Uncovering Divine Femininity: Returning to your Divine Self | Part 3
“Show yourself
Step into your power
Throw yourself into something new
You are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life
Show yourself”
I remember watching Frozen II and crying in the movie theater because of how much I connected with Elsa as she waded through her Dark Night of the Soul. In the opening scene, she’s surrounded by her loved ones by a crackling fire, playing games, and instead of enjoying the intimacy, she’s distracted by a voice that’s calling her into something new. No one else hears the voice, but to her, it’s the realest thing she’s ever heard.
Later in the movie, she’s determined to find the source of the voice. To track it down. As she does, fights nature and memory, realizing that those she thought were on her side were actually enemies, and things that felt like foes were actually making her who she needed to be. As she sings, she steps into her truest self, she harnesses her power, and realizes that she’s the one she’s been looking for all along. Once she realizes this, she faces a moment where it seems like she cannot possibly come back from the brink of death, but she does, and she relinquishes the title of Queen of Arendale so she can step into her true identity: the Fifth Spirit that unifies the whole realm.
Elsa’s moment on the brink of death at the heart of Ahtohallan felt like my Dark Night of the Soul. And as desperate as that season was, what came next was equally exuberant.
Once I gave up everything that had gotten me to where I was and relinquished my hyper-masculine energy, I actively fought against diving right back into hyper-femininity. I didn’t want to swap Wounded Masculine for Wounded Feminine.
Sometimes you just have to get out of your own way and
receive instead of seek, so that’s what I did.
I worked to genuinely believe the truth that I am worthy enough to receive all I need. I absolutely do not have to over-perform in order to get what I need. I swapped the lie that the only way to make money is by working really hard for the truth that everything meant for me will come to me because I am immeasurably loved and just by existing I contain the power to create a joy filled life.
I pushed pause on my business. I focused on creating my home.
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There were things I had to do because I was now separated from Brian. He lived in Nashville, I’d moved the kids and I back to Conway. I had been the “breadwinner” for years while he had handled the household things.
Everything about our situation swapped. And I thought I would resent the “chores,” but honestly, I was craving the simplicity of routine life. And it truly felt like an honor to take care of myself and my kids through doing laundry, making a home, creating a comfortable place for us to land everyday. I didn’t care if I lost followers from not posting new content every week. I didn’t worry about my audience wondering what was going on or anything like that. I felt really confident that creating a home and tapping into small, simple, feminine things would reignite the fire of my creativity when it was time. I trusted that I didn’t need to protect or provide for myself.
I had been running purely from my Masculine for as long as I can remember. It was going to take time to uncover my Femininity. To reintroduce myself to her. To get to know her. To embrace her. To ultimately love her. Saying hello to more of her meant saying goodbye to my Masculine - meaning the amount of time I spent with each. Just like any new habit, new education, new goal…it takes time. It takes discipline. (And even this gives insight into the balance and wholeness required for this endeavor. Discipline is a masculine trait, but I needed some of that in order to practice femininity.)
Most of all, I gave myself a lot of grace. I knew this wouldn’t feel comfortable, but I also knew my very best self would only come when I balanced these two energies out. I wanted to know my best self.
I knew of her. I remembered her. But I had to find her.
I allowed myself to create, and create without an end-goal in mind. I allowed myself to write poems just for me to read. I painted for the first time. I taught myself how to play a song on my daughter’s piano, I danced, I refinished pieces of furniture. I became really comfortable with knowing that sensuality, sexuality, and spirituality have always and will always co-exist. There is nothing to be ashamed of.
As this journey unfolded, I found such comfort in knowing that Earth is a planet of creativity, and the creative force is a divine energy in itself. We call her Mother Earth for a reason. But so many of us have forgotten to create. We focus so much on the necessities of life that we forget what makes life worth living. Somewhere along the way we stopped seeing ourselves as artists, creatives, poets, singers…yet to be human is to create.
I think there is something truly magical about living my life from the whispers of my soul rather than the expectations of society.
It allows you to turn down the volume on your ego.
The egoic mind is a very hard thing to turn off, so you have to be committed to doing it everyday. The ego cares what others think. The ego operates from fear. And we combat fear with love.
It would be very easy to think, “I failed. I’m divorcing. I’m moving back to my hometown. I haven’t put out any original new work or created anything new in over a year.” But deep down, I knew my dream life of ease, abundance, divine love, fruitful ideas, plentiful funds, was waiting for me. I knew it. But I also knew that the door to that life would never open unless I became whole.
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Just as I said in the first blog in this series, so often we treat the symptoms of a problem instead of finding the root issue, in this case, I didn’t want to chase the symptoms of a wholehearted life. I wanted to receive a wholehearted life and then watch the results of that fall into place.
So instead of working to create those results, the most important thing I did was work on keeping my vibrations high. I meditated. I practiced breathwork. I walked in nature. I consumed nothing negative. I realized all negative consumption leads to negative thoughts which lead to negative outcomes. I stopped watching tv. I stopped listening to anything on the radio that was negative or gossipy. I did not attend events where I knew the vibrations would be low or the conversation would be shallow.
I thought…
What if we took the time to heal the source of those negative thoughts and returned back to our Highest Self?
What if we moved away from the negative people in our lives and surrounded ourselves with positive loving people only?
What if we decided to no longer be in relationships that caused drama and stress and instead only accepted love, connection and passion?
What if we stopped listening to the news … the thing that always tells us what’s wrong in the world .. and we opened up our eyes to see everything that’s right?
What if we forgave all of those who’ve caused us harm and healed our hearts?
What if we actually discovered our true potential?
What if we invested in ourselves, received guidance, and stopped at nothing to receive healing and transformation in our lives?
Could it be possible that our finances, health, and relationships would improve?
There’s profit in you being afraid, in you waiting … there’s none when you meet your highest self.
This may seem like what I “did” to flourish in my Divine Feminine was just ask a lot of questions of myself. And in many ways, it was. That’s the trick about being committed to receiving and returning instead of chasing and planning.
It’s more about creating the conditions for change than forcing certain changes in your life.
There was one other essential component to this transformational season: for the first time ever, I didn’t give myself a deadline. I have to have this wholeness thing figured out by this date.
Even though the unknowns were scary and required constant re-commitment to not rushing myself to remember myself, I really tried to train myself to live in the present moment. To recognize that truly all I had was this moment. Worrying about the past is depression. Worrying about the future is anxiety. True contentment comes from fully embracing the present moment. And the best way to do this is through gratitude. Most of us don’t actually love things, we love the feeling we believe we’ll have when we get the things. So I thought– what if I can train myself to feel that contentment and abundance with what I have now.
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Beautiful growth can happen when you affirm that each day and each moment has exactly what it needs. That there is nothing missing. From there, you realize that you can have any joy and excitement for the future, because you realize you are the co-creator of your life, and your partner is God, the ultimate creator! There truly isn’t anything God can’t do. So it was pretty obvious I was the partner that needed to get my act together.
I knew that balancing my energy and raising my vibration was the most important work I could ever do. I also knew that when I began to live through this lens, I would align with my highest timeline, which is the reality we unlock when we live from our highest and best self.
I share these things not to give you a punch list of what you need to do in order to flourish in your Divine energy, but to share with you what I experienced and how I tried to actually undo that mentality.
Earlier on in this process, I remember attending a workshop and asking the instructor, “What is something I can do everyday to better align with my feminine energy?” He said, “Stop looking for a checklist. Stop doing. Just be. Just receive.”
Since the masculine energy was so natural for me to access, that was hard for me. I literally had to say to myself every day, multiple times a day, “You are worthy of receiving. You have worked so hard your whole life. You don’t have to work that hard anymore. That time is over. Trust that you are more than worthy of simply receiving.”
Some days I was better at trusting this truth than others. Some days I saw myself slipping back into that Wounded Masculine energy, and that’s when I’d recommit myself to surrender.
This is one of the reasons I knew I had to walk this journey alone. When you’re in a relationship, it’s easy to pretend all your problems are marriage problems, and all your marriage problems are the other person’s fault. Just like marriages where you can find yourself having the same arguments, the same conflict over and over, you can also do this to yourself. I remember experiencing this so clearly nearly a year into my process of uncovering.
Let’s just pause there for a second– one year into this journey, and I still wasn’t “done” or “fixed.” I still found myself in repeated cycles of woundedness.
Getting to the root of something is never an easy fix.
Before I had moved back to my hometown of Conway, Arkansas, I had some unspoken expectations of what I thought my life would look like when I returned. In my effort to see the best in every situation, I’d imagined some specific moments and memories I wanted to create. After being back for a few months, I started noticing this creeping feeling that those moments and memories… weren’t going to be my reality. I had put my hope in this version of life back in my hometown that would make returning “worth it,” and when that didn’t come to fruition, I felt stuck, a little hopeless, and more than a little devastated.
Since I believe in looking for lessons and opportunities to grow in the midst of pain, I asked myself, what the hell do I have left to heal? I thought I had looked through everything. I had peeled back layers. I had done some major healing. For a year.
And that’s when I woke up to the real cause– and purpose– of these wounded cycles we inflict upon ourselves.
I realized that each of us has some core wounds we internalize in childhood. They’re not always the result of bad parents or abusive situations or neglect, although they can be. They can also be interactions with friends, teachers, coaches, and strangers. However we come about them, once we internalize those core wounds, throughout our lives we “call in” scenarios that confirm the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Because even if the message we’ve internalized isn’t kind or loving, seeing it confirmed feels familiar, which can be mistaken for comfort.
If we don’t heal from these wounds, we spend our adulthoods recreating them.
It’s not coincidence or bad luck. It’s our subconscious recreating situations that expose us to our core wounds so we can either heal from them or confirm the lie that we’re believing about ourselves. The search for our true identity is messy and imperfect, and it takes practicing self awareness to separate the truth of who we really are from lies we’ve become comfortable believing.
Here’s another way I like to think about this– God is unconditional love. That is who God is. And Jesus is God manifested in physical form. When Jesus walked the Earth, he didn’t have lessons to learn. He knew exactly who and what he was. And that’s what made him so hated by the religious leaders around him– that he claimed to be the Son of God. But he didn’t let their wounding messages deter him from knowing who he was. When we see how Jesus trusted God and believed that he was who God said he was, we see a life lived with total trust and confidence, free from fear, even when experiencing pain and rejection. He ran towards the outcasts instead of running from them. He spent time with children instead of religious royalty. He washed feet instead of seeking a throne.
That’s what we have access to. That complete confidence in knowing who we were made to be and what we were made to do.
We each have God inside us. We were made of God. And this may be hard for some to hear, but because we are made of God, in God’s image, then we are made of both masculine and feminine energy because God embodies both masculine and feminine. God is all things and created all things.
But we did not come to this earth like Jesus in the regard that we didn’t have lessons to learn. We do have lessons to learn. In this world, we will feel fear, lack, want; we will question who we are and what we are here to do, and this points us to the areas we need to heal.
So just before this realization that I had moved to Conway and nothing was how I thought it would be, I remember closing my eyes and praying– through feeling– because the language of God and the love of God is to be felt, so with feeling I prayed,
“God, whatever lesson I still need to learn…I need you to bring it. However you have to show it to me. Show me. I can handle it. I’m tired. I’m ready for my life of pleasure and play. I know it is right there. I also know it won’t come until I heal whatever it is I have left to heal. So bring it. Let it crash into me in a way so direct that I can’t miss the lesson this time. Let it be obvious. Let me feel it so I can finally heal it. Let it rise to the surface so I can release it for good.”
And you know that phrase, be careful what you wish for…
I had been missing a lesson, one of those core wounding lies I’d been believing, and God had been trying to teach me throughout relationships in my life, but God finally got the point across through each of the most pivotal relationships in my life, my “soulmates.” I believe we all have soulmates. And I don’t mean soulmates in the way Hollywood movies portray them. Soulmates don’t have to be romantic relationships. Soulmates are people in your life who you feel that instant connection to, but not in a dependent or needy way. The guiding principle in a relationship between soulmates is that needs are equally met.
It’s someone that when you first see them, you are drawn to them. You have this feeling of either, “I feel like I know you” OR “I feel like I’m supposed to know you.”
In soulmate relationships, you can see and be seen as you truly are.
I know of four soulmates. I’ll share a few examples with you.
In kindergarten when we would get a new student, they would walk into the class and someone would volunteer to show them around the school. This happened a couple of times, and I never raised my hand. Until one day, a girl with long dark hair wearing overalls walked in. This intuition inside my five year old self made my body react before my brain even knew what was happening, and my hand shot up. I knew I was the one meant to show her around the school. I knew we were meant to be in one another’s lives. I now know, this is a soulmate of mine.
When I was eight years old, I was playing on the playground, and like a scene out of a movie, I saw a girl with short blonde hair playing by herself. I had never seen her before, but I felt like I already knew her. Without even thinking, I walked over to her. I knew we were meant to be friends. I now know, this is a soulmate of mine.
If you’ve read Sleeping with a Stranger, then you know that when I was 18, I was happily dating someone, but I had a moment where I encountered a guy named Brian. My immediate thought was, “This guy is going to play a very important role in my life.” Notice my first thought wasn’t, “this is the love of my life or this is the man I’m going to marry.” Brian is a soulmate of mine.
So when I prayed for God to bring it, boy did God ever…
And God brought me the lessons one by one that I’d been needing to learn since childhood. God had tried through other people. Through other events. Through other experiences.
But God finally got the job done because this time, the lessons were brought to me through the people I cared most about.
The people I loved more than anything.
With each of these four soulmates, God used them to hold a mirror in front of my face and force me to look at what I had subconsciously been blocking for years.
The first came in October from a soulmate I have had since childhood. When we met, this person felt like someone I’d known my whole life. Someone I felt would always be there for me. Would never lie to me. Would never deceive me. Would never cause me harm. Someone I had always been able to depend on. Of all the people in my life, this is the one person I knew deep down would never leave my life. But in October, this person did, in a way that was abrupt and totally unexpected.
It was an abandonment that I didn’t know existed. I remember crying on the floor for two days. I remember thinking, I have never in my life felt abandonment like this. And that is saying a lot from someone who had her sister ripped from her life without notice.
And then it hit me. My prayer. “Bring it to me however you have to through whoever you have to in order for me to get it. For me to finally learn it.”
The lesson, the false identity that I kept calling in and confirming, is that I had been abandoned. By Courtney, who, through no fault of her own, had left me when she died.
By friends. By boyfriends. By family. Every time I felt misunderstood. Every time someone had the chance to stick up for me but then didn’t. Every time someone could have picked me but chose someone else.
Finally, I realized that I hadn’t been abandoned. Not by this soulmate, and not by anyone before.
In truth, I had been self-abandoning my whole life and I needed to see that every single time I felt abandoned, it was actually me abandoning myself.
Once I started to learn the lesson, I realized how many times I’d missed it. For example, in 2014, I hired a business coach. She was someone who worked on her time only. If I needed her outside of our scheduled time, she was never available. Which I can respect– that’s called having boundaries. But if she called me or needed me outside of that time, I always made myself available. Until one day, when my own business really began to show signs of success, she left. She accused me of something that was untrue, and she used that to validate her leaving. I now know that she was threatened by my success, but that didn’t make sense at the time because wasn’t her whole job to see me succeed? But I continually self sacrificed my own business growth to put time into hers. I was self abandoning.
Another one is when Sleeping with a Stranger was published. My book released in March 2020 (yes, really) and the public relations world was struggling and trying to navigate a new way just like the rest of us. But I had put ALL my eggs for this book in the PR person’s basket. If he said he’d call at noon on Friday. I would rearrange my entire schedule and be waiting by the phone beginning at 11:30am. If by 12:30pm he hadn’t called. I panicked. My whole body would feel electrified with anxiety. I would call him several times until I’d finally receive a text that said something like, “Hey. Got stuck in a meeting. I’ll reach out tomorrow.” So then, I would clear my entire day…again because I felt so dependent on this man and believed he was the only way my book would get out into the world. I abandoned my own life, my own schedule, my own projects. Until one day, he just never called back. He left.
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So when this soulmate of mine “left” I felt those same feelings all over again. The same feelings that I had originally experienced when Courtney suddenly died. God had tried to reveal this false identity I’d been believing– that everyone I loved abandoned me– many times through many people. But I finally learned the lesson with this soulmate.
For the first time, instead of being torn up about the person leaving, after those two days of crying, I was able to shift my entire perspective. I understood that I called in that experience. I asked for the good life. And we don’t get the good life without having learned the lessons.
Because the good life is a life of unconditional love and that doesn’t happen until we first and foremost love ourselves unconditionally, until we can live out of our true identity.
This soulmate of mine was the only person who could have shown me that I am worthy enough to stop self-abandoning. This person didn’t leave me. This person loved me. The Jessica who dealt with the business coach and the PR person would have looked at this situation through Wounded Feminine energy. She would have been the victim. But not this Jessica. She was operating from Divine Feminine energy. So I looked at that situation and thought, Wow. This person who I love just changed my life. With one phone call, this person showed me the main lesson I am here to learn. And now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unlearn it. I’m one step closer to the good life. And that would never be possible without this person doing what they did. This person changed my life. Like on a Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa kind of level. That is some powerful shit, man!
And what truly showed me that I had learned the lesson is how I reacted to it. In the past, I would have tried and tried to prove my worth to someone. Like when I wrote my business coach a seven page letter explaining all the amazing things she had done for me– completely leaving out all the things I had done for her. Or how I tried relentlessly to get back in touch with the PR person until I got so panicked that I hired another PR person, instead of simply trusting that maybe I didn’t need someone else to promote my book. Maybe I was actually the best person for the job.
For the first time, I didn’t reach back out. I didn’t try to prove my worth. This person wanted to leave. So I let them.
I didn’t need to convince anyone of my worth. I knew it. I also knew that everything that is meant for me will never leave me. Never pass me by. And that when this person is ready, they will reach back out.
And just because God likes to be thorough, a month later, God taught me the same lesson with the soulmate I met in kindergarten.
And a month after that, I went through the same lesson with Brian.
And just to round it out, another month later and I checked off this lesson with my final soulmate, the one I met on the playground when I was eight years old.
These soulmates came in to set me free by showing me my true, God-given, divine identity.
I am not the core wounds I’d been believing. I am worthy because I was made in love by the God who is love. That is the truest thing about me. Not that my sister died. Not that I’d been abandoned. Not even that I’d been self-abandoned. I am loved. I am love.
I have the same birthright as Jesus, because I am also a child of God. I have access to sovereign love all day every day. I know who I am and what I was made for, and no one can take that from me just through leaving me. Once I realized that, I stopped trying to make people stay, to force them to see my worth, and in doing so, I was able to give up some of my final bondage to Masculine energy.
Divine love asks the Feminine to surrender. It asks the Masculine to take responsibility.
I had been operating from a place of control for so long that I needed lots of practice in learning to surrender. As I very slowly began to release my need to control, I started feeling. I started accepting. I started being.
I began going into every situation neutral for the outcome. When stuck in my masculine energy, I had high expectations over everything. High expectations for people, for my work, for an event I was attending. I would go to dinner with my friends and before I got there I would play out in my mind how I thought it would go.
And I was often disappointed, because I lived every second of my life trying to control it to the point I would assume how a situation would go and when I was wrong, I’d be disappointed by the outcome. Not because the outcome was bad, but because it didn’t match up with my expectations.
The beauty of life is not knowing what’s around the next corner.
No expectations for outcomes. Neutral for experiences. This has given me so much freedom and even what I may have previously thought of as a very mundane experience, because of no expectations, I leave most experiences today with a smile. With gratitude. With delight in the experience vs. disappointed expectations.
It can be tempting to get frustrated with yourself when you have to learn the same lesson over and over again. I’d try to just be aware of those moments and remind myself that you can’t shame yourself through the process of healing. At the beginning, anytime I battled or said things like, “I should…” I thought, “What if my daughter Stella came to me with this thought? How would I respond to her?” And I began to reparent the little girl who was still alive in me. I began to treat her with the kind of love and patience and grace I give my own daughter. I didn’t rush her. I didn’t shame her.
And throughout that process, bit by bit, I could travel back through everything I’d experienced as an adult, then an adolescent, then a child, and undo the trauma and hurts until I could embody the person I was meant to be. I was recreated and reborn.
I didn’t have to become someone else to find healing, I just had to forget everything that wasn’t my truest self.
In the next blog, I share what flourishing in my Divine Feminine has looked like since, and what it can look like for you.
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If you’ve read other posts in this series, you know that about a year into my 18 month return to the Divine Feminine, I had a breakdown. And I thought, “okay, this is officially rock bottom.” I had called in experiences that left me with only two choices: to break down and heal repeated cycles of hurt, or to just stay broken. I wanted to be broken down so that I could then be restored. And I was.
But first, I spent a couple of days on the floor weeping, and I remember feeling despair like I’d never known. My immediate reaction was the one I’d relied on over and over again throughout my life– even though I had worked hard for a year to uncover my Divine Feminine, but in this moment of despair, I wanted my Wounded Masculine energy back.
I wanted to put up walls and tell myself the other person is the problem.
It’s easier to do that.