Everything about the way we live in this society is geared to pull our attention outward and away from ourselves. We rely on external sources for information, knowledge, belief systems, entertainment, physical subsistence, codes of behavior, and everything in between.

At the same time, we’re sold the idea that our happiness will also come from the outside: acquiring external validation, material possessions, achievements, and pleasurable experiences. Over time, we come to believe that everything desirable, satisfying, and fulfilling, everything we want and need, comes from outside of us. Our focus is so habituated to go outward, in fact, that we forget that we are even here and can be a source of anything. We forget—or maybe more accurately, never learn—that we can look to ourselves for what we need.

We talk a lot about self-care in this culture, but most of what we consider self-care is some form of pampering. We see self-care as something we buy or do, something, once again, that sits outside of us—in someone else or some other activity, experience, destination, or maybe, lemongrass candle. But there aren’t enough pearls in the Dead Sea or hemp in nature to make us well. Ultimately, we must recognize that we are the destination we’ve been seeking; it is our own nectar that we think we lack.

In order for self-care to take root as a way of living, not something you buy or do, a one-off, you must be willing to consider that you know infinitely more than you’ve ever been allowed or allowed yourself to know. Both in mind, body, and spirit. And furthermore, to recognize that you are the only one who knows what’s true for you, the only one living your unique experience. In fact, while it’s the last thing the self-care industry wants you to discover, you are your most reliable source of well-being, even if you can’t imagine it yet.

But remember: The conditioning that led you to abandon yourself, to hand over your authority to others and the external world, didn’t happen overnight. Similarly, reclaiming yourself as a valuable source of wisdom also doesn’t happen overnight. Before you can see a new path, you must be able to see the path you are traveling now—all the ways you’re turning away from your truth and handing off your authority. In order to create real change, you have to be willing to challenge your conditioning and practice new behaviors.

Just as you build the habit of exercising by actually moving your body or eating healthfully by actually making healthy choices, you have to build the habit of curiosity in yourself, making yourself a destination, by doing just that: getting curious about your own experience, asking yourself what’s true for you, and caring about what you find. You have to be willing to look to yourself for answers and questions, too.

With practice, the inclination to turn towards yourself for guidance becomes second nature. But again, it doesn’t start out that way. The process of learning to trust yourself happens gradually.

Over time, you’ll likely start noticing you feel more present, more located inside yourself as if you’re living from something solid that feels like you. Without trying, you’ll find you’re speaking what’s actually true and being honest rather than saying what will secure your being liked. You’ll feel the gap closing between who you are authentically and the roles you play in your life. I’ve heard the process described in so many different ways, but what all of the descriptions have in common is a sense of taking your seat at the center of your life—coming home to yourself.

Keep inquiring into your own experience; keep spending time in your own company, listening to your truth, and tuning into your own presence. Gradually, your outward-focused wiring will shift, and your attention will start naturally returning home to you, its original source. And indeed, with intention and practice, you will become that destination, that magnificence for which you’ve always been searching.

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The patriarchy doesn’t have to do anything to enact its system of control over us, we do it for them. What’s most insidious about the patriarchy’s control of the female body is that women have internalized its system and become its most powerful enforcers, perpetrating its methods of imprisonment upon ourselves.

We’ve grown up in this cultural paradigm and internalized its ideology. Consequently, we also believe that our bodies cannot be trusted and are unsafe to inhabit. If we want to be successful in this society, we understand that our bodies need to be policed and managed, and used as instruments for the greater goal of being what’s wanted and desirable. With this as our core belief, we depart our own homes and give up our bodies as our primary residences. We stop living from inside our bodies and learn to relate to ourselves from the outside, as if third-person characters in our own lives. It is the ultimate paradox: we abandon ourselves to take care of ourselves.

Women feel trapped, pressured to play by the rules and jump through the hoops set up for us by our patriarchal system. If we don’t, play the game, we face rejection and aloneness. We behave obediently within a system that fundamentally doesn’t work for us, even when we know it’s sucking the life out of us. We conform and perform dutifully even when we know that it is the system for which we’re conforming and performing that keeps us imprisoned. It’s the dance that’s killing us and yet we keep dancing.

But I’m not here to cast blame, or make another case for why it’s our fault that we feel powerless and trapped. In truth, there’s little chance for a woman raised in this culture to feel safe listening to her own experience, or living inside her body, for that matter. The pressures to disconnect from ourselves and our bodies are strong and real. Simultaneously, the payoffs for participating in the system as it is are also strong and real. But so, too, are the consequences. In the end, such a system: abandoning ourselves and turning against our own bodies, leaving home in order to be safe and ensure we have a home with others, can only generate the most fragile kind of safety or self-esteem. Ultimately, playing by the rules is a recipe for feeling powerless and trapped.

In order for women to awaken our inner voices, trust that we can speak and live from what we really think and feel; for women to feel safe being who we are, even when that may not fit into the patriarchal ideal, women need to go even further than knowing, speaking or even acting on their own needs.

We need to return to our own bodies, to re-enter and live from inside our own physical experience. To invite ourselves, not just our thoughts and feelings, but our senses, our bodies, back into the conversation and into the experience of living. What’s needed now is a paradigm shift away from the patriarchal system that has us relating to and at our bodies, from outside of them, with our bodies as objects for patriarchal review and judgment—and towards a new system of our own making, one in which we relate—from and through our bodies, with our bodies as our guides, inseparable from ourselves.

As women, we want to feel more than just not exhausted. We want to feel authentic, empowered, and free to live the full expression of who we are, to be ourselves even if we don’t know who she is just yet. We cannot actualize ourselves or claim our full power while simultaneously ignoring, rejecting, and vigilantly controlling our richest source of self-ness and power—our bodies. The path back home to ourselves demands that we take up residence in our original home, precisely the place we were told we needed to vacate, to trust the very place we were taught to distrust. In order to do this, we must radically shift our whole conception of our bodies—from being shameful and rejected “objects” that need to be policed and adorned for the pleasure of others, to being the trusted “subjects” of our lives and a place we can and want to inhabit.

Our work is to reunite the fundamental split—from ourselves—the one we believed we had to perpetrate on ourselves. To unlock the source of our deepest power and wisdom, we must re-establish residence within our most vital source—our own bodies.

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