Practicing femininity

The women who are drawn to my work tend(ed) to be more comfortable overthinking than feeling.

For women who have been told their whole lives that they are too much, that their feelings are too big, that they’re too sensitive, they’ve learned over time to close off and shut down the feeling part of themselves. Many then resort to overthinking and getting trapped in trying to analyze and figure things out.

Some women, like myself, even took this to an extreme and worked in fields that rewarded that strength. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a programmer, but the reason I chose it was because my analytical skills had been so fine-tuned through not allowing myself to feel. Thinking became my strength, while my feeling self went quiet.

When a woman is invited into Focusing, she moves from thinking about something to experiencing it in her body. This reconditions her to be more in touch with the feminine side of herself, and it lays the foundation for guiding others to do the same.

Why It Feels Safer to Stay in Our Heads

For many women, coming back into the body feels scary. It can feel much safer to stay in the mind, to keep thinking. But when we allow ourselves to enter the body in a safe-enough way and practice receiving what comes, we begin to receive the sensations that arise and the underlying messages they carry.

In this way, Focusing becomes a practice of the feminine: the power and ability to receive.

For practitioners, the more you can experience this safe receiving in yourself, the more authentically you can create that same safety and receptivity for your clients.

Receiving as an Active Choice

Receiving isn’t passive. For there to be a giver (a nosein) there needs to be a recipient (a mekabel) who is longing for something. If the recipient is just sitting there letting things happen, the giver has nothing to respond to.

When we Focus, our felt sense speaks to us through sensations, revealing needs that are waiting to be met. As we open to feeling what is longing for something different, we allow ourselves to receive what those parts of us have been waiting for, sometimes for years.

As a practitioner, learning to notice and honor these needs in yourself teaches you how to hold space for the same unfolding in others.

How It Changes Everything

The way we do one thing is often the way we do most things. If we can’t receive what’s arising within us, where else in life might we be struggling to receive?

Focusing gives us a safe place to practice receiving and accepting all parts of ourselves. And as we do, we find it easier to receive and accept others, and to receive the love, support, and brachos that others and Hashem are longing to give us.

For practitioners, this inner work becomes the ground you stand on when guiding others: you’re not just teaching a method; you’re living it.

How We Practice This in B’Etzem

We don’t suddenly become empowered enough to receive or feel safe enough to receive just by deciding to. It takes time to build our capacity, especially when we’ve been disconnected from it for so long.

In B’Etzem, practitioners first learn to practice this for themselves slowly but surely over the course of the training levels and the practices in between. You develop the ability to safely receive all parts of yourself, so you can authentically hold that possibility for the people you work with.

As one participant shared:

This is the kind of shift that changes everything from how you relate to yourself, to how you receive from those around you, to how you open to what Hashem is giving you every day, and ultimately, how you guide others into that same experience.

Receiving isn’t passive; it’s powerful.