3 Ways Spiritual Women Unintentionally Disempower Themselves

Technically speaking, it’s impossible to use spirituality to disempower yourself or others. You can only use a bastardization of spirituality to disempower. And the place where we see the most of this bastardization is within the New Age community.

Spiritual women often end up using New Age teachings to disempower themselves. Just being aware that there is a difference between New Age teachings and spirituality as a whole can help you better understand where you trip up. Here are some of the biggest ways that spiritual women unintentionally disempower themselves.

Obsessing Over Manifestation

Cocreating with the Universe is a beautiful experience for a spiritual woman. She feels the power of the Universe and its hand on her back as she lives a life her ancestors could have only dreamt of. But some spiritual women go too far when manifestation becomes their sole spiritual undertaking.

A single-minded focus on manifestation can hurt a spiritual woman’s sense of wellness and self-esteem. The obsession keeps her in a state of wanting and therefore in a state of lack; she’s never satiated. This is especially true when all her “manifestation work” does not come to fruition. It makes her feel abandoned by God, betrayed by the Universe, and disbelieving in her own competency.

This is never truer than when a spiritual woman is obsessed with manifesting a “soulmate” or “twin flame.” Because it speaks directly to the wounds of her heart, this particular obsession can cause the most amount of chaos in a woman’s life.

Release work is what spiritual women need more than a manifestation practice. Release work helps women feel good now and paradoxically frees them up to “manifest” naturally. Release practices can take many forms, from physical exercise to meditation. Some good examples of release practices are yin yoga and sensual movement practices. Ideally, you’d want a practice that targets the mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

Think of all the cultural expectations, social conditions, dysfunctional systems, political betrayals, and ancestral inheritances that women carry both consciously and subconsciously. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to co-create with the Universe while carrying around this psychic baggage.

Trying to Be Only “Love and Light”

Many spiritual women want to carry an energy of “love and light.” This is a worthy pursuit. That is, until the point when women deny their natural instincts in favor of how “spiritual” they think they should be. In the New Age community, being compassionate, loving, and kind are qualities usually associated with spiritual, “high vibration” people. Anger, direct speech, and protectiveness are usually associated with “low vibration” people.

So, many spiritual women will try their best to be good. But what these women are actually doing is using New Age teachings to cope with their own self-hatred and complete the devaluing of their own innate goodness. The latter usually happens if they grew up in an environment where positive encouragement and well-matched opportunities were not provided to them.

A lot of spiritual women will judge themselves for not being more compassionate, loving, or kind. They will then take this to an extreme and show love in situations where self-protection (and perhaps even a bite) would be more to the point. Spiritual women who have unintentionally disempowered themselves will defang and declaw themselves to be a tamer, more socially acceptable kind of spiritual.

Sometimes, naturally openhearted women will believe themselves to be narcissistic (or generally bad or evil) because their rich inner world and authentic spiritual expression don’t match popular New Age tropes.

Spiritual women caught in this trap can fall prey to harmful teachers and peers and find themselves in dangerous situations. They will readily believe someone else’s poor opinion of them before they believe in their own innate goodness. They will also readily believe in someone else’s goodness (despite all evidence to the contrary) because they feel that believing in a person’s negative qualities isn’t “light and love.”

Here are some journaling prompts to help you reach your personal truth regarding the concepts of love and light:

• What do I want my style of enlightenment/awakening/spirituality to look like?

• What is my definition of God/Spirit/the Universe?

• How do I personally experience God/Spirit/the Universe?

• What does my natural, innate goodness look like? How can I better act in accordance with the belief that I am truly good?

• How can I practice my innate goodness in the real world?

Forgetting the Feminine Face of God

Spirituality (much like medicine and other important aspects of life) has been the domain of men for a very long time. A lot of what we know and how we’re taught is unbalanced at best. Because of the influence of the patriarchy, the only way for a woman to know her spiritual truth is for her to experience it directly. She needs to recover the feminine, remember it back into being, and live it in her day-to-day life.

Some spiritual women will ignore the divine feminine completely. It secretly makes them uncomfortable to even acknowledge its existence because that would mean acknowledging the immense grief that lives inside them at being raised in a patriarchal spiritual culture.

Some spiritual women will swing in the other direction and become fanatical in their commitment to the divine feminine. They do this because they are secretly afraid of being powerless.

Still, other spiritual women will advocate for the feminine by reinforcing old-world views of femininity, unwittingly perpetuating the same systems that did them (and the rest of humanity) harm.

There is so much New Age literature to sift through that speaks on the power of divine femininity—it’s Disneyland for the spiritual woman who is hungry for more. A lot of spiritual women then become lost while wading through these infinitely deep waters. Many of the New Age books on the divine feminine are, unfortunately, intellectual more than experiential—they neglect the practice element of spiritual practice.

The medicine, then, is for a spiritual woman to focus on her experience and practice. The best way to do this is for her to incorporate rituals into her spiritual undertaking. The most radical thing a spiritual woman can do is keep a “lab record” of all her experiments with the divine.

On Becoming an Empowered Spiritual Woman

Some surefire mental and emotional signs of “spirituality gone wrong” for a spiritual woman is when she experiences incredible amounts of confusion, heaviness, disconnection, paralyzing self-criticism, and a consistent background hum of disappointment in herself.

Some surefire behavioral signs of “spirituality gone wrong” for a spiritual woman are when she collects teachings, crystals, books, and other New Age props while giving no time to actually practicing and experiencing the divine.

All these experiences can be looked at archetypically as a spiritual woman’s journey to wholeness: She’s searching for her medicine. May she be aware of her hiccups along the way, show it copious amounts of compassion, and choose her unique path of mastery.

Explore some of the benefits of connecting with divine feminine energy.