68 Becoming an Embodied Woman: Reclaiming Your Feminine Power and Authentic Self-Expression

In this practical episode, I take the mystery out of embodiment and show you exactly what it looks like to live from your body instead of your head. We look at how most of us are trained to rely only on our minds where a lot of analyzing and managing happens.  We also get into why this habitual way of being may be the reason we end up feeling anxious, stuck, and disconnected.

When you’re stuck in your head, you’re using only half your power.  Join me as I dive into what it means to live as a fully embodied woman.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• What it really means to inhabit all of who you are: the light, the dark, the feelings, the fullness
• How being embodied helps you feel more present to your life, instead of caught up in thoughts or future worries
• Why embodiment is the way we begin to live from wholeness, with an open heart and in our own truth

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Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Feminine Embodiment podcast. This is your space to awaken your feminine energy, rise into confidence, and live from your most authentic and embodied self. I'm Tertia Regler, feminine embodiment coach, and I'll be your guide as we travel to the depths of your truth and the fullness of your magnetism while you remember the feminine power that is already inside of you. Thanks for pressing play on this episode. And in today's episode, I want to talk about how we can become more embodied woman. How can we live our lives and navigate the choices that we have to make every day in a way that is true to who we are and that allows us to. To show up in the fullest expression of our own truth, our own desires, and from an open heart? So that is quite a mouthful. And to me, embodiment is the way in which we get there. So today's episode is going to be a bit of an introduction to feminine embodiment. Embodiment is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It's a word that most of us are familiar with. But embodiment can also be used in different contexts. In the context that I'm taking you through today, I think it will be helpful if we create a definition of what I mean when I speak about embodiment. And embodiment, to me, means that we inhabit all of who we are. So that means that we are in touch with the full spectrum of our being, the full spectrum of our emotions and our feelings. Feelings. We are connected both to the light aspects of who we are, but also to the dark aspects. And we move then when we inhabit ourselves, we move from a place of wholeness. So when you think about inhabiting yourself, you can imagine that you are using all of your gifts, all of your abilities, all of the insight and the wisdom that you have, all of the strength and the power. Power that you have available to you. And not only. Which is something that I'm going to talk about a little bit more in this episode. Not only the power of your mind, your thoughts, your thinking, and your doing. All right, so inhabiting yourself means being connected to all of who you are. And even with me explaining it in this way, it still sounds a little bit intangible. Right? So what does this actually look like? I'd like to share with you now some ways in which being embodied shows up. Like, what does it look like practically for us as women when we are more embodied? And then I'm going to share with you how you can begin to become more embodied in everyday life. Being embodied means that you are fully present to, to your life. So think about this. How easy is it for you or how difficult when you come home from work, it's been a stressful day, you have a lot going on. How easy is it for you to actually shut down, right? And to relax and to not shut down, shut off. To shut off from work and relax and have a good evening and be present to, to your life? Or do you find yourself being irritable when your kids are too noisy? Let's say you're making dinner, for example, and everybody's talking to you, and you just feel that you don't have any capacity to listen to anyone. And even worse, they're interrupting your thoughts. You're trying to think about stuff, and they are just interrupting your thoughts. So when we are not present to our lives because our attention and our awareness is caught up in, in another aspect of our life, in a personal situation or a challenge that we busy dealing with, and we trying to process that through our minds, what happens is we become disembodied, we become disconnected from the present moment. And so when we learn the skill of embodiment, because it is a skill, right? The more we do it, the more skilled we become in being embodied in those moments where the default mode might be to become disembodied. So when you are present to what is happening in your life right now, it also opens you up to experiencing more joy and more pleasure, right? We have to be inside our bodies to be able to experience pleasure. Think about when you have a beautiful meal that someone has prepared for you, and the way in which the plate is laid out is exquisite. And that's all beautiful. So you can really take that in and enjoy that through your senses. And then when you bite into that very first bite, if there's like an explosion on your tongue of different flavors and unusual combinations, that is so, so delicious. As our senses become more awakened, as we get more into the present moment of what it is that we are feeling and what we are experiencing, it brings us present to our life. So being embodied means that we are fully present to our experiences and we're not floating around with our mind somewhere else while our life is busy happening around us, being embodied also means that we are free to express ourselves, right? So think about that family member that keeps on making jokes that hurt you, that annoy you. And when we are truly embodied, because we are connected to all of who we are, because we are in right relationship with ourselves and we have access to all of our parts, we can hold all of who we are. It also has the effect that we don't need to protect ourselves from things like feeling rejected or things like avoiding to rock the boat. So once we are more embodied, we find our own voices. We can express ourselves and we can say we don't appreciate that and that they should stop. Where before you might have hesitated to do that because you didn't want to rock the boat and you didn't want to deal with any repercussions or fallouts. Feeling free to express yourself also means that you can clearly state what it is that you are available for. Let's say, for example, you have a friend or a partner that keeps on SMSing you late at night and instead of waiting the whole night for the this person to write to you and knowing that the message is going to come through and being upset because you can't sleep because you're waiting for this message to come through and it's annoying and you just wish they would stop. Instead of being in this state where life is happening to you. When we feel solidly in who we are as a result of being more embodied, we can also start holding our own boundaries. We can start saying what we are not available for, like please do not contact me so late at night. And I think what's important here is to mention, of course we can all learn to say no. We can all learn to say please don't do that, or please do more of that, or this is what I want, this is what I don't want. But it has so much to do with the energy that's behind it. And if you are coming from an energy of defending yourself or energy of being afraid to either rock the boat or that people will judge you, your communication, the power with which you show up for yourself in your own life and the things that you are able to do as a result of that is so much less effective than when you embody the energy and you stand fully in the energy of your own sovereignty and express from that place. And this is what embodiment helps you with. Embodiment also helps you to listen to your intuition. How often might it have happened to you? I know this has happened way too many times for me in my past where you felt a strong gut reaction or a strong knowing or a strong impulse for something or against something and you didn't listen to yourself. You overrode your own instincts. You dismissed yourself, you said I'm being silly, I'M overreacting, Don't take it so personally. So we talk ourselves down from actually listening to our own intuition. And when we are embodied because we are more in contact with our internal feelings and sensations, our inner world, our internal felt sense, the subtle voice of our intuition gets louder so we can hear it more clearly. And not only that, what also happens is because of the relationship that we develop with ourselves again, we learn to trust ourselves more. We are less likely to dismiss what we are feeling or to try and pretend that we're not feeling that or saying that what we are feeling isn't true. So we really trust our own feelings and we trust our own ability to act on those feelings. The next thing that being embodied helps us with is to connect to our feminine energy. So everybody, every person, regardless of gender, has access to both masculine energy and feminine energy. These are the two energy currents that are alive in our bodies. And we are mostly skilled in using our masculine energy to get things done. Our masculine energy is a very go like, action taking kind of energy. And so when we are more embodied, we begin to connect deeper and bring online this feminine energy aspect of us. It's the feeling, the flowing, the intuitive, the magnetic current of aliveness that we have always available to us, but that we are not skilled in, in using. All right, because we default to using our masculine energy to get things done, we're very good at being productive and think about any kind of desire or goal that you might have. We use a lot of action, planning forward, moving in, creating those goals and making those goals come to life. But we only use half of the power that's available to us when we rely mostly on our masculine to get things done. And it is so that when we are disembodied, like when we're spending a lot of time in our heads thinking about the future, or obsessing about the past, or being stuck in mind loops, or avoiding being in our body for whatever reason. And I'll speak to that in a moment. Then that disconnects us from our feminine truth, right? Because of the cultural soup that we live in, where our go energy is really put on as the hero. We're not really taught to embody or to embrace the flowing, more emotional, intuitive currents of our nature. And so embodiment is one of the ways in which we can contact and start to live from this energy. The final thing that being embodied looks like on my list that I want to share with you today is that being embodied helps us to feel safe, to be ourselves. Our nervous Systems plays such a central role in the way in which we navigate the world. And when your nervous system is in survival mode, which means that it is constantly bracing, it's constantly on high alert, it's constantly anticipating, what that tends to look like in life is that we're feeling very tense. We might be worried about things, we might have mind loops again, which is in habitual patterns that play out in our nervous system. You might feel overwhelmed a lot, you might feel irritable a lot, you might feel frustrated a lot. You might have like repressed anger that you push away. And then in the most inconvenient times, and when you can't take it anymore, then the anger explodes and then you feel guilty and then your retreat, and then it's the cycle that keeps on playing out. Now if you don't feel safe inside your body and hence you are in survival mode, your system is constantly in fight, flight or freeze. And when your system is in this state, it is very difficult for you to make decisions that come from a place of ease. It's very difficult for you to be able to relax. It's very difficult for you to rest back and receive. And what you will find is that more often you are bracing against life. And if you don't feel safe inside your body and if you don't feel safe to be yourself, what ends up happening is we put these masks over so that people can't see who we truly are. So we don't let anybody in. And we also adopt all of these, let's call them patterns, all of these things that we do. So we try to be too controlling. We do things like always saying yes to people. We do things like putting up walls so that people don't come close to us. We, we do things like always asking or looking externally for validation that we are being loved or that we are good enough or that people accept us. And when we live in a place like this, and I'm speaking here from personal experience of for many, many years, not feeling safe to be myself. When we live in a place like this, how is it possible for you to go on and create a life and a career and relationships where you are fully expressed and fully showing up as yourself and fully using all of the power and the love and the ability that you have to self actualize and to live your life in a way where you feel most fulfilled? This is a point of power when we feel most fulfilled and so often when we tend to be disembodied, which is not something that you're doing wrong because we all disembody or so embodiment. And disembodiment lives on a scale. We are not either embodied all the way or disembodied all the way. We're always finding ourselves somewhere on the scale. But the thing is, there are many things in our life that causes us to disembody, and that is a whole episode on its own. And so when you find yourself doing some of these things that I've just explained, that is the opposite of what it looks like to be embodied. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. This is an awareness that, that I'm creating within you. I'm highlighting what could be different. I'm showing you new possibilities. So next I'd like to share with you how do we then become embodied? And what I'm going to take you through now is a process that I take my clients through. I don't want to call them steps, because they're not really steps, but these three pillars, let's call them of becoming more embodied. And so the first pillar is developing your sensitivity, so attuning yourself to your internal world. The second pillar is to liberate your internal world. And the third pillar is to expand into the world beyond, so expanding from your inner world into the outer world. And you can think of these not necessarily as consequences, sequential steps or something that happens linearly. Like you must first attune and then liberate and then expand. But think of it as a spiral. And we are always moving up and down the spiral. So we can always move between sensitizing, expanding, and liberating going up and down the spiral. What I'd like to do is name briefly what these different pillars look like. And then in the next episode, I'm actually going to break them down, dive deeper into each of the pillars, and show you how you can begin to apply that and use that and do that in your own life. So the first pillar of attuning to what is here and becoming sensitive means that we, if embodiment is that we are inside our bodies. We develop our sensitivity to learn the language of our internal world. Our internal world. Our body is always speaking to us in the language of feelings and sensations. And if we are habitually living up in our heads, of course we tend to only feel those feelings and sensations that are very big and very loud. Like, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I need to go to the bathroom. And even think about how often do we push those feelings to the side and we ignore them. So it's very easy for us to kind of override the feelings and the sensations inside our body. But for us to have access to the full spectrum of who we are, we need to stop overriding what it is that we're feeling, number one. And number two, we actually have to know what it is that we're feeling and become safe, sensitive to what it is that we're feeling. So this is what attunement does, becoming sensitive to what is alive inside the body. And then we can begin to move those feelings through us. The second pillar is to liberate. Now, if we go back to what I spoke earlier about feeling safe to be ourselves and feeling safe to express ourselves, liberate has everything to do with all of the tension and unprocessed feelings and emotions and experiences and situations that we have experienced through the course of our lives. It could happen that these experiences and even emotions has never been processed. And when they not processed, they are literally stuck inside our bodies and they are stuck inside our nervous systems. And this is where the habitual patterns that we have, like patterns of perfectionism or patterns of people pleasing or patterns of abandoning ourselves, these patterns are very likely unprocessed things that are stuck, stuck inside our nervous system that causes us to have these patterns in our external life. When you are feeling stuck, you're unable to move forward, and you have some block in your way, and you don't know what that is. Often what we want to do is we want to go and explore this in the mind and we want to pick it apart and we want to try and understand that. And in my experience, understanding why you are feeling stuck doesn't really help you to move forward. What I know to be true for me and for my clients is when we dive into the wisdom of the body and we work with the natural ability of the body to heal itself. We release and liberate the stuckness that is there so that you can come into flow, so that your action, actions can bring you into motion instead of you feeling stuck and frustrated and always playing out these same patterns. And then the third pillar in becoming more embodied and living more embodied is the pillar of expansion. And this is where we take all of that energy and all of the power that we have available internally that might have been released as a result of the liberation work that we've done, that might have been, like, turned up and dialed on because of the sensitivity work that we've done, the sensitizing work, we take that and now we can express this into the world. Now we can step fully into our purpose and into our power and into our potential. We are constantly manifesting. We use our subconscious mind which informs our actions, our typical belief, our mind loops, our perspective of the world. All of these things play a role in the the types of things that we manifest. And so if it is true that we are constantly manifesting, we are constantly bringing to life our reality in the way that we perceive and experience it. To me, it makes sense that I want to do it in a way where I am more empowered in what, what it is that I choose, that I feel more empowered in what it is that I perceive. So that I can start to magnetize my desires and manifest my desires in a way that feels easy and a way that feels aligned to who I am and that doesn't take so much effort. All right? And it can be any kind of desire. And we can only truly live in a way that is easeful when we have access to our full spectrum power, the full spectrum of who we are. So not only our masculine go, take action, break walls down and make things happen, but also that feeling flowing feminine that becomes the fuel that can actually drive our actions. I hope you found some nuggets in this episode and remember to watch out for the next episode where where I'm going to dive deeper into these three pillars for you to begin to apply them in your own life. Thank you so much for listening. And before you go, I have a free gift for you. It's a 12 minute guided audio designed to drop you out of your head and back into your body so you can reconnect with your inner landscape, your internal world, and access the feminine wisdom that is held there for everyday life. And if you enjoyed today's episode, you are going to love this guided audio. All that you need to do is scroll to the bottom, click on the link, fill in your emails, and I'll deliver it straight to your inbox. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll speak to you in the next one. Bye.