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Gender roles have a massive influence on how we see and understand the world around us. It also greatly determines our personalities and who we are.
When I was little, my mom sent me to etiquette classes, where I was taught how to behave, talk, think, walk, and act like a lady. Not that I wasn’t feminine before these classes, but in hindsight, these classes were meant to boost my femininity.
Femininity is a concept that’s evolved over time, and it means different things to different people based on their culture and worldly influences.
If you feel like you are lacking in femininity, here’s how to be more feminine – without going to etiquette school.
What Is Femininity?
In a very traditional, Western sense, femininity is associated with being a woman. The concept governs a woman’s attributes, behaviors, and traditional roles in society.
Typically, a lady must be nurturing, empathic, gentle, graceful, sweet, caring, demure, and sensitive (and a host of other adjectives that are more womanly than manly). She should also be aesthetically pleasing and look like a woman with how she cuts and wears her hair, looks after herself, and dresses.
Being feminine is also often deemed as being a lesser quality than masculinity:
- Feminine = being weak, irrational, ornamental, artificial, manipulative, fragile, and frivolous
- Masculine = being strong, rational, functional, natural, sincere, tough, and serious
These are obviously stereotypes. There are some people who equate being feminine with those lesser qualities, and femininity has also become so contradictory in nature.
If you’re assertive at work, it’s common for your male and female colleagues to call you a B*tch. If you cry, then you’re too sensitive. And if you climb to the top of the career ladder, you must’ve “slept” your way there.
America Ferreira’s monologue in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie encapsulates traditional femininity and how it's so contradictory:
“You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.”
Luckily, more and more women are speaking up for themselves, re-defining what femininity means to them, and empowering their fellow ladies. Being feminine is more than embodying female-specific traits and characteristics.
Femininity is an ever-evolving and nuanced term that’s become highly individualized. What you view as feminine should be unique to you, and that gives you the power to define, wear, and grow your femininity.
What’s Feminine Energy?
Some people view femininity as feminine energy and believe that men and women both have feminine and masculine energy. These energies are not always balanced, and that’s why some women may come across as more “masculine” and men as more “feminine.”
Feminine energy is called Shakti in Hindu culture and yin in Chinese philosophy. It is an energy or force that we all have and isn’t related to your gender.
It’s similar to traditional female and male-specific traits because it’s imposed by societal expectations. Your masculine energy comes to the fore when you are being ambitious, completing tasks on your to-do list, and working toward goals you’ve set.
Feminine energy is when you go with the flow, are sensual and creative, and attune to your internal processes.
It’s essential, however, to balance these energies to lead a happy, fulfilled, and healthy life. When your masculine energy dominates, where you are driven to succeed, you can feel exhausted, burned out, and unhappy.
If that’s you, it’s time to tap into your feminine energy to tip and rebalance the scales.
15 Strategies: How to Be More Feminine
Masculine energies are still highly valued in life, so follow these strategies to get in touch with your feminine side:
1. Engage in Self-Reflection
Knowing yourself is the first part of the puzzle. You have to know your inner self, discover your feminine aura, and remove all obstacles and false beliefs so you can embrace your feminine energy.
Consider journaling, meditation, forest bathing, running, intentional or mindful cleaning, and lucid dreaming as methods to release your trapped femininity.
Grounding is another excellent way to get in touch with your femininity.
There’s something deeply maternal and nourishing about connecting to the earth, and you may find yourself drawn to gardening or collecting plants. Mamma earth is a sultry creature, just like you.
Ultimately, to find and release inner femininity, you have to become self-aware and listen to the voice of your softer self, and that means directing your focus inward.
If the ways mentioned here don’t quite help you find your grace, you can turn to a skilled therapist who can guide you through self-searching.
2. Learn to Express Yourself Wisely
Women are too often portrayed as emotional and hysterical beings, when the reality is much different. Firstly, you need to understand your feelings, and then you have to learn how to process them, articulate them, and validate each feeling as you experience it.
This will take more in-depth work at self-discovery, focusing on you, your experiences, and how you feel about each. For too long, you have suppressed feelings and sensations that society may have deemed “unnecessary or inappropriate.”
Work on your emotional intelligence, feel what you feel, consider why you have feelings and what these are trying to tell you. Your feelings are mile markers to your life’s journey and shouldn’t be ignored. Journaling can be an excellent tool for emotional processing.
3. Honor Your Gut Feelings
Women are said to be more intuitive than men, and when you can learn to harness the feminine energy in helping you make decisions, you will discover wisdom that may seem almost magical.
Only by knowing yourself will you discover the trust and instinct that govern your intuitions.
Your feminine energy is highly intuitive, meaning that side of you is excellent at picking up on environmental signals, feelings, and more to reach conclusions that may not always be logical, but that has immediate and (far-)reaching effects.
Listening to your inner voice is how you give your gut instinct a way to communicate and tell you that something is right or wrong. How many women have said they just felt it wasn’t safe to get in a car with someone, speaking of their gut feeling.
Intuition can save your life. Your gut isn’t there to tell you it’s time for a snack – it’s there for situational awareness that will rival a Navy SEAL’s.
4. Make Nature Your Love(r)
While you can absolutely include nude moon bathing in your nature love routine, you can also get your daily dose of nature and wild growth with hiking, swimming (the motion of the ocean doesn’t only refer to sexual pleasure), horticulture, flower arranging, and playing with living things.
The silky feel of your pet hamster running over your hand can guide you to feel more intune with people and their touch.
Likewise, creating wonderfully tangled flower arrangements can help you identify patterns in the world around you that you’d miss without the deeper intuition and spirituality that’s your birthright.
5. Embrace Your Creativity
The feminine side of you will be highly creative. There’s no problem you can’t solve when you use your full inner artistic powers. But like any growing thing, that creativity needs to be nurtured.
Dive into hobbies, practice new skills, and enjoy the magic of making. Don’t go for the boring hobbies that are expected of you.
While you can definitely take up knitting, you don’t have to focus on knitting baby onesies. Instead, try knitting goth scarves or sexy lingerie or “weird hobbies.”
Get creative and you will become even more creative. Learn to cook exotic meals, become a pickleball champion, find your inner mixology connoisseur, and get fit with pole dancing or mud wrestling. Feminine creativity is what you make it.
6. Free Your Body
Your feminine energy includes the sensual side of you, and while this doesn’t necessarily mean sex and self-pleasure (although it can totally include these, too), you should get in touch with and befriend your body.
People are so disconnected from their own bodies, and many have an adversarial relationship with their physical selves.
Discover yourself with sensual activities such as yoga, body painting, sensory stimulation, and body tapping (body percussion).
Your body is a perfect living thing, and it’s where you live, so engage with it. Get a tattoo, try a sacred piercing, or book weekly massages. There are so many ways in which you can connect with your body.
Read up on how to be more sexual and sensual, discuss this with your partner, and don’t let society’s idea of what’s appropriate keep you separated from your flesh any longer.
7. Make More Me-Time
Because women are inherently caring and nurturing, they spend all their time and energy on others.
It’s time to save some time for yourself. This is also the ideal way to rediscover yourself, make friends with who you are, and tend to your own wants and needs for a change.
Put away the to-do lists, leave the shopping for someone else (or order in), and take the time you need to recharge. Your feminine energy is at an all-time low when you neglect yourself.
So find what picks you up (a nap, spa day, head massage, or day at the shooting range) and invest in you.
8. Become More Spontaneous
To create means you need to discover your playful self. While you’re taking me-time, you should find your inner child and learn to play again. Lie on the grass and cloud watch, stargaze, or blow on dandelions as you break away from reality and discover your whimsical self.
Shed the tired and worn down you and “rebecome” the child you were, fully embracing life, pleasure, and each moment for its value to you. Start by quieting your mind of the doubts and constraints of society.
Yoga, meditation, journaling, shadow work, and art can help you become more spontaneous.
Why not take art classes, but choose a studio that focuses on alternative art, where you don’t paint unless you’re using something other than paint (like blood, coffee, or other mediums) – which lets you channel your spontaneous artistic self.
9. Practice Being You in Each Moment
Restraint is often imposed on us by society and the people around us. Being yourself, without restraint, is liberating, and it will guide you to self-discovery and self-knowledge. It also means you need to slow down, step off the rollercoaster, and simply be you in this moment.
In meditation terms, it’s about finding stillness in the moment, then stretching that moment throughout your life. We often don’t realize just how much we’ve been neglecting ourselves until we stop, pause, and think.
While you’re off the hamster wheel, take the time to really think about what calms you and brings you personal fulfillment. It’s time to have more of that in your life.
Stop rushing.
As American author Claire Messud writes: “Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.”
So, stop, hit the brakes, and get off the crazy train by simply focusing on yourself in each moment. It’s not selfish, it’s a self-wish. You may be surprised to learn you can accomplish more by doing “nothing.”
10. Force Transformation
Have you been the shy girl all your life? Perhaps you’ve been conditioned to be demure, submissive, and subservient, always backing down instead of stepping forward. Well, your inner feminine energy is ready to blossom; it only needs to break out of the cocoon.
Of course, change can be painful, too. Remember that the butterfly has to disintegrate in that chrysalis before it can emerge as the beautiful winged fantasy we love. It had to stop being a caterpillar, turn to pulp, and transform.
It’s time to stop being a worm too.
Your feminine energy is brave, bold, loud, and proud. You don’t have to turn yourself into Barbie to express that energy. Instead, find what resonates with you, make it your own (just like the caterpillar eats leaves before turning into butterfly goo), and let it feed your transformation.
Yes, it’s scary. Changing who you’ve believed yourself to be always is. But, that person who has been walking in your shoes without any real light or life isn’t the real you. It’s time to balance your energies, find your wings, and fly.
11. Give and Receive Love
The feminine energy in you is ultimately an expression of care, compassion, and nurturing. You can’t really care for yourself while you dance to the pipes of others, but you also can’t self-care and ignore the need around you. This is where you get to explore your superpower: love.
You can spread love, compassion, kindness, and charity by doing one good thing each day. It doesn’t have to be big or a spectacle. Just think of something that will make the life of someone else better, and do it.
Doing something small often has a bigger impact than you’d think it would.
A gesture of kindness is a beautiful thing, and it gives positive energy and joy to you in equal measure to what it does for the recipient.
Doing nice things for yourself and others (even the least lovable people in your life, like your in-laws), helps your creativity and helping energies thrive.
12. Let Go of Anxiety-Preparation
As you embrace your feminine energy more, you’ll also start to notice that preparing for worst-case-scenarios simply leads to anxiety and frustration. It makes you a less-than nice person to be around.
When you anticipate bad things are going to happen, you will live in the expected moment, which shuts you off to potential and possibility. Learn to let go.
Start really cultivating a “here-now” approach where you trust yourself, your abilities, and the world around you. You’ve got this. Being a more feminine woman means you’re confident in yourself, will accept help when needed, and always see each moment as it happens so your intuition can guide you.
Meditation can help you let go, but sometimes visualization techniques are another great way to imagine yourself physically letting go of anxiety and fear so you can live presently in each moment.
13. Soften up, Dearest
In today’s world, we’re so often told to be tougher, to stand firmly against the world, when that’s not a woman’s only way of being. Your feminine power lies in the diversity of who you are. While you can be tough, you can (and should) also be soft.
You can listen to heavy metal and watch bunny videos on YouTube. If you fear your heart has hardened, it may be time to really get in touch with your feelings.
Start by helping others, without people-pleasing. Give love to those who need it, but don’t do it because you want to “earn” approval from society. Instead, do it because your heart responds and softens.
When you rediscover your inner marshmallow core, you will find another rarely-tapped-into source of power – the ability to let go and bounce back much faster than when you harden your heart and feel offended over everything.
14. Discover and Accept Vulnerability
While femininity is about you and what you feel inside, it’s also something experienced by others. When you need help, it may make you feel vulnerable, but you can (and should) reach out and ask for assistance.
There’s no shame in asking a guy to help you carry something heavy or to walk you home if it’s a scary neighborhood.
This doesn’t mean you need to repay him in any way other than a pretty smile and a thank you for his kindness. You can be vulnerable and let yourself realize that it’s a kind of beauty in itself.
By showing others you are fragile at times, you can encourage them to be softer with you and build on shared compassion and connection. Being feminine means being a soft place to fall to yourself and others.
15. Water as Your Element
While nature and the earth are typically seen as being the feminine elements, you can also benefit from water immersion methods that include swimming, drifting, bubble baths, showers, and more.
The sensation of being carried by water, feeling it run over your skin, and sinking into soapy bubbles are some of the more feminine experiences to engage in.
When you feel stressed, drained, and like your guard is up, consider hitting the waves, tub, shower, or river and letting that negative energy melt (or float or sink) away so you can be more positive and feminine again.
Final Thoughts on How to Be More Feminine
Being more feminine isn’t about becoming a typical girly-girl. In fact, to be a balanced woman, you should have equal feminine and masculine qualities, which gives you strength, creativity, transformation, and intuition.
When you learn how to be more feminine, you should try to embrace your inner (and often denied) woman as you learn to cultivate a more nurturing outlook that is bold and gentle to yourself and others.
Try strategies like making time for self-care, getting out in nature, building intuition, and discovering personal transformation through art. Need more help to feel feminine? Check out my guide with 17 tactics to help you give off more feminine energy.
And if you're looking for more articles about self awareness and personal growth, be sure to check out these blog posts:
- 20 Steps to Effectively Do Shadow Work to Heal Yourself
- 13 Self-Awareness Examples You See Throughout Life
- 7 Steps to Effectively Reparent Yourself
