Women’s circle - The Intelligence of the Feminine
Marie Louise explores feminine and masculine energetics, women’s circles, embodiment and the relationship between individual expression, resonance and collective influence.
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.
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