Feminine integrity doesn’t exist.

Before you crucify me, let me explain.

The way our society generally thinks of integrity is doing what we said we’d do. This is a masculine version of integrity (for a man or woman).

If we’re truly inhabiting our feminine – man or woman – then what is ‘in integrity’ is what feels good in the moment, and that may or may not be the thing you said you were going to do.

The tricky piece about this is that 90% of the people on the planet have a really shallow capacity to understand what truly ‘feels good’, so most people are expressing a very shallow version of integrity.

For example, I just came from a sitting at a cafe, drinking a chai and catching up on bits and pieces of work. It was enjoyable, pleasurable – it felt good! I’d said I was going to do a Facebook live at 11:30, but I didn’t really want to. On a shallow level, what would have felt good in the moment was ordering a second chai and staying at the cafe, but I know what feels good to me at a deeper level, is to consistently move myself forward in the ways I have chosen – even when I don’t ‘want to’ do them in the moment.

So I harnessed my masculine capacity – the part of me that’s willing to do what I said I would do because I have a commitment to something bigger than what feels good at a surface level in the moment, and I did the Facebook live.

Repackaging the Masculine as Feminine

What I love about a lot of the women’s work that’s coming into the world is that it’s encouraging women to tap into their feminine and it’s bringing a new valuing of the feminine into our vernacular and into our cultural consciousness.

But there are some things that drive me CRAZY about some of the women’s work I’m seeing.

One is this: what is being called feminine is often actually the masculine repackaged. I recently read the quote that said, ‘ambition is feminine,’ and I immediately thought no it isn’t.

Ambition can be sexy and a woman can be ambitious, but ambition is masculine. There’s a new wave I’m seeing in which people are rebranding masculine energy as feminine in order to pretend that {women} can live in {their} feminine all the time.

But this is just another way of not really honoring the feminine, AND subtly saying it’s not OK (or attractive) for a woman to have strong masculine capacities. It seems like people are needing to make all aspects of women feminine and I fundamentally disagree with that.

I am a woman, and I have a lot of feminine attributes and capacities, but I also have a lot of masculine attributes and capacities. It’s my capacity to weave the two together and dance on either ‘side’ moment to moment, that drives my success and makes my life and family not only work, but thrive!

So rather than trying to speak to feminine integrity, I’d rather say this:

It’s ok as a woman to use your masculine in service of your integrity AND to expand your feminine — your flow, your feeling body, your pleasure, expression and intuition – and still be able to draw on your masculine in any moment to get shit done in the world. It doesn’t mean you have to shut off your feminine, it’s just knowing that you have both capacities.

If, as a woman (or a man), you are unwilling, or incapable, of finding any structure inside yourself, then you are consciously or unconsciously expecting the people around you to hold that structure for you. While your feminine expression and the energy can be a gift, if you don’t have any capacity to hold your own masculine self, it doesn’t become a gift. Unless you have an explicit agreement with all the people in your life to hold all of the masculine for you, then you are simply taking advantage of their masculine – because they have to hold it for you if you cannot hold it for yourself.

Expanding Your Range

Another word I see a lot in relation to masculine and feminine energies is ‘balance’, as in “we should all have a balance of the masculine and feminine inside us,” and it makes me weary.  First off – don’t get me started on ‘balance’ because I don’t believe it exists. Also, in my experience, what people mean isn’t really balance, it’s a bland middle ground that doesn’t have much of either the masculine or feminine {energies} in it at all.

What I would prefer is what I call ‘expanding your range.’

For instance: I think I fall more to the feminine side but I have a very strong masculine capacity — some innate and some cultivated. Our culture is very afraid of the feminine, which made me afraid of it, so even though I have a lot of innate feminine capacity, it’s taken conscious cultivation for me to expand my range on the feminine spectrum.

As a woman, I have also been afraid to be ‘too masculine’ and it has taken very conscious practice to expand my range in inhabiting the full spectrum of my masculine – as a teacher, parent and even lover.

Regardless of where you fall on the masculine/feminine spectrum, what is possible for you is an expansion much farther and deeper into both the masculine and feminine, to find your deepest capacities on both ends of the spectrum. The people I know who have done that are the people who have the biggest capacity to flow and make art, and meet the moment in the deepest, fullest way possible.

So what is Feminine Integrity?

Ultimately, being able to tap into what I would call ‘feminine integrity’ – I prefer the word devotion – is crucial to living your deepest life possible. Feminine integrity is actually a deeper level of devotion to life.

Feminine integrity and devotion comes from feeling way, way, way beyond the surface level of what feels good in the moment. When we are in touch with feminine integrity, we choose, not from the surface level of what feels good and not from any rigid commitment to doing what you said you would, but from a place of what actually serves Life.

Watch this video for more on what Expanding Your Range actually looks like, and what it means to express Feminine Integrity: