“Women become empowered by the relationship they develop to their own body.”

Yes! This was said recently in my favorite podcast, Untame the Wild Soul by Elizabeth DiAlto,* and it’s absolutely true.

The thing is, we women have been enculturated to be dissatisfied, to mistrust, to dislike, to suppress, and to fight their bodies. Our culture separates us from our biggest source of power: our own physical body.

This cultural process is not accidental; it’s a key piece of enforcing and continuing the patriarchal system that drives our social structures. Separating women from their bodies and teaching them to mistrust their bodies keeps the status quo in place.

How can we be empowered if we don’t deepen our relationship with our own body and completely embrace it? We can’t.

Not fully at least.

Mamas, no matter who you are or what you have struggled with, your body is not your enemy.

The body is a beautiful vessel with infinite potential for health, flow, connection, and ease. It is a means, a portal to spirituality, and an antenna that picks up more around us than you could ever imagine.

The female body can grow and birth a freakin’ baby, after all. This power is and has historically been, very intimidating to many. We don’t understand it. Much of our power is centered deep inside the womb (or where the womb was if we no longer have one). It crosses over into the realm of sexuality, which has often been made wrong, sinful, and dangerous by many powerful belief systems in order to encourage mistrust and disconnect.

Many women have deeply embedded and even wholly embodied these ideas about their bodies from structures like religion, medicine, and the media. If we hear the same message enough, we start to believe it, and we start to run the same dialogue in the subconscious. We begin to believe that someone else out there has the answers and knows what is right about our magnificent female form.

The thing is – there is no right shape or size or color. There is no single right way to heal it or care for it. The body has definite, unique needs, and it begs to be heard via signs and symptoms.

If we tune in to our body, you’ll find you have access to answers and guidance that the mind alone could never tap into. That guidance is our intuition.

Intuition helps you find your truth. Notice I did not say the truth, but YOUR truth. This is the most important kind of truth there is. It will guide you in figuring out what your purpose is on this rock hurtling through space. It will connect you to your source, to Mother Nature, to God, to the universe, or whatever name you use to remind you of your divinity. So many systems will have you looking for the truth outside of yourself, which effectively strips you of your personal power.

No one else can tell you what your truth is. You just have to be willing to dive in and hear it.  

So how do we access our intuition?

  • We have to learn how to tune in and listen deeply.
  • We have to practice becoming an impartial observer and to listen without making it wrong.
  • We have to be willing to feel what comes up.
  • We have to learn to separate the chatter in our mind from the deeper, felt messages that arise from our intuition.

This is a hard process for many women because of their current relationships with their bodies. It seems most women (and most societies) have had past traumas that resurface when they start to tune in.

The body stashes and carries our emotional scars, and many women have physically disconnected in order to block these painful or scary emotions.

Plus, we often believe we’re supposed to feel good and happy all the time, and if not we’ve somehow failed. For all kinds of reasons, women just don’t feel safe reconnecting. They may even re-experience some of that trauma that resurfaces when they tune in to their intuition. Reconnecting is, therefore, a delicate process that takes patience, support, and a lot of consistent practice.

In sitting with countless women in my practice, I have seen firsthand that most women have experienced some kind of trauma earlier in life that has recalibrated their sense of safety and security in the world. That trauma made them physically disconnect from a viscerally uncomfortable experience, planted a seed of doubt about their personal power, and created a subconscious narrative that their body (and they) are unworthy of attention and healing.

This disconnect and our feelings of unworthiness explain why so many women, despite knowing what to do for their health, have trouble acting on the information and actually doing it.

Why bother nourishing a body that we don’t love and respect, a body that is constantly exhausted and has “failed” us, a body that keeps “misbehaving” with uncomfortable symptoms? In order to take good care of something, we have to learn how to value and respect it. That’s where so many women struggle.

The process is not an easy or a fast one, and as a culture, we favor the easy and fast. So healing our relationship with our body requires some level of swimming against the tide. The process is theoretically simple: We need to learn to really listen, release, and detach from those old stories, reconnect with our intuition, and develop a new relationship of love and respect for our wise and powerful physical bodies. When we do this, we will access our most powerful feminine intuition and our connection to the divine. Powerful stuff.

Mama. Trust in that beautiful body of yours.

There is some very powerful wisdom buried in there, ready to be tapped and released. Connect to it and you will not be disappointed. You will evolve, expand, grow, and change in ways you can’t even imagine. It is the natural progression of things when you reclaim your personal power.

Author: Dr. Emma Andre

* This blog article was inspired by an episode of my favorite podcast: Untame The Wild Soul with Elizabeth “Liz” DiAlto. Podcasts are one of my absolute favorite ways to gain inspiration, insight, and to grow personally and professionally. I do listen in the car, on walks, and even while doing the dishes at night (so I don’t need to “make time for it”). Liz interviews amazing people, and it’s real and raw and refreshing. If you want to hear more about this topic, and hundreds of other juicy ones, tune into one of her many amazing episodes. I have yet to be disappointed.