The Masculine Malaise

We are suffering from a masculine-obsessed society. Growing up, our educators and mentors enforced values of rigid self-discipline, goal-setting, and never being enough. It has infiltrated every area of our life. Millennial women were told to go to college at whatever expense (which often meant going to grad school), get a good paying job (easier said than done), and settle down to raise a family (re-enforcing the myth of “you can have it all”). Granted, our loved ones usually gave us the best advice they could, but the world was changing too fast for us to prepare for the student loan crisis, stagnant wages, and emerging and disappearing industries due to new technologies. 

For those of us who achieved the career and/or family success, we often did so at a huge expense to ourselves. In the U.S., more women than men have been attending college for decades. We had some catching up to do given the history of our rights and independence, but now we are experiencing an unhealthy imbalance between our inner and outer worlds. We’re highly intellectual and skilled. We’re high performers in our jobs. We also go out of our way to help others in the workplace, at home, and in our community. Perhaps we achieved all the classic markers of success by society’s standards, or maybe despite our best efforts to do so, we haven’t reached the pinnacle we imagined for ourselves.

Our to-do lists are never ending, but we don’t prioritize our sacred feminine practice. We don’t create check boxes for fostering a relationship with our inner goddesses, rage-twerking in our bedrooms, surrendering to our body wisdom, spending our hard-earned money on what makes us feel sexy, or stomping out our good girl habits. We tell ourselves it’s not important enough.

We are suffering from the masculine malaise, a general feeling of unease and discomfort from being masculine-possessed.

We’re sick, bored, lethargic, alienated, angry, and anxious. The malaise often hits us hard by the time we reach our 30’s. It’s an incredible opportunity to seek the meaning of our lives from within. Whether or not we have a spiritual or religious background is irrelevant—we get to take this sacred journey because we earned it.

When I am feeling wrecked from a day of making a thousand decisions, dealing with mundane personality types (mostly men), and performing under pressure, I unwind and re-center through my feminine rituals: journaling, talking to my inner goddesses, dream work, shadow work, and feminine movement. The truth is that I am a classic Type A personality. I fucking love to-do lists, getting shit done, spreadsheets, and thinking my way through problems. BUT, my analytical brain doesn’t know when to shut up, and my highly sensitive body gets overloaded very quickly.

We can opt out of the the masculine hustle. Without honoring our conscious femininity, all the success in the world will continue to leave us empty. We must return to ourselves—that is where the treasures are: sustainable joy, fulfillment, wholeness, intuition, wisdom, and enough courage to kick some seriously stanky ass.

Once we dive into our sacred feminine practice, we can return to the light and face the world and continue achieving more than we ever imagined with our newfound positive masculinity. This practice will transform you into the super heroine you are.