Internal Conversations- inner masculine and feminine

I don’t know how many of you do some of your best thinking in the shower? I hope it’s not just me, otherwise this will seem a tad strange. But it’s like the perfect alone time, no distractions, water literally cleansing away the days’ dirty baggage.

And I realised that over the past year while I’ve taken time out to rest and reset my lifestyle, it's been my inner feminine really in the driver's seat. It’s my feminine side that wants to go with the flow, that is able to listen to what my body wants to do on any given day, and notices where my energy levels are at. The flipside of this means I suffer from a lack of structure.

As I followed this thought process further into wonderland, I had one of those magical “aha” moments. Pursuing my own thoughts down the rabbithole often elicits really helpful insights, I really should follow these more often (except this also means being alone with what’s rattling around in my brain, and we all know that’s a scary place). At first, I thought ‘well of course my inner feminine has been loving the freedom she’s had this year, she hasn’t been in control for about five and a half years’ (the term of my legal career).

But really, it was my masculine side that got me through university too. My inner masculine meant I was able to set myself goals, juggle four essays at once, and successfully meet every deadline. I remember being able to convince myself to get up at 6am the day of an exam to cram even more information into my poor brain. My inner feminine would not have had a bar of that at all! I’m incredibly grateful for my inner masculine (as well as an unhealthy amount of naps and chocolate) for getting me through university. I mean you can’t argue with results, being in my masculine got me two degrees, one being an Honours degree in Law!

But that’s over 10 years. For more than a decade, if not longer, my inner masculine was driving my life forward. My version of success looked like academic achievements, so for that, I needed my masculine side. I needed self-enforced periods of study, I needed motivation to meet my goals, tick those boxes. If I go even further back, it’s highly likely that my inner masculine was the one in control since I was a child. When my nervous system closed down and I went into fight or flight mode as a teenager, it was my masculine side that chose the best survival methods and implemented a plan of attack. For that again, I am incredibly grateful to my inner masculine, because without him I’m not sure how I would have coped.

While trying to acknowledge that I’ve been completely out of balance for such a significant period of time is tough, it does mean I’m conscious of this and I get to choose what is in the driver’s seat moving forwards. My inner feminine has absolutely loved having the reins this year (unsure if I’m in a car or on horseback at this point), and it has been an incredible year of slowing down and healing my nervous system. I truly didn’t realise how much healing needed to happen for me to feel more like myself again, to start to replenish my energy levels, and figure out what boundaries I need in my life moving forward. And I would not have been able to heal my nervous system to this point without my feminine really showing up for me.

It really started when I began to question what success looks like to me. I realised my previous ideas of success were not really mine, and I no longer wanted to continue ticking boxes. I consciously choose to attach my ideas of success to how I’m feeling, rather than accomplishments, or external objects or people. And so began my reintroduction to my inner feminine. She was there this whole time, waiting in the wings for me to reach this place of insight on my own and to call her onto centre stage.

But I’ve also realised that while I am fully in my feminine and healing energy, not a lot gets done... I end up going with the flow so much that I have very few self-imposed deadlines, and I don’t take practical steps forward in my business or development. And for a while that didn’t really matter- I was resting, healing, coming to terms with my new lifestyle.

Now I’m ready to start moving forward again. I can’t say that too loudly, my inner feminine won’t be impressed. But sadly I can’t let her be in control of my life for the next 10 years to make up for lost time. I’m going to have to figure out a balance, find out how to switch between my masculine and feminine functioning depending on the day, the hour, the moment.

But isn’t that also incredibly empowering? Being aware of my own energies, being able to assess any given scenario, and then consciously choose which side to embody when I respond. Being able to have that internal conversation, like ‘hey looks like we’ve been given some work and the client wants a quick turnaround, we can make that happen (and we would like the money!), so how about the masculine takes over for a couple of hours?’. Then the inner feminine rolls her eyes, exasperatedly crosses her arms and says ‘ok fine, but afterwards let's go for a walk in the sunshine, no particular direction in mind, and listen to really loud music that speaks to my soul’.

Although these are two parts of myself, I’m starting to want to give them both names… I’ll ponder that one in the shower too.