#36 How It Feels To Be In Your Authentic Feminine Power, healing core wounds & being true to yourself

Your authentic feminine power is not about power over others; it’s about power within. It’s about expressing your authentic self, embracing your desires, and having the courage to pursue your dreams.  Instead of playing the role of good girl you're free to be true to yourself.  

In this episode, we dive into what it means to be in your feminine power, and identify obstacles to stepping into this power.

 I share:

🔥Understanding your relationship to your personal power

🔥Negative effects of relying too much on your masculine strengths 

🔥How societal messages during childhood create wounds around your worth

🔥The habit of disembodiment

🔥Recognizing patterns of disempowerment

🔥3 key habits to reclaim your feminine power

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About Tertia

I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.

In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.

I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.

Transcript

 (00:00):
Hello, hello, and a very warm welcome to another episode. I'm delighted to be spending some time with you today, and I'm also delighted about the topic that we are going to get into. You might know that I have a group programme called Untamed Feminine, and this is really a programme where I help women actualize and step into their fullest potential, their power and their magnetic radiance. And recently one of the participants, we are currently in a cycle of Untamed Femme. Recently, one of the participants asked me, how does it feel to be in your feminine power? And that's what I want to get into in our episode today. I feel for us to be able to get into our feminine and know what that feels like and experience the power of our feminine, we need to understand what is feminine power. We need to explore our relationship towards power.

(00:57):
And we also need to understand what are the things that prevents us from stepping into the power? What are the things that are in the way of us showing up as our truest, most authentic and powerful selves? So that's what I want to explore in the episode. And I'm also going to share with you then some of the best suggestions that I have that will support you to actualize. So make sure that you stay on until the end. Let's begin then with an exploration of what is feminine power. And if I had to ask you what comes to mind when you think of power, just pause here for a moment and contemplate that. What do you think of when you think of power? So many of us have quite an uncomfortable edgy relationship with power, most probably because we have suffered, and I'm putting that in.

(01:59):
We have suffered at the hands of power being exerted over us. We've experienced discomfort and unease because of power being exerted over us. And so this in a very big way tends to inform our worldview when we get power exerted over us. This informs our worldview. This informs our opinion about ourselves. So that informs our idea of if it is even possible for us to step into our own personal power. And then if we look at how feminine energy and claiming our feminine being in our feminine energy, how this is expressed on social media, on YouTube, on Instagram, on all these platforms, often I see it being expressed as light and floaty, as cultivating all these desirable aspects that will make you a good woman, that will put you in your feminine energy. And this is viewed through a patriarchal lens. This is viewed through a lens of this is what will make you a good woman.

(03:13):
Anything that doesn't fit into this little box means that you are not feminine enough. This keeps us stuck in what I call our good girl paradigm. This makes us believe that we only have to be a certain way in order to be loved and accepted. And this is a very disempowering belief to have about ourselves that only certain aspects of our feminine is allowed to be shown and allowed to be seen by the world. And we have to cultivate the lightness and the brightness and be contained and gracious because this is the ideal woman who is in her feminine energy. And to me, that is a very disempowering view. It doesn't speak to any personal power. So these are two of the most extreme ideas that I get when I feel into what power, feminine power could mean or represent. From this perspective, I'd like to share with you what I see feminine power as.

(04:18):
To me, feminine power is not power over it's power within feminine power is expressing yourself authentically, expressing your magnificence and your sexuality, knowing what your desires are, and having the courage to follow those desires, the courage to follow your dreams. Feminine power to me means being unapologetic in your body, unapologetic in using your voice. And if you look at this definition, it has everything to do with the relationship that you have with yourself. The risk that we have if we feel into both these extremes of power, what feminine power is, is that we continue to perpetuate and we continue to use our masculine strengths. So most of us are very, very skilled in using our masculine strengths because we live in a world that prizes the masculine, right? We live in a world that values the masculine. So we are very good at using our logic, our linear faculties.

(05:31):
We are very good at activating our go go energy, and we are not so good at tapping into the intuitive, more essential, more magnetic and cyclical nature of our feminine. In fact, I would even go so far to say as in this world where we prize our masculine strengths, we also reject our feminine strengths. And if we are going to reject those strengths and we've got this contorted view of what power actually means, can you see how difficult it would be for anyone to step into their personal power in a way where they are nourished and sustained from within? When you weightlift with only one arm, your body is going to be completely out of balance. And this is how I see us walking through the world in so many different areas of our lives. We are totally out of balance. And my intention is with this episode that you'll see how you can bring yourself back into balance.

(06:36):
But before that, you'll see the fact that you are out of balance is not your fault. You've done nothing wrong, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing about you that needs to be fixed. But if we go through life only using half of our muscles, only using the one arm, and we only rely on our masculine strengths and we forget our feminine in the process, what the cost is to us is our adrenals blow out. We feel dead below the neck, our sex life, our intimate lives suffer. We lack motivation and enthusiasm that comes as a result of the creativity that gets sparked within us. We feel numb. We go through life experiencing a kind of blanket numbness that lies over us. And the way out of this is to bring our feminine back online to begin to practise that muscle, but not in the way that gets portrayed in social media.

(07:45):
That's very light and very floaty, but in a way that brings us back to the truth of who we are. That brings us back to the core of our feminine strengths and our feminine power. And this will allow you to step into the woman that you desire to be. We do that by claiming back all those parts of ourselves that we have disowned because we believe through what we've been told and what we've seen, that those things are not enough. So this is the scaffolding. The scaffolding that keeps our power damned up, that keeps our power blocked in, and that keeps the false ideas that we have about power and that we have about feminine energy and the value of feminine energy in place. So I want to explore this scaffolding a little bit more. I also want to make sure that you understand that at no point in this whole conversation I bashing men.

(08:56):
This is not about saying men are bad and women are victims. But here's the thing, when we grow up, we are like little sponges. Up until the age of seven, we like little sponges that take on all this information that we see presented to us in the world. And even though it might not be overtly, subconsciously, we take on these belief systems. And if you live in a world which was the case when I was growing up, if you live in a world where you only see men in power, where you see men take advantage of the power that they hold, a world where it's believed that only men are successful and that only men are smart, and that men play a completely different role than women, women's roles are only there to support the man. Women's roles are there to be seen and not heard.

(09:51):
Women's roles are to be enough of something but not too much of something else. If this is what you see playing out in your world, then it's going to affect the way that you view yourself. And by extension, what it's also going to do, it's going to make you want to have more of the attributes and the actions and the activities and the traits that is deemed to be smart, that is deemed to be successful. And you're going to have to want less of the traits that are only supportive, that should be only seen, but just a little bit. And that should be heard, but only a little bit. And so can you see how we then begin to even in ourselves, in the relationship that we have with ourselves, we begin to elevate our masculine strengths and we begin to suppress, push away or deny our feminine strengths.

(10:49):
And what I see happens as a result of this is we end up walking around with core wounds in untamed feminine, we explore some of the core wounds that come as a result of this wonky relationship that we have with ourselves. And the first core wound that I see as a result of these beliefs that we develop about our worth is that we are not worthy. And the way that it plays out in the world is we have conversations around being a burden. We have conversations around we are not allowed to ask for anything. Conversations around, we have to try harder. We have to prove ourselves, we don't deserve what we receive, we don't deserve to be here. And so we have to really earn our keep. The second core wound or category of core wounds is that there is something wrong with me. And by extension, when we believe that, we also believe that happens to us, our experiences, it's our fault.

(11:58):
There are things within us that are broken. There are things within us that are mistakes. And so we need to fix that. We need to solve ourselves. We need to make that we tick all the boxes so that we can be acceptable, so that we can be loved because there is something wrong with us. We also use a lot of energy to try and fix our appearance, to battle our bodies and how we look and the shape that we have and the emotions that we feel and the ebb and flow because it doesn't fit into the, and I'm putting this in quotation marks. It doesn't fit into the prescribed box of how things should be. The third kind of core wound that we walk around is that I am too much. I'm too intense, I'm too demanding. And what this causes us to do is to shrink ourselves down.

(12:59):
It makes us smaller so that we don't take up as much space as we would if we were being our loud selves, if we were being our sensitive selves, if we were being our demanding selves. When we shrink ourselves down in this way, I believe it also has the effect of keeping us stuck in scarcity. There's not enough. There's not enough for me because I am too much. I want too much. I demand too much. And then the fourth core wound that we have is the wound of I am not enough. And when I believe that I'm not enough, then I work very, very hard to fix things. I work very hard to keep everyone else happy, and I work very hard to not make any mistakes, least I get into trouble. And so this drives that pattern of perfectionism and evil people and even people pleasing.

(14:00):
I don't want to disappoint anyone. When these core wounds play out as they do, I see that this is one of the biggest contributors to us experiencing habitual dis embodiment. So as a feminine embodiment coach, I speak a lot about embodiment. And if you are new to the concept of embodiment for clarity's sake, I will just briefly explore what embodiment means. So embodiment to be embodied means that you are inhabiting your full self. It means that you are connected to the whole of you. You're not only connected to those nice, desirable and good girl parts of you, but you are connected to all of your feelings, all of your expressions and all of your experiences, all of your flavours. You are connected and in touch, and you are complete with your light and your dark. You've integrated all of those parts of yourself that you have disowned, that you've shoved into the shadows because they don't fit your perspective of what you need to do in order to be loved, in order to be accepted.

(15:23):
When you inhabit yourself, you take the shame that so many of us walk around with at our core, the shame that comes from believing that who we are isn't enough. We are not worthy, we are too much. There's something wrong with us. It takes that shame and it frees it. So now we use that energy to move our lives forward, to do good in the world, to actualize and to step into our full power. These parts of ourselves that we disown are the parts of ourselves that we are at war with. We are constantly at war with all of these things that got us into trouble when we spoke our mind, these things that made us believe that it was our fault when our uncle was too friendly or the things that made us believe we needed to shrink ourselves and make ourselves really small so that we did not make other people uncomfortable.

(16:26):
All of these experiences, these shameful beliefs about the things about ourselves that are wrong, as we shove that into the darkness, as we disown those parts of ourselves, as we take that away from who we think we should be in order to be loved, this is what erects the scaffolding. This is what keeps our power damned up inside of you. And the scaffolding is also what keeps these false beliefs about ourselves in place. Now, these experiences that put the scaffolding in place also makes it very hard for us to trust ourselves. We don't trust our emotions if they too much. We don't trust our feelings. We don't trust our impressions. We don't trust our own warning signals. We don't trust our intuition. And when we don't trust any of these things together with the uncomfortable experiences of the shame that we hold, it makes it very hard for us to be in our bodies to feel what is there.

(17:31):
So it leads to this embodiment. But now this is the thing when we habitually spend all of our energy and all of our time up here with the stories in our mind about who we are, our place in the world, what rights we have, the possibility of our power, when we spend so much time here, we take the energy away from the body and we literally become numb to the sensations that are in the body. Now, the more numb we become in our body, in our feeling, the more we look for sensations in the outside world to feel and to experience. And then we fall into these traps, what I call the overs. So we overeat, we overdrink, we overwork, we over exercise, we over shop, we over binge watching tv, whatever it may be. But we do all of these externally sourced sensations. We look for these big things to give us a feeling of being alive.

(18:34):
Many of the women that I work with in my private coaching, in my group programme and also from experience, personal experience in my own life, I see that these scaffoldings really makes us show up or have certain experiences in life. And I want to share these experiences and signs with you now for you to develop that awareness. Once we have awareness around certain patterns, and once we know these patterns are not because there's something wrong with me, but because of something outside of me that have created this perspective of who I am, can you see that this allows us to begin to reclaim our power? So the very first pattern that I see play out is that a woman who is not in her feminine power, a woman who is stuck behind the scaffolding is also a woman with a extremely toxic in a critic.

(19:41):
So the job of the inner critic is to keep us safe. It's always going to make sure that you are aligned with the truth of who you are, even if the truth that you believe yourself to be is based on a false premise, even if the truth of you is formed around one of those core wounds, your inner critic doesn't care. Your subconscious doesn't care. It only knows that it has to align you with your truth. And the moment that you venture off course, the moment that you start extending your comfort zone, the moment that you start risking yourself and showing up in a way that is not aligned with I'm not enough, or there's something wrong with me, or I need to be fixed, it's going to make sure that you come back in place so that you can live up to your belief of I'm not enough, I'm not worthy.

(20:41):
There's something wrong with me. Our nervous system has the one simple task of survival. It needs to make sure that we survive. And so it's always going to together with a subconscious, it's always going to make sure that we come back in line. You can't negotiate with your inner critic. You can give it as many cute names as you want to. You can try and understand why it's trying to keep you safe in this way. But the bottom line is we need to go where this inner critic is drilled into the foundation of you where it's hanging on the scaffolding that's been erected. And from there, we need to liberate it from there. We need to transform it. The inner critic feeds on our shame. And so it is incredibly important in my opinion, to transform that shame to shift from shame into power. The second pattern that I see when we are not in our power is that there is this low grade resentment that plays out in the background.

(21:59):
Now, I have recently gone through an experience in my business where there was a situation that filled me with a lot of stress. And as is usually the case when we have situations like this, on some days I could handle it and it wasn't such a big deal. And then on other days I felt really overwhelmed with it and I would either just bite the bullet and get on with it or I would run away and avoid it completely. And I used to fluctuate between all of these states until I decided to take a little bit of my own medicine and go and explore what is under the hood here, what is going on? What is keeping these patterns or this specific pattern that I had this stress, what is keeping it in place? And what I discovered was the very uncomfortable truth that I was sitting in a state of blame.

(22:59):
And the blame has led to resentment. So blame is a state that says it's your fault. Blame is a state that says, whatever's going on right here, I had nothing to do with it. I can't do anything about it. It's all on you. I'm helpless. I don't have any choice in this. And so you can hear that this is a very disempowering place to be in what blame does. Blame keeps us safe. Blame keeps us away from the scaffolding. Blame keeps us stuck in the centre of us so that we don't bump up against the scaffolding that could potentially

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Rock the boat. But the price that we pay is this low grade resentment and low grade hopelessness that runs in the background. And then the third pattern that I want to share with you now when we are not in our power is that we hang our worth on the opinions of other people or we hang our worth on our external achievements. And I've grouped both of these together because in my mind they have the same result. They make us feel that we are not enough. So what we end up doing is we compare ourselves to others. We compare ourselves to other people's achievements, to what other people are doing, to what we see in their lives. And we can either find ourselves superior to them, which is a false sense of superiority, or we can feel that we will never be able to reach whatever they have reached.

(24:46):
We'll never be able to achieve that. And this makes us feel like imposters. This makes us feel like frauds. When we are always hanging our worth and our value on the opinions of what others think of us, we are going to act in ways to gain their approval. If we hang our worth on our achievements, we are always going to be doing things out there that look a certain way that give certain results in order to get approval. And again, these are very disempowering states to be in. This is not a state of power within the relationship that we have towards ourselves puts us in a state of empowerment or disempowerment. And it is vital that we learn how to change that relationship shift, that relationship that we have with ourselves into one that is more empowering. So how do we create this power within?

(25:53):
What are some of the things that we can do in our lives? If you have now recognised that these patterns are alive in you? If you've recognised these core wounds, I have some medicine that I want to share with you now and the first medicine, the first kind of medicine as a feminine embodiment coach and an embodiment teacher, the medicine is to come back into your body. Power within means that instead of living by the rules of how we should be, which is prescribed out there, we live by our own inner compass. We live guided by the internal data that we have to support us to make decisions. The internal data that informs us if our boundaries have been crossed, the internal data, which tells us if we are in alignment with our own values and this data lives inside the body, you can't access it through your mind.

(26:56):
You can't access it by writing down a list or imagining it. You have to access it where it lives, which is in the body. And the data that is available to us through our internal felt sense is the data of our physical body. So all of the feelings and sensations of our actual physical body, it's the data of our mind because every thought that you think has a corresponding feeling or sensation in the body, and a very common example is if you had to think about eating a lemon, if you think about eating a lemon, you can actually feel how as you bite into that sour lemon, you can feel how your saliva glands activate, right? So you have a physical response that happens in your body. If you think about having to do public speaking, just the idea of standing up in front of a room, if this is something that is not very familiar to you, the idea might fill you with dread and your heart may start beating faster or you might have a knot in your stomach so you have an actual physical sensation that happens as a result of your thoughts.

(28:11):
The third kind of data is all the emotions that we experience. So emotions, while they are very convenient to label, right, we speak of anger and we speak of joy, and that tells people what anger is, what joy is. So they have an idea of our emotional state. But what might be helpful for you to know is that we experience those emotions. Everybody experience those emotions differently. We all have a different constellation of feelings and sensations that happen in our internal world as a result of the emotions that we feel. And so joy or anger is going to feel different in your body than what it feels in mine. And we want to cultivate this sensitivity of being in touch with our emotions. If we habitually spend all of our time up here, if we only rely on our masculine go energy and we reject our feminine, we reject these more intuitive feeling abilities of our feminine, then it's very difficult for us to be in our bodies.

(29:22):
So by coming back into our bodies, we can begin to reclaim these aspects of our feminine power. The very last kind of data that we have, I've shared three so far. The fourth kind of data that we have is that of our energy. So this is what I see as our vibe. This is what I see as our state, whether we are in an empowered state or a disempowered state. And it's also the energy of how we relate to things, not only things in our outside world and our desires, but also how we relate to ourselves. So by learning to come into the body what we are doing, we are not only now relying on our masculine mind, our linear logical thinking ability, even though that is so important, we still need that. But we are not only relying on that, we also accessing some of the data that's available to us to inform us how to live, how to show up, and how to make decisions by tapping into our bodies.

(30:26):
The second kind of medicine is to feed the feminine. First, we need to break the habit of only relying on our go energy of using our go energy, our masculine energy as our default energy. When we are in this masculine default, remember that it cuts us off. It cuts off our creativity, it starves our feminine. And in my experience, the best time to feed your feminine is first thing in the morning. When we start going about our day, often I find that we get stuck in this masculine drive. We get stuck in this masculine doing, and it can be very difficult to get yourself unstuck. It can be very difficult to unlock that. And simply because it's a habit, we are habituated in using our energy and directing our awareness upwards and outwards. And so we want to begin to develop new habits that are more supportive to bringing our feminine online as well.

(31:30):
And I find that when we do it in the beginning of our day, as we cultivate that access to our feminine over time, what you will find it is possible for you to switch between the masculine and the feminine to call on your masculine when you need it, but also to call on your feminine and fall back in your feminine when you need that. I have a morning ritual, feminine morning ritual free guide that you can download from the link in the description if you want to learn a new habit to feed your feminine first. One of the other practises that we can do in terms of feeding our feminine is to bring more pleasure into our lives. Pleasure fuels our feminine, and I did a whole episode on that episode 49. I'm also going to link that for you in the show notes, and then you can go and take a listen to that.

(32:31):
The final point that I want to share with you, the final piece of medicine that I want to share with you is that we need to feel our feelings. We connect to our feminine by noticing what is happening inside our body, by having these habits that support bringing our feminine energy online and by feeling all of the emotions, all of the impressions, all of the discomfort and uncomfortable sensations, but also all of the pleasurable and more spacious sensations that we experience with vulnerability. So I want to dive into vulnerability a little bit more here. Vulnerability is a key ingredient for us learning to be with what it is that we are feeling. It's very easy for us to lie to ourselves. It's very easy for us to avoid going into the more tender and vulnerable parts of what is alive in us. And again, because this is a protective mechanism, once you know something, you can't unknow it.

(33:47):
Once you are aware of what is really alive in inside you, once you have contacted your desires, it's very, very difficult to forget them or to shove them under the carpet. And so going within could potentially mean that we rock the boat. We can take the lid off a whole Pandora's box, but it does require vulnerability for us to step into our power. We have to be willing to be vulnerable. It takes a lot of courage. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. It takes courage to explore what is really alive in here. If we don't have vulnerability, what we tend to do is we shield our hearts and we shield our truth, not only from the world, but we shield the truth from ourselves. And when you live behind the shield, when you are stuck in the scaffolding, it is simply not possible for you to step into the fullest expression of who you are.

(34:52):
It's not possible for you to share your magnificence and your radiance with the world. You are not only denying yourself, but you're also robbing the world from your gifts. The image that I have in my head when I think about shielding ourselves and moving away from vulnerability, I see it as if our life force, our feminine energy life force, if this was a river, it's like packing sandbags on the river. And what we do is we shrink the life force down to only a small, small trickle the flow of life force. It only becomes a very small trickle, and we show up as mere shadows of who we potentially could be. We show up as mere shadows of the change and the transformation that we can bring to the world. Every woman holds a unique expression of her feminine power by taking those sandbags away, by freeing ourselves from the scaffolding.

(36:00):
What we do is we allow this life force, we allow this authentic expression to flow freely. The way that you are going to be expressed in your feminine is different to the way that I'm going to be expressed in my feminine, but we hold this in common. Our feminine power is anchored in our authenticity and it's rooted in deep self trusts. The way that we feel when we are in our feminine power is also going to be different from woman to woman, but it share the commonality, at least I believe it. Share the commonality of it feels like inner peace. It feels like aliveness. It feels like spaciousness, and it feels like never ending possibility. It's a ripple effect that goes out into all areas of your life. It ripples through into your relationships and it ripples all the way to the ends of the earth.

(37:10):
I would love to know how what I've shared with you has landed. If this really resonated with you, if you feel a huge desire in your being to deepen into your feminine power, then I would love to invite you to join the wait list for Untamed Feminine. We are currently in a cycle right now, and the next cycle starts in September 24. So depending on when you are listening to this podcast, if you want to get on in the next cycle, then go to tertiariegler.com/untamed feminine to read about Untamed Feminine, and also to put your name on the wait list. If you are on the wait list, you'll get notified as soon as enrollment opens. And you also qualify for early bird pricing. I really enjoyed spending this time with you, and I hope that you found some great insights that you found it valuable. And as I said, I'd love to hear what resonated with you. So you can either dear me on Instagram or you can send me an email and the links for both of those contact points will be in the description. Thank you for joining me, and I'll speak to you next time. Bye.