I thought I’d share a little bit of my 2016 journey with you in this blog.

This year has been all about the feminine for me – yin, grounding, intuition, self-care and slowing down.

As I entered puberty and then adolescence, my femininity was suppressed as my father did not want me enhancing myself in any way. Heaven forbid any damn boys were attracted to me! I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs or underarms, nor pluck my eyebrows (don’t panic, I did it anyway). I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup (I would put it on as I walked up our 500 metre driveway on the way to the school bus), or wear stockings, or the same things all the other girls were wearing.

My mother’s femininity was supressed too – she never got her nails done, or facials and massages, and rarely spent money on nice things for herself.

We also grew up with the ‘don’t cry, you’re alright’, and ‘don’t come and see me unless there’s blood’ mentality – so we had to be tough.

This was really hard on a highly sensitive person like myself. I was constantly supressing my feelings and felt like I was invisible and didn’t count.

Becoming an adult saw me making some dubious life choices (haven’t we all?), and it took me about 15 years, two husbands, two kids and a couple of interstate moves to work out where a lot of my shit was coming from.

The past fifteen years has been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs as I’ve delved deeper into my issues, stopped talking to my parents, then started to talking to them again after dad had a heart attack, got diagnosed with depression, lost my brother suddently, and moved interstate, all with my amazing life partner, Charlie.

I truly believe that so many things in our life are serendipitous. At the beginning of 2015, I was sacked from my job at Fernwood because I stood up to my narcisstic boss (scary shit, but I had to do it before I had a nervous breakdown!), and once my emotions had settled a little, I decided I’d do more yoga and look into a yoga course. My research and yoga classes brought me to Peace Yoga and Meditation, and my delighful yoga teacher, Doreena, who spoke always of self-love and respect, being patient, kind and compassionate to one’s Self. Something I had never really done. I knew about it, but didn’t put it into practise.

Whilst studying to become a yoga teacher, I met some beautiful, warm, wise and inciteful women, learnt to love being still, started practising meditation most days, and discovered that my life had been quite yang (masculine) – busy, moving, hard and spent living in my mind (hence the anxiety and depression).

Over the past two years, I’ve read most of Brene Brown’s books – wow, just wow!! ‘Big Magic’ from Elizabeth Gilbert and other books that have helped me understand that I needed to accept all of me, the light AND the shade, the good AND the bad, the beautiful AND the ugly – ALL of it.

I discovered I had pretty much ignored the feminine side of myself for most of my life, so I deliberately began choosing more feminine clothes – I wore a long white dress and flower crown to my Yoga graduation, arranged a professional photoshoot for my business where I wore a dress and carried lots of flowers. I got re-branding for my business which now includes a feminine image – all still conscious decisions being made, sometimes painstaking,  but not yet truly following my intuition.

Then I discovered Yin yoga – beautiful, blissful, mindful, still and restorative, with the help of my sweet yogi friend, Ashleigh. My body, mind and spirit were crying out for this beautiful style of yoga. It was just what I needed, and I knew I needed to keep it in my life and that I wanted to share it with others. I want to share with them the beauty of stillness and just ‘being’ in this crazy world where we glorify being busy.

I signed up to do an online Yin certification and started attending Yin workshops run by Ashleigh, and then later with another lovely teacher, Judes. I will write more about Yin yoga in my next blog – hmmmm, maybe this isn’t the last blog for this year!

During this time I attended a Seminar called “Unleashing the Inner Goddess”, and it was at this Seminar that I finally connected with my womb space. I had a hysterectomy in 2005 and (thought I was) perfectly fine with having this procedure. It meant no more monthly pain, heavy bleeding and very low iron levels. I actually remember joking about a friend who asked me if I felt sad about ‘losing my woman-hood’ – my uterus didn’t make me a woman, there’s more to it than that (and I still believe this to be the case).

In the Seminar, we had to place our hands over our womb space and connect with it. As we all sat there silently in our seats, I focused on my breath and took my attention to the space where my womb used to sit, the magical organ that grew and nurtured both of my beautiful children. As I connected with this space, I felt a dull ache in the area, and then the tears began to flow. I felt grief at the loss of my uterus and lamented that I had never fully acknowledged the spiritual impact of losing one of the feminine parts of me. This womb space ached dully for the rest of the day, but I felt at peace knowing that I had finally dealt with the emotions related to this procedure over ten years ago.

I now continue my journey with great anticipation, to connect and find balance with my feminine, my yin, my intuition, and in being grounded. I continue to learn to trust my intution, to learn to let go and allow my inner goddess to guide me, to support my ventures and give me the strength to get up in the arena time after time.