There are parts of us we learn to hide long before we have the language to understand why.

Maybe it was a comment about your body when you were young. Maybe it was the moment you realized your fullness made someone uncomfortable. Maybe it was quieter than that – just a slow understanding that certain parts of you weren’t welcome, and so you tucked them away.

For a long time, I rejected what I now understand as the dark feminine. When I saw women who were sensual, expressive, wild, unapologetic in their bodies – I felt repelled. I didn’t realize then that the rejection I felt toward them was actually a rejection of something in me. Something I had abandoned a long time ago.

The dark feminine isn’t what the internet often makes her out to be. She’s not a costume or a mood board. She’s the parts of us that feel deeply, move slowly, take up space without apology. She’s our grief, our rage, our pleasure, our primal knowing. And for so many of us, she’s been locked away – waiting until it finally felt safe enough to come back.

That safety doesn’t arrive all at once. It’s built in small moments. In breath. In stillness. In the willingness to feel what we’ve spent years numbing.

The body keeps what we won’t feel

I remember when I first started actually being present in my body – not performing wellness, not going through the motions, but truly landing in myself – grief was the first thing that came up. So much grief for all the years I had abandoned her. All the ways I had given her away, shut her down, overridden her signals.

That’s the thing about suppression. It doesn’t make anything disappear. It just sends it underground where it waits – in our hips, our wombs, our nervous systems – until we’re finally ready to meet it.

A conversation that went deep

Emily Michelle joined me for one of the most honest conversations I’ve had about this journey. Emily is a somatic facilitator, dark feminine guide, and mother of four. She works with women to heal shame, regulate their nervous systems, and reclaim the parts of themselves they were taught to hide.

What I love about Emily is that she teaches from her own unraveling. She didn’t arrive at this work from a pedestal. She came to it through years of suppressing her body, performing independence, and slowly dismantling the armor she had built to survive.

We talked about how shame gets passed down through lineages – how your grandmother’s shame can live in your cells before you even take your first breath. We explored why so many women hold trauma in their hips and womb space. And we got into the real, messy work of softening when your entire identity has been built on control and not needing anyone.

What shifts when you come home to yourself

One of the threads that kept surfacing in our conversation was intimacy – with ourselves first, and then with our partners.

Emily said something that struck me: we can only go as deep with our partners as we’re willing to go with ourselves. If you don’t feel safe being expressed in your own body, that safety won’t magically appear in the bedroom.

This landed for me. I’ve lived it. The seasons where I was most disconnected from myself were also the seasons where my relationships felt the most strained. And the seasons where I’ve done the slow, quiet work of returning to my body… everything else has softened too.

The parts we hide hold the most power

What I keep learning – and relearning – is that the parts of ourselves we push away the longest often carry the most medicine. The grief we don’t want to feel. The rage we’ve been told isn’t ladylike. The sensuality we learned to be ashamed of.

When we finally let those parts breathe, something opens. We stop performing and start living. We stop controlling and start receiving. We come back to ourselves – not the version we were taught to be, but the one who was always there underneath.

This episode airs January 13th. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Xoxo, Lauren