S03|06 - The Divine Feminine in Motherhood with Cristy Duce

 

Cristy has been a high school teacher, app creator, yoga teacher, barrel racer and has taught high school in the jungle in Ecuador. Now she teaches and facilitates women’s group in combining both the feminine and masculine in growth and expansion.

What we discuss:

• What feminine and masculine energy are
• How we can lose connection with our feminine energy in motherhood
• How to start tapping back into the feminine and why it’s so necessary

Connect with Cristy: @cristyleeduce
Website: www.cristyleeduce.com
Podcast: Homefires Podcast

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Episode Transcript

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Hey, I'm Crystal, a certified life coach and mom of four. In this podcast, we combine radical connection and positive parenting theories with the How-To Life Coaching Tools and Mindset Work to completely transform our relationship with our children.

Join me on my journey, unleash your inner parenting expert, and become the mother you've always wanted to be. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast and rate this podcast on Apple, and check out my transformative monthly membership for moms in the show notes.

 

Meet Cristy Duce: Know what she does, and how she got started

Welcome to today's episode, The Divine Feminine in Motherhood with Cristy Duce. Cristy has been a high school teacher, app creator, yoga teacher, barrel racer and has taught high school in the jungle in Ecuador. Now she teaches and facilitates women’s groups in combining both the feminine and masculine in growth and expansion. 

Hi Cristy. Thank you so much for being on here with us. 

 

Cristy Duce: Oh, I am so happy to be here. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Okay. I found Cristy through Instagram-ish, I think, but we actually lived in like the same area. And anyways, now I feel like I just know her in real life, and she's awesome. 

I've had her come speak in my membership, and it was such a good experience. So, I want you guys to experience a little bit of her and her awesomeness. And I want her to kind of explain to us a little bit about what she does, and how she got into what she's doing; and it's just so fun. 

So, make sure you listen in. Go ahead, Cristy. 

 

Cristy Duce: Okay. So right now, I facilitate and coach in women's groups; and it's been such an interesting path. I feel like I have accidentally become a teacher a few times in my life. I went into education as a profession, first, with the idea that I was going to do something else after. 

And then, it turns out I was like, 'Oh, I love this and this is what I need to be doing right now.' And the same, probably six years ago I did yoga teacher training, and I was like, 'This is just for me, I just want to like expand my personal practice.' 

And then, when I started teaching, I was like, 'Oh, I have to do this.' And so, about a year ago, I started an experiment of just putting it out to my social media saying, "Hey, I'm going to run this thing. This is kind of what it's going to look like. Is anyone interested?" 

And it was sort of overwhelming and so fulfilling at helping people in that way, women. 

And so, what I do now is combine the masculine. So, most of what we've all been taught about how to grow and expand and do better in our lives, comes from structure and repeatability. 

And there's so much to be said for that, that there's also this magic integration of more than half of ourselves – of the feminine, of more of our life and essence and vitality and joy and love that we can also pour into our life. 

And so, when we have the capacity to maneuver between both of them, all of them, then we can feel so much more – and feel better in our lives and have that centered groundedness. And it's just been a really magical process to help other people through it. 

And I feel like I came to it really honestly, because if there was anyone that was all about like, functioning in this masculine world and getting things done and looking for sort of external milestones in progress and traditional goal setting – that was me. 

And it really changed my life when I allowed myself to open up to more parts of me and changed how I moved through the world so dramatically that it's just been really rewarding and humbling to help other women through that process. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I love that. I feel like all of the lovely things in my life have happened by accident. Like I just brought my kids home for a little bit to homeschool them and thought, 'I just want to spend like a year or two more with these guys.' 

And now, we're going into Grade 10 and I've homeschooled for 10 years; and all of these little things--  

 

Cristy Duce: Amazing, by the way. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Like, even like life coaching, I didn't even know what a life coach was and got invited out to this evening and was like, 'What is this magicalness? I love this.' 

And anyways, was on my way to try and become a marriage and family therapist, at that time, and totally, you know, diverted and went to something different. But all of those things, like I think that our path is so different than what we think it's going to be, but so exactly what we needed. 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally. When I talk about starting this, people sometimes would be like, 'Oh, was it your dream?' And I was like, no. And I don't know if that's more validating or less. 

Just when I started doing this, it was my nightmare to like, 'You're going to see pictures of my face all the time on Instagram. Like, I have to talk on my phone. Are you kidding me?' 

And the only way I can explain it was that I felt like if I didn't make something to share with the world, I would die; like it was just killing me, and just like bursting out. And so, it was terrifying, to start. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, I love it. 

 

Cristy Duce: It was so terrifying. I had to fight with so much of my own fears and ego stuff and everything to go through with it, which is also so much of the point of why we have to do things. 

And when we can marry those things together of our own expansion and then helping other people, then that's where a lot of the whole human magic we get it from. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Exactly. It's like who we become in that process, right? 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: It's totally different than what we think it's going to be. And even when I did life coach training, I trained at the Life Coach School, it was like, I thought it was all about the people I was going to help, but really that training was like for me; like that training transformed who I was as a person, and how I parented in so many different things in my life. 

And anyways, I just love how life is like that, how life is like all about-- I remember years ago, telling my husband, like, he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I'm like, "No, no, no, you need something stable." 

Anyways, now, fast-forward years later, and both of us are at home working from home – entrepreneurs; and I was the first one who started it. I'm like, 'How did this happen?' Anyways, life just has a funny way of being like that. 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally.

 

What feminine and masculine energy are

Crystal The Parenting Coach: But I want to circle back to what you brought up about masculine-feminine, because this is a new concept for me. I've only been into this for, I don't know, six months or so. I had never even heard about masculine and feminine energy; I didn't even know what that meant. 

I thought it was just like male and female; and so, I'm sure that there is a lot of listeners right now who feel out of the loop like I did. So, I would love for you to explain to us just what that is. 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally. And it was kind of an accidental wandering into so much of it for myself as well. I talked about the same thing on like a horse-training podcast about moving between both of them. 

And so, it's been so-- Yeah, it's been so interesting because traditionally, like I sort of happened into this idea through the Tantra stream of Yoga, which is like the lineage of what I trained in. 

And it talks about like the energy flowing through the whole world. One way that you can kind of phrase it in those terms is that we all have Shakti and Shiva energy in us, Yin and Yang energy. 

So, I speak mostly in masculine and the feminine, but that's not to be confused with gender and essentialism; we all have both of them. And usually, we are more dominant in one than the other. 

So, I am sincerely left-handed and I, sincerely-- And so, I talk about it how if we are a feminine-dominant being, which most of us don't think we are because it's scary and powerful, and we can talk about that later, and we're only functioning in our masculine – then it's like being forced to write with our, do everything with our right hands. 

That, yes, we can get better at it, and we can improve and we can do things and be capable – but we are missing out on kind of our superpower on what we have that would be more natural and more powerful and easier to grow through. 

So, the masculine, the metaphor that is most helpful for most people is the masculine is like the riverbanks, the structure, the steadiness, the consciousness – a lot of what we do through our brain, through our mindset is very masculine, has order and makes sense. And, that is so important. 

Like I said, we need really both of them. And, the feminine is the river itself. It's like the pure energy, the connection to love. It's the emotions that maybe sometimes are overwhelming, but contain intelligence for us. 

And so, when we have them both together, then we can be powerful and magic, but one without the other is problematic. So, if we just have the banks, and usually we're only focusing on growing through the banks to like, 'What's another strategy that I can use? Like, how should I change my morning routine?' Those are all really 'river bank masculine strategies.' 

But those river banks are not very exciting if nothing is flowing through them. And same with if we are just in our feminine, if we have no structure to work through things – to understand our emotions, to pause and respond instead of react, all those sorts of things – then that river water is just flowing everywhere. 

Then we're a flood, then it has no directionality; it has nowhere to go. It has no power to it either. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, I love that. I love the idea of like integrating both of them. I, a few months ago, hired an intuitive business coach; and I loved it. 

And she was the one who kind of started getting me into masculine and feminine, and I realized that I pretty much live my whole life in the masculine. And so, it was really different to like totally swing over to this intuitive side, which I also loved. 

And it was so, you know, tapping into what I truly wanted to do, and what I truly believed in, and working on my belief. And, it was just a lovely time. And then, over time, I was like, 'Okay, now, let's figure out how to integrate these two now that I know this other side of me.' 

And it was just such a lovely and expansive thing to get into that I had never done before. So, if anyone is listening, make sure that you go and follow Cristy on Instagram. 

I will have her social links in the show notes, so that you can listen to some of her meditations and go to some of her trainings that she does because it's so helpful to really tap into that side of you. And I think, as mothers often we presume that we are tapped in because we're female, but it's totally different.

 

How we can lose connection with our feminine energy in motherhood

Feminine is totally different, feminine energy, than what a lot of us are used to or even really know. I'd love for you to tell us in what ways you kind of see this lack of feminine energy affecting your clients now that you've helped coach people and brought people through this process? 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally. And I love that you started, well, obviously, you're mostly talking about parenting; and it's such an interesting dance for mothers because you have to live in your masculine. 

And like you said, that's almost counterintuitive because you're doing all of this mothering, but you have to keep all the trains running on time; and people need sandwiches, and you need to think ahead to have snacks, and people need to get to practice and get up and that is all very masculine-like thinking energy – anytime we're dealing in time and space and structure. 

So essentially, most mothers, just by necessity, have to be in your masculine to make your life work. And there is-- It's really easy for us to sort of forget the feeling of being in the feminine, being tapped in. It's a really deeper, more organic feeling. 

And so, for-- I coach a lot of mothers, mostly mothers as well, which is sort of funny to me because I don't have children. And so, my number one coaching statement to mothers is like, 'It's so freaking hard, you're doing great. Whatever you're doing, I'm sure it's great because that is like the hardest job. I don't know.’ 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. 

 

Cristy Duce: But, most of what they are seeking is feeling more; like they want to feel more connected, they want to feel more love – they don't want to feel so burnt out, so overwhelmed by their lives. And when we're only functioning in their masculine, those are feelings that we can get to really easily because the feminine is regenerative. 

It's when we're really tapped into our connection to everything – that feeling that you have when you're in nature and you don't even necessarily know how to articulate it, but you're feeling more, and you're feeling connected and more deeply grounded into yourself and everything around you; that's the feminine. 

And so, a lot of mothers are really craving that feeling of, 'how can I get my kids to bed, and also feel love and connection when they don't want to go and when they, we like do the same thing every day?' 

And so, a lot of it is learning how to locate that within ourselves because it's always there. And sometimes it's just a matter of remembering the route to get to it, and dropping in and doing activities that restore it because pleasure, joy, love, all of those things, restore and build up our wellspring of feminine energy as well, which is just this pure energetic fuel source. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, I love that, doesn't it? Like hey, if you're listening to this, doesn't that feel magical the way that you described it, I'm like, 'It feels so good.' And that's exactly how I feel. 

I remember being-- I was hiking up Red Rock Canyon in Waterton. For you, those of you that aren't local, Google Waterton National Park because it's beautiful. Anyways, I'm hiking up this canyon; and we went on a day when it was like the middle of the week, nobody is there. 

And I was there with a friend of mine and we were just like sitting there; she's doing yoga because she was doing some yoga training stuff. So, she's doing yoga, and I'm just sitting there with my hands in the water looking at all of the beauty around me; and I was just felt so in tune with nature and felt so still and so peaceful, and just so--  

I felt like I could have just sat there for hours. I did sit there for a very long time, and I just remember thinking this is feminine energy. And I remember hearing your analogy of the riverbank and I was, had my hands in the river water and was thinking, 'This is what it is, this is that flow.' 

And it's so easy for us to get stuck in that day-to-day structured routine that we have to do in order to make things happen as moms; and think that that's, you know, feminine energy or whatever, and really lose out on this feminine energy. 

And I think what you said with women craving it is so true. It's like they're craving this like identity. They feel like there's more and they don't know what that more is--  

 

Cristy Duce: Yes.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: -but more is the feminine energy that more is following your passion and your intuition; and it's totally transformed my life. I think my whole journey for the last few years has been this; I just didn't have like a name for it until now. 

So, if there is a mom out there--  

 

Cristy Duce: Can I just--  

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah, go ahead. 

 

Cristy Duce: Finish you go. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: No, no, no. 

 

Cristy Duce: Well, I think that there's also all these factors that are working against women too that's saying that feminine means that you're emptying out, that you are just giving everything to everyone else. 

And when we're filled up with a feminine, like the gift is you, like more of you. And you can sit, we've all felt this way where we sat with someone, and just their energy was like nurturing and inspiring; and they weren't emptied out, they weren't like a shell of themselves – them being filled up, and in their own like power and connection, we can feel that off other people. 

And so, because throughout history we mostly have had men's voices talking about growth and improvement-- And I did a guest, I don't know, class for another group of moms in a book club. 

And they were talking about the miracle morning and morning routines, which is something I love talking about and I never call routines – your morning practice because we all need different things from our mornings all the time. 

And they were like, 'I just like my baby wakes up and I don't know how to spend like two hours to have this perfect morning.' And I'm like, 'Do you think the guy that wrote the book had a baby waking up?' 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Duh!

 

Cristy Duce: No, his wife got the baby so he could have his two hours. And so, we've mostly just had men's voices in the space. And even biologically, their rhythms reset every 24 hours. They experience life physiologically completely different than most women whose energy cycle is over 28 days – that we are a different person day 1 to day 14 with different needs. 

And so, because it's a space so dominated by men's voices or women that have been successful in this masculine paradigm, then most of the time moms, women that are coming like, 'I want more in my life, I want to feel more, I want it to be better, I want to work on my goals.' 

Whatever it is, you're only getting feedback like this and adding more structure, showing up those river banks doesn't actually allow you; to feel more, to pour more into your life, to feel more connected into the truth of who you are, into what's underneath, into your connection to everything. 

And so, it's kind of rigged against us until I feel like lately there's way more discussion and talk about it to ever get there.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Totally. I love that you mentioned that because I was going to divert into another question. I love this one though. I love what you said about the gift that we give to ourselves is the gift of you. Because so many times, moms will tell me like, 'Well, I can't spend time on me, and I can't do this on me.' 

And they think that it's like taking away from their motherhood, but what I always see is that it actually gives back to their motherhood, it overflows into all the other areas of your life. 

So, if you're listening to this and you feel that same way, focusing on you and focusing on this journey – this feminine journey and tapping into your passion and what inspires you – it will actually flow out to the rest of your life. 

Like will flow to your parenting and to your motherhood and to your relationships. And even into your goal setting, all of the structure that you want to have, it's like just this beautiful relationship you can have between that masculine and the feminine when you switch over your focus to the feminine when you haven't been doing that before. 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally.

 

How to start tapping back into the feminine, and why it’s so necessary

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. So, my question then for you would be for people that are listening here and thinking, 'Okay, this all sounds lovely and magical, but like, what do I actually do? Like, how do I tap into the feminine?' 

Because you mentioned that there was, you know, activities you could do or things that you could kind of do to figure that out more, what are those? 

 

Cristy Duce: So, a couple of them; I offer a lot of free meditations, and they're very visualization-focused. There's like, you're imagining connecting into nature and moving your energy around internally. 

I talked one time about how the most creative successful things that I've done in my life, I felt like from my low belly like womb space, it sounds like kind of woo-hoo in mindset stuff, but, and they're like, 'How do you know how to move your energy there?' And I was like, 'Oh, how do I know that?' A lot of just practice and meditation and things like that so that we have access to more of ourselves. 

 

The importance of shifting focus from time management to energy management

But also, I think a core shift that everybody can make is shifting focus from time management – which is a really masculine way of moving through the world and sometimes necessary, totally – to energy management, to really noticing how things are affecting your energy because our energy is elastic through the day. 

Our time is finite. We only have certain amount of hours in a day, but we-- I think probably because we're mostly talking to women here, most of you understand the idea that if you have 20 minutes to get ready to go somewhere, it will take you 20 minutes. 

And if you had an hour to go somewhere really special, it would probably take you an hour or whatever. Our activities morph and time is not as – this sounds way out there, but time is not as – non-negotiable as we think sometimes. 

And so, when we're paying attention to the things that give us energy – that might be working in your garden, that might be reading a book – then you have more of that when you need to clean your house, when you need to like have your repetitive bedtime discussion, then you are filled up in a different way. 

And so, noticing and noticing what resonates. A lot of us are living a little bit automatically – well, all of us to some degree. And so, we think that we have to do things a certain way, that other things are non-negotiable. 

Like, you need to keep your flower beds super clean, but like, do you? I was working with a mom who I said like, "Okay, well, what are all the things that you want to do in a day?" 

And I wrote them all down, and I was like, "How long do each of those take?" And she told me and I was like, "Okay, we're at 32 hours, so some of those things have to go." 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah.

 

Cristy Duce: And getting real about what lights us up, what takes too much from us – taps into that deeper knowing, intuitive, feminine parts of ourselves. And also, expands what we have access to so that we have more in the tank - we have more reserves when we are doing the Have-Tos because we are filled up with the Want-Tos. 

And the Want-Tos could even be cleaning out a closet, if that is sincerely adding more energy, more of ourselves to us. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, that's so good. I love this switch between time management to energy management because that's so true. When I sit and even if it's only like 15 minutes, I'm doing something that I love, it fills me up so much with the ability to go do other things. 

So, if you're a busy mom and you're like, 'I don't have time to spend hours in the garden,' it doesn't have to be hours--  

 

Cristy Duce: No.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: -it's the getting filled up with that energy that then just can, you know, transmit to everything else that you're doing. 

 

Cristy Duce: Totally. And, I first-- I heard this idea a couple years ago. I was in a class with an Olympic athlete; and she coaches from a very like high-performance, like a very masculine framework goal achievement. 

And she was talking about that it's a very well-accepted fact in Positive Psychology that doing something that you like first thing in the morning, fuels your productivity. 

And I was like, 'Wait, all I've ever heard was like, you do all the hard stuff first and you like suffer first; and then if you have enough time, then you can be happy.' 

And sometimes, especially for women, because we have such a higher propensity to see ourselves as not doing 'being enough', way more than men do, that's also statistically proven that if you're coaching men's sports, you're showing them videos to be like, 'You make a lot of mistakes, buddy,' when they're like, 'I'm the best that's ever lived.' 

And to women showing highlights of like, 'You are really good,' when they're like, 'No, I did this and this and this.' 

And so, knowing that tendency sometimes to do something that fills us, lights us up first thing in the morning – which is why I love talking about morning practice so much – then it's also this confirmation of like, 'Just because I woke up today and I'm me and I'm human, I deserve to feel better.' 

Because we lots of times have taken in this idea that we deserve pleasure, joy, delight after we've done all the things that prove our worthiness. And first thing in the morning, upending that paradigm can be so powerful of you deserve to feel better just because you're here. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I love that. 

 

Cristy Duce: -ever feeling better looks like to you, which can be so different for so many people.

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah. 

 

Cristy Duce: Because I think as moms often, we wait until the end of the day to like reward ourselves with some like downtime versus like starting with that time. You know, even if your kids are running around and doing whatever they're doing, like you can still sit there and just like relax or do whatever it is that you need to do. 

Like, I love to just do like a quick little meditation or read a book or do like a couple like journaling prompts or whatever; like it doesn't have to be this long thing. It can be five minutes, and it can like fuel you in such a big way for the rest of the day. 

And you've just stood up first thing and said like, "Me being in charge of me, like that is our first assignment here," is that we are in charge of us, our own souls. 

And then, a lot of women have all these other souls that they're in charge of after, but like your number #1 assignment is you, and not in a selfish way, but in a way that boundaries, which is, I know such a hot topic with moms because everyone wants things from you all the time. 

But when you're looking at your own energy, when you're looking at what you need to be the most you – to be the most loving, to be the most connected, to offer the most – then we can be sometimes a lot more energetically clear about our boundaries. 

They're not so messy and sticky because we're not like, 'Oh, I'm such a bad person for needing this.' We're like, 'No, it's not morning time – like, my door is shut, see you guys in a few.' 

I mean, depending on the age of your kids, but then that's not you being a bad mom – that's, to be my most me, this is what I need right now. Easy. 

 

Final tip from Cristy Duce

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yeah, exactly. Okay. This has been such a great conversation; and I would love for you to just leave us with one thing, whatever it is, a tip or a phrase or advice. And I know you have a hard time with 1, 2, 3; if you want to leave us with three, that's cool too.

 

Cristy Duce: Yes. Sometimes I like tapping in like, 'Oh, you want to know what the feminine sounds like?' It's like me when I teach and talk that even when I taught school, they're like, 'Are you ever going to like write something on the board?' And I'm like, 'No, probably not. We're just going to make meaning together.' Yeah, the flow. 

Probably, what I would say is one thing to start with is to make time in every day – whatever that looks like – to connect into who you are because a feminine also is trusting that underneath all the ways that we mess up, (and we don't do enough) that underneath all of that you are good and powerful. 

And the feminine is morphous; like, it can be anything. And so, sometimes we look at other women and we're like, 'Well, I could never do that,' but you can, that lives inside of you too. 

And so, tapping in and getting to know yourself in silence is really powerful – whatever that looks like is just making, hanging out with your own soul a priority. So, there's lots of free meditation resources, and moving past the realm of the mental and just starting to notice that deeper feeling and how that moves through the day. 

I think the consciousness of it is just powerful in itself. That starting to wake up to, what's going on beneath the surface and trusting who you are underneath that, I think is the first big giant step. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Oh, I love it. 'Hanging out with your soul,' I'm writing that down. I love it. Love it. Thank you so much for being here with us, Cristy. It has been so good. 

 

Cristy Duce: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. And I'd love to connect with anyone that has listened to the podcast. If it made a difference, if anything stuck out to you, then drop in and let me know. I really can talk about this stuff until the end of time, so I'd love to hear how it landed with you. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Yes. And another thing I have to mention is that there's so many people that ask me for meditations. They're like, 'Well, if we want to get into meditation, what do we do? Like, where do we go?' 

That is where you go; you go to Cristy, there's going to be lots of links below this so you can go to all the things, connect with her all the different ways. And, go get her audio meditations because they are lovely; I personally really appreciate them. 

 

Cristy Duce: Yes. And they are from a feminine paradigm. So, dropping in, connecting, learning where you live underneath all of that, where that is. 

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Perfect. Thank you, Cristy. 

 

Cristy Duce: Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Make sure that you give it Five Stars on Apple, and check out my monthly membership for moms in the show notes.