The Pulse Beneath It All

Feminine intelligence, life force and the dance of creation

There is a pulse beneath so much of what we do. Before the project has a name, before the idea becomes a plan, before something is organised, produced or offered to the world, there is often a movement—a flicker of desire, an impulse, an image, a sensation, something stirring in the body that says there is life here.

I am interested in that movement.

Within the language of energetics, one way I explore it is through the qualities we have traditionally called feminine and masculine. Not female and male, and certainly not a prescription for how women and men should behave, but different energetic qualities through which life can move and take form. The feminine, speaks to receptivity, sensation, creativity, intuition, movement, relationship, gestation, wildness, sensuality and the capacity to receive what has not yet become fully formed. There is potency in that and I think we've sometimes mistaken receptivity for passivity because we have become so accustomed to measuring power by what is visible: action, productivity, direction, speed, output, control.

Yet anyone who has sat with an idea before it is ready, created something from nothing, listened deeply to the body, made art, birthed a project, moved with desire or remained present to an experience without immediately trying to fix it knows that receptivity can be an extraordinarily active state. Something is happening. Something is gathering.Something is becoming.

Within Tantric traditions, Shakti offers a beautiful spiritual language for this; the dynamic, creative movement of life, consciousness in expression, energy taking form. I don't need that language to become a scientific explanation for what we experience. I value it as a spiritual and experiential lens through which we can explore our relationship with life force, creativity and the movement of energy through the human instrument. and yet the feminine doesn't exist in isolation.

This is where my relationship with the masculine has also become more interesting. The masculine, in its coherent expression, can bring direction, discernment, containment, presence, clarity and structure. Not domination of the wild, but enough presence for the wild to move without losing itself. Its where stillness meets movement. Direction meets receptivity. Structure meets creative process and conscious attention meets the pulse of life.

When these qualities are in relationship rather than opposition, something beautiful can happen. What is felt can find expression. What is imagined can find structure. What is received can be acted upon. The creative impulse can travel from the unseen into form. This is where the dance becomes far more interesting, than trying to decide whether we need “more feminine” or “more masculine.”

We need relationship between them and that relationship will not look identical in every human being.

Our histories, bodies, conditioning, environments, cultures, relationships and individual nature all participate in how these qualities have been developed, suppressed, distorted or expressed. Some of us have become magnificent at doing and almost frightened of receiving. Others can feel enormous creative possibility but struggle to give it enough structure to enter the world. We may know how to hold everything together while having forgotten how to move spontaneously, or become so identified with freedom that commitment itself feels like confinement.

This is why I prefer to speak about dissonance and harmonisation rather than deciding one quality is good and another bad. The question becomes: How are these energies actually moving through me? Not how feminine should I be. Not how masculine should I be, but what is asking for greater relationship of coherence here?

I find this particularly alive when we look at the systems we participate in. Many of our workplaces, financial structures and ideas about success have rewarded qualities such as speed, productivity, linearity and constant output. Those qualities are not inherently problematic. Direction and action can be wonderful. The dissonance appears when one way of functioning becomes so dominant that other forms of intelligence have little room to participate. A system that knows how to produce but not how to pause. A leader who knows how to direct but not receive.A human being who can achieve but cannot feel when enough is enough.A creative person overflowing with ideas but unable to give any of them form.

The answer isn't to throw out structure and all go dancing barefoot through the forest—although I'm certainly not opposed to the occasional barefoot dance. It is to become more sensitive to the whole instrument. Can we recognise when direction has become force? Can we feel when receptivity has become collapse? Can we distinguish stillness from avoidance, surrender from giving ourselves away, structure from control, wildness from reactivity?

This is where energetic language becomes useful only when we bring it back into lived experience.

We can feel these qualities. There are moments when the body wants to soften and receive, and others when something very clear wants to move forward. There are times when an idea needs spaciousness and times when it needs a deadline. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is open. Sometimes it is to close the bloody door.

This is the intelligence of relationship and somewhere within it sits our relationship with sexual energy, which I experience as belonging to a much larger conversation than sex itself.

Sexual energy can be explored as life force—the current of vitality, desire, creativity and aliveness moving through the body. It may express sexually, but it can also move into art, work, movement, relationship, creativity, voice and the simple pleasure of being vividly alive inside our own skin. Rather than making this energy something taboo, performative or something we must immediately discharge, we can become curious about it. What does vitality actually feel like in my body? Where does desire move? What happens if I breathe with that energy rather than immediately directing it somewhere? Does it want movement? Expression? Creation? Connection? Stillness?

There is something deeply developmental about learning to remain present with our own aliveness and perhaps this is part of reclaiming the feminine—not reclaiming femininity as an identity we must perform, but restoring relationship with receptivity, sensation, creativity and the living currents we may have learned to override The feminine does not need to defeat the masculine to become free. Nor does the masculine need to contain the feminine into submission. Their coherent expression can become a dance through which something uniquely ours comes into form.

Our own divine blueprint, if you like—not as a predetermined script we need to discover and perform perfectly, but as the particular configuration through which life, consciousness, body, history, energy, creativity and spirit meet and become expression and there is no universal ratio.

The invitation is to listen.

Five Doorways Into the Dance

These aren't prescriptions or another five things to squeeze onto the self-development list. They are simply ways of getting curious about how these qualities are moving through your own instrument.

1. Come back into the body.
Feel your feet. Notice gravity. Bring attention into the skin, breath, belly and chest. Before deciding what you need, notice what is actually happening. The body gives us somewhere tangible to begin.

2. Become curious about your life force.
Notice vitality, desire and sexual energy without immediately making them mean something or directing them towards an outcome. How does aliveness move through you? What nourishes it? What contracts it? Where might that energy want expression beyond the sexual?

3. Let movement move you.
Walk, shake, dance, breathe, make sound, stretch, become still. Rather than always telling the body how to move, occasionally listen for movement from within and see what happens when the instrument is allowed to participate in the conversation.

4. Explore receptivity and direction.
Where are you forcing something that might need space? Where are you waiting for something that might need action? Notice whether the moment is asking you to receive, initiate, soften, structure, open, discern, surrender or hold.

5. Follow what feels alive—with awareness.
Curiosity can become a compass without every impulse becoming an instruction. Feel what has energy. Stay with it. Give it attention. Let consciousness participate. Then notice what wants to become expression.

Perhaps this is the pulse beneath it all. Life moving towards life. Energy meeting awareness. Receptivity meeting direction. The unseen gathering itself towards form.

We don't need to become more feminine or more masculine according to somebody else's idea of what those words mean. We can become increasingly intimate with how these qualities live within us, where they have become dissonant and what becomes possible as they begin to harmonise.

Then creation becomes less about forcing life into the shape we have already decided upon.

We listen. We meet it. We participate and we allow the particular intelligence moving through this human instrument to find its own way into form.

Women’s circle - The Intelligence of the Feminine

What becomes possible when women gather and give attention to the feminine qualities moving through them?

What a crackin' circle of goodness. There are moments in facilitation when you can almost feel a room change tone.

Bodies soften. Voices become more available. Movement emerges. Someone expresses something that gives another permission to feel something within herself. Laughter moves through the room. Vulnerability appears without needing to be fixed.

Something begins to hum. This is one of the things that fascinates me about women's circles.

Not simply women gathering to talk, but what becomes available when a group of human instruments come together and intentionally give attention to the energetics of the feminine.

Feminine Does Not Mean Female

This distinction matters. When I speak about feminine and masculine energetics, I am not using feminine as another word for woman or masculine as another word for man. I experience them as qualities or energetic architectures that can move through human beings irrespective of gender. Each of us carries our own composition. We may experience qualities associated with the feminine — receptivity, intuition, nurturing, creativity, sensuality, relational awareness, fluidity, feeling, collaboration, gestation and qualities associated with the masculine; direction, discernment, structure, focus, action, containment, protection, penetration, orientation.

These aren't rigid boxes. Nor do I see one as spiritually superior to the other. They are different qualities of expression and within each human instrument they can meet in unique proportions, forms and relationships.

The inquiry isn't:

Which one is better?

It is:

What is moving here? What has been given expression? What has been suppressed? What has become distorted? And what becomes possible when these qualities are brought into greater relationship and harmony?

The Female Body as an Instrument

There is another dimension to this that interests me. Although feminine energy is not exclusive to women, being born into and living through a female body creates a particular field of human experience.

• Biology participates.

• Genetics participate.

• Hormonal rhythms participate.

• Family history participates.

• Culture participates.

• Relationship participates.

• The experiences held within and interpreted through the body participate.

So do generations of stories about what it means to inhabit a female body; what is acceptable, desirable, dangerous, powerful, shameful, beautiful, sexual, maternal, expressive or forbidden and through my own experiential and energetic lens, I am interested in the possibility that all of this contributes to the tone of the instrument. The body carries memory in many form, some we can describe biologically. Some psychologically. Some culturally and relationally and some I experience more subtly'; through sensation, resonance, energy and the ways the organism responds before the intellect has found language. I don't need all of these dimensions to be the same thing. I am interested in how they meet.

What Happens When the Instruments Gather?

Put one instrument in a room and it has its tone. Bring many instruments together and another phenomenon becomes possible.

Resonance.

This is where women's circles become particularly interesting to me. When female-bodied human beings gather with intention, there can be an opportunity to experience qualities of the feminine not simply as ideas, but as something tangible within the body and within the collective environment. One woman moves and another recognises something in herself. One woman allows vulnerability and another nervous system discovers that vulnerability can be met rather than rejected. Someone expresses pleasure without apology. Someone else recognises how long she has withheld hers. Someone receives instead of immediately giving. Someone speaks. Someone listens. Someone laughs loudly. Someone takes up space. Someone softens. The field changes and the individual instruments within it respond.

This is where the subjective and collective begin speaking to one another.

Beyond Competition

Women have not always experienced other women as safe. Competition, comparison, judgement, jealousy, exclusion and manipulation can become expressions within female relationships but, I don't see these as evidence of something inherently wrong with the feminine. They can be understood as dissonant expressions arising within human systems shaped by fear, scarcity, conditioning, protection and lived experience. A women's circle can provide another environment. Not one where everyone must agree. Not one where everything is soft and certainly not one where difficulty is spiritually bypassed in the name of “sisterhood.’ but an environment in which we can become curious about what happens when women give attention to support rather than comparison, collaboration rather than competition, expression rather than suppression, and curiosity rather than judgement.

Repeated experience matters, because what we experience within one environment can begin to influence what becomes available within us elsewhere.

Remembering Through the Body

There is something I find particularly beautiful about exploring feminine energetics through movement, breath, sound, sensation, creativity and relationship. We are no longer only discussing the feminine.

We are giving the organism an opportunity to experience it.

• What does receiving feel like in my body?

• What happens when I move without performing?

• Can I experience sensuality without immediately relating it to sexuality or desirability?

• What happens when I allow intuition to have a voice?

• Can I nurture without abandoning myself?

• Can I be fluid without losing direction?

• Can I experience softness without equating it with weakness?

• Can I receive support without needing to earn it?

• These become experiential inquiries and perhaps something that has existed only as an intellectual concept begins to find its way into the physical instrument.

Understanding begins to marinate into lived experience.

The Feminine and Masculine in Relationship

The deeper inquiry, however, isn't about creating a world dominated by feminine energy. That would simply recreate imbalance in another direction. I am interested in harmonisation through our true nature.

The feminine and masculine can become extraordinarily generative when their different qualities are available to one another.

• Structure can support creativity.

• Direction can meet intuition.

• Action can emerge from listening.

• Containment can create conditions for surrender.

• Discernment can protect what is tender.

• Receptivity can reveal where action wants to move.

• Neither disappears.

• Neither dominates.

Each becomes more available to its own intelligence while participating in something larger and this inquiry belongs to all human beings, not only women.

From the Individual to the Collective

This brings me back to the question that runs through so much of my work:

What happens in the collective when something changes within the individual?

If a woman develops a different relationship with her own feminine expression, she doesn't leave that experience in the circle. She takes the instrument with her.

• Into relationship.

• Into family.

• Into creativity.

• Into sexuality.

• Into parenting.

• Into friendship.

• Into leadership.

• Into organisations.

• Into community.

Likewise, when any human being gives attention to the relationship between masculine and feminine qualities within themselves, the expression they bring into their environment may change. The tone entering the field is different and when another instrument encounters that tone, something else may become possible.

This is the multidimensional nature of development that fascinates me.

Individual awareness becomes embodied expression.
Embodied expression enters relationship.
Relationship participates in environment.
Environment participates in the collective.

And the collective, in turn, continues to influence the individual. There is no neat beginning or end. There is relationship. There is resonance. There is harmonics. There is participation.

A Circle Is a Place to Practise

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of gathering. A women's circle doesn't need to provide an answer to what the divine feminine is. Perhaps defining it too rigidly would miss the point. Instead, it can create an environment in which we become curious about its qualities.

• To move them.

• Feel them.

• Question them.

• Express them.

• Play with them.

• Notice where they have become suppressed or distorted.

• Notice where they are already beautifully alive and experience what happens when different expressions of the feminine are allowed to coexist in the same field.

Not to become more feminine.

Not to reject the masculine. Not to perform an idea of womanhood. But to become increasingly available to the unique composition of intelligence seeking expression through each of us. Perhaps that is where the real elevation occurs. Not feminine above masculine. Not woman above man but awareness elevating our capacity to recognise, harmonise and consciously express the many qualities already moving through the human instrument. when we do that together?

Well...

something begins to hum.

Continue the exploration

Essence Energetics®

Essence Energetics® explores the physical, emotional, psychological, energetic and spiritual dimensions of the human experience — becoming increasingly sensitive to the intelligence of life moving through us and the unique ways it seeks expression.

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Elevating Consciousness

"The full spectrum of body/mind functioning vibrates at its collective frequency—the body/mind/spirit vessel, named YOU. I experience the human being not simply as an isolated physical organism, but as a multidimensional participant within a larger field of life.

We are subject and object. Individual and collective. We perceive the world through the particular organisation of our own human instrument, while simultaneously participating in and influencing the environments and relationships of which we are a part.

From this perspective, consciousness is not only something occurring privately “inside” us. Our actions, reflexes, attention, emotional states, choices and expressions enter the field in which we collectively live.

This is one of the conceptual lenses through which I explore human development: as the individual organism changes its relationship with awareness, what becomes possible within the collective also changes.

The often-told story of the “hundredth monkey” has been used as a metaphor for this possibility — the idea that when something shifts sufficiently within a group, a wider field of possibility may also shift. I don't need the story to function as scientific proof for it to remain an interesting contemplation.

Nature continually shows us that no organism exists independently of its environment. We influence and are influenced. We receive and transmit. We participate.

So I remain curious:

What am I contributing to the field through the way I am being?

Subjective — What am I experiencing?

Objective — What can we observe about the body, brain, nervous system, behaviour and environment?

Relational — What happens between organisms?

Collective — How do patterns, behaviours, ideas and ways of being propagate through groups and culture?

Universal / spiritual — What is the relationship between the individual expression of life and the greater intelligence or field of life itself?

Mystery — What can be experienced or contemplated without needing to be prematurely explained?

Perhaps this is another way of understanding responsibility, not as blame or burden, but as recognising that our expression participates in the whole.

'Discover Worlds Within' by Marie Louise