I love being a woman. I love everything about it. The foul moods, the shimmering glee, the curves, and bumps, and soft skin… The enormous, ever changing heart. Round, grounded, fertile, arid, wet, unpredictable, and peaked we, like Mother Earth,…
Your Body Is Listening
If you believe in the study of your mind, then you must believe in the study of your body. It is all so deeply linked.Stress, for example, isn’t just an overall feeling of your brain being overstimulated or overwhelmed with thoughts and to do’s. Stress affects the body with a quickened heart rate, quickened breath, tighter muscles, higher blood pressure, and high alert senses. When we bring words into the body-mind equation, things get even more complex.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Did you know that when you speak negatively to yourself – either in your mind or out loud – that you develop more anxiety overall – body sensations of buzzing, breathlessness, shaking and tension arise.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Another study found that if you think positive thoughts and words, you stimulate your frontal lobe which influences your motor cortex (the center that controls your actions) and can propel you into pleasurable physical action – like going on that hike you’ve been dreaming about or running yourself the bath you’ve been craving all day.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
FEMININE POWER
I asked my friend what the word “feminine” meant to her. She scrunched up her nose as if smelling something putrid and said, “delicate, dainty you know… Effeminate.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I looked up “effeminate” on the internet – “effeminacy is the manifestation of traits in a boy or man that are more often associated with feminine nature, behavior, mannerism, style, or gender roles rather than with masculine nature, behavior, mannerisms, style or roles. It is typically used implying criticism or ridicule of this behavior.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
There it is. That last sentence, on Wikipedia no less – “it is typically used implying criticism or ridicule of this behavior.” Effeminate, and the other words we use to express feminine qualities is a word that desperately needs rescuing from a culture that has a wickedly disturbing relationship to all things feminine.
