Inner Serenity: Meditation Techniques for the Female Psyche

You’d be forgiven for thinking that meditation requires sitting cross-legged, uncomfortably on the floor, straining to keep your spine straight and face serene (the irony) while attempting not to have thoughts. Very unappealing. Also, incorrect.

Meditation, and the right meditation for you personally, is the most natural thing in the world. At the risk of sounding twee, it’s a homecoming: a return to your most profound, wisest, essential nature, allowing for the natural arising of well-being, connection, and joy.

It’s the radical act of replacing doing with the ease of being. Being is effortless. It’s not the same as “doing nothing,” which can often be a struggle as we wrestle with inner turmoil, feel guilty, or realize we don’t know what it means. Instead, being arises and animates us when we stop pushing, step into the present-moment stream of our life, and allow everything to be as it is.

Now, before you think, “I can’t do that,” let me say, with complete certainty, that you’ve already done this many times in your life, and your children do it daily. Have you sat in the sweet, present joy of holding a sleeping baby, watching perfection breathing in your arms? Found yourself unintentionally in the center of bliss from dancing with abandon or surrendering fully to the simple companionship of a partner? Have you experienced a profound sense of peace as you take a quiet moment on a hike to appreciate the forest? You’ve meditated.

Remembering How You And Your
Daughters Meditate

I am continually amazed at how many tasks women juggle in a day: attending to loved ones, working hard, managing a household, tracking a million details at once. A woman’s nervous system is a highly tuned instrument, sensitive to her environment, picking up emotional undercurrents in family and friends. Naturally responsive, giving, and compassionate, she tends to override her own needs to take care of others, that is, until she drops from exhaustion. But hey, somebody’s got to do it! Isn’t that my job? While this is part of our feminine generosity, we can forget to be generous to ourselves.
~Camille Maurine, author of Meditation Secrets for Women

One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is reclaim your connection to your inner world. One of the most empowering things you can do for your daughters is to teach them how to not sever that connection in the first place.

There are as many doorways to our inner realms as there are people. While the general themes tend to overlap, only you can know the exact right path for you. When trying to map a way back to yourself, it can be helpful to watch your daughters.

Notice which activities are immersive for them. It may be coloring, climbing trees, daydreaming, reading, or swimming. Ask them how they feel when doing an activity. Common words used by people who connect to their essential nature through “Being” are peaceful, calm, connected, presence, safe, well-being, and heart-centered.

What activities evoke these feelings in you? How can you incorporate more of them into your life and relay the importance of keeping up these activities to your daughters? There’s a reason they work for you. Reclaim the deep nourishment, restoration, and connection only your meditative processes offer.

Because women’s bodies and psyches are designed to be close to nature through our hormonal and emotional rhythms, abandoning our home in the body is even more disastrous. To state the obvious, your body is your own. We tend to forget this because our bodies have been colonized by other people’s thoughts, generic cultural images, and the comparison/competition mentality that are all based on a numbing sense of conformity. It takes a tremendous amount of consciousness to break this collective trance and reclaim the sovereignty of your inner territory.
~Camille Maurine

Nourishing The Female Body

In a go-go-go hustle-promoting society, we have to intentionally make time to reconnect to the feminine polarity of flow. Flow enables us to move out of our planning and controlling doing mode into our receptive, pleasure-filled, therapeutic flow mode.

Exercise:

Psychotherapist and embodiment teacher Michaela Boehm (author of  The Wild Woman’s Way) developed a practice for deeply processing and integrating uncomfortable emotions, trauma, and stress through the body. We reconnect to our groundedness, courage, and pleasure as we do this.

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Select a playlist of wordless music that appeals to you. Get comfortable on all fours, using a yoga mat or blanket for cushioning. Close your eyes and notice what you feel. Choose a physical sensation like tightness in your lower back or an emotion like anxiety. Then, begin to move as that sensation. How does your tight back want to move? How do you move when you notice anxiety?

This practice is the art of moving what you’re feeling. After ten minutes of continuous movement, bring the exercise to a close by lying still and noticing how you feel now compared to how you felt at the start. The activity can become a profound daily moving meditation for you and your daughters.

Written by Roxana Bouwer
Top image by Andrea Piacquadio for Pexels
Second image by Wendy Hero for Pexels

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