Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

Last week I started this conversation about why the feminine energy in our culture tends to be the instigator of change. I know this is not always true but I do find that many women whether by choice or force of life events, tend to explore themselves deeply and the fact that we have this deep inner knowing which I talked about in last week’s blog which means we tend to read the ‘tea leaves’ and know when it’s time for change.

Anecdotally, when I think about all the training and professional development I have done over the years, there has always been a much higher percentage of female participants than male participants and so we notice this and we talk about it. You could complain about it and say men don’t do the hard work, but I don’t think this is entirely true because I have lots of male clients and friends who have committed to exploring themselves, but to be honest it is usually after something going really wrong in their lives. Maybe it is that it is women who are the instigators of change in relationships, in families, in cultures. Many studies of couples on relationships and marriages consistently show that around 70% of divorces are instigated by women.

There are many ways we can explore why this happens and I always love taking a Jungian lens on what is actually happening because it always explores the shadow side of everything which I find super interesting. If we look through a Jungian lens, It is always the masculine within the feminine that changes first. In Jungian parlance, the animus (the inner masculine in a woman) seeks direction, clarity, and forward motion. When a woman begins her transformation (say, through grief, menopause, creativity, or awakening), it’s often her inner masculine that reorients first, perhaps by finding new values, boundaries, or purpose. Once that internal alignment shifts, her outer relationships must also adjust. How I notice this in clients is they cannot pretend to be anything other than their authentic selves anymore and this often causes friction in different relationships in their lives as this authentic self in them is emerging. Things can be a bit wobbly for a while as she finds comfort with meeting these new parts of self.

And yes, often this catalyses change in the masculine partner or in the wider system. But not always right away. Sometimes the feminine awakens and moves first, and the masculine (whether internal or external) resists or lags—until it feels safe or necessary to catch up. That friction can either break the container or refine it.

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

In the simplest form, we are the ones who can create life and give birth to that. Even beyond biological birth, the feminine is the archetypal womb—the container that holds, gestates, dissolves, and re-emerges. This role isn’t limited to women, but in most systems, it is the feminine energy that initiates the deep work: the descent, the death, the regeneration. Women, especially at midlife, often step into this initiatory role on behalf of their families, partnerships, and communities.

It’s like we become the crucible in which the old dies and the new is born. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives:

• Biologically: Our hormonal cycles force us into regular encounters with change. Life transitions like menstruation, pregnancy, birth, perimenopause, and menopause demand transformation. For example, every month when we have menstrual cycles, we are moving through a cycle of change, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth metaphorically speaking that is experienced in an embodied way with our menstrual cycles.

• Emotionally: The feminine is finely attuned to relational field dynamics because we have lots of estrogen which helps creates oxytocin. Our nervous system is regulated by oxytocin which acts as a neuro-modulator. Neuro-modulators fine tune and shape how our nervous system reacts to stimuli over time. So we become more relationally attuned and attuned to social safety. We feel what’s missing, what’s breaking down, or what wants to emerge sooner. So oxytocin plays an enormous role in regulating arousal, stress responses and healing.

• Spiritual/Archetypal: The feminine holds the wisdom of the underworld. We know how to descend and return with insight. That’s where true alchemy happens.

So when it comes to relationships, often, when a woman begins to change, it upsets the systemic homeostasis of the relationship. If she holds the relational field (as is often the case), any shift she makes is deeply felt by the other. This can either provoke resistance or invite the partner to evolve too. Sometimes both. In this sense, women often become the alchemical fire that either transforms or reveals what’s no longer sustainable.

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

I have been doing a bit of work with a biodynamic cranio osteopath on my pelvis. I have had pelvic issues for years, predominantly starting with a car accident as a kid, and things just go layered upon it. I have worked with different body workers over the years and I have to say it is in a pretty good state now. If you aren’t familiar with this modality it is a lot of neuro-affective touch work, and the body in all its wisdom and intelligence, reorganises, because it knows how to heal. It is very similar to the touch work we do sometimes in somatic experiencing.

My osteopath and I have big chats when I am on the table. Last session she asked me “do you think it is trauma that causes all the autoimmune issues in women”. (if you don’t know the stats, something like 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers are female bodies). I said sometimes, but I think it is because as women we carry so much of the relational field and after a while that takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body if there is not enough sharing of the load going on in the family system or she does not have a good circle of support around her. After a period of time the body screams whether it be relational rupture, physical pain or discomfort, illness. It tells us, things need to change now!

So let’s talk about that because there is a price we pay for holding the relational field.

Why do we hold the relational field and how does it prime us to lead change?

Well some of it is biological, some is cultural and some is archetypal.

Biologically and neurologically we are wired for connection. Our estrogen creates the oxytocin that drives us to connect and attune to our children.

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is more prevalent in women. It surges during intimacy, birth, breastfeeding—but also during conversation and emotional connection.

• Our mirror neuron systems, which help us sense and empathise with others' emotions, tend to be more active.

• From a nervous system lens, many women are socialised (and biologically primed) to track relational dynamics, often before we even understand we’re doing it.

The social conditioning is strong. From a young age, girls are typically taught to; caretake others’ feelings, keep the peace, maintain connection and be “good,” agreeable, relationally aware. We are socialised to value harmony over truth.

On a deeper level, the feminine principle (not just in women, but especially expressed through them) is associated with; holding, containing, gestating, weaving the web between things

So the relational field—that unseen space between people where emotion, meaning, energy, and nervous system cues travel—is often carried by the feminine. Not because it’s our duty, but because we feel it first, and most acutely.

Women tend to track what's happening in the in-between. This might look like noticing when something feels “off” even if nothing is said, adjusting ourselves to keep harmony, carrying the emotional labour of a relationship or family.

While this conditioning can be limiting, it also hones an early sensitivity to emotional tone, unspoken tensions, and disconnection. We’re trained, often unconsciously, to sense and hold the relational space around us. My neighbour always said to me, ‘if mum is okay the whole family functions well. If she is not the cracks start to occur’. We are the emotional anchor in the family system.

From a more archetypal or somatic-mystic view, the womb is not just a biological organ but a relational centre; a place where life is created, held, and nourished. Even for women who do not have a physical womb, the energetic imprint always remains. The womb and ovaries have a incredibly strong energetic imprint, so even if you have an hysterectomy, the energetic imprint never leaves you.

This womb-space can sense the field like a tuning fork. It picks up resonance and dissonance, and often prompts us to move toward repair, connection, or withdrawal. So even beyond personality, trauma history, or conditioning—there is an embodied deep knowing that many women carry. A sense of what’s happening in the space between.

The big challenge.

Many women hold the relational field at the expense of themselves.

We track everyone else’s nervous systems, needs, moods—and forget our own. We become hyper-attuned, hyper-responsible, and depleted. This is where somatic reclamation, reconnecting with our body, becomes essential. Learning the skills to come back to your body so you can hear it when it is speaking to you. We learn to track ourselves first, then engage from a resourced place. This is what transforms holding the relational field from a burden into a gift.

It is this gift, that tells us when change is needed.

Women don’t hold the relational field because we ‘should’, we hold it because we are tuned to life, to connection, to what moves between. To coherence in the field, to what is working well and what is not working well.

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

In midlife, the body begins to speak more loudly. Years of holding the field—of tracking, softening, absorbing—can begin to show up as: chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, thyroid dysfunction, mystery symptoms, emotional exhaustion and uproar or a sense of grief no one can name.

Many women reach a point where their bodies refuse to keep playing the role. Where the cost of emotional labor has accumulated and the body keeps the score. Not because we are broken. But because we are done.

I often wonder if all of these health issues in midlife or the tough perimenopause journey experienced by some midlife women are the body’s way of saying:

“You’ve spent a lifetime turning against yourself to preserve connection. Now I’m turning inward to get your attention.”

It’s not our fault. But it is our invitation—to begin again, from the inside out

But we’re also being called now to hold it differently; not by abandoning ourselves, but by anchoring into our bodies, our knowing, our rhythm.

That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for the whole field we’re in.

The healing path isn’t about abandoning our relational gifts. It’s about reclaiming ourselves as part of the field we’re so attuned to.

It’s about learning to: track our own nervous systems first, let others hold space for us, to feel safe saying no, set boundaries without guilt and recognising that we are not here to carry it all alone

This is where deep nervous system healing and somatic work become essential. They help us untangle the pattern of self-abandonment woven into our care.

We were never meant to carry it all.

We are capable of holding so much but we were not meant to hold all of the emotional dysregulation of others, all of the unspoken weight of a relationship. Nor were we meant to hold all of the relational field of a family, the workplace, the world - at the cost and detriment of our own health.

This is a huge price to pay and our midlife transition is the initiation into change we need to let some or all of it go. When this initiation happens it causes change in all the relational fields we are in.

So if you are finding ourself, exhausted or unravelling at midlife, you are not failing, your are awakening. Your body is asking you to step out of the role of ‘holding all the relational energy’ return to yourself.

I work with women who are ready to listen to what their bodies are saying, to come home to their own rhythm, needs, and truth.

Part 2, coming next week…..

Shame and our bodies

Shame has a huge influence over how we perceive and see our bodies. Many people have been strongly influenced culturally to compare our bodies to others, particularly those others we see in the media and popular culture. These are impossible standards to live up to, particularly when we know that technology allows manipulation of photographic images. What we are looking at is not reality.
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So much of what we believe about ourselves, when it comes to body image, comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from our family and larger society. From a very young age we internalise messaging about what we are supposed to eat, how we are supposed to look, who we are supposed to be, who we should love, what we should be able to do.

Our body is centred in all of this.
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Notice there are a lot of should and supposed to be there.

When you look around the world, what is considered healthy and acceptable, changes culturally. Although this has morphed and blended with social media.

Image - Mohammed Nohasi

I was a teenager in the 80s and young adult in the 90s and this was the time where diet culture was everywhere in popular media. It was aerobics everywhere, hello Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. I was an aerobics queen, don't get me wrong it was a lot of fun and a great thing to do with friends, but the body standards were impossible and dangerous. The leotards were ace though!
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This was also the generation in modelling of the waif. Remember Kate Moss when she started out, impossibly thin. So there is a whole generation of 40 and 50 year olds out there who whose mental models of acceptable beauty are based on, excessive exercise, starving yourself and dangerously thin models.
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We are very impressionable in our early years and these impressions around body image last for years. When we don't look like what is portrayed in popular culture as normal, we feel like we aren't enough, like we don't belong. Some of us will go to extremes to fit in. This need to belong is hardwired into our DNA. In Tribal days, we relied on the tribe to be protected and fed. So it literally can feel like a life or death situation when we feel like to don't belong. It puts us into survival mode.
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So as you can see, shame has a lot to say about how we perceive our bodies. We have these internal versions of ourselves based on these external images that relate to our self-esteem. Some of us who suffer pervasive shame over our body image, have some very harsh inner critics. Some of these inner critic parts live deep in our unconscious so they are not always that easy to detect and hear. They way to diminish them is to talk about them. Shame thrives on secrecy; when we talk about our inner critic we starve them of their supply.
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There is a particular type of shame a lot of us feel as we get older. We compare how we are now to our younger selves. We remember when we were really fit and healthy and could do a lot. We remember our young faces, without wrinkles and saggy skin. We remember our hair before it was grey. Some of us go to great lengths to avoid this. There is a particular strength that can be found in accepting ourselves just as we are right now. A happiness, a contentment, a sense of joy.
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Whats the antidote to all this shame?
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Pride, curiousity and open conversations, shut shame down. Learning to love your body and all the amazing things they have done for you is the way through. It might not be easy but it is totally doable.

Need some help? Come talk to me.

Emotional Starvation

The midlife crisis is not really a crisis. It is a slow wake up call from your bodymind asking you for big changes. Come back to who you are, come back to the body. So much of our culture does not support people thriving and being able to be their real selves. Instead it encourages the ego, those survival strategies you built as a kid to get by, to run the show. It traumatises us time and again. So many people I have worked with push themselves outside their window of tolerance time and again, just so they can function in the workplace.

Midlife is the time when you have a chance to set yourself up to thrive in the second half of life. It asks you to take a deep inward look and really commit to sorting out what needs to be healed, whether it is physical, emotional, social or cultural. Lets undo these survival strategies you have going, that are stored in your unconscious so you can come back to the truth of who you really are.

There is nothing wrong with most of us, it is the system that is broken. The culture telling us how we should be, often this is far from our own reality and lived experience.

Your body has an innate intelligence around healing. You don’t have to tell your body to do anything when you cut your finger, it knows what to do. However our brain can override many of the actions that bring us back to homeostasis. This impacts us significantly when it comes to our emotions and the feelings associated with them. We’ve been trained to ignore the bad stuff like the feeling of anger or sadness or grief in our body, so we override it using our powerful brains and coping strategies to numb ourselves.

The common survival patterns I see that are distracting us from this are: I work too hard, I eat too much, I don’t eat enough, I exercise too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And there is a still a sense of hunger within all of us that cannot be touched because really what we want is to feel.

Emotional Starvation I call it. We starve ourselves of feeling these tough emotions so that we can feel safe, fit in and belong and receive love.

We are doing all the “too much” just to keep up in a culture that numbs us to the sensations and emotions we feel in our bodies. We ignore our own need for pleasure. We ignore the warning systems of our nervous system and over ride our own boundaries to fit in and please.

Our ability to be honest with ourselves, intimate with ourselves, comfortable in our own skin become so confined and limited. We go to all the ‘too much’ activities to avoid looking inside, to avoid noticing the basic sensations, messages our body is trying to give us. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, honour our own feelings, emotions and needs it makes intimacy with another really hard.

How can we connect with ourselves? Through connecting with our pleasure. Feeling the sensations is the important guide. We experience the world through our five senses, they are what tells us if something is pleasurable or painful. When we consciously choose pleasure, and bring attention to the sensations of that, we start to recalibrate our system.

Feeling tells us what is safe and what is not, it connects us to what we really want in our life - our desires, and it puts us in touch with our nervous system, teaching us how to listen to it. Pleasure comes from inside of us, we can create it for ourselves.

Next time you feel like doing one of the “too much activities’, see if you can stop yourself in the moment and choose something that is pleasurable to your senses. Create a sensual experience that brings pleasure to you, that allows you to focus on that feeling of it inside of you.

It’s not too hard, start small, walk in the park, consciously eating nutritious food, dance to music your love. Start small, small steps are more sustainable than grand gestures. That is how change happens.

Choose you.

Your purpose - following the path home to you

When we go through our midlife transition, many people start to question everything about their life. This is perfectly normal and common. Our midlife transition is very much about moving from our first adulthood which has been driven very much by our ego; establishing our career wanting to achieve, meeting a partner and starting a family for some, maybe buying a house. The common theme of doing. Our second adulthood about discovering purpose, passion and meaning in our life. We ask ourselves the questions, Why am I here? How can I be more of the real me? What brings me love, joy, calm, happiness in my life.

Our midlife can be a time of great rupture. Some times this is good, sometimes it is not. What it asks of us is to go inward. A journey into our innerworld. Here is where many people, in my opinion, get stuck, using a first adulthood model when it comes to the bigger questions in this transition. Our purpose is not what we do in the world - it is who you are (be). Other people experience your purpose through your sense of ‘beingness’ or being human. It’s not about making things happen, although to be fair, just being yourself and doing work that lights you up, can allow you to really show the world unapologetically who you are.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms moment to moment as you go into your inner world and explore your cultural conditioning, your ego survival strategies, your childhood wounding. It is more a gentle unfolding. It is how you show up moment to moment in life. Who you are, with friends, with your kids, with your partner, talking to your neighbours, doing the dishes, when you are on the train or the bus. It is you in life, in the day to day moments.

We tend to overthink purpose and turn the finding of it into an achievement of great magnitude. When we do that, we become like Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ following the yellow brick road, looking for something outside our ourselves. It is not outside of you, it is in you. Nobody is going to give you a gold medal at the end of your life for finding your purpose. It is the essence of you, the authentic you behind the ego wounding, the persona’s you have created to belong. Who you are to strangers, to animals, in the garden with the earth. It is your strengths, your wounding, who you are in partnership and who you are in friendship. It is who you are with yourself.

We expect our purpose to come to us in an aha! moment. Your purpose blossoms within you. Is is a gentle unfolding, moment to moment.

Midlife is the right time to start this journey for a lot of people because we have the life skills, experience, knowledge and understanding to discern what is really going on for us and in some way our psyche knows this. For women, I often wonder whether the shifts of our hormones starts this quest, this journey of coming home to you, the essence of who you are. You can’t use logic and reason to find your purpose, all you have to do is start to make friends with your emotions, look through the lens’ of conditioning that have imposed views of how you should ‘be’.

When we push on our edges, beyond what is comfortable, when we make mistakes, when we let ourselves slow down, in our moments of stillness; we learn to be with ourselves. Your purpose is your journey of life, in some ways I think our learning journey is a constant state of learning who we are. Who we are in a bigger picture of collective humanity. Of a collective state of being.

For some people it can take their whole lifetime to get to this state, for others they find it sooner. There is no rush, go slowly and gently. My motto in life, SLOW is MORE.