GUEST POST by LiYana Silver

I’ve always carried the statistic in my head that one in three women will be sexually abused in her lifetime. I just found out a new one: one in four women has been or will be physically abused in her relationship. Think about that for a moment. Conjure an image of eleven of your girlfriends; intense violence and wounding will have visited – or will visit – about three of them.

Now, as staggering as these stats are, I’d go so far as to say that actually nearly EVERY woman is in an abusive relationship. Every woman. I call it Lady Hate, and it’s an inside job. There are plenty of men who hate women, but I’m more concerned with the relationship we women have with ourselves.

If you are in that 99.9% of women in an abusive relationship with herself, know this:
If you talked a child the way you talk to yourself, child services would be all over your ass in a hot minute. If you treated a cat the way you treat yourself, PETA would string you up by your fingernails and make a national example out of you.

You remind yourself daily that no one in his or her right mind could ever love you. You call into question your very worth as a human being over the smallest infraction. You’re mean. Hateful. Discouraging.

Glamour did a study and found that the average young woman has around 13 intense self-loathing thoughts every day, which is about once every waking hour. For many it’s more like 30, 50 or even 100.

Think of all the woman- and girl-hours wasted on worrying about body fat, calories, nail color, brand of jeans, and if we deserve love or a place on the planet. Calculating it is impossible. Contemplating it breaks my heart.

Lady Hate is like an auto-immune disease where the body starts thinking of itself as a foreign entity and attacks itself. When you are at war with yourself and you win, who loses?

OK OK, enough already; the last thing I want to do is make you feel bad about yourself because you feel bad about yourself.

Your self-critical voices – even your bitchiness, anger and depression – are actually trying to tell you something. Chances are, you’ve been doing the equivalent of smothering your Feminine Power with a pillow, and the self-critical voices are the only sounds that get through. It’s really your Inner Feminine Badass, as I like to call Her (the seat of your Feminine Power) shouting through the pillow, although it comes through as self-trashing.

Finding your Inner Feminine Badass is the antidote to Lady Hate.

When the universe is conspiring to shower you with blessings and lay your desires at your feet, your Inner Feminine Badass acts as translator. She knock-knocks on your ribs and says, “Special delivery for Goddess Extraordinaire. Are you going to pick up?”

Inner Feminine Badasses are good for a lot. There are the fun little things like parking spots, being the life of the party and raises, but manifesting your heart’s desires is Her main gig.

No matter how long ago you buried Her, She’s down there. Whether She’s six feet under or only covered with a fine layer of muck that a little dusting would clear right up, She’s down there. And I do mean DOWN THERE.

Here’s one of the things Nisha is brilliant at: helping woman get über clear on their desires before they get to work on manifesting anything. It’s like playing a game of pool and lining up your shots to clear the whole table with one velvety stroke. Most of us, without Nisha in our corner and a switched ON Feminine Badass on our side, do the equivalent of picking up the pool cue stick and waving it wildly around the room in the general direction of the pool table. I tried that for years. I’m sure you can imagine how successful I was with the results and how happy I was along the way: not.

What does this picture of me, swimming through this beautiful art deco pool with a knife in between my teeth have to do with anything?

This is the photo documentation of a ritual I did a while back, to get my Masculine Power in service of my Feminine Power. What’s the difference, you might ask?

Masculine Power is direct, productive, linear and focuses on a singular goal. Obstacles sliced through, excess trimmed, potential leveraged. An adrenaline shot of go-get-it and get-it-now. A great metaphor for Masculine Power is a locomotive train.

Chances are, you’ve already got your Masculine Power dialed in. Most of us ass-kicking, successful women rely on mostly Masculine Power for our work, our sex and our creativity.  Unfortunately, it gives us the nasty side effect of drying us up and giving us an advanced case of Lady Hate.

Don’t get me wrong, Masculine Power is wonderful; it’s useful for what it’s useful for. It’s simply the gold standard, and most women don’t have much familiarity or facility with Feminine Power. Or, we are downright suspicious and scared of it.  I know I sure was for most of my life.

Feminine Power is circular, operating in a different time zone and zip code than Masculine Power.

It winds, it wends and it spirals back on itself, inhaling slowly. Feminine Power feeds on pleasure, spaciousness and the silkiest desires of your inner heart. Feminine Power creates by pulling toward itself, attracting that which it needs. It magnetizes. Like a radio station, it receives exactly what it needs. It turns metaphor into reality. The perfect metaphor is a womb.

Both a uterus and a locomotive are powerful, phenomenal tools, and good for what they are good for, but you wouldn’t want to mix ‘em up in your tool box.

A business that runs on mojo, where folks simply want some of what you’ve got; falling in love with your sensuality and sexual power; plugging directly into the power source of creative life force energy itself… for all this, in esoteric terms, you want to get your Masculine Power in service of your Feminine Power. You’ve got both in you, and the key is some partnership between the two kinds of power.

Back to me and the pool (the watery kind, not the billiards kind):
The finale of my ritual had me swim through a body of water (the pool, my Feminine Power) with a blade in my mouth (my Masculine Power). I dove to the bottom and cut open a buried treasure box (my heart’s desire for my work in the world). My Masculine freed my Feminine desires and then we feasted.

Here’s how the metaphor of getting your Masculine Power in service of your Feminine Power translates to your desk, your bed, your art:

Start with what you desire. What is asking to be expressed, through you? What’s your treasure to be unburied? What would your inner lioness fight for? What will it feel like when you have it and are living it?

I suggest creating some totem or reminder to this, and place it on your desk, near your bed or on your body. Maybe you light a red, rose-scented candle whenever you sit down at your desk to work, like I do. The color red and the rose are “official” symbols of the Divine Feminine. My lit candle serves as a visual and olfactory reminder to me of who I do it all for and what gets lit in the women I touch.

As you get to work doing Masculine Power things like composing emails and coaching, putting paintbrush to canvas or touching your beloved’s body, remind yourself why you’re doing it.  Your big why. What you stand for. What makes it all worth it. Whether your version is wearing a specific necklace, putting up a painting, dabbing an essential oil on your wrists or modifying your screen saver, it’s an anchor to remind you that your efforts are service of your desires. Your efforts are in service of your desires. I find this breathes life, spaciousness, humor and meaning into what otherwise could run me down. When your Masculine Power is in service of your Feminine, you’ll naturally be more energized and clear, and less exhausted and overwhelmed.

It’s also key to make time and space to listen to your Inner Feminine Badass, the mouthpiece for your Feminine Energy. Ask Her. Ask all the time, about everything. Ask Her what she’d like for lunch, if you should compose in the key of C or F, which flowers to buy, what designer to go with and what to say to your child.

Please be aware that She may speak to you in clear and tidy sentences, but She may also communicate in grunts, body sensations, slices of poetry or billboard signs. As you keep asking, widen the aperture of your ears so you can pick up what She’s putting down.

Even if you get silence or static for a long time, keep asking. It could be that your Inner Feminine Badass is on mute, but eventually you’ll grow new auditory receptor cells to hear Her language, which is specifically designed for you to hear. Eventually, She’ll communicate the equivalent of, “well, I’m so glad you asked! It’s about time! I have a lot to say about that! And what’s more ….”

In case you noticed that I keep capitalizing She and Her, like I would a deity, you’re right and I’m doing it on purpose. Your Feminine Power is the same power that makes the sun come up every morning, bursts the cherry trees into blossom in the spring and grows babies. It’s creative life-force energy itself, and I don’t know anything more holy, God-like and caps-worthy than that.

Here’s why you’re reading these words: I wrote them as an invitation to join the 0.1% of women who give the finger to Lady Hate, get in partnership with their Inner Feminine Badass and switch on their Feminine Power.

If you want to spend five weeks with me and your Inner Feminine Badass, jamming on how to Find Her and Name Her, Feed Her and Heed Her, flip Her the mic and let Her rip, get yourself on the Early Bird list here: InnerFeminineBadassBootcamp.com. The course isn’t yet open for enrollment, but as soon as it is, I’ll reach out to Early Birds first.

If I have my way, there will be more happy, turned-on, statistic-defying women wielding their full-wattage Feminine Power than the world has yet to behold, starting with you.