Having two parents is crucial when it comes to the balance of energy. And when I say two I don’t mean that it has to be man and woman because each individual has feminine and masculine energies, and it’s important for children to learn and see how to operate in both. Growing up, my mom was a single parent. I knew my biological father, but if I’m being honest and vulnerable, he wasn’t much of a dad. All throughout my adolescence, he was in and out of jail, and when he wasn’t in jail, he was somewhere using drugs. So that left my mom to raise my older sister and I with the help of family. My mom was the sole provider so she was always operating in her masculine energy. Not only was she a single mom, but she had baggage and trauma of her own that she kept bottled up so that resulted in her masculine energy becoming very dominant. My mom wasn’t affectionate. She was hyper independent, controlling, and very aggressive. Spending time with my grandmother and being involved in church was the only time I got to experience women who were not masculine dominant.
As a young child, I knew my mom was more aggressive than me, but I didn’t know what it was then. But, the older I got and the more research I did, I learned that my mom, and like many black women, didn’t feel valued enough, or safe enough to operate in their feminine energy as a child. And after she became an adult, she never realized how important feminine energy is because operating in her masculine energy is all she has ever known. It is important to do the work and heal your feminine energy if you want to grow and become the best version of yourself.
How to Heal your Feminine Energy:
Examine Yourself
Becoming self-aware should be like the number one golden rule. If you don’t take the time to understand your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, you will never be able to heal period, let alone heal your feminine energy. I will use myself as an example: I love my mom, and I know that she only did the best she could, with the cards she was dealt. But I cannot deny my own feelings either. As a child, I questioned if she even loved me because the lack of affection was very traumatic. I would see so many other people hugging and kissing their mom, and my mom barely even told me she loved me. And now that lack of affection has been passed down, and showing affection to anyone other than a child or my significant other is really hard for me. I have acknowledged, understood it, and now I have to do the work to heal it.
Prioritize Your Mental Health
Mental health issues are killing us as black people left and right, and it is simply because it is not made a priority. Your mental health affects everything you do. Your brain is the control center of your body, and you have to make sure you are nurturing it. We are not robots. If we continue to go through life and not address those emotions, past traumas, or little annoyances, they will show up in other ways. I hate to use this extreme example, but one particular person that comes to mind is Ike Turner. Now I didn’t personally know him, and I can’t take away the fact that he could’ve seen his own father abusing his mother but I will say that anyone who knows the story can link it back to one emotion: jealousy. He was so jealous that Tina was becoming a star. Now of course mental health was a foreign subject to black people back then, but see how his jealousy turned to rage, and caused him to inflict harm on anyone he knew was weaker than him. Ike, just like most black men back then and today, think that expressing your feelings is weak, but they don’t know the power of emotional expression and intelligence. And those are things that you can learn in therapy.
A big part of prioritizing your mental health is by finding a therapist. Most therapists take health insurance, but if you still can’t afford that, there are many organizations out there that offer free counseling if you do a quick Google Search. For anyone who lives in Maryland, I found a free counseling program for Marylanders called www.probonocounseling.org
Take it one Day at a Time
Healing is not linear. I had to become an adult before I could start healing my own traumas, and it is so difficult to try and stay afloat, and heal. I had days where I thought the work I was doing was stupid, and I felt like it wasn’t going to lead anywhere, but I think about how much I have grown since I started my journey in 2020, and I know that it was all worth it. So give yourself grace because that’s a step in the right direction. A toddler doesn’t learn how to walk in one day. They start, they fall, they get frustrated, then one day they figure it out. That is going to be you, and when you finally learn to walk, you will realize that the journey was the best part of the entire process.
I challenge everyone reading this to start making strides towards healing your feminine energy. You don’t want to continue these same patterns that have been passed down from generation to generation. Let’s be a generation and raise a generation that knows the power of feminine energy.
“Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength.”– Betsy Cornwell
