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You don’t have to be a healer, coach or creative to be following the feminine career path. It’s possible for women across almost all industries to find a feminine way to do their work in the world.
So what exactly is a feminine career path? And how can you incorporate more of the feminine into your current work?
My first full time job was in a hospital pharmacy department. I knew nothing but I was eager to learn and to become as knowledgeable and insightful as the senior pharmacists who could manage complex patients and knew all the fancy things about drugs.
Fast forward six years, I’m now managing a team of pharmacists, and I still feel like I know nothing. Sure it seems like I know what I’m talking about, but part of me feels like such a fraud. Everyone else is so much more intellectual, research-savvy, rational and just smarter.
It’s about this time that I begin to realize that more intellectual knowledge, more smarts, might not really be what I need long term in life.
But what else is there? If we’re not getting smarter, doing more research, learning more theory, knowing all the facts, what else does someone do with their life? It was about this time I was, in a roundabout way, introduced to the embodied arts, a feminine path that dramatically changed my life.
Where once I was so interested in knowing more.
I became interested in feeling more.
Where once I found the truth in the evidence and research.
Now I found the truth in my own body.
Where I was always looking for how I could shake this sense of shame of not knowing more and being the pharmacist who was as smart as my seniors.
I now embraced the shame and found a whole other skillset – a skill set of sensitivity and feeling my body – was wanting to be lived inside me.
This is the feminine path.
A path that isn’t only concerned with intellectual, logical advancement.
But which is most concerned with feeling, expanding depth.
Here are my 5 favorite ways to incorporate the feminine in your career, whatever work you do – pharmacist or embodiment coach!
1. Balance value of your intellect, with the value of your feelings
We’re all raised in a society that values smarts and tells women that they feel too much and are too erratic.
Well newsflash, there is power in the feminine.
Our feelings are just as important, valuable and necessary as our intellect. But when we, as women don’t embrace these feelings, value these feelings, and learn to navigate and work with our feelings – instead of bottling them up and suppressing them under our little vices and distractions.
Then the world is never going to find a way to include a feminine seat at the board room table.
Practically what this might look like is – you’re at work, for yourself or someone else and an emotion or intensity of feeling arises – don’t shut it away to deal with some other time 20 years down the track. Pause, in the moment, gift yourself two minutes to sit with what you’re feeling. Let yourself feel it fully, and let the energy of that moment complete. It’s a simple little embodiment practice you can use when you kick your toe or receive a rude email from your boss.
Process your emotions at the moment, don’t put them on ice. Value the feelings that arise, they are your allies.
2. Hold Healthy Boundaries
The second tip to incorporate the feminine into your career is to hold healthy boundaries. I’ve got to tell you, women are terrible at holding healthy boundaries – because for centuries the martyr in us has been celebrated. Selflessly giving, overdelivering, going over and above. Good women are women who give, and so many of us have learned to do this in our own businesses and in our work. Giving, giving, giving, giving 110% when everyone else is giving 80%.
Staying late, stressing over getting it perfect. These boundaries are not healthy. And the result of martyrdom is often a sense of bitterness and resentment. Giving what we don’t really want to give.
The feminine, she asks us to hold healthy boundaries. Boundaries based on love, not obligation or martyrdom. The world doesn’t need more of that from women.
3. Take a bleeding day!
Third tip – take a bleeding day. The first day of our period, the day we bleed the heaviest is the most introspective day of our bleed. It’s the single most important day – in my opinion – to rest and replenish. Of course, whether we’re working for ourselves or for someone else it might not always seem possible to take the day off. Perhaps you’ve got meetings, it looks flaky to call in sick or there is simply too much work. But who are you helping if you don’t rest, and show up at only 80% capacity for the other 29 days of your cycle?
Rest now, reap the rewards later.
I track my cycle via Clue and gratefully now manage my own schedule so it’s possible to lessen the load on those days and stay in bed a little longer.
If you’re working for a boss talk about creating a bleeding day that you can use sick leave for or at least some special consideration to lighten your duties for the day.
4. Beauty, ritual, pausing for pleasure
Okay, so this one is one of my favorites. The feminine is concerned with love, radiance, and beauty. She desires to enrich everything with more wonder. So, beauty, ritual and pausing for pleasure are a big part of incorporating the feminine into the way you work.
On my work desk, you’ll find simple adornments, crystals, lamps, oils, flowers, soft lighting and relaxing tunes to bring more radiance into my office. Where is your beauty found?
5. Consider a career change
Final tip, perhaps like me after making all the internal changes in the world you just have to consider a career change. For me, entering the world of feminine embodiment which is concerned with guiding women to fully inhabit themselves, through being intimate with their body and the sensations and textures of their internal worlds is simply the shit.
There is an infinite world of depth here that will forevermore keep me intrigued and interested to work and play with.
If you’re interested in becoming a Feminine Embodiment Coach consider joining internationally recognized, 6mth coaching training – you can join the waitlist at www.jennaward.co/certification. We’d love to see if this career could be a fit for you. Enrollment opens soon.
Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear from you in the comments below how you weave the feminine into the way you work.
+ Is there a suggestion here you’re going to implement?
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