How to Increase your Self Worth (unlock FEMININE energy)
There’s a link between your self worth and your feminine energy. Things like self-sabotaging and people-pleasing and perfectionism, all have to do with the way that you relate to yourself and your feminine energy. I want to share with you four of the keys that are going to help you increase and improve and unlock your self-worth.
What is feminine energy? I think there’s a misconception sometimes that being in our feminine means that we are very girly and very ladylike. And yes, it is an aspect of our feminine energy, but it’s only a tiny small bit of what it means to be in touch and connected to our feminine essence. Being in our feminine energy means that we are connected to the body, connected to our beingness.
We carry a masculine and a feminine energy essence within us. But most of us have been conditioned to mostly rely on or only use the masculine aspect of our energy. When we are in the masculine, when we come mostly from our masculine energy, it’s a very forceful, drive, determined, goal-oriented, achieving kind of energy.
This masculine energy also has a shadow aspect. And the shadow aspect is when we start looking outside of ourselves for validation. So if you are finding that people-pleasing, sabotaging, and perfectionism, all of these things are showing up in your life, chances are that there are some shadowy aspects of your masculine energy at play here. So when we then want to move into a place of truly feeling worthy as we are, it means a couple of things, it means that we have to heal our wounded masculine, we have to work on that shadow aspect of ourselves. And it means that we have to embrace our feminine energy, our beingness being connected into the body.
So now I want to share with you four of the keys which I believe will get you there.
So the first key is that of “self-trust”. Self-trust is a very, very big topic. And to me, it has two aspects. It is the self-trust of trusting myself, but it also is related to trusting the universe. And I know many of us can feel like the universe is an unfriendly place.
You feel that the universe doesn’t have your back, you feel that you are all alone and you have to simply rely on yourselves to get by. So we want to begin to examine the core beliefs and the past wounds, the wounding that we have around this feeling of being alone, this feeling of not being supported by the universe, and also not feeling supported by ourselves.
So a lack of self-trust also implies that I feel that I don’t support myself. I feel that I can’t rely on myself and I was listening to a podcast the other day by I think it was Maddie Moon where she spoke about “your yes being your yes, and your no being your no. And you cannot know your “yes” from your “no” until you know what a “no” sounds like or feels like in the body”.
To me, that’s a beautiful entry point into beginning to develop self-trust. Begin to understand what does a hard “no” feel like to me so that I know what a hard “yes” feels like to me. And if I am able to begin to tell my “yes” from my no, if I’m able to stand fully in my own “yes”, can you see how that leads to me knowing that I’m there for myself. I can support myself, I can trust myself, I can trust my decisions.
So the first key then to self-worth is to learn and enter into this relationship where you’re with yourself, where you can begin to trust, trust your decisions, trust your feelings and trust your knowing.
The second key is to work with “self-acceptance”. So this is another big theme that I work with many of my clients, this theme around self-acceptance, and truly accepting all parts of yourself, even the parts that we reject, the parts that we deny, the parts that we wish weren’t so.
Self-acceptance is the key to self-love. You cannot love yourself if you don’t accept yourself, and it’s quite obvious, but sometimes we forget that step when want to work on self-love. And we tend to maybe only look at the external things that we can do to make ourselves acceptable to the outside world according to societal norms and conditioning.
We don’t always take the steps to accept and work with our shadow aspects. Because again, if I’m fully going to accept myself, I have to face my shadows, I have to bring my shadows into the light, so that I can integrate them and take them on as a full part of my lived experience.
The third key that will help you unlock your self-worth and unlock your feminine energy is to have strong boundaries.
I talk about boundaries a lot because it’s so important. And here, I talk about both boundaries to the outside world and boundaries for ourselves, we have to be able to not only draw the line out there but also draw the line within ourselves.
Looking at the boundaries with regards to self-worth, I want to talk about this industry that exists out there which preys on our insecurities. We have to stop ourselves from being sold to, we have to stop listening to this industry that tells us that there’s something wrong with the way that we look. And that we need to change our appearance, our figure, our hair, our body shape, we have to change all of those things in order to be more acceptable.
As long as you keep on looking for that validation outside of yourself, which is again, that shadow aspect, you’re looking for validation outside of yourself that who you are is acceptable.
Can you see how that is blocking your road to self-worth? So as a practice, that I can suggest to you here is whenever you feel yourself comparing yourself to others, or you feel less than whenever you see something online or on social media, really check in with yourself and ask, “Is this the truth of who I want to be?” Does this support me in my growth, towards fully loving and accepting myself? So that’s a good reflection question for you to work with so that you can start to see where you want to draw your boundaries.
The final key that I have for you is ritual. I think ritual, especially for us as women, is a beautiful way for us to drop back into our bodies to get out of the domain of the masculine, which is in the mind, into the domain of the feminine, which is the body and ritual is going to help us to do that.
So, one of the things that are so important when we work with our feminine energy, is to keep in mind that the masculine is all about go, go go. It’s all about striving, the feminine is all about slowing down. And ritual is going to help you to do that.
Now, the thing is we have rituals all the time, a lot of these rituals are unconscious, our brains have been designed in such a way that we create rituals around things to make us more efficient.
So rituals are already a part of your life. And what you can begin to do if you want to use your rituals to increase your self worth to unlock your feminine energy is to become conscious of the types of rituals that you can engage in.
So, for example, cyclical living is a ritual that I’ve adopted now, which allows me to slow down.
And there are very many different things that you can do in your morning routine, the way that you kind of wake up before you engage with the world.
That kind of ritual will also help you to grow your self-worth depending on what it is that you do.
Another ritual is “around meditation”. So just talking about meditation, I think meditation is a very powerful practice to help us become present, it helps to quiet the mind and it’s wonderful for anxiety.
And what I want to talk about meditation from a feminine energy perspective is stillness meditation versus movement meditation. So the typical masculine energy meditation is about sitting still, it’s about quieting the mind, it’s about just focusing on the breath, and becoming still.
The feminine types of meditations that I’ve been practicing are more of active imagination, meditation, where there’s movement and where there’s sound. And this kind of ritual is also going to help you to unlock your feminine energy.
So this was a very brief overview of four of the different keys or aspects that will really help you to step fully into your self-worth and to love yourself and see that you are a valuable and wonderful human being.