In our busy day-to-day lives, we can often forget to pause and feel our way back into our incredible feminine strength, beauty, power, wisdom and intuition.
If you’ve been feeling frazzled, out of touch, or disconnected, here are five ways to truly celebrate being a woman.
1. Celebrate Your Femininity
This is all about doing something for YOU that makes YOU feel your most amazing, beautiful, confident, sweet, sexy self.
Maybe it’s wearing beautiful ‘special occasion’ underwear on a seemingly normal day. It could be adorning yourself with special jewelry or a head piece or donning some killer heels. Take a long bath filled with epsom salts, do a full body scrub and put on a face mask, lovingly rub lotion into your incredible body celebrating and loving every curve.
Or put on some music and dance around the house, really connect to and feel your body move from the inside out, allowing the movements to come right from the source of your deep feminine. Maybe you wear a floaty gypsy dress and walk barefoot over the earth or dedicate a day to listening to only your needs and indulge in them in every moment.
Whatever it is that makes you feel like a woman, that makes you feel fully connected to your femininity — however you see being feminine — for just one day, do that.
2. Develop a Sadhana
Do something for yourself that nourishes and nurtures you every day. In yoga, this is known as a Sadhana — a daily spiritual practice — and it doesn’t really matter what it includes, what matters is that you DO IT!
A Sadhana is a time where you can be honest with yourself about your challenges and innermost feelings, for unless you realise them, you cannot hope to release and change them. It is not a time for judgment but rather for honest reflection and sacred space.
A sadhana practice can be a simple 10 minute yoga practice, a 5 minute meditation, some time set aside for journaling or you could even chant a mantra or go for a walk in nature. The idea is to have a practice that calms the mind and brings more awareness to the present moment.
This daily anchor helps you to see things how they really are, transcend your circumstances and shine your light out into the world.
3. Honour Your Cycles
Everything in the world moves in cycles, you only have to look around you at nature to see how true this is – the cycle of night and day, the sun and the moon and the seasonal cycles.
With a monthly cycle of our own women are already so deeply tuned into this cyclical nature of life but we seem to have forgotten our connection not only to nature’s cycles but also to our own natural cycle and intuitive wisdom as a woman.
Research shows that you will feel more loving, sexy, withdrawn, inspired, shanti, creative and even intuitive depending on where you are in your cycle. So get to know yourself and start to notice your patterns – when are you at your most creative?
Are you more tired/hungry around the full/new moon? Where does your cycle fall in relation to the moon? When are you most emotional? Most intuitive? As you tune into your own cycles, you'll have greater access to your own magic and understand yourself on a deeper level.
4. Call Upon Your Inner Goddess
In Hindu tradition, Shakti, divine feminine power, is said to take on the form of Goddesses or deities. Connecting with this energy can help you to tap into your own inner source of empowerment, creativity, strength and transformation.
Deep within us all is the strength and power of Durga, the abundance and manifesting power of Lakshmi, Saraswati’s creativity and passion, the love and romance of Radha and the loyalty and devotion of Sita – to name just a few!
The mystical power of these deities comes to life when invoked and contemplating their qualities can help you to tap into the same qualities in yourself. You can call upon your inner Deities for extra inspiration, insight, strength and help, calling forth transformative powers from within your mind and heart to help change the way you see yourself and the world.
Whenever you feel like you need a little helping hand it’s never far away, simply invoke your favourite Goddess and watch the way that they rush in to lend you all the support, protection and guidance that you need
5. Go On an All-Women Retreat
Time with other women can be so empowering and important. Spending time with other women allows you to draw on each other’s strength and experiences and helps shape you as a person.
Women can provide emotional and spiritual support for each other, holding a space to allow you to be exactly where you are and helping you through your healing processes.
There is no better feeling in the world than the feeling of being surrounded by pure Shakti energy — women coming together to support and nurture each other, create change, celebrate life and tune deeply into the messages of our bodies, our intuition and our instinct to find our own true rhythm.
I’d love to hear from you how these ideas work, or what you do to tune deeply into your Shakti power and feel truly like a woman. Share your thoughts below!