There are women who spend entire years away from themselves without realizing it. Not because they have ceased to exist in their own lives, but because they learned to accommodate themselves so well to the desires, rhythms, and expectations of others that their own voice ended up lowering in volume. First, you give in on small things. What to order at a restaurant. How to dress. What to say. What not to say. Which discomfort to downplay. Then, almost without noticing it, that habit becomes a way of being in the world: a way of surviving without inconveniencing others, of loving without taking up too much space, of existing without asking too much what one truly wants.
Psychologist and founder of Sex Talk Karla Ezaine proposes looking at that distancing from a powerful image: the inner goddess. Not as something mystical or foreign, but as a deeply personal, intimate, and concrete part. In her words, that goddess is “that part within ourselves that is intuitive, sensitive, secure, powerful, and capable of inhabiting the body in a way of presence and awareness.” She also says it is the part of a woman that can see herself “with kindness, with respect, and with that security of knowing who you are and where you are going.”
The interesting thing about this idea is that it doesn’t start from the fantasy of becoming someone new. Rather, it starts from recovering an interrupted relationship. Because one of the most honest questions that run through this topic is precisely that: how is something so essential lost? At what point does a woman stop listening to herself clearly and begin to live more dependent on the outside than on what she really feels, needs, or desires?
Karla Ezaine places the origin of that disconnection in a familiar combination: judgments, beliefs, mandates, and a culture that defines too soon what a woman should be and what she shouldn’t. From a very young age, she explains, many have grown up in contexts where that intuitive and secure part wanted to come out but was held back. Not always with explicit violence. Sometimes repeated cultural signals about how a woman should behave, what she should prioritize, how she should look, or how much space she is allowed to occupy are enough.
Our co-founder Ursula Pfeiffer puts very precise words to that moment of breaking when she remembers that there is a point, between childhood and puberty, when many girls begin to disconnect from their bodies. She also observes it from her experience in the sports field: many stop practicing sports between ages 10 and 11, not necessarily because they have lost the taste for it, but because certain mandates about how the female body should look and behave begin to weigh too heavily. As Ursula points out, a series of restrictions suddenly appears: “a woman supposedly shouldn’t sweat, a woman shouldn’t be disheveled, a woman shouldn’t be untidy.” And when the body stops being a space for play to become an object under surveillance, something deep is interrupted.
That interruption is not always experienced as a visible tragedy. Sometimes it manifests in apparently minimal details that, nevertheless, reveal a deep disconnection from one’s own desire. Ursula brings up a scene from Runaway Bride that is especially illuminating: the protagonist doesn’t know how she likes her eggs because, in every relationship, she had adapted even that taste to her partner’s preference. The anecdote may seem light, but it points to something serious. How many women have learned to accommodate themselves so much that they even lose sight of their most basic preferences?
Ursula takes that observation to daily life with a very recognizable example: a woman who doesn’t enjoy eating meat ends up at a steakhouse anyway because she feels it would be selfish not to accompany her partner. The point is not the menu. The point is the automatic, almost invisible resignation of her own preference. It is there where the question ceases to be only what one wants to eat and becomes something deeper: how long has a woman been choosing based on others before asking herself what she wants?
That is why the proposal to reconnect with the inner goddess does not sound like an empty slogan, but like a process of reconciliation. Ursula names it very clearly when she says that communicating again with that authentic being probably involves recognizing that she was neglected for years. And Ezaine agrees: the difficult thing about listening to that goddess is not that she doesn’t exist, but that “we are not used to doing it.” Comparisons, criticisms in front of the mirror, mandates on what a woman should be, and the constant attention placed on the outside end up preventing the look inward.
Karla even resorts to a physical image to explain that process. She talks about shavasana in yoga, that final posture in which a person simply lies down, closes their eyes, and remains with themselves. She says that, at the beginning, it is usually uncomfortable: it is hard to stay still, hard not to look at the clock, hard not to run away from the silence. And something similar happens with the inner reunion. You don’t suddenly enter a restored intimacy. It starts, she says, almost like when you resume contact with someone you haven’t spoken to in a long time: with a simple, awkward, initial “hello.”
That image is especially useful because it dismantles another contemporary trap: the idea that self-knowledge arrives in the form of a great instant revelation. In reality, it often looks more like a practice of presence. To notice the body. To recognize subtle signals. To perceive when something feels uncomfortable, when something feels good, when an intuition tries to speak. Karla insists that the body gives warnings, but only someone who is in dialogue with themselves can hear them. Those who live completely turned outward hardly perceive those nuances.
And that dialogue doesn’t just transform the relationship with oneself. It also changes the way of relating to other women and to the world. Ezaine stresses that reconnecting with that inner strength brings security, but not a competitive security. On the contrary: it allows one to stop looking at oneself in constant comparison and start recognizing that each person “shines with a different light.” From there, something closer to empathy than to rivalry appears. It’s no longer about asking why another woman is doing well and you’re not, but about being able to recognize someone else’s shine without feeling that it threatens your own.
Ursula also touches on a key point by remembering that many women today live comparing themselves not with reality, but with a carefully edited version of others, especially on social media. That continuous comparison with “the best moment of others” feeds both disconnection and internal competition. That is why returning to a more honest relationship with oneself can be, in a way, an act of resistance. Not because it denies the context, but because it stops giving all authority to the context.
Ultimately, talking about the inner goddess is not talking about perfection. It is talking about presence. About the possibility of listening to oneself with more respect, of recognizing one’s own value without waiting for others to define it first, and of returning to a less hostile relationship with the body, desire, and intuition. As Karla suggests, perhaps one of the first gains of that process is precisely this: discovering that one is not alone with oneself. That there is a voice inside, a strength, a sensitivity that did not disappear; it was only waiting to be attended to again. That possibility of reconnection is deeply aligned with Yuriyana Club’s mission to accompany women toward a fuller life at an emotional, physical, and sexual level through knowledge and enriching
connections.You can find the complementary video for this article here: https://youtu.be/p9xrZ3bdlq8
