Welcome to Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow and the Divine Feminine Awakening Series.
An integral part of our leadership, sovereignty and empowerment is rooted in our inner fire. Even more specifically our instinctual capacity to self protect. This innate capacity enables us to effectively set boundaries, have courageous conversations and make bold requests in our lives.
Amid the backdrop of the #Metoo movement this 2017 re-release episode explores the ways we’ve been conditioned as women to turn off this capacity and how we can begin to reclaim it.
Discussed in the episode:
- Self Protection: What it means and why it’s important
- How the impact of the ME TOO movement is changing the dynamic of our society
- Why it’s so important for us to trust in our physical bodies and our emotions.
- Where our ferocity and instinct to self-protect really comes from.
- A short but powerful exercise to help you find the place where you can set boundaries from.
This Divine Feminine Awakening series provides emerging wisdom from my own journey of feminine awakening delivered episode by episode in real-time over the last 5 years. Through my present-day lens, I’ve chosen the most vital topics to revisit with you.
May you recognize and receive tools, wisdom and landmarks for your own journey of awakening.
To join me in community, go here.
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Read the Full Transcript Here:
Welcome to Trust your Sacred Feminine Flow. I’m your host, Joni Advent Maher, I’m a spiritual midwife and a transformational guide, and I’m so glad to be with you today.
We’re at the time of the year where life is reborn. We’ve come through the darkness into the time of the growing light. As we look into the new year, personally, I’m feeling deeply called to share with you beloved ways to access those deeper resources within you and within life that can help you move through your life with greater grace and ease and to stand fully in your sovereignty. So today I want to talk about an important subject, our innate capacity to self-protect. Now you may wonder what that means and why it’s important. And at its roots, it’s really an aspect of our fundamental instinctual physical nature that’s rooted in our nervous system. So in our nervous systems, when we are healthy and whole, when something that feels threatening occurs, we instinctively act to protect ourselves.
And the example I can think of is if you go to fall, you instinctively put your hand down without even thinking about it. Your body will naturally do this, unless there has been something to disarm that capacity within you, which can sometimes occur. And the reason I’m bringing this up is not so much to talk about physically our capacity to self protect, but to go to the idea of how we self-protect in our relationships. I’m bringing this up for two reasons. It’s actually been something I’ve been chewing on for a few months now, as I’ve been unwinding some old, old, old trauma peeling back the layers of the onion of some relational trauma for my own history. And then as the Me Too movement has been emerging and we’ve been hearing more and more and more women coming forward. It really came to me that this is an important topic for us to discuss because personally, I believe that we as individual women and collectively are being called to evolve into reclaim our capacity to self protect and to reclaim these innate and instinctual aspects of our self that would allow us in relationship to take a stand, to protect ourselves, to claim our space from a place of wholeness, from a place of dignity, from a place of deep rootedness in our sacred nature in our personhood.
So it’s clear that things are changing on the planet. It’s clear that things are changing in our world and certainly between men and women. And for so long, we, as women have been conditioned, frankly, to disable our own capacity to protect ourselves, we have been conditioned to override and to tamp down and to discount our own instincts when it comes to relationships, we have been conditioned to be the good girl, many of us, and with that came our abdication of looking after ourselves in some very essential ways. And so I frankly believe that we have disconnected from our bodies. We have disconnected from our emotions that both have the capacity to give us wisdom and instincts and information that enable us to respond to situations. So when you think about the situations that have been occurring in terms of women coming forward related to their Me Too stories, first of all, those stories happened, women were violated, women’s boundaries were crossed, inappropriate things were happening.
And the vast percentage of us as women were silenced, we were silenced and we carried the shame for what happened in one way, shape or form. And that is changing one by one. And as each woman steps forward, it increases others’ capacity to do the same. And my sense is that there is this, for lack of a better word, light switch, that’s getting turned on or this fire that’s getting ignited within us, this place that says no more. And I certainly know that has been my experience as well. The more and more I have come into my own body and my own being and my own feminine sovereignty and claim to my sacred nature. There is that way in which I will no longer tolerate mistreatment. I will no longer tolerate disrespect. I will no longer tolerate someone crossing my boundaries. And that is a very potent and powerful state of being.
And it’s a state of being I want for you. And I want for every girl and woman on the planet, and again, this experience, the state is not about becoming overly aggressive. It’s really about embodying our wholeness. It’s about embodying that fierce lioness energy or that mother bear energy that just kick’s in at the thought of someone coming to try and harm her young cub. And there’s a way in which we have cut that fierce part of ourselves off in an attempt to be polite. Amazing. And this is a big deal because it cuts us off from the source of our own power. For so long, we have been conditioned to believe that our power and our protection lay outside of us, that we needed to be pleasing and we needed to be agreeable and we needed to be submissive in order to be protected.
And so we cut off from those places within us that would say, in a situation, this doesn’t feel good to me. I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t like this. And we silenced ourselves and we were silenced often by our very own mothers and they by their mothers and they by their mothers because of the inequitable distribution of power in the patriarchy. It was essential for us to stay silent. Sometimes our survival depended upon it as women, but as we all know, things are changing and we are now, we are the generations of women who have the capacity to come back online to reignite that fire in our belly. And to finally take those stands and say no more I can and will protect myself. So when you think about a young one, whether it’s an infant or a little one, if you try to engage them in something that they don’t want to participate in, or they don’t feel good about, they instinctively take their hand and they push away.
I can just see it right now. That idea of a little one, just pushing away and saying no. And that is that visceral instinctual place within us that says, I don’t want any part of that. And of course in polite society, we all have to learn to “behave and comply and go along with things” however, when it gets taken to the extreme, it cuts us off completely from that capacity to say no, deep breath, deep breath. Yeah. So how many times in your life ,beloved, have you wanted to say no. And you didn’t feel like you could?
How many times did you betray yourself or saddle or live with something that wasn’t serving you because you didn’t feel safe enough to speak up or have a courageous conversation, or just simply say, I don’t like this. Too many! Too many times, even once is too many. So it’s time, it’s time beloved. It’s time to access those resources that are deep within you that allow you and give you that capacity to self protect and to preserve yourself and your wellbeing and to preserve your resources and your assets, whether they be your peace of mind, your energy, your physical wellbeing, or even your finances. And I believe that we are the generations and that we are called to do this work, not just for ourselves to do this healing, not just for us, but certainly for our daughters, for our granddaughters and for our mothers and our grandmothers and all those women that came before us that sacrificed and that had to disable that capacity to self-protect that had to become submissive in order to seek protection and had to betray themselves.
And so my beloved sister, the way back, what is our way back first and foremost, it is to recognize our right, to protect ourselves, to make people uncomfortable if necessary, to speak up on our own behalf and to say, no, as it’s been said, many times, it’s a complete sentence. No. So sometimes it can be as simple as preserving our energy and turning down an invitation to yet another holiday party or event. And sometimes it can be speaking up boldly to a partner, to a boss, to a child, to a parent, and just letting them know clearly what you need or that you have limits. That’s a biggie for us as women, that we have limits that we can self protect and not carry it all, not take it all on for everyone around us. The other thing that is so critical in this is that we begin to learn to trust our bodies and our emotions, and that we really take the time to come back to ourselves, physically and emotionally.
And what I mean by that is to employ some simple practices like using the breath and breathing down deep into that belly, where that fire, whether it’s just a flicker or a massive bomb, fire lives, and to breathe to that space and to feel our rootedness and our connectedness with mother earth and with all her creatures, because they do all carry the same instinct to self protect and to preserve themselves and their wellbeing. And because they don’t have the same pieces that we deal with in terms of relationship, they don’t have the prefrontal cortex, which complicates everything, the mind, the stories, the expectations that this is how it should be. This is how nice women, this is how good daughters, this is how good wives, this is how good mothers behave. They don’t have those stories that they’re running.
So those instinctual natures are much more intact than our own. So the same idea of coming back to the physical body and listening, listening to when we’re tired and we just need rest listening to that constriction in the chest or that tightness in the gut that says something’s going on, that I need to pay attention to tuning in and listening to our emotions and learning to trust them, learning, to trust our bodies and our emotions, and to come to embrace them both as wise teachers and as our own, the love it’s as we would cherish our own newborn, that we would tenderly tend both our physical bodies and our emotions and know that they guide us. They are what guide us and assist us in protecting ourselves in recognizing what is off. When we feel anger, when we feel resentment, when we feel upset, it’s telling us there is something off in the relational field it’s telling us either that we’re giving away too much of ourselves, that we’re betraying ourselves in a way that’s not useful, or someone is taking advantage of us or something needs to shift. So our feelings in our body are a powerful guide.
Another aspect that is beneficial is that we get comfortable with our fierceness. And I can tell you as a woman of a certain age, that once we reach a certain phase in our life journey, usually in our midlife and when our hormones start shifting, the fierceness starts to kick in and there is less attention to other people’s opinions or what other people think. And it just becomes about being true to ourselves and not just in a conceptual way, but again, going back to our body and our emotions. So being true to ourselves in a way that is in alignment with our body, heart, and spirit, and being true in that way and being willing to be fierce. So I know for myself, I have cultivated the capacity to feel that fire in my belly, to feel it in my core, to have it come and rise up to my heart space and to be able to give that look that says “don’t mess with me.”
Reminds me a little bit of the movie scene from Fried Green Tomatoes where Kathy Bates’ character rams into the young girl with her big Cadillac and starts using the phrase Towanda. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s well worth it. She is really coming into her fierceness. And the final piece I want to say about this is this idea about using our ferocity, not again, to be aggressive or destructive and not out of fear, but really this it’s like that ferocity or our impulse to self-protect ultimately comes from deep and abiding love. Self-love, love for humankind, love for all creation.
It is that full being full body. Ferocious love that says, hell no, hell no, it’s that capacity. That is the game changer for all of humanity. It is the feminine rising in each of us through our own physical instinctual nature. So I want to take just a moment with you to take you through an exercise and just give you a taste. So if you’re able to sit back and relax, or actually even stand, if you’re sitting, I want you to have both feet on the ground, and I want you to feel your pelvis and your base balanced and rooted and feel those feet rooted onto the earth. And I want you to breathe down, down, down, down to where you could touch your paraniem, which is between your genitals and your anus.
I want you to bring your breath all the way down to your root and to feel that rootedness connected with the chair, connected with the sofa, just take some deep breaths. And as you inhale, bring that awareness up to your pelvic bowl. And I want you to imagine a cauldron in that womb space in that pelvic bowl. And I want you to envision a flame in there and just see how big is that flame? Is it a small flicker? Is it a nice fire that warms your being? Or is it a raging raging fire? Using your breath, I want you to imagine breathing that fire and letting it grow up, up, up through your center, where you can see those flames in your heart space, the love in your heart, burning with the fire in your belly, and then imagine bringing those flames up into your throat that would enable you to speak out and speak your truth clearly and boldly.
And then again, to bring that fire up into your eyes and to just imagine, or even experiment with giving a fiery stare, just let yourself gaze out in front of you. You might even imagine someone from your past that you’re staring at, that you would want to just give them that fiery stare that starts deep down in your root and into your belly. And you’re able to look them in the eye in this moment, and you’re giving them that, “Pardon me? Don’t mess with me, stare”. Who would it be in your life that you would want to give that look to and to feel what it feels like in your body to let that molten core fire get stoked and to inhabit that in your being, that is the place we set our boundaries from. That is the place that allows us to respond to whatever life brings our way.
And that’s what this is about. It’s about reclaiming that resource for yourself, so that you have the capacity when you need it. And it’s not that you need to meet the world from that place all the time. But to know that you have that within you, that you can use at any given time, should you need to so that you have that capacity to turn that pilot light up, to turn that fire up and to use it, to use it in the service of love for your wellbeing, for the wellbeing of humanity and the wellbeing of this planet. So beloved it’s time to wrap it up for another episode. As I said earlier in the coming year, I will be providing a number of opportunities for you to access those resources that are deep within you and deep within the matrix of life that can support you in standing in your sovereignty and living your most empowered and grace filled life.
I’m getting started in January with a free event on January 11th, I’m offering a free introduction to creating personal altars. It’s going to be a fun and creative way to use symbolism and beauty to bring this powerful matrix of support into your life or your personal space in a tangible way. We’re going to have a lot of fun. So that will be January 11th at 1:00 PM Eastern standard time. If you’d like to sign up and join me, you can go to the website, revolutionary heart.com. It will be a recorded event. So if you can not join me live, you can access the recording. You can also access my free gift Standing in your Sovereignty there as well. If you haven’t claimed that already. So again, it’s revolutionaryheart.com. Until next time, I’m sending you my love and reminding you to always trust what your heart knows.