Undomesticating the Goddess
When Amy reached out to me after reading my article “The Erosion of the Feminine Principle,” I was deeply touched by her honest and vulnerable response. Her questions struck a chord within me. Echoing the struggles that so many of us face in reclaiming the divine feminine in a world that often devalues and dismisses our intuition, emotions, and inner wisdom.
I do my best to answer Amy’s questions with the depth, nuance, and personal resonance they deserve. Weaving together my own experiences with the collective wisdom of the feminine path.
My hope is that these words will serve as a source of validation, inspiration, and companionship for all of us who are navigating the sacred and often messy work of reclaiming our feminine soul.
How can we honor the divine feminine in our daily lives?
Honoring the divine feminine is ultimately about reclaiming parts of ourselves that have been fractured, disowned or devalued by a culture that prioritizes masculine ways of being. It’s a process of radical re-membering — putting ourselves back together, piece by piece.
This isn’t about rejecting masculinity, but rather restoring the sacred marriage of opposites within. We’ve been conditioned to view feminine qualities like softness, receptivity, intuition and emotional depth as weaknesses. Honoring the feminine means seeing these as the superpowers they truly are.
On a practical level, this can look like consciously making space for more being to balance out all our doing. It’s about receiving as much as giving, listening as much as talking, resting as much as striving. It means embracing the full spectrum of our human experience, from the messy and dark to the joyful and luminous.
We can invoke more of the feminine into our daily lives through small rituals and devotional practices, like lighting a candle, adorning ourselves, writing in a journal, or spending time in nature. But ultimately, it’s an inside job — a remembering of the wild and wise woman within.
What are some concrete ways to build this up?
Reconnecting to the divine feminine isn’t a linear process with an end goal, but rather a cyclical, lifelong journey of shedding and becoming. Some key practices that can support this unfolding.
Develop a dynamic relationship with your inner world through practices like meditation, dreamwork, therapy, journaling, art-making and being in nature. Create space to drop beneath the surface of daily life and listen to the whispers of your soul.
Connect in community with other women who are on this path. We need each other to midwife the remembering of our wholeness. Whether it’s a women’s circle, a creative collaboration or a spiritual sisterhood, find ways to tap into the collective feminine power.
Practice embodiment through movement, dance, yoga, breathwork, sensual exploration. Our bodies are the greatest altars to the feminine divine. Cultivating a loving, respectful and non-judgemental relationship with your physical form is essential.
Study women’s her-stories, unsung heroines, lost traditions. Reclaim the threads of women’s wisdom and weave them back into the mosaic of your lineage. The path has already been walked by countless women before us — we simply need to find their footsteps again.
Make beauty a priority — not as a superficial luxury but as a devotional practice, a way of honoring the sacredness of life. Adorn yourself. Beautify your spaces. Celebrate the sensual joys of being alive in a body. Let aesthetics be an entry point to the divine.
How do we follow intuition after years of therapy—being told I have a faulty mindset and misinterpret the actions of others?
First, I want to honor the pain and confusion of having your inner knowing undermined and pathologized. It’s an all-too-common experience for sensitive, intuitive people, especially women, to be gaslit and taught to mistrust themselves.
Reclaiming your intuition after this kind of conditioning is a process of deprogramming and reprogramming. It starts with questioning any beliefs or voices (internal or external) that tell you your perceptions are wrong or broken. You are the ultimate authority on your own experience.
At the same time, practicing discernment is key. Not every feeling or intuitive hit is factual or actionable. Sometimes our wounds and traumas can distort our intuition, so we need to get skilled at telling the difference between fear-based projection and true inner wisdom.
Somatic practices can be a powerful way to cultivate this discernment. Our bodies often register truth on a visceral level. Practice noticing how different choices, people and situations feel in your body.
Let your body’s yes and no be a compass. The more you build this muscle of interoception, the easier it will become to distinguish clear intuition from distorted perception.
It can also help to reality-check your intuitive hits with trusted allies who can offer an outside perspective. Seek out people who won’t judge your process, but who will lovingly reflect back what they’re noticing. Over time, you’ll start to internalize that support and develop more confidence in your own inner knowing.
How to follow intuition when I have a hard time trusting others and mainly my own discernment?
Intuition and trust in oneself can be rebuilt, even after being eroded by external factors or trauma responses. Here are some ways to get back in touch with your inner compass.
Start small. Pay attention to your intuitive nudges around low-stakes things. If you’re at a crossroads between two options, check in with your body and your first instinct. Take note of the decision you made and the outcome. Over time, you’ll start to build evidence for your intuition’s reliability.
Practice self-forgiveness. You won’t always get it “right,” and that’s okay. The path of intuition is non-linear. If you make a mistake or realize you misread a situation, meet yourself with compassion. Trust is built through showing up for ourselves even when we stumble.
Go back to the data. If you’re doubting your discernment about a person or situation, anchor back to the facts. What do you objectively know? What are you filling in with assumptions? Separating out the neutral information from the stories we tell can provide clarity.
Attune to your energy levels. Notice how you feel before, during and after interactions and decisions. Trust the wisdom of expansion and contraction. Your energy doesn’t lie. If something is consistently draining you, even if you can’t pinpoint why, that’s valid information to include in your discernment process.
Name cognitive distortions. Sometimes anxious or depressed thoughts can masquerade as intuition. Get skilled at identifying cognitive distortions like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, and personalizing. If your “intuition” is telling you globalizing messages of doom, it’s likely not true intuition.
How do we honor ourselves and find our voices in complicated situations where we feel indebted to others?
Guilt, obligation and people-pleasing are some of the heaviest chains that keep us tethered to a diminished life. These tendencies often have deep roots in childhood wounds, cultural conditioning and systemic oppression. Unwinding them is a process of reclaiming our sovereignty, our right to take up space, have needs and define our own worthiness.
On a practical level, it’s important to get clear on the actual agreements and contracts you’ve made vs. the assumed ones. Do you truly owe this person/situation what you think you do? Or have you inherited a distorted sense of obligation? Naming the real deal can free up a lot of misplaced guilt.
From there, practice connecting to your deepest self and your deepest truth in the moment. This part of you knows what is self-honoring. It knows what is in alignment, even when it’s uncomfortable. It knows how to say the hard thing with love. Connecting to this part of yourself is a meditation and a prayer. Call on it often.
You may need to grieve. Honoring yourself often means disappointing others, and that can bring up a lot of sadness. Let yourself feel the full depth of that grief, the cost of being “good” and “pleasing” for so long. On the other side of this is freedom.
Give yourself permission to start small. Practice honoring one want, need or no in low-stakes situations. Let it be messy and imperfect. You don’t have to renegotiate every relationship or boundary all at once. The path of finding your voice is one of baby steps, not leaps.
Seek out role models who embody the kind of safety and solidity you desire. Let yourself be inspired by those who have walked this path before you. It may feel lonely at first to honor yourself in a world that profits from your smallness, but trust that you are part of a lineage of those who chose their wild truth over the tenuous safety of the cage.
Final Thoughts
The path of feminine awakening is not always easy or linear, and it’s okay to stumble, to doubt, to circle back and start again. Trust that your own unique journey is unfolding exactly as it’s meant to, and that your voice and your wisdom are needed in this world.
Blessings on your journey.
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