Before you can begin to understand the power of the Divine Feminine, you may first need to look more deeply at the spiritual beliefs you’ve been taught and feel safe with questioning and exploring them. Shakti practices offer you an empowering way to begin welcoming Her energy back into your life, giving the feminine space to breathe, create, heal, and transform you.
Shakti has always been divine and worshipped as the feminine power in the universe. But, in the world of religion, men have been centralized. This has obviously been experienced in branches of Christianity, but it has also been the truth in many eastern practices, including yoga.
While yoga is currently dominated by female teachers and practitioners in the world as a whole, its roots lie in male dominance. Like many other religions, only men were allowed to study and teach the spiritual practices of yoga. Just as Christianity required maleness to acquire priesthood, yoga, too, required the practitioner to be male to learn and transmit the teachings.
Why Shakti Has Been Suppressed
While the world of structured religion and spiritual enlightenment was male dominated, the feminine never disappeared. In fact, it is the feminine that offers the fluidity and flexibility that so many crave. It is the feminine that brings sensuality and pleasure into practice. It is the feminine that embodies creation, creativity, and life.
Patriarchy has always been alive and well within the world of yoga, as it was in the world as a whole. A feminine perspective of yoga and spirituality seemed to radically shake up the rut of patriarchy that the world had been in for some time, offering it a desperate freedom from the shackles of male-dominant spirituality.
Traditional yoga focuses on a “bottom up” philosophy. This means that we start with the root chakra, at the base, and work our way up. The goal here is to reach enlightenment as we grow and expand upwards. It is a practice of ascension.
Early practitioners of yoga even focused on preaching the necessary ascension as moving away from the energy of the feminine. By moving away from our sensuality and sexuality, we are then able to experience enlightenment.
Shiva and Shakti: Why We Need Both Energies
In yoga, Shiva represents the masculine energy of the world. This energy is all around and within all of us. Shiva is stillness, it is consciousness, it is openness. If one were to simply focus on the energy of Shiva, They would be in a constant state of meditation, unable to move, create, or truly live. This was (and still is) what many aspire to.
The goal was balance. One cannot thrive without the other. Without Shakti, the world would cease existing, becoming lifeless. And without Shiva, life would be formless, lacking awareness and purpose. Balance is needed to maintain flow and to ensure that form occurs with thought.
With the knowledge that balance is needed, the yoga world (while under the guise of seeking this balance) was dishonoring the feminine in the oppression of Shakti. The goal being enlightenment and clarity through ascension left out the most important piece of actualization, that without Shakti, without the feminine, enlightenment would mean endless and formless stillness.
This is what the patriarchal focus on control, power, and knowledge have done. It has led us to a world of imbalance, a world of pain and suffering, a world that oppressed the feminine has become a world of dominance and exploitation.
This can be seen easily in the world around us, and if we are willing to take a closer look, this can be seen at the deeply personal level of the self. The medicine of the feminine is desperately needed to reduce violence of the self, to restore care and equality within. This can be done by beginning to tune into Shakti.
Shakti is the energy of the universe. Shakti is life force. Shakti is the feminine. In order to feel truly balanced, we must unite the two energies so they can flow together. The problem is that spirituality has been grounded in patriarchal male dominance for so long that the pendulum needs a desperate swing in the other direction in order to truly return to balance.
Shakti needs attention. Shakti needs to be given the space to breathe and play and explore and also to scream and cry and heal. Shakti has spent too long in the shadows and is waiting to truly emerge as the life force of all.
If balance is the priority, then we must understand the deep wounds that patriarchy have had on the feminine. The feminine doesn’t need to just be seen or witnessed, the feminine needs to be freed.
Consider how Shakti has been minimized in your own life. Do you have any Shakti practices in your life? How have you been taught to prioritize a sense of control over intuition? How have you been taught that pleasure needs to be reigned in and sacrificed in order to feel connected to the Divine? How have you been taught that your worth comes only from the formal, structured ways in which you have been educated?
How can we begin to welcome Shakti into our daily lives? By liberating Her.
Shakti, Tantra and the Divine Feminine
Tantra is a branch of spirituality rooted in the feminine. Tantra was radical at the time of its emergence because it dared to elevate women and return to a state of worshipping the feminine as creation, with Shakti revered as the Goddess and divine feminine power, rather than limiting her to being of service to others. In tantra, the feminine found a home.
One of the guiding principles of Tantra is that the body is not something we must ascend from. While many religions view the body as holding onto the sins of the flesh, Tantra reveres the body, understanding that to ascend from the body is to detach from life itself. Without the body, we are floating heads. We cannot aim to “rise above” without oppressing the parts that are below.
Tantra speaks to the power of staying grounded in the Earth, rooted into the body, while also expanding beyond ourselves. Without rooting in, we become lost, drowning in awareness. Instead of “rising above” the body, we recognize that it is the body that is the pathway to divinity.
When we view our physical experience as divine, we have no need to transcend beyond it. In fact, transcendence is not an escape of the physical flesh, it is an embodiment of it.
In Tantra, we use our desires, our pleasures, our bodies, as a gateway to the Divine. It is through connecting deeply to our humanness that our spirit has the space and safety to weave itself fully together and we become united within.
5 Shakti Practices for Restoring Her Into Your Daily Life
Here are five Shakti practices for beginning to restore the feminine in your own life and allowing Tantra to guide you toward experiencing life more fully.”
- Engage your senses.
Your senses are a portal to experience. When you are able to tune into your senses, you have the power to be immersed into each moment as it happens, potentially experiencing bliss everywhere. You don’t have to go out of your way to practice sensual awareness. When you drink your morning coffee (or tea), feel the warmth of the cup in your hands, inhale the fragrance, breathe in the feelings that first scent captures, slowly drink, allowing the warmth to spread from your lips into your mouth. The warmth continues to expand, touching so many parts of you as you taste and then swallow. So much possibility in one sip.
- Embrace all of your emotional experience.
Anger, grief, sadness, rage, horniness, arousal, excitement, etc. Talk to your emotions as if they are visitors passing through. Each one needs some hospitality. A little tenderness goes a long way with letting the emotions be experienced, without being consumed by them. Consumption often happens when we are desperately pushing the feeling away, only for it to get louder. Try making gentle space for it to visit, not take up residence.
- Breathe deep into the body.
This is the first step toward the feminine desire to descend into the body, rather than ascend. Drop your shoulder, let your belly out without sucking it in, and as you inhale, send the breath down into your root, into your Yoni, your Womb. Expand from here. As you exhale, imagine the breath extending beyond your root to encompass different parts of your body, perhaps even your entire physical self or beyond.
- Shakti Shakit.
Shakti shaking is a foundational practice in Tantra. We use the movement of shaking to physically release anything we are holding onto. As you shake, you give it all back to the Earth. Mama Earth knows how to recycle naturally. (NOTE: shaking when bleeding may not feel good because your body is already naturally releasing through your cycle. Trust in the timing and don’t force any practice if it doesn’t feel right)
- Touch as medicine.
Touching of the self is something many people have struggled with. I’ve heard people say it feels taboo and even wrong to touch the body. This is heartbreaking that we have gotten so detached from ourselves that to touch our own bodies feels wrong. Let’s start by reintegrating touch slowly. A simple self hug can be transformation. Caressing the arms, holding your own hand. Working up towards embracing or massaging the breasts, cradling the womb, or cupping the Yoni.
These Shakti practices aren’t about becoming something new. They are an invitation to make space for the feminine that has always existed within you.
If you want to explore these Shakti practices more deeply, Turned On offers a nine-month journey into sacred sexuality, pleasure, the feminine, and the Self.”
