Personal Growth

As the saying goes, “teach what you most need to learn.”

During the month of June, what a lot of us have come to know as Pride month, there’s an energy, almost a buzz in the air. It’s an energy of freedom, lightness, uninhibited joy. I think about pride and I remember moments of celebration surrounded by love and embraced in community.

This year the arrival of summer coincides with the perfect time to expand your life. A difficult year has created problems that have gained publicity like increased anxiety and depression. But at a deeper level, even noticing no symptoms, almost everyone has experienced contracted awareness. When awareness contracts, you are less optimistic, see fewer opportunities, and fear that normal life has grown risky.

I recognized at a young age that when I expressed myself in ways that were seen as ‘different’ it wasn’t received well. As a trans kid in this world, you learn pretty early on what folks around you believe to be right and what they believe to be wrong. Because difference in the Western world is often used as a substitute for wrong, I knew that to survive I’d have to hide parts of myself away. This experience, unfortunately, is not exclusive to me. There have been moments in all of our lives where we’ve sacrificed pieces of who we are for fear of being seen as different or ‘other.’

Oprah fave and much-loved author Dr. Shefali Tsabary is making a case for revolutionizing the concept of "femininity."

The eternal feminine side isn’t restricted to just women—it’s a part of everyone’s wholeness, and when it is ignored, distorted or wounded, it can have devastating effects. Here are some ways to help you nurture your feminine side of wholeness.

In a world that is constantly telling us who we should be, to hurry up and wait for the manifestation of that narrative, it is no wonder it took a pandemic to slow us down and provide us an invitation to become. It was, and has been, a harsh and yet necessary pause; a diversion in this road of life to bring to our attention what has been wholly out of balance and what is looking to be birthed, nurtured, and manifested in its place.

I grew up in a home where we learned a lot about Hindu mythology. It seemed there were an endless number of gods and goddesses and it was easy to get caught up in a literal interpretation of their stories. In all honesty, it never really resonated with me. In my analytical mind, I never connected to the idea that worshipping a particular form would somehow bring things into my life. And the representations seemed flat and simplistic. Were these actual beings? What did it mean that Saraswati was the goddess of knowledge? And couldn’t I have knowledge without making an offering to her? I didn’t know how this all fit into my life.

We’re living in a time that is reflective of imbalance at every level, whether it be in physical and tangible space, or reflected in the depths of energies within us. What the Western world has created is a society that favors specific qualities, often related to masculine energy, and shies away from other qualities, related to feminine energy. This carries out into our personal lives, in our relationships, actions, and interactions, and can also be seen on a much larger scale. The Western world has defined narrow lanes of existence, for all of us to participate in, through the lens of imagined binaries.

In this human experience, it can be easy to get caught in a world of binary 'truths', a world where two opposing forces or qualities exist with little to no room in between or outside of. We interpret these two sides to be unwavering qualities of opposition on a linear spectrum. With certain limitations in our ability to understand, this way of interpreting the world makes a lot of sense.