How to Reconnect with Your Feminine Heart with Jessica Winterstern

Jessica Winterstern (0:00)

I was very attached to my hair. My hair was part of my femininity. And when the fire happened and we lost everything, I heard this voice and it said, you need to shave your head. You need to offer your hair to the land. Life is taking everything. You're being stripped right now. Meet this moment with devotion and offer something back. The next day, we buried my hair on the land, and it was another opportunity for me to meet an edge.

Radhi Shetty (0:22)

Jessica Winterstern is a writer and mentor and a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Her work explores femininity, grief, relationship, self-love, and what it means to live with an open heart. One, I love the name of your Instagram page, The Feminine Heart, because I think it's something that I'm really desiring in my life.

Jessica Winterstern (0:38)

The feminine is life force. It's energy, it's aliveness, the way that our hearts meet moments.

Radhi Shetty (0:44)

What's one thing you think every woman should stop apologizing for?

Jessica Winterstern (0:48)

Her fullness, the full range of her expression in this world.

Radhi Shetty (0:52)

Welcome to A Really Good Cry podcast. A Really Good Cry is here to help you understand your body, feel confident in your skin, manage your emotions and take back control of your health. Because growth doesn't always start with answers, sometimes it starts with a really good cry.

Jessica, thank you so much for being here.

Jessica Winterstern (1:09)

Thank you for having me.

Radhi Shetty (1:11)

I have watched your content online and I reached out to you saying I am obsessed with you and I would love you to come on the podcast because the way that you speak to women and the depth that you go into about spirituality and how it relates to every part of our being, I just find so beautiful. The way you carry yourself is so magnetic and I am so happy to have you sitting here with me.

Jessica Winterstern (1:32)

Thank you so much. I feel the same way about you. When you reached out, I was like, yes.

Radhi Shetty (1:38)

I want to get straight into it because one, I love the name of your Instagram page, The Feminine Heart. I think as soon as I read that, it attracted me to your page because I think it's something that I'm really inspiring in my life and I've noticed so many women that I speak to and some of my best friends. We're all like, how do we get more into our feminine? But I know it's so much deeper than that. So I guess my first question is, what is a feminine heart and what are the qualities of one?

Jessica Winterstern (2:03)

I'll start off by just sharing that I think I was very disconnected from my feminine for most of my life.

I don't think that our world does a very good job at fostering and cultivating the feminine, the divine feminine, and the strength that comes with femininity. And so for me, it was a real unlearning around how I held the feminine.

And through practices and teachers and support, I got to reclaim that part of myself. And so just really feeling into the feminine being my aliveness, the love that lives me, the orientation to beauty, to the felt experience. There was so much focus on the outward external variables of success and proving myself and performing in my life, and discounting my sensitivity, and discounting how much I felt my entire life. And so it was really when my mom got sick, and I came back to LA to care for her, that I was confronted with how disconnected I was from my own femininity. And in that reclamation process, I got to really feel the power of the feminine. I was surrounded by incredible women who were connected to their hearts, their embodiment, their willingness to be open and experience this life. And then with the support of my teachers and the support of my husband, it was just like this beautiful coming together of forces that really allowed for me to step more fully into that. So for me, it's an orientation to feeling, to the heart, to slowing down and not going into the performance and not going into like trying to react or respond to a moment from like a practiced place, but more so what's alive, what's coming through me right now in this moment, and how do I move through the world where I'm able to access that softness and that vulnerability and that authenticity that comes through my femininity.

Radhi Shetty (4:27)

What was it in that moment that created that for you?