“Everything feels like a chore” is a common sentiment that women confess to me. The “chore” experience can refer to specific actions or to a more general existential state.

For many women, this can become a state in which they see their own existence as a chore. Everything that they do to maintain or upkeep themselves — eating (or preparing food), maintaining the surroundings, reading, hobbies, taking care of themselves, getting dressed or doing make up is experienced not as pleasure or joy but as weight.

These are also not women who suffer from clinical depression or anything similar. In fact, they perform “the chores”, but the actions themselves are experienced as mechanical, obligatory, separate and therefore heavy. It is as if acts do not stem from within themselves but are reactions to involuntary external pulls. Their own light and essence appears to be eclipsed beneath the subtle accumulated social or collective whispers that command an infinite amount of “oughts” and “ought nots”.

No wonder then that everything feels heavy. When our actions are separate from our interior (our soul if you wish to call it so) and when they are experienced as involuntary service to an external standard or rule, it will drain us. Service to any ideal, standard or rule (external or internal) feels meaningful and will not feel draining only when voluntarily. And that can only come from the state of internal freedom and energetic excess.