Welcome back to the podcast and the second discussion of David Deida’s Intimate Communion. If you missed last week’s episode you must go back and take a listen because I talked about chapter 8: The Masculine Way from Deida’s book which if you are the more masculine in your relationship it will give you more insight and understanding of yourself and if you are the more feminine energy in the relationship it will give you a better understanding of your partner. In both Chapters, Deida does a beautiful job of integrating both energies into the discussion so if you only listen to one of these episodes you will find yourself missing out on a whole piece that will help you create a better understanding of how each of you are showing up in your relationship.
As we explore the feminine way I will also share some aspects of the masculine way, just as Deida does to help you grasp the difference between the two. This contrast will help you also see how you might be overusing the opposite energy to your disadvantage. By the way, if you are of the more feminine way this chapter beautifully describes who you are, possibly not who you are showing up as, but who you are at your core. I’m going to start with sharing what the feminine way looks like, then how the feminine and masculine way differ and then I will get into the three stages of the feminine way, which is the core of transformation I bring my clients through in AwakenYou.
The Feminine Way
Let’s take a closer look at the feminine way, a look that is more descriptive of who the feminine is at their core. Deida says “The feminine is the force of life itself, and you can experience it in many ways.” This sentence in of itself opened my heart up wide. In the book he goes on to describe a few different ways the feminine force might manifest itself. Here are a few examples that come to mind for me:
- You’re out for your morning run and the sun disappears behind the clouds as rain fills the sky, you smile, you raise your hands in celebration, you run faster while jumping like a child in the puddles forming along the way
- You’re chopping vegetables for your delightful dinner and a song comes on that makes your hips sway, your hands go in the air and the vocals bellow out from deep within.
- You are focusing on writing that next little piece for your social media when your puppy comes prancing along the way begging you to play. You get down on the floor and pretend you too are a little one full of bursting energy and love.
At the core of the Feminine is radiance and the only way to magnify the inherent radiance of the Feminine is love. When your heart radiates love, you are radiant. This my friends is the final step and goal of my AwakenYou coaching program, for the feminine to reach radiance from within instead of from outside of herself.
The masculine looks to the feminine for completion says Deida, and so the more the feminine shines the more they will fulfill their masculine partner’s desire for completion, without doing much else.
The feminine is what we seek: the force of attraction and enchantment. Like the sunrise or the sunset, a flower or a newborn, the feminine attracts and enchants us, opening our hearts to beauty and love. Deida explains that this is what we seek when we go on a vacation, we seek the extraordinary natural beauty of the world so we can bask in Her enchantment.
The feminine desires to be noticed, it is the natural sign of a more feminine sexual essence. I hope this will bring you the liberation it brought me, though I do realize much of my desire to seek approval from the opposite sex through my appearance was early conditioning but this idea that Deida presents allows me to love the adventure of wanting to be attractive for myself first but also for my husband. Deida talks about our masculine-dominated culture seeing a desire to be attractive self-centered or petty but that sensitivity to attractiveness is actually a “natural recognition of the power, depth, and beauty of one of the qualities of the feminine force.” Deida also notes that there is also a feminine radiance in men which will have them grow from a “macho slob to a clean and attractive gentleman;” but that if he cherishes his attractiveness more than that of his chosen woman he isn’t in intimate communion, he is in the 50/50 directionality.
“The feminine lives in the world of sensation, the world of the body, the world of unseen connection to the flow of elements and natural forces.” This can be true for either the one with more of the masculine or feminine. “Any person, man or woman, who is thus connected to the world around him or her has a highly developed feminine. Whereas extreme masculine energy is focused on what is straight ahead of them, never pausing to see the beauty along one side or another without distraction, unaware of his body or the relations going on around him.
The feminine is a loving sensuality that is alive in the body and quite a delight to gaze upon yet many of us are pulled away from fully embracing our feminine full-bodied flow for a preference to our masculine relationship to the world: goal-orientated, staying mental and sharp, seriousness in it all.
Relationship is top priority to the feminine, when it is going well, she feels happy and radiant, it is central to her emotional being. The tone of her intimate relationship permeates out into her day. This is the opposite for the masculine, when he leaves the house his relationship is behind him, a disagreement in the morning does not affect his ability to carry on with what is ahead of him.
Deida talks about how the feminine will stay too long in a relationship, opening and closing depending on how things are going. When her partner is being nice and attentive she starts to open up while the opposite has her closing down but not leaving. The masculine leaves too soon, if his life is going well he is moving deeper but will pull away when things appear to not be going well.
Knowing the way of both the masculine and feminine sexual essences helps you understand how to make your relationship more magnetic as well as depolarizing. With the masculine essence being about direction, the feminine essence can support their direction which will cause sexual polarization or the feminine can mistrust the direction of the masculine which will be a source of devastating depolarization and tension. Similarly, putting a damper on a woman’s radiance will depolarize her sexual essence while letting her shine and encouraging her uniqueness will bring a magnetic polarization to the relationship. Discovering ways to be gentle and kind around inspiring the masculine towards a different direction or sharing with the feminine how you love when she is radiant will allow your opinion to come through without numbing each other’s sexual essence.
The feminine way is to hear mood and tone through the words the masculine speaks while the masculine tells the feminine how to do when the feminine speaks how she feels.
The feminine flows through her day while the masculine focuses on one thing at a time and our culture puts a higher value for the masculine go than the feminine flow. I love Deida’s analogy of how our culture pays to navigate the boat while diminishing the value of the flow of the ocean upon which the boat rides. Like the flow of the ocean, the feminine is often taken for granted and from this I can clearly see why so many women diminish their true feminine power while mistakenly taking on the masculine power to prove herself and her value in this world.
Deida talks about how the feminine can get in her own way by allowing emotion to get in the way of clear thinking and effective action but that equally, or perhaps more often, the masculine allows clear thinking to get in the way of love. We know that without love our lives are empty, that’s why my clients come to me, they are seeking love in their relationship.
“The feminine is a force of creation and destruction,” this statement helped me to embrace the “strongly wild and destructive aspect” of my feminine nature and helps me to clearly see how the masculine throughout my life has tried to calm that inner fury. I can see clearly how when cultivated that strength can be channeled into good, keeping the relationship charging forward instead of watering it down into something less than exciting.
Right along with that, our culture tends to be unappreciative of the always timely connection the feminine has with nature and their intuitive intelligence of the body and mind, with the masculine mind attempting to prove the world with science and facts that quickly become outdated and needing to be continually revised. The masculine wanting to “pin the feminine down and keep her contained, rather than allowing her to flow as she will.”
When we, the feminine essence sell out our femininity for the masculine way we disempower our core strength, similarly attracting the masculine whose sexual essence has likewise been disempowered. Deida shares that the first step to evoking more masculine energy from your current partner is to cultivate your ability to trust your own feminine core. As you learn how to relax into your “feminine essence’s inherent attractiveness, radiance, wildness, spontaneity, and intuitive connection with life, you will empower your core and you will shine. Then you will automatically evoke in your man a strong masculine sexual essence. Again, another affirmation for my AwakenYou program because this is the essence of my program, when I created it and as I continue to create the actions that are at the front of my mind is “revitalizing essence,” this is the underlying goal of everything we do in the program.
I would love to just read every delicious word in the book to you but my job here was to try to narrow down the gold mine and get you excited to discover something new for you in your life. In that discovery finding the spark to start the journey of letting go of the masculine you have understandably turned to in order to move ahead and begin to awaken the feminine within,
The three stages of the feminine way
Remember that the masculine is constantly hoping that their mission will satisfy them while the feminine is constantly hoping that her intimate relationship will satisfy her. Her deepest desire in life is to feel loved so throughout the three stages of the feminine way she lives her life in an effort to be fulfilled in love.
First stage love
In this first stage, the one with the feminine essence will often give up her own needs and desires in an effort to “get” love from her man. This is often the beginning of all of her relationships. This goes hand in hand with the masculine first stage of directionality and a dependent relationship.
Second stage love
As time goes along in her relationship, the feminine discovers that stage one does not satisfy her, at this point she often undergoes a crisis and chooses to be strong, establishing her independence financially and emotionally. She begins to focus on herself, her creative talents and her gifts while cultivating her masculine energy to double down and create her independence often in the shape of her career. She begins to learn how to give herself love, to love herself instead of always seeking love and approval outside of herself again by using the masculine discipline to do so. This is the complement of the masculine second stage directionality which is the 50/50 relationship where she resolves to be in an intimate relationship but that she is essentially her own woman. She fulfills her own needs and is no longer dependent on the masculine to make her feel good about herself.
Third stage love
Interestingly, as time goes on in stage two the feminine discovers she is doubly in despair. Her feminine core is unsatisfied by the lack of love she receives from her man and she is also unsatisfied with the love she is getting from her own masculine. She is still desiring a man to share her love with. Her heart is still yearning for more love in her life, her heart may feel ok but it is not overwhelmed by love. Her next crisis begins when she discovers that she can’t get enough love from him and she can’t give herself enough love, she yearns for more, she feels hopeless.
Deida compares this second to third stage crisis equivalent to the masculine mid-life crisis of emptiness and inauthenticity in life. During this crisis, if the feminine is willing to cultivate, explore and allow herself to relax into this despair, Deida states that the yearning itself will reveal her divine nature. This means that if she can be “open to the darkness without attempting to fill the hole in her heart with outside distractions like food, social activity and intimate hopes, this dark hole will eventually widen to the size of the universe. If you close your eyes and envision your heart widened to infinity, this is where absolute love flows with no obstruction.
Deida states that it is rare for a woman to allow herself this degree of heart vulnerability, just as it is rare for the man to allow himself the degree of self-death required to enter stage three directionality. Instead women will keep searching for the right man or hoping their man will change, but it will never happen unless the feminine goes through the stage two crisis into a heart-opening without protection. Not until she is able to have an unguarded heart open in love with no expectation of being given love in return.
Though this third stage feminine heart may be frequently wounded because it is not protected, she is able to feel the love she allowed and never lets her heart be closed by the pain it feels. “Love and openness are the nature of the thrid-stage feminine heart, even in the midst of hurt.”
Now the heart is always open in love and the feminine heart is finally pervaded by the love it has always been searching for. The thrid stage feminine opens in the inherent love of God, in every present moment, as a practice, either alone or in the midst of relationship.
Reclaiming the feminine gift and trusting the force of life
As I wrap up I can’t leave out what Deida leaves us with, and I challenge all of us feminine powers to consider the work of reclaiming your gift and trusting its force.
We live in a masculine-dominated culture forcing most of us to not be fully free in our feminine expression, we deny her force and beauty. As you allow yourself to ease into your feminine essence notice how that tightness in your solar plexus eases, how the shallowness of your breath deepens.
I want to encourage you in this moment if you are able to close your eyes and imagine how much happier you would be if you spent more time moving with the force of life, dancing, singing, making love instead of having sex, walking in the woods or the garden instead of constantly pushing ourself along a path we think is leading us to where we want to go? What if you could soften into the truth and guidance of the feminine force of life. Remind yourself of the truth that love is not logical, there is not a planned out direction to it, it flows as it should. Our masculine mind cannot fully embrace that which is the feminine, can you surrender to its flow?
“This intelligence, this wisdom of love, this genius that is inherent in a radiantly alive, open and sensitive body, is the intelligence necessary for spontaneous and skillful means within our intimate relationship. It is one of the gifts of the feminine force.”
With that, I will leave you, my friends. This chapter on the feminine way in Deida’s Intimate Communion makes my heart swell with inspiration to continue the work within my AwakenYou program. It’s like Deida wrote this chapter for me but I know that had I read this prior to creating my program it wouldn’t have felt right. I know that I had to discover it on my own and it helps validate that I am on the right path, I am on my own path and that I know exactly how to create that path when I stay true to who I believe I am and my mission.
I’d love to hear what resonated with you throughout these two episodes reviewing the masculine and feminine ways and what you might be taking forward into your journey to Awakening your true you in your marriage.
I am a life coach who works with individuals to break down relationship barriers by awakening their true selves. My process isn’t about changing your partner, it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage. If you’re ready to take your life and your love relationship to the next level then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s decide together if this is your next step to creating the life you’ve been dreaming of.
