Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign hello and welcome back to another episode of Deepen your yoga practice. I am Lauren Leduc and I'm the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. What you may not know is I'm also a published author. In 2023 I published my first book, Embody your Inner A Guided Journey to Radical Wholeness. And I'm going to be pulling a little bit from that to talk about today's topic. So today what I wanted to talk about was this polarity of masculine and feminine energies that you might hear about in yoga. I feel like it's important to talk about because it's a relevant topic to everyone and I feel like there's so much misinformation out there and a lot of propaganda, quite frankly, as to what's feminine and what's masculine. So going to share with you through Yogic Tools a way to open your mind about these topics, I think, and set the record straight in a way, as well as diving into a bit more of the feminine energy than the masculine energy today. I'll explain why and and how later on. So sit back. Whether you identify as male, female, non, binary, trans, the this is still great information for you because we all have bodies. According to yoga, we all have energy bodies. And you'll come to find out we all have masculine and feminine energy within us. So again, I share a lot about this in my book which essentially works as a workbook called Embody youy Inner A Guided Journey to Radical Wholeness. I'll talk about that before episode end, but I did want to give a brief overview of this topic today. You'll see if you read the book, but also through exploration of this topic in general that to me this is a way for people to find wholeness within. So this isn't a way to pigeonhole ourselves into stereotypes or into cultural, social, religious expectations, but instead to look at the different sides of what makes us who we are, embracing both sides, maybe working with both sides and feeling a sense of wholeness and completeness within. And I think we can do that through this exploration and even balancing of the masculine and feminine. So let's talk about what masculine and feminine are. I'll say these words can be totally replaced by other ones if it makes more sense for you. So masculine we also consider to be solar energy. So like a fiery penetrating energy from the sun, Yang energy. So think of yin and yang. This is the Yang side and active K kinetic energy. We can think of feminine energy on the other hand as lunar or having to do with the moon and cycles with yin energy. So yin as opposed to yang as, rather than penetrating energy, receptive energy, and it's oftentimes characterized as wild and creative energy as well. So yin, yang, sun, moon, masculine, feminine, we are not one or the other. We might lean one way or the other depending on our personalities, depending on our focus in life, whatever it is at the moment, depending on cultural pressure. But we embody both of these energies within us. And it's really important to experience both, to live both, to feel, acknowledge and express both within us. It doesn't matter what our gender is. And these energies play out all the time in our day to day life. So you can think of productivity as masculine and rest as feminine. You can think of structure and planning as masculine and flow creativity, leaving some room for magic as the feminine. So if you think of these things, there's this interplay going on all the time in our lives and we might really lean toward one side or the other. But oftentimes if we're leaning really hard toward one side, that means we need to find the balance of the other, other side. So if we are super rigid about our schedule, for instance, it can start to cause some issues and we need to invite more flow into our lives. Or if we're too flowy, we might need to invite some structure into our lives to find balance, happiness and a sense of wholeness as well. So I want to talk about how these energies show up in the energy body in yoga and how we can balance these energies through yoga as well. So there are a couple different ways to look at this. So if we look at classical yoga within that Tantra and Hatha yoga, these both have a lot of techniques to basically energize and awaken feminine energy within and join it with the masculine energy. So in this model we're looking at the base of the spine containing kundalini energy or Shakti energy, this pure feminine wild energy that they say is dormant and lives within everyone. And then we're thinking of this masculine energy living around the crown of the head, this Shiva energy, this more directive penetrating energy. And when I say classical yoga, these are like thousand year old practices. They might use breath and breath retention, they might use bandas or specifically holding the muscles in way to drive the energy up. They might use posture, different cleansing practices, et cetera, to awaken this feminine energy at the base of the spine and bring it up to the crown of the head. If you're a modern yoga practitioner, you might not use a lot of these techniques, but you Might use some. You might do Breath of Fire. Sometimes if you take Kundalini Yoga classes, you will be tapping into some of these more ancient techniques. You might have felt this awakening energy at the base of your spine before and not really known what it is. So that is one way to look at this energy and how it's balanced through yoga.
[00:06:40] It's not really the way I connect with it so much. I connected with it more through the energy body, meaning nadis and chakras. So I'm not going to go deep into that system in this episode, although I'm happy to do it in a future episode. But just as a brief overview, according to Yoga Anatomy, we have prana that runs through our systems. Prana is life force energy. You can think of it like the force in Star wars. And it runs through these highways or roadways within us called nadis. So it goes through these nadis, and there's many, many, many nadis. And everywhere to intersect creates a chakra or chakra, a whirling vortex of energy that holds some kind of specific type of energy within the body. So within this is one main nadi, or channel that runs along the spine called shushumna. You can even think of bringing the kundalini up through shushuna, Shishumna part into the crown. But then there are two secondary NADIs next to Sushumna. One is Pingala, which is the masculine channel on the right side, and one is Ida, which is the feminine channel on the left side. These two channels spiral and travel up Shishumna. So from the tailbone through the crown of the head, and everywhere they intersect creates a major chakra point in there. Seven major chakras. Just to let you know, there are different systems. Chakras are an ancient concept, so there are different systems with different numbers of chakras. But this is what you will mostly see modern practitioners working with is the 7 system. So basically, these masculine and feminine chann work together, create to create these energy centers within us. And we do different practices to work with both. So on a yogic level, this can look like pranayama. So think of nadi shodhana, that is alternate nostril breathing. We're not just working with air through the nostrils. We are balancing our prana through the ida and pingala nadis. So that's one example where you can work primarily with ida, you can work primarily with pingala. Depending on which nostril you're breathing out of, we might translate this into finding a more masculine practice that's very sun salutation focused and really strength focused and structure focused. Or we might work with a more feminine practice that is more flowy, that has less rules, that has more space for intuition. We can meditate on different chakra points, we can meditate on the nadis. So there are different ways to identify these energies within our bodies and to work with them in the yoga practice. So that brings me to my viewpoint on these energies. And I said I was going to talk a little bit more about the feminine energies is that we live in a modern, fast paced, masculine centric society. Things are structured, things are typically more authoritarian. We are productivity focused rather than rest focused. We're about tangibility rather than possibility. None of these things are bad, standalone necessarily, maybe authority, authoritarianism. But when they're out of balance, when the feminine is suppressed, things really can spiral out of control toward patriarchy, toward war, competition, domination, fascism. Because we are uplifting this one side of us. And by us I mean the individual and collective, while suppressing, demonizing, othering this whole other side of us. So to me, writing a book on how to embody your feminine energy or embody your inner goddess, I call it, is really important. Not because masculine is bad, not because we need to be all feminine and no masculine, but because we need to befriend this other side of us on both an individual and collective level to bring more love, more peace, more acceptance, more wholeness into this world. So if you feel yourself overworked and under rested, you might have an imbalance of the masculine and a suppression of the feminine. If you feel yourself rigid and unable to relax, you might hold the same balance. If you feel yourself clinging to beliefs, ideals, you might have this imbalance. If you feel yourself valuing productivity over creativity, you might have this imbalance. So how do we cultivate more feminine energy? So in the book I take this chakra by chakra. We go through the seven major chakras and talk about these imbalances within them and how to correct those through acknowledgement, acknowledgement and reflection of what is there. And then through different embodiment practices, which are usually yoga based in some way. Some of them are not. But I'll start with an example of day one, because this is a 49 day workbook, seven weeks, seven chakras, and day one is called I love my body. So that exists within the root chakra. Our relationship with our physical body, body, not only physical body, but like the earth itself, with matter, with the density lives in this chakra. Most of us receive cultural, maybe familial social, romantic, whatever it might be, messages our entire lives that there is something wrong with our bodies, that it's not good enough, that it needs to look a certain way, it's not sexy enough, it doesn't fit into the whatever, the style of clothes is enough, that there is somehow like trends around what your body is meant to look like. And it's really exhausting. So embodying and embracing feminine energy would be befriending the body, loving the body, loving whatever shape it comes in right now. And not only that, but tuning into the intelligence of the body. It holds so much information for us. And when we're divorced from that, we're really divorced from our aliveness, from our intelligence, from our potential. So although I think the exercise that I give for this one is yogic in origin, it's not exactly like pulled from the Hatha, yoga, Pradikapa or something like that. But the reflection is to list all of the limiting beliefs and negative thoughts that you hold around your body and then to rewrite them to create positive mantras around each thing. And the embodiment practice is a self massage and you add mantra. The mantra is, my body is mine, my body is sacred, my body is beautiful. So we start to unearth some of these shadow beliefs that in my opinion, typically are the more feminine part of ourselves. It's the yin, it's the hidden. We bring it to light and then we just love on it, love on it so much. And we do this in so many different ways throughout the book. And I think my main messaging for you listening is yes, we all, including you, have these polar, these opposing energies within. Neither is bad, but they can be out of balance. And if they are out of balance, just look around you. There are so many reasons that it can happen. And that by shining a light into our shadows, by loving on them, by transforming them oftentimes into our superpowers, we get to embrace and embody a sense of power and wholeness that can only be found by bringing these different sides of us into harmony. So just to conclude, these masculine and feminine or solar and lunar energies are vital and important forces within all of us. Yoga, reflection, just awareness in general can initiate and hold your hand through a journey that can be difficult, I think, but absolutely worthwhile that leads into this feeling of harmony and wholeness. And that in the book I share a lot about my own life and things that I've been through and discoveries that I've made, ways that I've messed up to help give you this systemized look at your energy body, at these polarities, so that you can find your wholeness within. And I feel like I'm still on that journey, right? It's not like I've done all the things and now I'm perfectly balanced all the time. I still get knocked to one side or another. But these practices, yoga awareness, mindfulness, community, all of these things bring me back to this sense of flow, to this sense of center, to this sense of balance where I can really utilize these different sides of myself in a way that's really beautiful and helpful. You can purchase embody your inner goddess in person. If you're in Kansas City, you can come to True Love Yoga and grab a copy or rainy Day books. You can also get it from any online book retailer. And I just want to thank you so much for listening today. I'd love to know your thoughts on this topic and would love to know if you have more interest in learning about the energy body and yoga. Because in yoga we look at the body as so much more than the physical. There's. There's so many other layers going on. So I want to send you so much gratitude and love and I'm cheering you on as you unearth and love on your shadows and embrace your wholeness. Om Shanti Om. Peace.
