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In This Article:
- Why does femininity need redefining in today’s world?
- How has patriarchy shaped femininity, and what’s next?
- How can women balance strength, intuition, and leadership?
- What lessons can we take from matriarchal societies of the past?
- How do feminine energy and empowerment create real change?
Redefining Femininity: The Future of Feminine Empowerment
by Alanna Kaivalya.
No doubt you have heard buzzwords like the patriarchy and toxic masculinity being tossed around as we enter a time of reckoning, reconciliation, and re-creation. We are questioning how the past few thousand years have gone and wondering how to make the next many years better for ourselves and the women who come after us.
This book (The Way of the Satisfied Woman) is not about masculinity, the patriarchy, the toxicity of both, or the dismantling of either. However, it is nearly impossible to discuss the feminine and the state we find ourselves in today without talking about these things or how we got here.
After all, we are trying to survive in a primarily patriarchal structure with the rules of masculinity dominating us. There has not been room for feminine structures or cycles, and the needs of the feminine have not been heard or understood for quite some time.
It is time
Within the past hundred years, the world has been privileged to see women rise up and fight for their rightful, equitable place in the world. With the suffragettes of the early twentieth century, the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and the #MeToo movement of the early part of the twenty-first century, the struggles and suppression of women were finally being voiced, reevaluated, and revalued.
However, all these movements have taken place within a patriarchal culture, where even many of us women have a difficult time operating by anything other than patriarchal rules. It’s no one’s fault. The intention here isn’t to place blame or pit one polarity against the other. In fact, just the opposite.
When the qualities of a more balanced society are achieved, divisions dissolve, and symbiosis occurs. But it’s not balanced to have women fighting on men’s terms.
We need our own terms
While we have a twenty-five-hundred-year (or more!) cultural legacy of patriarchy, before that, much of the world existed as matriarchal societies. Now, we have to bear in mind that this was prehistoric, and they also didn’t have a lot of the tools and concepts we work with today, like reliable contraception, bills of rights, or the practices of modern medicine.
People in prehistory also didn’t have the language of psychology that we do today, which allows us to take a meta look at the mind and understand its complexity. These societies were more basically concerned with living to the ripe old age of thirty-five (the average lifespan), protecting the safety and well-being of the tribe, and advancing the human race through procreation.
Different times. Different problems.
One era is not better than the other, it’s just that we’re living in this one. Rather than idealize the matriarchal societies of thousands of years ago, what I find more interesting to do is to look at what worked (or didn’t!) within them and what might help us thrive as women in our current reality today.
The challenge with either a matriarchal or patriarchal society is that each version values power over the other polarity. Even in matriarchal societies of old, women held power over men, made decisions for men, and controlled assets and resources. Because we know how this feels, we can easily see why the founders of the patriarchy we live in today fought so hard to gain power, control, and decision-making privileges!
If we are looking to achieve something new, something stronger, something more balanced, then we must seek to establish methods of influence that incorporate generosity and surrender, power that empowers everyone, and decisions that are made for the highest good of everyone involved.
While this may sound like a Pollyanna ideal, we find some evidence of this having existed in matriarchal societies when we look to what they valued. What were they most concerned with having power, control, and decision-making abilities over?
The family and the tribe
It wasn’t about status, prestige, esteem, or personal glory. It was about making sure that the family unit or the tribe was thriving. Sometimes that did require difficult decision-making and strategizing, like when one tribe battled another over resources. \
Sometimes it did require some control, like when it came to an aberrant member causing harm to another. Sometimes it did create power differentials, because at the end of the day, a clear yes or no is necessary.
If both matriarchy and patriarchy equal hierarchy, what are we to do?
We lean fully into our essential feminine nature. Not in a way that abdicates power and allows anyone to have agency over any part of us, but in the same way that water flows around a rock. The rock may be immovable, but it is still moved, carved, and reshaped by the flowing, graceful power of water.
Think of masculinity as the rock: a solid, steady presence. And of femininity as the water: a graceful, flowing change.
It is the water that determines the course of the life-sustaining river, not the rocks.
Rather than focus on hierarchical structures that always leave someone powerless, let’s set a vision for a future where it is through one another’s strength that everyone is empowered. This requires us to remain steadfast in our feminine ideals, powerfully rooted in our intuitive and emotional guidance, and firm in our desire to commune and collaborate for the highest good of all. Without this, the life-giving waters of the feminine either freeze solid in a deranged faux-masculine state, or they evaporate completely, vaporizing away until rain brings us back to the earth.
This is a lofty vision. It is both an individual and a collective vision. I imagine empowerment in apartments, where people living in partnership find their water-over-rock ideals, as well as in the houses of government, where the collective finds balance through steadfastness and graceful change.
Remember that this work starts within you. When you are able to achieve even a little more of this sacred balance within your own daily life, it has a ripple effect — just like the feminine waters — on those around you. And as women, we can move this life-giving and life-changing water from the streams to the rivers to the great, vast oceans.
This work starts inside of us. Just as all life does. We are the Satisfied Women. We are the changemakers. We are the birthers of new life and of a new way of living.
Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission from New World Library.
Article Source:
BOOK: The Way of the Satisfied Woman
The Way of the Satisfied Woman: Reclaiming Feminine Power
by Alanna Kaivalya.
Although women today have greater opportunity to make our own choices, build independent lives, and craft powerful careers, we all too often forge our path by following the trajectory laid out by men. By emulating what men identify as desirable goals and strategies, we deny our truest, most innate feminine qualities and desires.
The Way of the Satisfied Woman offers an alternative path for women, and for any person who cares to focus more on the feminine than the masculine. The path of the feminine is simply different — perfect in its own right yet integral and complementary to the path of the masculine. Alanna Kaivalya shows how embodying feminine energy sets us free, relaxes us, and allows us to more completely manifest the things that are most important to us.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as an Audiobook and a Kindle edition.
About the Author:
Alanna Kaivalya, PhD, is an author, educator, speaker, and thought leader in the field of women’s empowerment and femininity. She has written five books, developed international training programs, and taught audiences around the world. She earned a doctoral degree in mythological studies and depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and spent more than twenty years studying psychology, the human condition, the nature of the feminine and femininity, and Eastern spirituality.
Her work centers on equipping women with a better understanding of what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Her day-to-day efforts are focused on offering empowering resources through her website, including The Satisfied Woman podcast, her blog, and her exclusive women’s community and online courses.
Find out more and connect with her at TheSatisfiedWoman.com.
Article Recap:
The modern world is undergoing a shift, with women redefining femininity beyond patriarchal structures. This means moving beyond hierarchical power dynamics and embracing feminine empowerment as a force for balance, leadership, and change. By leaning into intuitive wisdom, collaboration, and resilience, women are reshaping power and stepping into their full potential.
#RedefiningFemininity #FeminineEmpowerment #DivineFeminine #BalanceOfPower #FeminineEnergy #WomenInLeadership
