A friend says it across the table at the coffee shop: “You need to be stronger.” You nod, because there is nothing to argue with, and then you carry the sentence around for a week without any idea where exactly strength gets installed or where its handle is supposed to be.
The trouble is that strength was described to us once, and it was described in male terms. Grit your teeth. Do not show weakness. Push the thing through. Up at six, make the list, close the tasks. Women take that instruction in good faith and execute it, and for the first ten years it even works: the career moves, the house holds, the kids are fed. Then comes the evening when you sit down on the floor in the hallway with your coat still on and understand that you cannot do one more minute.
The instruction breaks for a simple reason: it was describing a different machine. In a woman's body strength is built differently, and it is measured in sensitivity.
Peruquois, who has run women's circles across many countries for three decades, puts it without metaphor: “I think that feminine power is rooted in the woman's body. It is not a theoretical aspect.”
Not theoretical means something quite literal: strength has an address.
Throat, heart, chest, womb, feet
She gives the address as a list: “in her throat, in the heart, in the chest, in her womb, in her yoni, in her feet.”
The list only looks strange for a second. Try to remember where exactly you feel the wrongness when you agree to something you do not want to agree to. Almost everyone answers with one of those places. For some the throat closes and the voice comes out higher than usual. For some it goes hard under the ribs. For some the lower belly pulls and it gets written off as tiredness. The feet in that list handle the simplest job of all: when a woman genuinely agrees with what she is doing, she stands on the ground with the whole foot, and when she does not, her weight slides forward onto the toes, as though she is about to run.
Sensitivity in those places is the working instrument. It lets you “learn to hear your inner voice and to move through life from an inner call, instead of being easy to manipulate.”
That last word is the point. A woman who feels her own body is hard to talk into something that does not suit her, because she has a fast and honest answer before the arguments even start. A woman who has lost the connection to her body can be talked into almost anything, and everyone who has ever sold anything knows this.
Strength arrives from below
The body is rooted in the ground. Energy moves through it upward and downward, like water in a tree, and a woman whose channel is open can raise and lower her output to fit the situation: full power when the moment needs it, quiet when quiet is what is called for.
The difference between effort and strength shows up right here. Effort comes out of the head and spends the reserve. Strength rises from below and refills it. That is why one woman comes off three hours on stage or in a room still alive, and another comes out of the same three hours in a meeting completely empty: the first one was standing on the ground the whole time, the second was running on shallow breath and willpower.
The throat and the womb mirror each other
“A woman's throat, her voice, they are directly connected to her vagina, to her yoni, to her womb. They mirror each other on the physical level,” says Peruquois. Anatomically this comes down to how smooth muscle is built and how the body responds to bracing. Practically it means that a woman who has spent years not saying what she thinks usually finds tension lower down as well.
Hence her choice of tool. Most of her practices are vocal, because sound is the fastest way to open the whole channel at once. The breath drops, the throat releases, the vibration travels through the bones, and the body remembers that it is alive.
When everything was run from the head
There is a state she describes in one sentence, and the sentence is recognized instantly: “We went up, and we understood that we lost our wholeness, because we were doing, doing, doing, doing.”
Four times “doing” is there on purpose. That is exactly how it feels from inside: the day is made of actions, each one of them sensible, and together they add up to nothing, and by evening a woman cannot answer the simple question of what she herself wanted today. The top took everything, the bottom is silent.
The objection that comes up most
Somewhere here a woman will say: lovely, but I am feeding two kids on my own, and sensitivity in my feet is not going to help with that.
The objection is fair and brushing it off would be dishonest. Peruquois is not suggesting you drop the tasks that look male in shape, and nobody is advising you to quit your job. What is on offer is a skill that works on top of any load: noticing the moment the connection to yourself is gone, and being able to come back into the body quickly, instead of discovering the loss six months later on the hallway floor.
A woman who does this regularly carries exactly the same weight, and comes out of it with a different remainder. Her decisions land better too, because a calm body sees more options than a revved one.
Where to start today
The easiest place to start is the feet, because they need no relaxing and no tuning.
Today, when you catch yourself running hot, stop for ten seconds and check how you are standing. Is the whole foot on the floor, or has the weight moved forward onto the toes. If it has, put your heels down and stand there until you feel the support. It takes almost no time, and it gives back the connection everything else is built on.
If you want to go further and learn to come back into your body for longer than ten seconds, Peruquois has a course, Meditation for Women, Level I. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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