The Healing Power of the Feminine
Courtesy of Sterrekopje Farm.
The Healing Power of the Feminine
In celebration of HERitage — SmartFlyer's founder-to-founder collective spotlighting the women at the helm of hospitality — we invited five leading women from across the industry to write about the rooms they've built, the ones they've walked into, and the ways hospitality shapes — and is shaped by — the women who run it.
When rooted in their feminine force, women live, lead and work from–and with–their intuition, compassion, playfulness, joy, connection to nature and flow. While these characteristics or elements may come across as soft and gentle, they are powerful beyond measure and exactly what the world–the world of hospitality, and even more so the world of wellness–is in need of.
When we step into a space, we immediately pick up on whether a WOMAN was involved or not. Not just in the design. It’s noticeable in everything.
When we step into a space, we immediately pick up on whether a woman was involved or not. Not just in the design. It’s noticeable in everything. It is an energy you can sense, from the interior to the team and the offering. Many spaces within hospitality, and particularly in the well-being space, feel strongly masculine. Often cold, impersonal, rigid, prescriptive and too programmed.
Aside from the well-being niche, the world of hospitality in general is in need of warmer, more personal spaces that are genuinely inviting. We are in need of spaces that make us feel safe, supported, held. Places that support us to ease back into just being ourselves. Coming back to the state where we are able to feel and follow our own rhythms, where we are connected to our intuition and able to let our bodies tell us what we need. In this fast-paced world, we, both men and women, are more and more in need of and searching for spaces to be able to rest and find a respite from the rush–spaces to return to ourselves.
Healing is not about fixing something that is broken. Healing is not something external. Healing comes from the old English word "hale", meaning "whole". One can derive from this that healing, or working on one's well-being, is about returning to or remembering our wholeness. It is about deeply connecting to ourselves, our bodies. It's not something to achieve, nor a trend or commercial objective to capitalise on. It is a deep need for the world as a whole to return to wholeness within ourselves, in connection to community and nature. The world and the worlds of hospitality and wellness are hinging too much on the masculine and are in need of a much healthier balance between the masculine and feminine. Women can and should play a central role in supporting this need. Women have the innate ability to create, hold and lead spaces and journeys of well-being and healing.
While we see so many hospitality spaces opening within the wellness realm, they often miss female qualities and consideration. Instead, they feel medical, serious, soulless, often offering austere guest and treatment rooms and full, complex programmes to detox or enhance longevity. Within this wellness trend, the guiding energy seems to come more from a fear of disease and death than a joy for life and living fully. This is not to say that these spaces are led by men, but rather by men or women strongly rooted in their masculine energy.
Thankfully, there are also enough hospitality spaces created and run by women or with a strong feminine energy. Spaces where the décor is warm and inviting–not just aesthetically beautiful, but offering a feeling of safety and support, bringing the depth and space needed to allow for healing. Spaces where one feels the presence of the team in the most gentle way; where they do not offer service in a sterile manner but instead gently and intuitively hold space for the guests, tuning into their needs naturally. Spaces where the wellness offering is deeply considered and established through personal conversation and care. Above all, these spaces seem to be in a natural flow and have a playfulness to them. These energies are essential to support one on their journey of healing and well-being. They allow one to gently sink from the head and the cognitive back into the body, into the somatic. Back to wholeness. Back to being fully grounded in our bodies, fully alive. This is not some woo-woo thing–this is our essence, our natural state. We have just forgotten.
The essence of the feminine is playful, rooted in joy. We take ourselves and the world so seriously, too seriously. We are overly stuck in the masculine. The feminine invites us to take a more gentle, playful approach to our lives and to our well-being or healing. This life, this journey, is meant to be lived, to be revered and enjoyed, to be experienced and explored with a curious eye like that of a young child.
The soft yet fierce abilities and energies women have and bring are essential to hospitality and in particular the well-being realm. These worlds need more female leaders, leading from the feminine. Through Sterrekopje, we work playfully from the feminine each day to add something of meaning to the world, the world of hospitality and the world of well-being and joy. We hope to see more of such spaces being created in the world. The world is craving them; the world is craving the feminine.
