“Be bold, have your experience,”
says Samar Shata to a captive audience at Empower Health Clinic, on Commercial Drive, East Vancouver. Samar is a psychotherapist, with a focus on women and the Feminine Experience. Her talk was titled the Feminine Energy Treasure Map.
How we label human experience.
She explains how the medical system labels and categories human experience in a book called the DSM. The original DSM was essentially written by “old white men” who were part of the American Psychological Association.
This has limited our view of both humanity and more specifically, femininity. In it’s most recent revision, the chairman of the task force Dr. Alan Francis reflected:
“Whenever we label another human condition as a ‘disease’, we further chip away at our human adaptability and diversity.”
Feminine energy, Samar explains, is a quality that both men and women have, and is often repressed in both men and women. While often parallel with the experience of being a woman, it is not always the same thing (i.e. women can also carry higher amount of masculine energy: more career and goal oriented, etc.)
Medicating emotions… just calm down!
Femininity is often experienced in the realm of feeling and emotion. Samar explains that 25% of women are given medications for mental health, compared to 15% of men, and anti-depressants are used at twice the rate in women versus men.
When we live in our feminine energy, we more likely to be repressed. Women (or men) who express freely are often told:
- “calm down”
- “what’s wrong with you?”
- “your emotions are too intense.”
Or there simply just isn’t support, understanding, listening or response. Particularly toward women who express anger.
Blocking anger also blocks our joy.
Anger, Samar explains, can be a reaction our boundaries being crossed and can be healthy to express. Repressing anger eventually leads to health problems.
Anger an joy are part of the same channel. All emotions are part of the same channel, we block emotion in general.
Depression as the first step toward a spiritual awakening.
By getting in touch with our emotions, by feeling our emotions, our depression, our anger or whatever is arising, is healthy, when done in an authentic way.
“How many of us get colds or flu each year? Depression and anxiety are the “colds and flu” in the psychological field. Each and every human being gets depression or anxiety at a certain stage of their life. It’s actually a mark that they are on the threshold of going into a different level of consciousness in the journey.”
It requires a village…
It’s not a particular incident that causes trauma and emotional shut down, it’s the lack of community support that allows trauma to take hold and stick with us.
When and where are we given enough space to grieve? When are we allowed to crumble under our emotion? How do avoid becoming numb to our experience and emotions?
The transformation will take many people getting on board, so that it becomes the cultural norm.
Allow yourself to be intense!
Samar would love everyone to allow ALL of themselves to shine. She tells us to be intense!
“So if your own your emotion [comes] from a very intense space and somebody labels you or tells you are too intense when you know that it’s one of your resources, you will not buy into that, you will not internalize it.”
The Feminine Energy Treasure Map
with Samar Shata, MCP RCC
Presented by Empower Speaker Series
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Samar Shata is a therapist that works in the realm of prevention, intervention, treatment, with a special focus on the feminine experience, and founder of the WELL Institute currently working out of Alyson Jones & Associates in West Vancouver, BC. Samar was also recently features in TedX in May 2015 in Vancouver.
