Women's top 5 fears that are keeping them small.
Women often compartmentalize different parts of themselves to be revealed in different parts of their lives, but they rarely show all their colors everywhere. They downplay their worth with timidness or overly project it somewhat aggressively both because of insecurities they don’t know how to genuinely overcome.
Women fear claiming the beauty that is them. But why?
This conversation of women’s fears is much more complex than five singular points. The why's are vast, but what I can tell you is that they are all rooted in the fear of truly exposing all of themselves.
As much as our feminine power and feminine wisdom live in our bones, so does our fear of embracing it.
The complexity of our feminine nature has been shamed and ridiculed in its entirety over generations and lifetimes. When I say our feminine nature has been shamed in its entirety, I mean it has been shamed to embrace ALL parts of our feminine nature as ONE.
The mother, the nun, and the prostitute. The warrior, and the dark goddess. The hunter and protector, the medicine woman, the mystic, and the virgin. The list goes on and on. The facets of our feminine psyche and the many faces of the Goddess are endless.
The feminine is vast, and our freedom and power come from our capability to embrace ALL of it. Our fear is what it takes to do that.
#1 Women fear abandonment, rejection, and loss (or lack) of love.
The fear of abandonment could come across as weak, or strike a trigger cord that paints a disempowered codependent woman who lacks sovereignty or love for themselves, but that isn’t what this fear is about.
As much as we can enforce the practice of self-love, and say we should never depend on another’s love, we are designed for love. Yes, we must love ourselves to truly experience the depths of love with another, but we are designed for unionship.
Women’s superpower is those massive hearts of theirs. Women are designed to live in a state of being in love. Regardless of their choice to be a mother, they are biologically wired to fall in love with their children and wired to live in a state of grandiose love - with spirit, the earth, life, and one another.
Women are passionate in nature, and in a world that has been taught to cut themselves off from vulnerability, women have come to a place of fearing their vulnerability or fearing the shame and rejection they will receive from exposing it. They know the labels of needy, dramatic, invalid, and weak all too well.
We all long to be loved. And we all fear not being lovable. But sometimes our fear closes our hearts so tightly it keeps us from experiencing it at all.
Even though when we compose ourselves out of fear we end up isolated on the inside, for some reason we fear isolation on the outside even more. Once we start feverishly choosing love for ourselves over “achieving” the love of another we will eventually know the visceral value of that love so well, we’d never abandon ourselves again.
#2 Women fear that they aren’t beautiful.
This fear may sound vain, but the wounds are woven deeply into a woman’s survival. Most products designed for women are around weight loss, anti-aging, or something regarding beauty. Women don’t fear aging as much as they fear they were never beautiful enough in the first place. We have been taught that beauty is based on physicality, and that "beauty" equals love, acceptance, and safety. It’s gripping, painful, and makes us berate ourselves in desperation to be enough.
Beauty has been confined to a jaded little box that invokes self-hatred and self-berating, and our sexuality has been confined to this little jaded box of beauty as well. Women have been sexually objected for far too long and shamed as the prude or the whore. The truth is our sexuality isn’t about sex, and it isn’t about another desiring us. It’s our life force energy that has nothing to do with how we look or fitting into society's so-called standards. Beauty is just the same.
Beauty has nothing to do with our physicality. Each of our bodies is divinely beautiful. Every shape, wrinkle, dimple, stretch mark, size, and color is divine. Every face is a piece of art and every single body is a temple to a soul.
Beauty is embodying yourself vivaciously. Beauty is about confidence, self-love, and embracing every part of yourself. It’s the embodiment of your essence with adoration. It’s embodying your energy, and your heart with overwhelming amounts of self-love that you then radiate - to the point where you glow, where you are irresistible, inspiring, and contagious. That is beauty.
#3 Women fear asking for what they want and they fear pursuing pleasure.
Women have been so berated with shame for making a fuss that they fear setting boundaries, they fear opening their hearts and stating their true desire, and they fear wanting.
Dreaming big, playing big, and choosing one’s self first has been instilled with guilt considering that there is a world that needs saving. Women have been taught that they are the heal-all, fix-all, self-sacrificing, noble saviors.
Pursuing pleasure, desire, and asking for more have been painted as greedy, and sinful and women have instead been taught that it is honorable to be grateful for what they have and that it’s honorable to be a martyr. Pleasure quite literally feeds our brains with the hormones and chemicals that make us feel vibrant, joyous, and alive, and when women feel alive they are unstoppable.
So many women live with internalized rage, bitterness, and resentment over the caged animal inside, whose boundaries are crossed constantly. They don't even know how to find the words to express what they long for because the reality of their desires seems so beyond reality that their conscious mind doesn’t even know how to process it.
If we can’t create boundaries for ourselves we will never get the life we desire, and will always be a victim to the current others are invoking. Awakening to our desires, finding our voice, and taking action is what sets us free, and is how we forge the path our hearts are yearning for. We have to be able to speak what we want, state our boundaries, and what isn’t serving us, and then, we have to follow through.
Pause into your heart every day, and make a ritual of listening to its truth. Let it whisper what it’s been afraid to say out loud. Become infatuated by what it has to say, and fall in love. At some point, you will have to start small and begin by verbalizing your truth and taking steps but begin by listening. Listen until you realize what you’ve been wanting all along, what has been true all along, and how you have turned your cheek the other way.
Once you truly see what your instilled timidness has been keeping you from, the holy rage will be enough fire to light you up and make you persevere until you are set free.
#4 Women fear that they aren’t good enough.
Women drown themselves in perfectionism and the hustle and bustle of burning themselves out until they are a pile of ashes with no Phoenix rising.
I saw a quote the other day that said “If only all women had the confidence of a mediocre man…”. Men are taught to be shameless. They are taught to fake it until they make it and to say that they can do anything and that they're qualified above and beyond - and then they figure out how to do it.
Men come with their own set of fears, complexities, and suffering, there is no denying that. Just consider the daintiness women embody in comparison or the way they sacrifice their femininity to thrive in a patriarchal world (which completely defeats the fight for feminine power because it's just the opposite).
Women put every ounce of their being into mastering something running themselves into the ground, and still only see the imperfections. They then feel obligated, to be honest stating the disclaimer of their shortcomings so that they don't deceive anybody “covering their tracks”. On the contrary, I think women simultaneously think that they are too much, and therefore never enough. Either way, it suffocates their spirit, dims their effervescent light, and stops them from taking action and making change.
Women have to start seeing their strengths and gifts and dismiss their shortcomings as programming. They have to start getting comfortable in the discomfort of playing big, being big, and getting loud in the face of their imperfections. They need to realize the way their contractions, and insecurities are depriving the world of powerful women that can make the changes the world needs to be made. Women are the saviors but our role has been misrepresented.
#5 Women fear following their intuition full-heartedly.
Women fear truly following their intuition because that means they’d have to burn the residue of everything that isn't serving them to the ground from every crevasse, pocket of comfort, situation, and relationship in their life.
Deep down we all know when our inner voice is speaking Truth. We know that following that truth means freedom. We also know that following that voice requires us to walk through a blazing fire. We know everything may crumble behind us when we follow that voice. Especially if we haven't been honoring our boundaries, if we haven't been speaking our truth, and if we haven't been loving ourselves (because that most likely means our relationships aren't valuing us either).
What we have to remember, is everything worth hanging on to, and every relationship that is worth being in, won’t leave us when we shake things up for our wellbeing or reclamation of personal power.
Our intuition is our greatest companion and it will always guide us in the name of our highest service. What we have to remember, even in times of uncertainty, is that everything is a choice. Lingering in indecision or dwelling on the past creates suffering. Time is always moving forward, and it's in our best interest to keep moving forward with it. Choose the life you want to lead, and lead it.
Freeing ourselves is finding courage bigger than our fears.
This infinite journey of breathing into our fears and stepping forward one step at a time is freedom. Freedom is not for the faint of heart. As scary as it is to leap, we all know deep down - this is freedom. It's finding courage that is bigger than our fear to chose ourselves and make the life that we want.
Freedom is falling in love with ourselves so deeply, another's love could never make us abandon ourselves. Freedom is loving our bodies so feverishly, we embody our soul with every ounce of our life force energy. Freedom is pursuing our most lavish desires, speaking Truth, and using our voice to forge the life we are on a mission to lead. Freedom is following the wise discernment of our inner knowing guiding us every step along the way.
Women's fears to embody their feminine nature are valid. The backlash is real, it's visceral, and lives have been lost when it comes to women getting big, speaking up, and owning their power.
Domestic violence is real, witches burning at the stake are real, missing and murdered indigenous women are real. The statistics that 1 out of 4, some say 1 out of 3, women have been raped or molested as children is real. Unequal pay for women is real. The fact that black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women in America is real.
For those of us that are in a position to speak up, claim our bodies, our power, and truth without getting beaten, losing our lives, or being physically threatened - take care of yourself, protect yourself, do not allow yourself to be swallowed by the martyr, and find the courage to take one breath that is bigger each time. Find your sisters who are ready to rise with you. Know it gets easier, each step of the way, and that once you get a taste you will never look back.
Each breath of courage into your fear is a breath of courage into the fear of all women.
With love beautiful woman.
Abby
