Author: Cate Stillman

Woman are Water, part 1

Women are Water The big realization that upleved my family’s bliss in the past year was that I set the rhythm. I set the rhythm whether I’m conscious of it or not. I imagine most of you are saying, “yea. Duh.” But I’m wonder if you, like me, forget to actually own the implications. For those in my prenatal/postpartum online course, you’ve been ingrained with my matrika “mother as the midline”.  My sense is it also works as “woman as the midline”. In tantric language, perhaps we might see shakti dancing in the center that keeps drawing shiva’s attention to circle around her. The many residual shadows in our subconscious from the remnants of patriarchy may lead us to believe it’s the other way around.  About a year ago, in a fit of not knowing what to do next (a.k.a. surrender), I cultivated a new depth of my own center and let the chips fall where they may. What that looked like in reality is that I stopped cooking for my family. How un-Ayurveda of me, oh my! (Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t let my 2-year old starve). I decided to listen to what my body needed for optimization. I would consciously do this before I asked others about their needs and wants. Revolutionary, I know. It became my 10 x daily practice.. moving against female conditioning. Why is this crucial?  Why me before you? The most fundamental explanation lies in the energy field. Let me break it down:

• Woman’s bodies have more water element (kapha, moon energy).
• Men’s bodies have more pitta (fire, sun energy).
• Water is receptive and morphic (changes to take the shape of the container it's in). Water also gets polluted very easily. In Ayurvedic terms, water element is chemical energy. (Fire has radiant energy, air has kinetic and electrical, earth has magnetic).
• Fire element is radiant, or moving outward from center, and therefore less sensitive to other’s bodies. (Of course this sensitivity is developed by our lovely consciousness practices)

When a woman puts other’s needs before her own she invites outside energy into her field before her field is protected, grounded or balanced. Doh. If she forgets to clear, nourish and protect her receptive energy body nobody wins in the long run. And I keep hearing this from different experts. Bridget Brennan,bestselling author of Why She Buys, encapsulates corporate strategy into this sentence: “The lesson is this – when you make women happy, you make everyone happy.” How do we make women (ourselves) happy? We start by owning our water body. When women know how to keep their watery bodies uncongested, unpolluted and grounded, guess what? Not only is the woman happy. Everyone is happy. She glows. Everyone notices and attunes.