The woman within

For years, Lauren Barber repressed her feminine energy – now she sees it as a superpower, the font of her creativity, health and sexuality. She offers some powerful and liberating exercises, so you can reconnect with yours

Apart from a few years during my late teens, I have spent my whole life believing I was unsexy. I wasn’t elegant or poised – I was messy and chaotic. As I strived for success in a business I created, I shut off my emotions to appear strong. I was fiercely independent and the fact that I was a woman didn’t even cross my mind. The world told me I needed to switch off my femininity and switch on a linear and consistent outer shell.

When I turned 30, after punishing my body in the gym and restricting my food intake in a bid to achieve the ‘perfect’ body, I was anxious, exhausted, without a menstrual cycle, in a relationship that was falling apart and with a damaged disc in my back. I was so disconnected from myself that I pushed through workouts in agonising pain. Emotionally, I was empty; depleted of life force, sexual and creative energy – the things that I now see as innate superpowers. There was a void, something missing, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

I ventured into what I call a journey of remembering. I used practices such as womb yoga, a deeply feminine form that is all about working with the female anatomy and energy, listening to my body’s wisdom and intuition and understanding my sexual energy as more than about sex but as a font of creativity. I began to connect deeply with my body in a nourishing and gentle way that felt both alien and familiar at the same time. It was like an ‘unlearning’ – as if something within me remembered, and had lived this instinctive way before, but had forgotten it.

I felt my spark return. I rediscovered an inner confidence and was more trusting of the path my life was taking, despite huge challenges. I started to love my body beyond appearance, and I felt alive. There is not one area of my life that has not been affected by this.

Eventually, I trained as a yoga and meditation teacher and a sex, love and relationship coach. Self-love, self-connection and self-intimacy cannot be fully reached without a sense of embodiment. Our minds will only take us so far. What follows are some of my favourite practices to help you reconnect with your feminine energy.