Journey to Freedom: Awakening My Fierce & Wild Feminine.
I sit here shit scared. Completely rattled and struggling to contain the heaviness of my thumping heart.
The last few weeks have been a journey of undeniable awakening. Witnessing, experiencing, manifesting everything that has been dancing in my subconscious.
For so long, I’ve questioned everything. I’ve relentlessly pushed myself to keep challenging the norm, fuck the way I should do something, and take the huge fucking leap into the abyss. Which is probably what enticed me into my own pursuit of challenging my dominant, independent persona, and as a result exploring the soft, feminine, fragile woman who sits inside of me. This exploration went against everything I had ever believed and experienced.
As a fragile teen who devoted so much energy into fighting an experience completely out of her control, who sought independence to free herself from pain and vulnerability, embracing a life of organic, feminine flow was never a priority of mine.
I grew up watching my fiercely independent mother take charge of her own life after divorce, exploring her own desires, and unleashing her own femininity. I was too young to get it, and it scared the fuck out of me. I held on to story after story on what expressing our femininity can mean, and I charged forward headstrong and determined to control my destiny with a grip tight enough to suffocate. Don’t get me wrong — it is this resilience, independence and fierceness that I love about myself that has got me to where I am today — but not without a deep shadow of stress, anxiety and frustration.
My determination to make this world my bitch, and lead others through fierce empowerment and a daring existence, allowed me to fully experience what being daring and living life on my own terms actually meant to me. And back at me glared this un-missable reflection of everything I had run away from since my teenage years..
The desire for surrender, when all I had ever done was fight my way through.
The desire to trust, when all I had ever done was analyze, manipulate and control.
The desire to be soft, sensual, sexual and held, when all along I claimed to be all that I’d ever needed.
If I truly wanted to live a daring life whereby I carved my own path, lived wholeheartedly, and danced in the freedom of who I was and everything I had ever wanted, I needed to loosen my grip. I needed to unlock the cage that I had been keeping my feminine self in all these years, and I needed to walk my talk and get fucking uncomfortable.
I needed to unlock the other half of me: the free-flowing, vulnerable and intuitive woman who loves to dance alongside my independence and closet over-planner.
The wild and free-spirited woman who loves to mingle with my go-get-’em girl boss.
And so I took the leap.
Faced with the reality that my fear of femininity could potentially ruin my relationship, my career and my whole life, I chose to take the leap.
I chose to devote myself to the exploration of who I was underneath the thick layers of masculinity, and I chose to reveal my inner feminine one layer at a time. Raw, real, uncomfortable and incredibly vulnerable. A process that to this day I am still undergoing, one which will continue to unfold throughout my entire life. Learning to nourish and nurture my feminine energy like I would my physical body or mental health. Learning to weave my feminine self into parts of my life that until then had always felt like I was between a rock and a hard place. And learning to embrace my whole self in its entirety — not ever changing who I was, but simply amplifying the parts of me that had been patiently waiting in the shadows for 20 years, dying to make their debut performance.
And the journey itself has been nothing less than… freeing. It has been complete and utter freedom.
A journey of freedom that will never end, nor do I ever want it to end. Finally I know what it feels like to feel whole, expressed, loved, alive and free. And it is a journey that every woman deserves to experience. For without our femininity, the masculine is starved of soul and cracks begin to appear in its dry, lifeless existence. Fear overrides love, magic ceases to exist, and the sweet polarities of life are imbalanced. The Universe thrives in paradox, and we need not fear it. For we can be both, you know…
… a fighter, and a lover.
Strong, and soft.
Fierce, and feminine.
***
Tara Caetano is a certified health and life coach, writer and creator of the Fiercely Feminine and Free Online Workshop. Tara mentors strong, independent women who are ready to ditch their inner ‘control freak’ and start living a life of more spontaneity, femininity and freedom. Tara shares her articles via her blog Feed Me, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Get on the Well-Fed love list for a weekly buffet of inspiration and personal insights straight to your inbox.
***
{Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest}