When we are struggling, it’s never just ours. Nothing is just ours. Our shadows are not just our shadows. Our wounds are not just our wounds. Our struggles and our stories are not just ours — we are all bound. There is an undeniable bridge between our personal healing and the collectives. We are all affected by one another and we are all affecting everybody else. Until we understand the magnitude of this, it’s really challenging to transmute what is ours.

Creating sacred space is creating space for the essence of life itself to come alive through your receptivity. It’s creating space for the essence of life within, and around, that is far beneath the chatter of accomplishment, consumerism, becoming, politics, work, responsibilities, or our mental interpretation of trauma, pain, struggle, dysfunction, justice, the past, the future, what may be, and what has been to take the forefront.

This type of space is sacred because it grants the essence of what is right here, right now in both divinity and physicality the throne it deserves.

Receptivity is what keeps us nourished, our vitality up, our roots grounded, and our sight, actions, emotions, intuition, and thoughts stable and clear. Receptivity is also the driving force of what we give. Our resources are finite and unless we make peace with this, we will live constantly struggling in exhaustion, and angst in an attempt to survive on output not realizing we have nothing fueling us.

If our cup is empty we have nothing to give, and how we fill it is not necessarily based on self-care — it’s based on presence. This is the art of receptivity.

One of the biggest entities that pulls us away from our feminine power is busyness and overwhelm. Even though it may feel counterintuitive, slowing down is one of the most productive things we can often do in this demanding world. Slowing down in itself is empowering. It’s illuminating — especially in the moments when we feel the most pressure not to. The rapid pace that society tries to sweep us up in, is one of the most detrimental forces to our power. Slowing down is an act of resistance.

Our feminine power comes from many things — and attuning to the unseen world is the center point from which we must navigate everything. Activating our feminine power is profoundly nurtured by our relationship with the divine, great spirit, or whatever that force that is greater than us may be. Yes, a huge part of our power comes from our inner work — it comes from the liberation of shadow work and the great work of shifting from shame to self-Love, but our power as women also comes from awakening our felt sense feminine intelligence that is bound with the divine.

Shadow work is a process of unwinding between our conscious and unconscious selves to free ourselves from our own constraints. But sometimes we try so hard to let our story go and move on, and we try so hard to be the bigger better person, and we try so hard to heal, succeed, and liberate ourselves that we can engrain what we are trying to let go of more deeply.

The more conscious we are when we face shadow work, the more leverage we have for freedom, but for those who know this, it can be easy to think we are doing the right thing pursuing it when we are instead digging ourselves a trench.

We all have shame, and we all hide to some degree no matter how minute. Shame to self-love is the first significant shift in claiming our personal power. Without shame, we have no inhibitions. And without our inhibitions, our inner wise one is set free.

We may intellectually understand that shame has no right to keep us small. We may know that we should love ourselves and that what other people think doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, but why is this so hard?