Feminine and masculine energy exists within everyone, and is an integral aspect of our work lives, relationships, and personal confidence. Everyone is naturally ruled by both of these energies, though one is usually predominant over the other.

Here we discuss the attributes of both feminine and masculine energies, how to tell if one is wounded, and guide you through the steps to healing.

Divine Feminine

The Divine Feminine energy deals with the unseen — our subconscious mind, intuition, and emotions. This is where new ideas and inspiration are born, so this energy also guides our creativity and encourages us to nurture our ideas until they materialize in the physical world.

The Feminine is associated with the elements of water (representing emotions) and earth (representing physical manifestation). It is also associated with night and the moon, the time when things unseen come to light.

Wounded Feminine

The Feminine becomes wounded when it is excessively influencing the system. When there is not a healthy amount of masculine energy keeping it balanced, it enters into its shadow state. This looks like:

• Being unable to set boundaries in relationships with others

• Feeling powerless or a loss of control over our lives

• Being overly dependent on others for emotional or financial support

• Feeling overly sensitive or burdened by emotions

• Overthinking or ruminating

• Lacking confidence or self-worth

• Lacking motivation to take action on goals

Wounded feminine energy is a wound of deep mistrust of the self that causes us to look for saving in other people, prioritize other’s needs over our own, and accept poor treatment from others.

Past situations or traumas that involve abuse or neglect can make us feel unsafe or undeserving of expressing our masculine attributes, (like boundaries or independence) and is often at the root of this wound.

Society and the Wounded Feminine

It’s no secret that our society values masculine traits over feminine ones. Achieving goals will gain you much more respect in the world than being intuitive and emotionally receptive. For this reason, the wounded feminine struggles with two things:

1. Side effects of wounded feminine energy

2. Guilt and shame instilled by society for experiencing these side effects

This leads to feeling insecure about our insecurities and shameful about our shame — piling on to the imbalance we already feel and driving us into a toxic cycle of self-loathing.

Many times we try to free ourselves from this emotional weight by numbing ourselves to our emotions and detaching from the Feminine entirely — both the wounded and the Divine. While this provides a temporary respite, it is not an answer to healing. It is simply a shift from the wounded feminine to the wounded masculine and only perpetuates our low vibration.

Rather than cutting ourselves off entirely from our sensitive side, we must infuse our feminine energy with enough masculinity to restore a healthy balance to our system and alleviate any fear of living in our power.

Divine Masculine

The Divine Masculine energy deals with the observable world — our conscious mind, real-world action, and logic. This is how we bring ideas into the physical world — through strategic planning, consistent action, and discipline.

It is associated with the elements of air (representing logic) and fire (representing action). It is also associated with daytime and the sun when we are conscious, awake, and ready to work.

Wounded Masculine

Like the wounded feminine, the masculine becomes wounded when it excessively influences the system, not having enough feminine energy to keep it balanced. The masculine shadow traits look like this:

• Emotional unavailability from heart blockages

• Overworking and not taking time to rest

• Narrow-mindedness and an inability to think outside the box

• Being uninspired or lacking in creativity

• Not accepting help or support from others

• Feeling disconnected or numb to feelings

• Inability to get close to people

Wounded masculine energy derives from a fear of vulnerability that causes us to isolate ourselves, avoid connections with others, and deny or ignore our feelings.

Past betrayals, damaged trust, or uncomfortable emotional situations can make us feel unsafe expressing our feminine attributes of vulnerability and intimacy and are often at the root of this wound.

Society and the Wounded Masculine

Wounded masculine energy doesn’t trigger the same shame as the wounded feminine, because it’s considered normal (almost encouraged) to isolate ourselves or disconnect from our feelings.

The “constant grind” is also continuously promoted — emphasizing a lifestyle of all work and no rest. Eventually, we begin thinking this behavior is normal, and rather than trying to heal it, we pursue it instead.

This encouragement to seek out an imbalanced lifestyle influences those of us suffering from masculine wounds to continuously suppress our inner states, causing us to feel increasingly detached from ourselves, lost, and oblivious to our inner needs.

Rather than live out unconscious patterns that society has structured for us, we must continuously check in with ourselves to ensure that our behaviors are in alignment with what we truly want, even if that requires us to be vulnerable.

When we are able to connect deeper to ourselves, we stop avoiding our fears and take more risks for our happiness — stimulating our growth and elevating our life experience.

Balanced Feminine and Masculine Energies

When the feminine and masculine energies are balanced within a system, they are equally infused with each other and work together to create a healthy connection between our inner emotional states and our outer physical actions. This balanced energy system looks like this:

• Pairing emotions with logic to guide our decisions

• Engaging discipline to bring our creative ideas to life

• Setting and maintaining personal boundaries while being vulnerable, intimate, and open

• Allowing ourselves to receive love and support from others, maintaining our own independence

• Having a healthy work/life balance

• Feeling confident and powerful individually and in relationships with others

Achieving a perfect balance is not the end goal, as we all lean towards one energy or the other. When the dominant energy consumes our system, we become wounded, living in fear and avoidance of expressing our lesser energy. In healing this equilibrium, we work to dissolve this fear and persist through avoidance to transcend our negative patterns.

A Guide to Healing

As a society, we are (slowly) re-introducing a balance of these energies into our cultural norms. The collective feminine has become more financially and emotionally independent, while our masculine-driven work culture has started to question the never-ending grind, considering alternative lifestyles that offer more flexibility and higher emotional fulfillment. So how can we add to this expansion and heal our energies?

Healing Feminine Energies

Powerlessness is the core of wounded feminine energy. It makes us feel stuck and helpless, causing stagnancy in the realms of accomplishing tasks or achieving goals.

To heal, we must take back our power and pull ourselves out of the pit of emotional despair. Prioritizing action over inaction, movement over stillness, and logic over emotion stimulates the infusion of masculine energy into the system, lifting us out of the pit and bringing balance back into play.

Some steps we can take to begin this healing are:

• Physical exercise (or any body movement)

• Disciplined structures (strict diet, specific bedtime/wakeup time, consistent practice towards a goal)

• Establishing strong boundaries (saying no more, prioritizing personal time)

• Doing things alone that make us feel proud and independent (hiking, traveling, building things)

• Taking the initiative to earn more money, increasing our self-trust and inner power

• Root chakra healing meditations or yoga

These steps taken consistently allow us to feel more in control of our circumstances and promote independence and trust within ourselves.

Healing Masculine Energies

Fear of vulnerability is at the core of wounded masculine energy. It makes us feel so uncomfortable with emotions that we disconnect from our own, causing us to become numb to our intuition and lost on our life path.

To heal, we must release our defenses and let down the walls around our emotions, allowing ourselves to feel without fear. Prioritizing self-care, introspection, and rest stimulates feminine energy into the system, softening our exteriors and dissipating our anxieties.

Some steps we can take to begin this healing are:

• Journaling (recording inner thoughts/feelings, rather than what’s going on externally)

• Meditation (observing and analyzing inner thoughts/feelings)

• Affirmations (Repeating statements that emphasize safety in receptivity)

• Allowing more vulnerability in relationships (sharing/opening up to another person)

• Practice nurturing (holding space for something other than yourself — a friend, a pet, or a plant)

• Creating something from scratch (a meal, a painting, or a piece of furniture)

• Heart chakra healing meditations or yoga

Wounded masculine healing requires constant self-reassurance to resist the societal pressure that comes with actively infusing femininity into our masculine-dominated lives. But over time we learn to relax — surrendering to our feelings and enjoying our intimate connections with others.

We should expect to lose our balance from time to time, but knowing where we tend to land gives us the opportunity to re-stabilize, rather than dropping unconsciously back into fear-based patterns. To surrender to our emotions or to assert our personal power — to infuse into our system what doesn’t come easily to us, is to do the scary, inner work of growing into the best version of ourselves.