DTOP #40: Being In Flow With Yourself, Your Intuition, And The Divine Feminine

Hi there lovelies, welcome back to another episode of Doing Things On Purpose, the podcast that empowers women to take charge of their time, health, relationships, and money by doing things on purpose. 

This is episode 40, and I’m your host, Suri Stahel, a self-love and self-empowerment coach for moms, caregivers, and heart centered rebels looking to challenge the status quo.

Celebrating International Women’s Day

It is early March, and if you don’t know, March is very much about women. International Women’s Day is on March 8th. And this month also highlights a lot of awareness around women’s health. So I wanted to focus this episode on what I see women coming to me as a life coach for support with, which is to be more in flow.

Of course, being in flow can mean so many different things to different people as it should very well do. But a lot of the time, it’s about wanting to be more in flow with their energies, their life force, with their cycles, with the way things are in their life, and with the universe. So in this area we hear so much about manifestation, creation, abundance.

And it’s all very exciting, and at the same time, when we’re feeling stuck in a situation of lack, feeling very limited and stuck, it can be hard to see how we can even get inflow. 

So today, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this idea of being in flow. And I’m sure depending on what you’ve read and the areas of interest you’ve explored, you might have many thoughts yourself on this idea. And if you do, I’d love to hear your comments in the comment section of the episode page of this podcast at suristahel.com/40, or feel free to message me on social. 

Mom check-in

Before we begin, let’s start as I like to do on most of my podcasts with a quick mom check in. Honestly, I feel like it can be also just a women’s check in, really, or a human check in:

• So how are you feeling today?
• How are you arriving at this podcast episode today? 
• How is your heart? 
• How is your mind? 
• Are you in a rush? Are you juggling multiple things at the same time right now? 
• Or are you sitting quietly down on your sofa? Maybe with a cup of hot cocoa. Have you created space to listen to this right now? 
• Or are you listening while doing something that doesn’t need your attention, like cleaning the kitchen or the toilet? …Maybe gardening? 

All of these things can be necessary – can be beautiful. And I’m just inviting you to notice, how you are coming to this space today. 

And you can also choose to check in with your senses:

• What textures are you feeling? 
• Can you feel the clothes against your skin? 
• The chair that you’re sitting on?
• Or something that you’re holding? What’s the texture there? 
• What can you smell? 
• What can you hear? 
• What can you taste? 
• And what can you see around you?

This is a very grounding practice that you can try and come back to if you ever find yourself spinning out in your mind, in your thoughts. To just refocus your energy into the present moment, into what’s happening, into your body, and your senses. 

So I hope right now you’re feeling a little bit more grounded and in this present moment so that we can start to gently flow into today’s topic of being in flow.

How To Be More ‘In Flow’ With Life

Tip #1: Nurture the Divine Feminine more than the Divine Masculine

So the first tip that I have for you, if you’re a woman looking to be more in flow with life, is the idea of nurturing the Divine Feminine in you more than the Divine Masculine. If you don’t know what the Divine Feminine is, I’ll explain it in a little bit. 

But the idea is that each one of us has both masculine and feminine qualities.

And they can exist at different levels within us, depending on how we are naturally made. We’re not the same, as you can probably tell, in this multifaceted world.

Qualities of the Divine Masculine

So just to have some background information, let’s talk about the qualities that are normally associated with the divine masculine. Qualities such as:

• Strength and courage
• Action and initiative
• Logic and rationality
• Leadership and authority
• Discipline and focus – that ‘pushing’ energy
• Independence and sovereignty – that ‘I’ energy
• Protection and provision – ensuring everything’s all right
• Honor and integrity – being true to your word

These are all beautiful qualities that I think we are very familiar with. They are qualities we want to see in ourselves and in others.

They’re qualities that our education system, our society, and our workplaces have long held up as things, that we can aspire to be in life.

That initiative, action taking, leadership, self confidence – you know what I’m talking about.

But we forget that we are not made up of only masculine qualities alone. We are also made up of feminine qualities that want to be embodied in our lives. So let’s now turn to the Divine Feminine.

Qualities of the Divine Feminine

The Divine Feminine invites us to tap into our:

• Intuition and wisdom
• Nurturing and compassion
• Creativity and creation – as women we are natural creators: we give birth to babies and have breasts that magically produce milk (I’m still amazed by that)
• Emotional awareness and sensitivity – which we tend to feel bad about owning
• Receptivity and trusting – that ‘accepting’ energy: wanting to listen to others, the willingness to be vulnerable, and inviting others to be vulnerable and trusting of us as well
• Healing and restoration
• Collaboration and community – that ‘we’ energy
• Self-love and inner strength
• Fluidity and the flow of cycles
• Connection to nature and Mother Earth – reminding us that we’re not just machines producing, doing, and acting – that we are part of a greater whole.

However, if you notice, many of these feminine qualities have not been nurtured or celebrated in our capitalistic world.

So when we talk about being in flow, we’re acknowledging that we live in a world, or we swim in this world, where we’re expected to be more masculine, both by society and also by our own expectations (our own conditioned expectations of ourselves), yet deep down, we feel that we’re off balance.

We feel drained, uninspired, overwhelmed.

We feel like we’re just one of the many tools in a toolbox, and we don’t really matter.

Being in flow invites us to balance that masculine energy – our masculine tendencies that we have long relied upon, those that have helped us succeed at work, school, and helped us serve others, sometimes to the detriment of ourselves – to balance that with the more feminine aspects of our being.

And this is where we thrive – in balance.

So my first invitation to you is to start nurturing and exploring how you can strengthen and nurture more divine feminine qualities into your life. 

For example, we can tell ourselves: “I need to do this right now,” when in reality, we’re exhausted. What we actually need is maybe a nap, a walk, a bath, or to put away our electronic devices.

Instead, we’re used to forcing ourselves forward. Or we’re used to numbing that signal that our body wants to tell us, which is a very masculine way – of just ‘pushing through’.

So instead, we can ask ourselves:

• Where can I soften?
• Where can I listen more?

So that’s my first tip.

And remember that we’re all learning to do this together. There’s no such thing as perfection. It’s just about practicing.

Tip #2: Anchor in what ‘pulls’ you rather than ‘pushes’ you

And this brings me right up to my second tip, which is about embracing the energy of being ‘pulled toward’ something, or being ‘invited toward’ something rather than ‘pushing’ and ‘forcing’ your way into something.

So what do I mean by this?

Being in flow means choosing to let yourself be pulled in a direction that feels exciting and right for you.

What can this look like?

• When your body feels like it’s full of vibrating energy and you’re just ready to go.
• Your face lighting up when you talk about something.
• Your voice getting all excited.

But sometimes it’s harder for us to notice these things about ourselves. So we can use our friends, our spouses, our children as mirrors.

We can actually ask people to let us know: “Hey, what do you notice me getting excited about? What do you notice me being interested about?”

And I have to say, in today’s world, we often feel like we need to know what’s the right answer before we commit to something. Because our minds crave certainty. But real life is full of uncertainties.

Many of us have spent our whole lives trying to keep us safe.

For instance, when I was in high school, we were told: “You can choose the art stream or the science stream. The science stream gives you options to switch to the arts later, but not vice versa. So if you choose the arts, you can never go to the science stream. So make your choice now and be wary.”

This signals that an area of your life will be permanently closed off if you choose one path. And I think this kind of categorization – of putting people into boxes and lanes – is a very well meaning, but very masculine way of doing something.

It serves a purpose, which is efficiency, but at the same time, it’s less accepting of differences and the mysteries of the unknown, the mysteries of life.

• We don’t know if we’re going to be late bloomers.
• We don’t know if our kids who show no interest in math and science at a young age will then suddenly develop this interest later on.

No one can anticipate that.

So this idea of being ‘pulled’ is more about noticing the things in your life and the lives of the people around you that excites – that creates this sense of aliveness – that is inviting you to explore further.

An example could be when you’re brainstorming ideas about paths you could explore to find your dream work or relationships – ask yourself: “Okay, does this option excite me, or do I feel like I have to convince myself to do it?”

And we have to also remember that hesitation is okay. Hesitation can stem from the discomfort of the unknown, of something new. It doesn’t necessarily signal that something’s wrong for us.

For example, I have an interest in public speaking, and the idea scares me because I don’t have a lot of experience behind me in that. But it also excites me to think about myself in that role, and to explore ways that I can develop to become a speaker.

So that’s an example of a ‘positive pull’ rather than something I’m trying to ‘push’ because I think speaking will help me in my career and so on and so forth…

So expect resistance whenever you’re trying something new. And that’s okay. That’s part of the adventure. But anchor back in that feeling of being ‘pulled’, that feeling of excitement when you think of an option you’re looking to explore.

And this is the opposite of surrendering to life. Surrendering to where life pushes you towards. That’s a very important distinction because we want to align ourselves with how our lives naturally want to unfold, want to manifest – rather than forcing things to happen in directions or ways that don’t fit us.

Especially as parents, I invite you to notice this pull versus push energy.

Because we can, for instance, have specific outcomes and specific pathways that we want our children to go into. Notice:

• Are we talking about it in a way that is pushing our child to do something?
• Or is it an invitation for our children to go down a path that they’re naturally pulled towards themselves?

I think when we start to honor these ‘pull’ invitations in our own lives, we will naturally begin to notice them as we relate to other people, because we want them to thrive. We want them to recognize and honor their own ‘pulls’ and not our ‘pushes

So it’s kind of like something that serves us and can serve so many people naturally as we honor ourselves.

As we honor ourselves, we honor others, too.

Tip #3: Cultivate a relationship with intuition and synchronicity

And the third tip is about cultivating your relationship with your intuition and with synchronicity. So when we talk about intuition, and when we talk about synchronicity, you might think about manifestation, affirmations, and the idea that if you keep repeating something, it will come true.

For instance, something you might have heard about is a visualization:

• Thinking about your life in 5 years, in 10 years, when you’re 80.
• To really feel into that future version of yourself so that you’re motivated in the ‘now’ to take action.

This can sometimes feel like it’s just a mind trick, but it does work for some people.

And if it’s something that you’ve tried before and hasn’t worked, something that you could do is to take a softer approach to it. It’s not about the discipline of sitting every day, visualizing, and feeling into your future self.

It can also be about just noticing what comes up – not so much about you pushing an agenda, and putting in ideas of how your future self ‘could’ be.

• Just sitting and letting your future self emerge
• Seeing what comes up
• What do I see?
• Where am I?
• Who am I with?
• What’s the color of that sofa or that picture that I see in this vision that has come up?

So this can be like a gentle invitation to your intuition so it can speak to you. And the more that you cultivate and trust that what comes up or what needs to come up will come up, you begin to strengthen that bond and almost increase the volume of your intuition.

And this can help guide you in so many different ways. You know, instead of making a decision out of your head, can you feel into it?

A simple way to cultivate intuition: nurture spaciousness

And if cultivating your intuition feels like it’s just so much effort, a simple idea that you could try is just to create more spaciousness in your life. Because there’s nothing intuitive about living in a packed schedule, rushing from A to B to C with no breathing room.

Because intuition needs space to be heard.

That’s why I’m a huge fan of spacious calendars and daily planners.

For example, when you think about vacations, some people come home feeling even more stressed than when they left.

• A simple tip could be deciding to plan activities, only on every other day instead of every single day.
• This way you allow space for surprises, synchronicities. to find out what happens when you arrive there.

Getting into the practice of not filling your schedule, is something that can be very supportive of cultivating your relationship with your intuition.

And this can be a very rebellious act, because we live in a world where we’re supposed to fill our time with useful things, right?

So I invite you to ‘rebel’ and do the thing that nourishes you. That makes you feel alive. Because otherwise, what is the point of living?

• Can you cultivate a different way to see success, to be successful, to feel successful?
• Can you question what success looks like to you versus what society has told you it should look like?

Now about synchronicity, it’s almost like the universe’s intuition, or the universe’s invitations to us.

And by cultivating your intuition, I think you also start to notice synchronicities in life. Just the word synchronicity is so magical. It’s ‘being open to the unexpected.’

For example:

• Having just the right amount of money to book a course, or to buy that favorite chair you’ve been eyeing – just at that month when that chair was on sale.
• Meeting the love of your life on a random night at a random place.

It’s about seeing the signs from the universe, checking with your intuition, and saying ‘ye’s to those synchronicities and invitations.

Because oftentimes, your body intuition tells you something that your mind doesn’t yet understand.

Your mind doesn’t yet have the ‘proof’ that you and this person are right for each other – or you and this job – or you and this experience. But you kind of know ahead of time that, “I just have to go for it. It feels right, and things are just aligning to make it happen.”

Here’s another example:

• It could be that I happen to have my calendar open up during the week when somebody really needed my attention.
• Maybe one of my children got sick or a family member needs support.
• And noticing, “Huh, there’s an invitation here for me to seriously consider, and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to.”

This is being open and saying ‘yes’ to seeing and noticing synchronicity.

An experiment about being ‘lucky’

I wanna tell you about a study by Richard Wiseman on luck. There were two experiments.

Experiment 1

The first one was that he asked people who identified as being lucky and unlucky – to read a newspaper. Asking them to count the number of photographs in the newspaper.

And on page 2 of the newspaper, there was a large message saying, “Stop counting, there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” 

The ‘lucky’ participants tended to noticed these things, they stopped counting, and could say how many photographs there were; while the ‘unlucky’ people missed this shortcut.

Experiment 2

Then, in the same experiment, he also put an ad in the paper that said: “Tell the experimenter that you have seen this and win $250.”

And this message was even bigger and more obvious than the first one. What he found was that the people who identified as lucky were more likely to spot the reward and claim the prize, while the unlucky people missed it entirely.

Conclusion

So the conclusion is that things like luck, which we tend to see as random, is sometimes just about our mindset and our openness to ‘the invitations in life.’

• So lucky people, for instance, tend to notice more opportunities, simply because they were more open to them and expected to see them.
• While the unlucky ones missed them because they were maybe too focused on their task and missed all the synchronicities and unexpected invitations that crossed their path.

Quick recap

Okay, so this has been a lot. How are you feeling with all of this information? Take a deep breath. Breathe out.

Is something percolating inside of you? Are ideas and curiosities bubbling up inside of you somewhere? I hope so…

So let’s do a quick summary. For those of you looking to be more in flow with creation, whether it’s with your body, your energy, your family, the world, consider these three tips to cultivate that flow:

1. Nurture the Divine Feminine in you more than the Divine Masculine.
2. Anchor in what ‘pulls’ you rather than what ‘pushes’ you
3. Cultivate a relationship with your intuition and with synchronicity

That’s all I have for today. This is perhaps a pretty uncommon episode for me as quite a practical person, but I think it’s a fascinating idea.

It’s the kind of area that’s yet to be fully explored and embraced, but it just makes life so much more magical and joyful.

So I wanted to talk about this in honor of this month of International Women’s Day, and I hope it has brought some hope, some spark into your life, and got you started on some ideas you could try.

And if you’ve tried anything, I would love to hear from you, and hear any questions you might have. You can contact me anywhere on social, or email me at suri@suristahel.com.

If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to follow, rate, and share it with a friend. It really helps me.

And you can also find me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

As usual, the show notes will be available at suristahel.com/40 for this episode 40. Have a beautiful rest of your week, and I look forward to seeing you again next time!