A key part of The Desire Map process is about uncovering your Core Desired Feelings – the feelings that make you feel good and that you want to live in as much as possible. When you get clear on how you want to feel and align your routines and goals to generate those feelings every day, week, month, year – well, that’s a wonderful life of feeling good!
This is all fine, but for desire to work, it needs action – real integration into daily life as well as the big goals. Deliberately doing things in ways that will make you feel good both whilst you’re doing those things, and when you achieve what you set out to achieve.
Feel good now…and when you reach your goals.
Over the next several blog posts, I’d like to share with you my life with each of my Core Desired Feelings to show you what they mean to me and how I integrate them into my life.
Today’s Core Desired Feeling is…Female.
~*~
What does it mean to me?
Primarily, it evokes {Unity} in me:
Of body and soul – those moments when I feel my soul is firmly-gently tethered to my body are the moments I feel whole; feeling whole, or otherwise easing into myself, makes me feel very Female.
Of vulnerability and strength – we unfortunately still live in a world where a woman’s appearance is valued more than her actual skills and strengths, and where a woman is considered to be a valuable commodity instead of another human being.
It matters to me because I didn’t used to feel this way. You know when you live so far in your mind that you use your body to achieve the things that your mind wants? Whilst that is satisfying…it also never ends. That empty feeling of going through the motions but not actually feeling anything, probably not enjoying yourself as you’re going for your goals?
That never-enoughness that doesn’t go away, even if you feed it with goals and achieving what you set out to achieve.
Female brings all of me back together and helps me find meaning in the things I want and do.
Female is a moderately quiet aspect of me – it’s always there in the background, but it’s not as loud and feisty a feeling as Freedom and Dynamic for me. I love it all the same – the softening, the gentle acceptance of myself and the way the world feels.
Why the word “Female” over other words?
When I did The Desire Map the first time, I actually came out with “Feminine” to evoke this within me, however I was never entirely happy with the word. The word just didn’t fit me – saying it out aloud felt a bit too “girly” for me.
Yet, “Divine Feminine” also wasn’t right either – it felt too majestic for me, and as if I wouldn’t be able to turn off the spotlight when I wanted to.
The other thing that didn’t sit right with me is this: I also have very male or masculine qualities – the logical, pragmatic, practical, Dynamic, forward-looking, videogaming, motorbiking side of me – and adopting “feminine” felt like it would completely exclude this part of me. And I love men, maleness, have real affection for masculinity – not Magic Mike style rippling muscles (*really* not my thing), but that driving energy that’s bristling under the surface that men tend to have, and their particular brand of comraderie. “Feminine”, to me, denies me access to that.
So I wanted to keep the “male” with me. “Male”, yet not quite male. Unity of male and un-maleness.
Fe-male.
Female.
The beauty of The Desire Map is that we might all be feeling the same feelings, but they are evoked in us in different ways depending on our histories and tastes. For someone else, “Feminine”, “Divine Feminine”, “Priestess” or “Earth Mother” might evoke the same feeling that I desire, but it’s evoked in me when I say “I am Female.”
How do I use “Female” to guide my goals?
Whereas Freedom and Dynamic eagerly race ahead, make plans, engage 6th gear and pull the throttle back – Female is the part of me that will whisper in my ear:
“How will that make you feel? How do you want to feel?
How will we all get there together?”
Female brings much loved unity to my decision-making – because it’s all very well steam-rolling ahead with objectives, tasks and to-do lists, but if they don’t feel good whilst I’m going for it or achieving them?
It’s just not worth it.
Female is the subtle side that shows what’s worth going for and what’s worth burning.
What do I do each day to feel that CDF?
I have a thing for perfumes and wear one every day.
I’m a bit of an ophresiophiliac and love tuberose-based perfumes. Probably my favourite fiction book and movie of all time is “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind because of the way they made your mind imply scents by overpowering your imagination and other senses (not so much for the wanton murder Grenouille does…).
Currently I’m wearing The Fragrance Lab’s #148. The Fragrance Lab was an immersive perfumery experience at Selfridges in London in 2014 that profiled your personality and gave you the perfume that matches your personality type. You went on a journey through 
several rooms with audio, and you made choices based on the situations you were put into – choosing scents, choosing objects and so on – and at the end, an engineer would ask some final questions before presenting you with the perfume that matches your personality. My one has rose, tuberose, jasmine, vanilla, tonka bean and neroli – a bit nostalgic-romantic.
I also really love Shantoung by Galimard. My first motorbiking road trip abroad was to Castellan in Provence, France, and since we were near Perfume Mecca (a.k.a. Grasse, where 80% of the world’s perfumes are produced), I begged my dad to take me to one of the perfume factories for a tour. I really recommend it because they give you a tour showing the history of how perfumes were made in the past and how the processes have modernised, plus their prices are really reasonable when compared to the mass-produced, massively-marked-up “designer” ilk.
Music also evokes Female in me each day.
I listen to music a lot, partially because I have a 4 hour round-trip daily commute to my day job, but also because it expresses some of the unexpressable within me.
I’ve had my MP4 player for some 10 years now, and it’s still working surprisingly well!
Artists that bring out different aspects of Female in me:
I wear great lingerie every day
Yes, I went there.
– bras that support beautifully, soft and comforting fabrics against softer parts of my body.
That’s such a cliche, I know – “wear good underwear to feel a million dollars”. Except that it’s true for me. I first read about the importance of wearing the right fit from Camilla Morton, and how great underwear makes great outerwear – your makeup and outerwear is only ever as good as your foundations. I worked briefly as a lingerie girl at M&S, and it just reinforced the importance of well-fitting underwear.
But it also goes a bit deeper than that – it wasn’t until relatively recently that I was comfortable with my breasts. Don’t get me wrong – I was always grateful for them and for their good health…yet, they were always “something attached to my chest” rather than being part of my body.
What changed that? For me, it was when I just decided to stop settling with a “good fit” and finding bras that also felt great to wear and made me feel beautiful underneath my clothes.
And suddenly…I felt myself softening into my clothes, into myself, into my breasts. I was eased from my head back into my body. The rest of the day went by quite easily and gently.
It’s only when you create routines that support your Core Desired Feelings that you can feel the way you want to feel every day, not just when you’re goal-chasing.
Next week, I’ll show you the heart of my Core Desired Feelings: Freedom
Laughter,
Catherine
P.S. Did you miss the chat about Desire I had with Tamara Romaniuk earlier this week?
Don’t worry – hear it here:
