The Living Holism Philosophy
As the practitioner behind Living Holism, I am not here to give you beauty tips. I am not here to tell you men are destroying the world and that women should run it instead. I am not here to tell you how you should live your life. I am no more here to tell you that women should be in the kitchen than I am to tell you we should stay out of it.
What I am here to say is that society is out of balance.
In this manifesto, “masculine” and “feminine” are not defined by gender identity. Rather, they are conceptual modes of being that every person embodies in varying proportions. The masculine is traditionally associated with qualities such as action, structure, independence, competition, and rational analysis; the feminine with receptivity, fluidity, intuition, emotional intelligence, community, and interdependence. Neither belongs exclusively to one gender, and neither is complete without the other.
However you try to understand life, you find you must do so through binary oppositions, pairs of terms that define each other by contrast: yin and yang, Apollonian and Dionysian, intuitive and rational, extroverted and introverted, art and science, city and country…
We cannot understand hot without understanding cold, just as we cannot have a concept of what “up” is having one of “down.” So when the entire world is organized around competition, rigidity, physical strength, hyper-independence, action, rationality, and practicality, we neglect their opposites — qualities that carry their own profound and essential value.
Again, this is not to pit the worth of one trait against the other or to say that rationality is superior to emotional intelligence (or vice versa!), for example. It is to say that both are equally important. Yet, one is regarded as inherently “masculine” and the other as inherently “feminine,” regardless of the gender exercising the trait.
And while both men and women possess traditionally masculine and feminine qualities, society’s tendency to de-emphasize fluidity, softness, community, emotional intelligence, intuition, and the qualities that help us relate to one another has created an imbalanced world that suffers.
Because society so often asks women to adopt more traditionally “masculine” attributes to thrive in the workplace, earn respect, make decisions, or just be taken seriously, feminine attributes have historically come to be seen as less valuable.
Yet just as the pendulum swings to the right, it always swings back to the left, and women are once again reclaiming the spirit and qualities many of us recognize as natural to our femininity — whether we’re stay-at-home mothers or criminal attorneys.
The question, though, has become how to go about it. And so often, we take a masculine approach because we’ve been taught no other way. We strive to be quick, efficient, and goal-oriented, rather than enjoying the journey, the feeling, and the joy of inhabiting our bodies and celebrating the energy we’re cultivating with our own intuitive processes.
We want to feel beautiful, sexy, and strong while also feeling wise, safe, and joyous. We want to feel calm and centered. We want to feel valued and honored as single women, mothers, wives, and grandmothers. We love movement, laughter, and being in the community of other women.
And more and more, we’re realizing there’s no reason for us to compete with one another because we’re finally seeing our own unique value and honoring one another’s femininity.
In fact, the more we recognize what we have in common, the more fulfilled we become because so many of us love finding kindred spirits far more than we love “getting ahead” and occupying the number-one spot.
And that’s natural. That’s femininity.
While we’ve so often been taught that focusing on appearance is shallow and vain, the truth is that our bodies reflect so much about how we feel. Many people compare the state of their minds to the tidiness of their homes, saying the more cluttered their homes are, the harder it is to think straight. I believe something similar can be said about our bodies.
The healthier we are, the better we tend to look and feel. Health affects our energy, emotions, skin, hair, weight, mental clarity, vitality, and so much more — and taking time to enjoy ourselves at our most beautiful is about embodiment and self-reverence.
It is important to question why we find it so much more acceptable to care about the health of our hair than how thick and lush it is when these can be two sides of the same coin. Good health is one of the keys to your femininity, centeredness, and full beauty potential. You deserve to be proud of working toward that and to enjoy it.
Living Holism does not exist in opposition to men or feminist principles. It represents the return of women to the Sacred Feminine. It is a conceptual place for women to reclaim our unique beauty, health, and self-esteem in the most natural and aligned way we can.
It is my mission to help women become the most beautiful embodiment of their femininity through the philosophy of holism, which recognizes that what we do to and for ourselves, we also do to and for our families, friends, communities, and the world.
After all, we cannot care for others if we don’t care for ourselves.
As above, so below.
So let me help you fulfill your highest potential for natural beauty and femininity through what I do best: whole-food nutrition and holistic lifestyle guidance.
My name is Tasha Shayne, and I am a Certified Nutritional Coach, researcher, and writer. I am a woman’s woman — and I’ve spent the better part of my life rejecting the strength of my intuition in favor of rational decision-making, hiding my love for my body because I didn’t believe it could coexist with my love of reading, and feeling weaker when I cried under pressure or couldn’t physically compete with various men.
At some point, after years of feeling miserable about not belonging, I found a home within myself, within the softness that had begun to dominate my fierceness — not by relinquishing my “masculine” traits, but by embracing my feminine ones. It’s then that I grew.
As a healthcare practitioner and empath, it has always been my credo that we must all do our part to help those we can and that I will do my utmost to relieve the suffering of those in the world whom I am capable of helping.
But there was always another side to that credo that I shared with those closest to me: I want to leave the world more beautiful than I entered it.
And in that concept, Living Holism is epitomized.