Uncovering Divine Femininity: The Truth and Relief in Discovering the Masculine and Feminine Energies | Part 1 — Jessica Zimmerman (2024)

If you do a quick Google search, you could learn enough facts and talking points about the concepts of Divine Masculine and Feminine to get you through any dinner party conversation. You’d find information about how the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine have been present in various spiritual traditions and belief systems throughout history. You’d find lists explaining that Divine Masculine usually represents qualities like strength, action, logic, and rationality, while Divine Feminine represents qualities like intuition, nurturing, creativity, and emotional intelligence.

The last time I shared a series, Following the Stars, I shared how the most life-altering piece of information I received during my deep dive into astrology was learning about nodes, which revealed that this first part of my life, I’d been living out of “masculine energy,” and to receive the life that was meant for me, I would need to access my Divine “feminine energy.”

After some reading and discovery, the concept of masculine and feminine energy made so much sense to me and gave words to a truth I’d passively noticed.

See, each of us, no matter how we were made and what parents we were born to, were created because the genetic material– and the energies– of a man and a woman brought together. Regardless of how this union happens, the masculine material, the sperm, penetrates, enters, and gives. The feminine material, the egg, receives and then the woman continues to nurture and birth.

I’m not saying that you need a man and a woman to make a family. And I’m not saying that all men have Core Masculine energy and women have Core Feminine energy.

And every single human embodies both because we were created from both. You will identify as either a Core Feminine or a Core Masculine, no matter what your gender or sexual preference.

This energy framework gives language and understanding to how our heads and hearts, souls and bodies, ego and actualized selves can interact and come into balance. It’s like the legend on a map– it tells you how to read the map and interpret the landscape. When we understand how masculine and feminine energies play out in our lives, we can understand the landscape of our relationships and experiences.

So when I first learned about this way I could understand myself, I realized that although I identified as a Core Feminine, I had been operating for nearly 40 years internally from Masculine energy.

One of the first things that happened on this journey of uncovering my Divine Feminine was that, in October 2021, Brian and I made the impossible decision to legally separate. As much as we loved each other, as much as we wanted the story of what we had been sold– the dad, the mom, the kids, everyone living under the same roof– to be a reality, it became clear that neither Brian nor I could grow and heal while acting as husband and wife. When you’re raised the way we were, to believe that divorce wasn’t ever an option, choosing to separate felt like ultimate failure.

But we realized that we had two choices: we could look like we failed at our marriage to a bunch of people who weren’t actually in our relationship, or we could actually fail by knowingly holding each other back and making each other miserable when we knew we had the power to set each other free and love each other without condition.

At this point, Brian and I had been through the highest of highs and lowest of lows, hundreds of hard conversations, countless hours in therapy, and we still could not understand why two people who had devoted their lives to be together, who had brought three beautiful children into the world, who both were “good” people, with no ill intent, no deceit coming between us, and could honestly still see the best in one another… how could we keep missing it? Missing each other? Unintentionally hurting each other?

Up until this point, I knew there had to be a root issue, but I honestly couldn’t find it. Anywhere. My search for the answer was relentless. I had done everything I could.

And even though we hadn’t found the root issue, we knew the way we were currently operating was only further hurting one another. And we loved each other too much to continue. So even though we didn’t know exactly what the future held, and we didn’t know exactly what our future would look like, we had the most honest conversation, born 100% from a place of love and kindness, and decided to legally separate. And maybe, for the first time, we were able to truly love one another unconditionally.

Logistically, we were still living in Nashville, still under the same roof. We had just moved there and had signed a year-long lease, so we decided to use that time to try to figure things out slowly and purposefully, without the pressure of explaining ourselves to three kids, our family, friends, and the world. We waited months to tell our parents, and even longer before telling our friends. And finally, we told everyone else.

We may have been living under the same roof, but we were legally separated and more importantly, we were energetically separated. We had given one another full permission to do whatever the other person needed to do to try and find the root issue. Because a divorce is never about just one person. And we wanted to understand why we needed to be apart in order to be healthy.

Throughout this process, as I learned about Masculine and Feminine energies, I discovered that I’d been betraying my true core energy for decades, and…

It started when I read a book, Understand Women Better by Lorin Krenn. It was a quick read; I read it in one sitting. I felt relief like I can’t explain. I finished the last page and it made so much sense to me. I had found the root issue.

I gave the book to Brian and asked him to read it. I had never done that before so he knew it must have been important. I’ll never forget when he finished it. He walked into the room after the kids had fallen asleep. The book was in his hands. Tears were in his eyes. He looked at me and said, “I am so sorry.”

I said, “Me too.”

We both felt the sorrow that came with realizing that although Brian identifies as a Core Masculine and I identify as a Core Feminine, the environments we were exposed to growing up, the relationships we experienced in childhood, and the events that occurred throughout our lives had wounded Brian’s Masculine energy and wounded my Feminine energy, resulting in my operating primarily from my Masculine and he from his Feminine.

He had spent years feeling depressed, anxious, and immobilized. I had spent years feeling angry, resentful, and abandoned. We weren’t doing it to each other; we had called one another in. We had attracted each other. We had attracted a partner who embodied the things we didn’t receive growing up. We were unconsciously feeding our core wounds over and over again. Our protective, wounded selves had reached out to each other in a crowded room, and we were only realizing almost twenty years later that the more we healed, the less our energies could match up. Without knowing it, we had connected in brokenness, and we’d have to become energetically disconnected to find healing.

This is when we both realized all the therapy in the world will never help. We had, and still have, individual core wounds to heal. Being under the same roof was only going to continue feeding those wounds. I love Brian so much that I wanted to heal him. And as much as I wanted to do that for him, to save him, it was a bitter pill to swallow to realize because of my own unhealed wounds, I was actually the one that was harming him. And him with me.

It was the most difficult yet clear decision that at the end of our one year lease, we would indeed move into separate houses.

He needed to heal without me. I needed to heal without him.

For Mother’s Day that year, Brian asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to attend a conference that Lorin Krenn was hosting. He was teaching on Embodying Divine Feminine Energy.

At that conference, Lorin helped me remove so much shame from operating nearly forty years in my masculine. He explained how it wasn’t my fault, and that we live in a society that prizes masculine energy, so women often do what I had done. We give and we give and we give.

So I thanked my masculine energy for all it had given me and protected me from, but I decided that I wanted the life God intended for me. I was ready to receive. And that’s when my work truly began– to take down, brick by brick, the protective walls I’d built to survive. I would look at them, examine them, and I would sit in that terrible, uncomfortable place of self-reflection until I recognized my true self, the Divine Feminine that was buried alive deep inside me.

And that’s where this discovery of Divine Femininity began. And that’s why I’ve been a little quiet over here. Over the past 18 months, my eyes have been opened. I am awake and I couldn’t go back to sleep if I wanted to. I have become so aware of humans, of their energy, of how so many of us are living totally out of balance. Instead of living out of Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine energy, we’re living out of Wounded Masculine and Wounded Feminine energy.

And this is showing up in misalignment, sadness, confusion, purposelessness, relational bitterness and resentment. And we get stuck in patterns of trying to treat these things with books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Love and Respect and going to counseling and couple’s therapy, but all of those are just trying to find ways to address the symptoms of a deeper problem. If there’s one thing about me, and you see it in my book, in my Ted Talk, and in my life: I’m going to dig a little deeper and get to the root issue.

And here’s what I believe the root issue is:

First, we were made for a life of ease and abundance. A life of nothing broken, nothing missing. A life of wholehearted companionship amongst ourselves, each other, and God. Is that not exactly what Eden was? And when we feel stuck and frustrated and broken, it’s because we’re living a life that’s the exact opposite of those things. A life of difficulty and limitation. A life of disjunction and want. A life of disunity and misalignment in ourselves, our relationships, and with God who lives inside of us.

Second, I believe that this misalignment and disjointedness is the result of favoring one energy over the other. Regardless of your gender, sexual expression, sexual preference, relationship status, etc. you favor either Masculine energy or Feminine. You’re either trying to recreate Eden through effort, force, logic, capability, or through nurturing, interdependency, people pleasing, or manipulation.

You could have daily hour-long couples’ therapy by the best therapists in the world, but it won’t do you a lick of good unless each person participating is operating from wholeness. This will only lead to further disappointment, feelings of failure, stress, depression, etc. Before we can even begin to repair relationships, we must go deep into the darkness of our own individual shadows in order to heal our God given energy.

Because God is Love. And we were made in God’s image, so we remember. In our bones and in our souls, we remember that energy of love because we’ve experienced it before. In our core, we know it. We know love deep, deep, deep down. When we can do the work to rediscover the energy of love and live rooted in love, we will live Heaven on Earth. We recreate that Eden.

That’s why life can feel so hellish sometimes. Hell is separate from Divine Love. Hell is living a life separate from what your soul knows to be true, what it remembers.

What I’ve learned over the past 18 months is how one perceives God is how they perceive themselves. A lot of people still associate God with shame, fear, and guilt. And this isn’t just true in the super Christian, evangelical, Bible-belty world I grew up in. Many of us get it wrong, and it tears us up.

So if those experiences of longing for a restored world, a life of ease, purpose, and alignment, of trying to fix symptoms of a deeper problem by just trying harder, of feeling stuck in the same situations having the same conflict in yourself and in your relationships, then it’s time to dig a little deeper and to heal into wholeness, remembering what you were made for and who you were meant to be.

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It’s time to talk about Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine energies.

And we’re all supposed to live in wholeness with both Masculine and Feminine energies, because we were made in the image of God and God is love and God fully embodies those energies.

Masculine and Feminine, at their best, are Divine, working in tandem, leading to wholeness and love. At worst, we embody the Wounded Masculine and Wounded Feminine, and we create a world where we force separation and opposition onto these two energies that should be working in unity.

When we have one without the other, it means that we have the Masculine creating dream lives without the emotional intelligence to enjoy it through receiving and relaxation. That life looks good, but the person living it lacks the ease to actually experience it and feel it.

At the same time, the Feminine is like a flag waving in the wind, totally detached from a flagpole. The Feminine can embody passion and creativity, but there is no room for the Feminine in the Masculine’s perfect world.

And remember, the Masculine isn’t necessarily a man and the Feminine isn’t always a woman. In my own experience and observations, however, most women are operating out of masculine energy because our world prizes masculinity. We’ve adapted a masculine posture to succeed in a world that wasn’t built for us, wasn’t built for wholeness, and now everyone is paying the price.

The truth is, my natural state is not to be all in my masculine. As much as I thought I wanted to set the vision, to create the plans, to take action, to prove, etc. Deep down, I didn’t want to be living in my masculine. I wanted to care and nurture, to be deeply devoted, to receive love and abundance. But I called in that masculine energy because I feared a lack of love. I felt a lack of tenderness. I felt a lack of kindness. I was driven to live in my Masculine because at some point in my life I created a story that I had to put up a hard shell, I had to wear a suit of armor. No one stood up for me emotionally. No one protected me emotionally. No one validated my emotions. I didn’t feel safe emotionally. A Mature Masculine makes his Feminine feel completely safe. This allows her to be wild and free. If one is surrounded by Wounded Masculines, the Feminine will have to attempt to provide that Masculine energy for herself. The armor was my hard defense. My attempt of never allowing myself to be harmed. My attempt of never allowing myself to be let down again. My Masculine energy completely took over. Because my Masculine energy is simply a defense mechanism that is only there to protect me.

So we go through life looking for experiences and relationships that confirm the identities we’ve built for ourselves, or that we’ve had to build to survive. The Masculine looks for relationships that won’t question or undermine their control and power, then wonder why no one in their lives is standing up for them or protecting them. The Feminine looks for relationships that take care of business and meet their needs so they can continue receiving and being passive.

In my own experience, learning this didn’t feel like condemnation, it felt like freedom. I was operating from my Masculine energy in my marriage. Brian from his Feminine energy. And when we saw lists of the Wounded Masculine v. Wounded Feminine traits, it felt so comforting. We knew that the ways we repeatedly hurt each other, the ways we kept missing each other, the ways we wanted more from each other, weren’t personal attacks, they were individual patterns.

I was constantly looking for Brian to defend and protect me, and I felt so hurt when he couldn’t or wouldn’t. I told myself he didn’t love me enough to protect me. But the truth is, from a very young age, I believed I wasn’t emotionally protected, seen, or understood. So I recreated that truth in all of my relationships. And I wasn’t going to give anyone a chance to risk my protection, to not see me, or to misunderstand me. So I was the protector. I was the achiever. I over-explained myself. There was no room for Brian in my reality because I needed to be enough for myself and for everyone around me. I needed to prove I was worthy. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to leave or find fault. Because I wanted to ensure my own protection.

I didn’t know it on a conscious level, but something inside me figured if I don’t feel protected by Masculine energy in my life outside of me, I’ll create it inside me. This pulls me further away from my natural state. I used to wear my Masculinity as a badge of honor. But there is nothing honorable about living inauthentically.

I was tired of attracting relationships, romantic, platonic, work partnerships, that were passive. I was frustrated. Passivity does not make me feel safe. I was so tired of leading all the time. In fact, I just got home from a weekend in Dallas with my friends celebrating my birthday. When they asked me what I wanted I said, “to not make one single decision. I can’t remember the last time I traveled and wasn’t responsible for every decision, every dinner reservation, every source of entertainment, every confirmation email. You know what would make me feel the most loved? Having everything taken care of!”

Eighteen months ago, I knew I was tired of being the leader all the time. I was tired of being the one in most of my relationships making the effort– all I wanted was to be taken care of. Or at the very least, reciprocity. At the beginning of my journey these past 18 months, I resented that I had to be my own protector.

This is when Brian and I realized that we needed to separate. In order to find wholeness, we needed to break out of our harmful patterns. We needed to swap the Wounded for the Divine, so we could stop recreating the hurts we’d experienced in this world and start remembering the wholeness of the perfect ease we were created for.

And what we found, when we let go of expectation and embraced each other as we were, was real, true, unconditional love. Both for each other and for ourselves.

This kind of love requires radical honesty, self-awareness.

It means walking away from things that no longer serve us. It means stepping outside our comfort zone. It means unlearning all the things we were taught. It means reparenting ourselves. It means giving the child inside of us a voice and the space to finally be heard. It means realizing that each and every situation you’ve experienced you’ve called in for yourself because you have lessons to learn on your way to wholeness.

When you are asking for the good life, you are ultimately asking to be ripped away of the things that no longer serve you. Most of the time, we will experience the same heartache, the same disappointment over and over again and wonder why? It’s because God is trying to get us to learn the lesson because we’ve asked to learn the lesson. So God brings the lesson to us over and over again in many different ways, forms, through different people.

In order to get back to the love we were made for, we MUST be aligned. Alignment is our highest self, and it requires ripping off the mask we wear. It means no more acting. It means vulnerability. It means healing. It means facing our demons. It means no more avoiding.

My hope is that through this series, you will also be able to pinpoint some of your lessons that you were brought here to uncover, to hear from, so that you too may experience the life God brought you here to live. A life of pleasure and play. A life of ease. A life of love.

You simply surrender the parts of you that keep you from living in your natural being. Who you naturally are. Who you effortlessly are. Your natural essence. Your natural energy.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL, YOUR ULTIMATE DESTINY
IS TO LIVE IN HARMONY.

Our destiny is to live a life of ease through harmony and wholeness. When we arrive in this state, our soul power ignites and begins to effortlessly attract everything we need in our lives to be whole, happy, and complete.

You are both Masculine and Feminine. You are a soul in a human body. This means you were created to harness both. When you do, you experience wholeness. You experience heaven on earth.

That’s what the last 18 months have brought me. And it’s been worth it. I think you can see that.

But before ending up here, in joy and pleasure and play, I had to walk through a Dark Night of the Soul. And it was brutal, but also essential. I share more about that in the next blog.

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