The Twofold Challenge for the Sensitive Woman Living in Today's World

Today I am talking about sensitive women and sharing what I see as the twofold challenge that they face living in today’s world, encompassing the disempowerment of both the feminine principle and high sensitivity.

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HSPs, highly sensitive person, highly sensitive people, highly sensitive women, empaths, introverts, feminine energy, feminine empowerment

Before we start exploring challenges, I want to start by saying that I’m not trying to encourage a victim mindset, nor focus on difficulty and suffering. But we also have to see a problem before we can resolve it. The work that I do is about deep empowerment, and part of that is deep understanding. I think it’s important for us to really see and understand the imbalances that we are facing in the world today, and to stop blaming ourselves - to cultivate self compassion and forgiveness, and to see clearly what is in or out of alignment for us so that we can take responsibility for what we choose and create.

The oppression of the feminine principle

The first part of the challenge has to do with the overall oppression of women and the feminine.

For many years, for thousands of years women and the feminine principle, meaning the feminine part of the universal masculine/feminine polarity, have been oppressed and exploited.

There were times in history long ago when we saw more balance in the world, but in the past two thousand years or so, we’ve seen a culture that has lost a lot of the feminine wisdom that used to be woven into our human lives.

During that time, humanity has been in a patriarchal society (meaning that we live in a society that is dominated by men and the masculine, and we were taught a masculine value system) and at the same time, the feminine principle was devalued and discarded.

Now, there are some people today who believe that we have overcome gender inequality, and that women have risen due to the feminist movement and women’s liberation movement. And, while I can agree that things have improved for some of us, especially in the west, in my view the feminist movement was not truly a movement for the empowerment of the feminine principle. Because we still have a masculine value system, and I don’t believe that we have achieved balance.

And this may be a topic for another day, but I will just say that, in my view, women are still facing a lot of disempowerment on this planet, and everything that the feminine principle represents, including this earth and all of life on this earth. The feminine part of life is still facing a lot of dishonor and exploitation.

I once heard my mentor Shannon Port say "the way we treat the earth, is the way that we treat the feminine", in other words the way that we are treating the earth, that it the same way that we are treating the woman, because the earth is a powerful embodiment of the feminine.

We still are deeply entrenched in a disempowered masculine value system. A system that values… domination, aggression, productivity, achievements, profiteering, brutality, exploitation, and disconnection from the heart and wisdom.

So, more recently in our history, this has been a man’s world. And women have been trying to shape themselves to fit in with our man’s world, but at the cost of their well being. Because women’s bodies are not designed for a hyper-masculine way of living with the constant working and stress. As we can see from women’s health today, this only leads to burnout and unhappiness.

So, my point is that for a long time now, it has been a challenge and a disadvantage to be a woman on this planet, and especially to be a powerfully feminine woman - a woman of intuition and deep heart wisdom.

The oppression of sensitivity & wisdom

The second part of this twofold challenge that sensitive women face, is the oppression of sensitivity and our sensitive gifts.

So, it is also a disadvantage to be a sensitive person in our current world: a world that is increasingly insensitive and overstimulated, extrovert dominant, a world that values the loud, the tough, as well as competition, power over, and aggression. There is no place for the quiet and gentle. And there is no refuge for a sensitive nervous system.

Our human world is moving at a faster and faster pace, there’s ever increasing information, stimulation, busyness and distraction. We have become numb. We have normalized constant doing and the pressures to always accomplish more, have more, be more.

We have normalized overworking to the point of exhaustion, burnout and desperation. We have normalized prioritizing work and productivity over wellness, self-actualization and enjoying life.

According to anthropologists, our human ancestors lived pretty leisurely lives. In hunter-gatherer societies, they rarely worked more than 15 hours per week, and spent the rest of their time pursuing creative projects, exploring and with the people they loved.

Our obsession with hard work and long hours arose during the early days of agriculture, and while that may have been necessary for survival at the time, this is no longer the case.

Currently humans work way more than is necessarily to provide for all our needs.

Why? Well, that may be a topic for another day, but in short: inequality and greed.

Whatever the reason, today we have normalized a lifestyle that is not truly living, that leaves us exhausted and distracted from what really matters. This is not good for any human being, but my point is that this way of living is especially out of alignment for sensitive women.

The modern lifestyle of working 40 plus hours per week, often at meaningless jobs that don’t honor our values and gifts, never resting, never taking breaks - this especially does not work for sensitive women and often leaves us drained, disempowered and miserable.

The truth is, sensitive women should be supported and revered for their wisdom, creativity, healing and spiritual power - just as the priestesses of old were. They should be amply provided for, so that they can provide their wisdom and healing presence. Yet we often find ourselves feeling trapped in this struggle to survive.

And we know in our bones that it’s not right, it doesn’t feel right and it can really make us miserable. But unfortunately, we often believe the programming that tells us that we are the problem, we are wrong, we are failures. We blame ourselves for a world that doesn’t work for us.

There is often a lot of shame around being sensitive, because at some point our culture devalued sensitivity, and we often feel that something is wrong with us because we struggle to keep up with our modern world. But this is a flaw with society, not a flaw with sensitivity.

Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

So, struggling in today’s society does not mean there is something wrong with us.

Our sensitivity is not a flaw or weakness and it is not meant to be a burden; it is an ability.

Sensitive women are women of heart and soul, and one of their greatest gifts is their wisdom and intuition, but our world does not value these gifts, in fact we even seem to shun them, preferring crude narcissism and the denial of our inner truth.

Yet we need these gifts more than ever.

Humanity today has become deeply disconnected from heart and soul, wisdom and intuition. And this has led to a lot of suffering on this planet.

The Twofold Challenge

So, this is the twofold challenge that I see sensitive woman are facing at this time.

Both femininity and sensitivity are not the ideal and have been disempowered.

So again, I don’t say any of this to encourage a victim mindset, but simply to acknowledge and understand. And to free us from self-blame and unworthiness. There is a lot of suffering on this planet due to the oppression of sensitivity and femininity, and it’s important that we don’t place the blame for this on ourselves.

I believe that it's important to know that it is not our fault that we have been disadvantaged by a culture that has a very narrow and imbalanced value system.

At the same time, we are responsible for ourselves. So, what can we do?

It’s our responsibility to understand ourselves and what we need to thrive and then to empower ourselves.

Society is not going to honor our needs nor our values until we do and we stop tolerating anything less. It's not going to give us permission; we have to give ourselves permission. We have to claim these things as our birthright and create our own reality that is more aligned with who we are.

Only then can we rise up and help to create a more beautiful world as we head into this era of a new earth.