the men/ man in her life to show up in their masculine energy for her.
They want to be there for her when she needs them, provide for her with their most generous acts of service.
They want to be around her all the time, simply because they cannot resist it. (feminine-masculine polarity)
When in a committed relationship,
her feminine embodiment looks like feeling comfortable with receiving the affection and attention her masculine energy partner gives to her.
She lives each day with a self-sourced assurance in the love he has for her. She feels secure in her relationship both in his presence and his absence.
In case of conflicts, she expresses her concerns with love without spending her days resenting him, feeling jealous or harbouring insecurities.
She lets the man be, without feeling the need to mother him or fix his problems without his invitation.
When single and dating,
her feminine embodiment looks like not feeling the need to rush into anything with just any man she meets.
Not only does she feel safe exploring her options but also stays open to the infinite possibilities that exist for her in the dating world.
She feels self-assured in owning and protecting her standards in love, not settling for anything less than what she truly desires and deserves.
She practices effortless embodied presence and lets the masculine pursue her, impress her and win her heart.
As a woman embodied in her feminine essence, the idea of chasing men, leading her dating process or initiating efforts feels out of alignment with her truth.
What differentiates a woman connected with her feminine essence from the ones who aren’t, is the way she lives her life.
She is rooted in the belief that the love she truly desires is already out there. And that in its own Divine timing, it will come find her. All that she needs to do is to show up in the world (of dating) as her radiant and embodied self.
If you would like to learn the skills of feminine embodiment in love through a self-study resource, I invite you to explore my book, Becoming a Goddess in love.
Structured in 9 parts, this ebook will help you transform your love life by reclaiming your feminine essence + power and becoming a magnet to embodied masculine leadership and devotion.
So many women from around the globe have used the wisdom of feminine embodiment shared in this book to transform their love lives.
Here’s where you can learn more about this powerful offering.
3 main reasons why we struggle with our feminine embodiment – an article for the woman who wants to liberate the obstacles to her feminine embodiment and return home to her raw, untamed, organic feminine essence.
~~~
Very often, we think of our feminine embodiment as a modality, a concept, a theory that we need to somehow ‘get’ to be truly embodied in our (feminine) essence.
But if we pause to reflect, we will realize how our feminine embodiment is simply we embodying our truest essence.We inhabiting and living in connection with who we are, at our raw, organic, untamed, conditioning-free level.
This is why when we start peeling the layers of our (mostly hyper-masculine) conditioning and begin connecting with our feminine essence, it feels like we are coming back home to ourselves. To who we naturally are. To the unique design nature gifted us with.
In my work of supporting women on their journeys of feminine embodiment, I have noticed that oftentimes this process doesn’t feel as easy as it sounds.
Even though our essence is a part of us, we don’t always ‘naturally’ embody it.
There are many reasons why this happens. For today, I want to share with you three of those reasons I rank highest in that list. (Not a coincidence that these were the very reasons that kept me disconnected from my feminine essence for years.)
#1. Our fast-paced, effort-centred conditioning
To be able to connect with our feminine energy, we need to slow down and tune into our body’s natural pace. But how do we do that if our conditioning since birth has been to constantly be on the move?
We have been so deeply trained to value momentum over stillness, hard work over rest and play. It’s not a surprise why so many of us lose touch with our femininity and gravitate to the far masculine end of our energy where we want to control everything in our lives, where the energy of effort-ing precedes meaningful, inspired action, where busyness equals productivity.
Our default instinct is if we are not ‘doing’ enough, we are not worthy enough of the desire we are calling in.
This ends up relinquishing our feminine magnetism that is alive when we are in our ‘being’ energy, in our feminine energy of play, rest, pleasure and flow, practising embodied presence in the mundane moments of life.
One of the course students of my core feminine embodiment course Your Magnetic Femininity shared this with me recently,
“What drew me to this program was a desire to actually feel my feminine energy vs what the mind tells me is the feminine. For the first time I have been able to feel that I have been in stagnation & freeze within myself and my emotions. This program has allowed me to see why my life has been a circle of the same thing because I only knew how to operate from the masculine & was very unhappy. Just constant go go go all the time & finally a massive exhale and relaxing and has shown me where I need to let go & release.”
This is such a simple yet powerful example of how our fast-paced, effort-oriented conditioning depletes our connection with our feminine essence and becomes one of the primary obstacles to our feminine embodiment.
#2. Our somatic state
A while ago a dear friend of mine texted me after almost a year since our last conversation. A new mother of two, she was catching up with me and sharing her motherhood tales. It took me more than a week to be able to answer a simple question of ‘how are you?’
With our earth at the centre of polycrisis, I have found myself going into freeze mode more than ever. I don’t remember the last time I had to turn to my embodiment practices this frequently to regulate my somatic state.
So when her texts flashed across my mobile screen, even though I was fully embodied and aware of my state of freeze and numbness then, I wasn’t feeling anywhere close to my inner magnetism and pleasure. It was only after shifting my somatic state that I was able to receive my friend’s love and respond to her texts.
(Side note: this is different from how I used to live my life in my dis-embodied years where I was completely numb and unaware of my inner world, let alone my feminine embodiment.)
So this is how our somatic state facilitates or obstructs our connection with our feminine essence:
If we are numb to our feelings and our heart’s deepest desires, the process of our feminine embodiment stays disrupted.
If our body is carrying past trauma of any kind, it doesn’t have the ‘normal’ capacity to flow, to receive, to stay open, to even feel our feelings.
If we are carrying the weight of the world in our shoulders and muscles, it’s going to create constrictions in the innate flow of our feminine energy.
This is why everything that I teach across my work, whether it’s my private coaching work or my self-mastery offerings, it’s all a blend of theoretical/ educational concepts with integrative tools like embodiment techniques, somatic meditations and conscious breathing practices.
Because we really can’t think our way into our feminine embodiment (I spent years trying to). It is through tuning into our somatic state- our feelings, our sensations, our energetic pulsations- that we can arrive to our embodied truth stored in our beautifully wise feminine body.
#3. Our relationship with ourselves
Often overlooked and underestimated in the list of reasons we struggle with our feminine embodiment is our relationship with ourselves.
When we set out on our journey of feminine embodiment, we are returning back to ourselves. To our core. To our essence. If we don’t have a healed/embodied relationship with ourselves, who are we going to come back to?
If we haven’t accepted who we are as we are, why will we want to come back to that version of ourselves?
Some common notions circulated in the space of new age spirituality are solely focused on raising our vibration, moving into the ascension mode, towards our higher self, etc. What many of us don’t know (including me in the past) is that this is an ideal example of spiritual bypassing.
If we can’t embrace our shadows (our grief, our rage) how are we going to illuminate and receive their medicine?
If we consider our natural gifts of vulnerability, of feeling-our-ache-and-all-our-dark-emotions…as our weakness, how do we expect ourselves to show up in the world in embodiment of our true feminine power?
If our understanding of ‘healing’ is that we are broken and in need of fixing, how is that process of healing going to be embodied?
If we don’t know how to accept and love ourselves as we are, how are we ever going to be able to change a bad habit, break an unhelpful limiting pattern of living, loving, leading and more?
No one of us is perfect, nature is no way is perfect. It is in our imperfections that we find the beauty of being alive, of being a part of the Divine feminine ecosystem of nature and life.
When I was creating my signature feminine embodiment course Your Magnetic Femininity, one of the steps that found its place in the natural order of this offering was that of embodied self-love. Because time and again, I have witnessed that our self-acceptance and self-love are the origin points of our feminine embodiment.
Every single student who has learned from it has unearthed a completely unique need in their subconscious and has gained a new perspective around loving themselves more deeply and wholly.
One of the course students sent me this email halfway through the course, “I had a family event that I decided to attend & decided that I actually wanted to look well & invested in something nice for myself to wear not cheap per usual & it was a different experience. &&& I now understand from your program why I have debt. Many many many ahas. I couldn’t understand before I have been in debt like 10*. Pay it all off & amass even bigger debt the next go around.
It was everything you said in your program. So I could finally find compassion and forgiveness for myself for acting against my own best interests. Many many gems, thank you for creating something authentic & truly helpful.”
This is how important a role our embodied self love + acceptance play in the process of our feminine embodiment. They remind us of our divine enough-ness as we continue to unravel and un-become all that we are not.
journey deeper
If you’re at a point where you want to learn how to liberate such obstacles to your feminine embodiment and return home to your powerfully magnetic feminine essence, I invite you to explore Your Magnetic Femininity, my core feminine embodiment course.
This is a deeply transforming offering designed to help you peel back the layers of your hyper-masculine conditioning and reconnect with the core qualities of your divinely magnetic femininity.
Through the embodied wisdom shared in this offering, so many women from around the world are experiencing phenomenal shifts in their inner and outer world.
“I recently bought your course and seriously love it so much.
I immediately saw how I have only ever operated in the masculine & felt all the frustration of never ever having my needs met in a relationship. Just unwinding now & it feels so good.
Thank you for creating this program, I have hope that my life is improving. Looking forward to being first in my own life now as well.”
“Seriously the best investment I’ve made to step into my own feminine energy with tools I’ve learned from this program. Educational and to the point. Sort of like dusting off my own inner compass. I would recommend this program to any woman looking for a deeper self connection.”
If you too would like to reconnect with your innate feminine wisdom through this gentle yet powerful offering, here’s where you can learn more about it.
Honouring the sacred wisdom of our menstrual cycle – an article for the woman who wants to understand and embrace the power of her feminine design.
~~~
Did you know that we women are cyclical beings? And that we are fully utilising our potential when we are living our lives in sync with our (menstrual/bleed) cycle?
We all know that our cycle begins on the first day of our bleed and ends on the 28th (-ish) day from then. But what a lot of us do not know is that we are expected to live and in most cases thrive in a world that is designed according to a man’s 24-hour body cycle.
Men have one internal timekeeper, that is their circadian rhythm, one that regulates our sleep and wake hours.
We women have two internal timekeepers. The circadian rhythm and the infradian rhythm, that is our (menstrual) cycle of 28-30 days that our bodies follow over a course of a month, not necessarily the one that we see in our calendar from 1-30.
So while men’s bodies go through all of their phases in a day, we women go through them both during a day and during a 28-30 days period. But because we live in a patriarchy that supports and celebrates the masculine over the feminine, our whole world is set up to support a 24-hour cycle, not the 28-day cycle of our bodies.
We are expected to ignore the natural ebb and flow of our bodies during this 28-day cycle of our four different and very unique inner seasons. We are expected to show up at the same time every day and put in as much or more effort and intensity than we put in yesterday.
The narrative is to hustle, to keep moving forward, to keep pushing, no matter what the cost to our bodies, our well-being, or our families.
There’s no surprise then as to why so many women feel disconnected from their womb- the creative centre of their feminine being, why our periods are demonised so often, why most women feel like the world just isn’t designed to support who they are at their core. Why we feel that in order to succeed in the current design of our world, we have to shut down our intuition, our emotions, disconnect from our sensitivity and live, lead and love like a man.
So now, what if I told you that there actually is a way to succeed in the current patriarchal design of the world while owning the full spectrum of your femininity?
This is exactly where our menstrual wisdom comes in.
When we were entering our menarche at puberty, while we were given the sex-ed needed to guide us in our grown up years, what no one told us about was the genius that our female bodies were going to be in these very years. (and even after!)
Just like nature, these 4 seasons that our body experiences every month in form of our 4 cycle phases, have a reason to their occurrence.
Each of these four cycle phases play a significant role in the nourishment of our organic feminine design.
Think for a moment, what a world would we be living in if there was only the spring and summer season to experience?
Not only would the human race be burnt out because of the heat on the outside & on the inside of our bodies, but also would our natural water bodies dry up, our crops burn/perish, our earth’s surface scorch because of the heat.
Nature needs the balance of the masculine and the feminine forces to sustain itself. It needs both the outward, playful spring & summer months and the inward, hibernating autumn and winter months.
Similarly, we too need our pre-ovulation and ovulation phase to experience our playful, radiant, outward-masculine expression. And our pre-menstrual and menstrual phase to turn inwards in our feminine depth for rest and recalibration.
There is a reason as to why we women, the most powerful feminine beings heal when brought in contact with nature.
There is a reason as to why the women who follow the feminine way of living have their bleed cycle in sync with the moon’s cycles.
That’s because we are the most essential parts of nature, where nature signifies ‘the feminine’.
(Only in the 31st year of my life, did I learn that Mother Earth and its atmosphere that is our nature is the Big Mama, the Divine Feminine. And honestly, I wasn’t surprised!)
Just how our Big Mama thrives by embracing her seasons, in order to thrive in our outward world AND feel aligned with our feminine essence in our inner world, we too need to put into practice the wisdom our menstrual cycle brings with it each month.
Looking back, I feel deeply grateful for this wisdom for not only has it healed my relationship with my aspirational nature but has also helped me connect with my womb’s power and honour my femininity at its most primal level.
Knowing how to apply this (menstrual) wisdom to the way we live, love and lead is a skill, one that I teach my clients in my signature private coaching offering – The Magnetic Woman.
This 6-weeks private coaching container has been designed for the woman who wants to reconnect with her magnetic feminine essence and call in her deepest (and wildest) desires in life, love, business and wealth creation with utmost ease & pleasure.
If that’s you, here’s where you can learn more about this offering.
What weakens the polarity in romantic relationships – an article for the woman who wants to re-activate the attraction in her love life.
~~~
Every once in a while, I think of my past dis-embodied relationships and the woman I used to be then.
As a hyper-masculine, disconnected woman, the only way I knew to operate was to lead my romantic relationships, playing Mommy to my ex-partners, providing for them, rescuing them from their money problems and what not.
I was so deeply drowning in that way of living with no hope of a life beyond that reality.
In retrospect, it feels like the blessing of a karmic gift that I experienced everything I went through in those years. Towards the end of which, in my 3D reality, my body came to my rescue.
After landing in the hospital for an emergency surgery amidst my ‘busy’ life of over-working, I was forced to slow down. As I slowed down physically, my inner world started slowing down as well, helping me connect with my heart, my feelings, my desires, my essence.
Opening my soul’s eyes to the mess I had got myself in.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Three months later, I had walked away from the longest adult relationship of my life only to fall so deeply in love with myself. And then slowly and gradually cultivate the feminine art of receiving in my being, creating an infinitely large space within me to receive from men, and from the rest of the world.
In less than a year, I had gone from being a depleted woman to a deeply nourished woman who felt comfortable :
..allowing the men in her dating circle to travel >100kms to pick her for their date and drop her back safely home.
..receiving the acts of service from those men without feeling the slightest need to return those loving gestures.
..pacing out her suitors to honour her preferences and standards around intimacy and commitment.
If you asked me today, what was the most pivotal aspect of my healing, I’d tell you- it was healing the shadow side of my Mother archetype and reconnecting with my inner magnetic woman.
As the eldest of my siblings, I had the giver and doer energy activated in me from an early age. But meeting wounded masculine/passive men in the early years of my young adult life drew that energy out of me in unhealthy proportions.
I was hopelessly trapped in the cycles of over-giving and then feeling resentful, over-doing and then feeling bitter to my core.
What weakens the polarity in our romantic relationships
When you keep pouring from a cup for years without filling it back, it runs dry to an extent that you can see the marks of dried out tea at its bottom. That cup desperately needs to be washed and cleaned inside out, and refilled again.
When our beautiful (feminine) value of nurturing and caring for others is practiced from an under-resourced and under-supported state of being (especially in the area of our romantic relationships), it can lead to SO much self-harm.
Not only does it end up depleting us but also leads to extinguishing any possibility of romantic polarity that could have been established in that relationship.
A man who may have taken on his embodied role of leading, providing, initiating, taking care of you and your relationship when treated like a toddler, mothered and smothered by his woman starts behaving like one.
And then we are left wondering why does this man never lead.
We expect the man to be the leader in our relationship but when he does, the wounded side of our Mother feminine archetype is standing over his head with a list of ways he could have done it correctly.
This shadow side of our Mother archetype isn’t just limited to when we are in partnered dynamics.
If it’s part of our deeper conditioning, it can show up in how we date as well.
~ Meeting a date halfway to make it easier and more convenient for him..
~ Offering to pay the check when you’re meeting a man who asked you out on a romantic date..
And at a deeper level,
~ Leaning forward in your energy by thinking of a future with a man without he having mentioned about it ever!
~ Being in the energetic state of leading the dating process forward, thinking of ways to “make things happen” in that courting process.
Everything around us is energy. And all of us feel it.
Men, especially the embodied ones, feel the overpowering impact of your masculine leading energy and their inherent masculine nature feels repelled by your presence no matter how attractive they may find you at the physical level.
Romantic polarity, that is the force of attraction between a masculine energy man and a feminine energy woman, keeps weakening with each instance of the two people abandoning their core energetic expression.
So how do we turn this around?
journey deeper
As a feminine-essenced woman, you can take responsibility of your part by understanding the laws of feminine-masculine polarity AND learning how to stay relaxed + rooted in your powerful feminine essence…thus becoming a woman who is magnetic to (so many) men around her.
If you’re looking for a self-study resource to learn the priceless wisdom of feminine-masculine polarity and apply it in your love life, I invite you to explore my book Becoming a Goddess in love.
AND/OR
If you’re looking for a self-paced resource to reconnect with your femininity at the somatic level, at your energetic level, you’re welcome to explore Your Magnetic Femininity, the core feminine embodiment course.
Forever in awe of our feminine magnetism, Navdeep x
related reading
When you are embodying your feminine energy, that is, when you are simply being, flowing, surrendering, receiving, the men who are already in embodiment of their masculine energy instantly feel and notice that. The ones who are just starting out, not so much. After all, not all men in the world have the potential to become the God in love at the same time, right? Read this article to learn the 7 ways an embodied woman can awaken the God in a man.
Recent Comments