Oh, I am so deeply filled, thrilled and inspired. I just got back from an incredible week-long retreat with my advanced students in the Creation Course. It was so moving for me to take a wholehearted dive with this extraordinary group of women. It’s what I live for. Truly.
On the heels of all that passion and power, I want to take you deeper and wider than we have ever gone before, here on the blog.
In fact, this month I’ve got a treat for you. I’m writing a special 4-part weekly series starting today, on the four keys to creating the freedom to live the incredible, inspiring, passionate, lit up life you want and deserve.
A life where you feel utterly and completely yourself, no holds barred. Where you are as comfortable with your deepest dark emotions as you are with your light. Unafraid of your truth – able to say ‘no’ with as much power and delight as you say ‘yes’. Where you are comfortable and at ease with your sensuality. And enthusiasm is present in everything you do. With an extraordinary group of women who have your back, and you have theirs.
The idea for this series came to me as I pondered one of the most common questions I’m asked … “What’s this School really all about? I just don’t get it.”
In a world that devalues women at work, at home, and in relationship, the School of Womanly Arts is about giving women the support and the tools that we need to connect with our innate enthusiasm, in order to be, do, and have anything and everything we want – in this short, brief, sacred life.
Each of the four topics that I am about to share over the next few weeks is a key to unlock a divine inner door.
Each one alone is crucial, and many-layered, but all together they combine to unleash your distinct magic.
You will find a sense of freedom and power begin to seep into your system after reading this first piece, more after the second, and at an even more profound level after the third and fourth.
Especially if you do the small exercises following each blog, and post your responses in the comments.
And, if you want to climb to even more unimaginable heights, come to The Experience – our live intro weekend on Dec 2nd & 3rd in NYC – and work with me, live. These concepts are game-changing on the page – but even more profound when you can actually feel and embody them. The Experience is my gift to the community, and the absolute best way to feel first-hand what this work is all about. All the details are here if you want to find out more.
So, what are these four keys I’ll be writing about?
1 – Feeling, honoring and getting straight with all of your emotions (dark ones included)
2 – Inhabiting and experiencing through your body (not your head)
3 – Reclaiming your relationship with your turn-on and sensual power (your life force!)
4 – Leaning into and being supported by Sisterhood through it all.
For today’s topic, I want to talk about something that silently impacts every woman’s life.
Chances are, at some point, if you are like me, you have felt emotionally congested and shut down – as if the world can’t handle you, and everything you actually feel. As if your deepest truth had no place in the world.
When you are a woman with big dreams and big responsibilities to your work, your home, your family – being shut down stifles your creative flow on both the inner and the outer.
Women need to feel free in order to flow and live our best lives.
And we can – and must – find that freedom from within.
Our creativity and power come when we are feeling and living every drop of the women we are.
Yet, we have been trained, taught, and conditioned to turn down the volume and velocity of our emotions and our emotional responses.
When was the last time you had a big, loud, righteous cry? And allowed yourself the soothing arms of compassion from someone who feels for you?
Yes. You deserve that and more. We all do.
But who amongst us hasn’t been told (or told ourselves) that we feel too much. That we are too much. That we should just be “fine”.
When we do feel something deeply…poof!…we think something is desperately wrong with us. Our balance is gone. We are lost to the abyss of wrongness.
In fact, for most women, our highest goal for ourselves is “fine”. We think we would be better off with a plain vanilla emotional life. But there is nothing plain and nothing vanilla about a woman.
When we are taught to disconnect from our feelings, we feel just that: Disconnected.
Disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from life itself.
And when we practice disconnection successfully for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, then we can’t even find the outlet, much less the plug. And the whole world loses its color and just becomes a mass of depressing grey.
We are encouraged and taught to restrict our true feelings to conform to a culture that does not understand, appreciate, or acknowledge the ever-changing, ever-unfolding inner life of an emotionally healthy woman.
And by doing so, we restrict ourselves.
When we tourniquet our truth, we cut ourselves out of the love we long for, the intimacy we crave, and our own innate sense of rightness with ourselves.
The truth is, most of us have no idea how to navigate our brilliant, beautiful, important, and dazzlingly perfect emotions.
Life is only wonderful when we are having the chance to live full throttle. To play all 88 keys on our piano, not just Middle C, over and over again.
And no one tells us that! We are told that we are supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice. We are told to stuff the deep, dark emotions inside. We are never supposed to be angry or jealous or flat out enraged.
Why would we have all these emotions if we weren’t supposed to feel them?
Think about a toddler. In the expanse of a minute, she can go from gales of laughter to collapsed in tears, and then back to giggles again.
And we have been taught, over and over again, to keep a lid on it, stifle it, hold it back, and hold it in.
In so doing, we lose so much of our native enthusiasm and life force, that we end up keeping a lid on our vitality for the work we do, or the people we date, or the way we truly feel.
When we aren’t connected to the way we truly feel, our decisions lead to compromise.
If we are taught to suppress ourselves, how will we ever be able to communicate our satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the world?
How will we ever be able to live our truth?
No wonder there is an epidemic of dissatisfaction and a crisis of confidence amongst women.
In the world of the feminine, everything you feel is right, perfect, beautiful, changeable.
Like the wondrously variable weather, the emotional variety of a woman is glorious.
You feel. Exactly what you feel.
The feeling part is the best part of each of us.
Our feelings connect us to ourselves, and one another. Our feelings connect us to our joy. Or to our unbearable sorrow. Our feelings are sacred. They connect us to every animal, every blade of grass, the changing leaves, every human being.
When we risk feeling, there is a very deep body sensation of being absolutely grounded, plugged in, a vessel for divinity.
This week, I invite you to start exploring this in three ways:
1) First, examine and acknowledge just how stuffed down your feelings and emotions are currently. Where have you noticed your emotional truth has been made wrong, excluded, disenfranchised, or made suspect? Who/what is making it that way (it could be someone else, or yourself)? Take some time to inventory your current relationship with your feelings – how free are you?
2) Second, begin to give yourself permission to feel, to truly feel your feelings. (Heads up: This is hard to do alone – you are a fish swimming upstream in this culture, which is why later in this email series I’ll be talking about how to cultivate and make use of Sisterhood. Women need women to witness and be witnessed. But, here is one thing you can do on your own.) For 24 hours, keep a journal, where every hour you jot down your feelings, just like this:
10am: I feel bored, and that is a right way to feel.
11am: I feel frustrated with my boss, and that is a right way to feel.
12pm: I feel jealous of my co-worker, and that is a right way to feel.
Since we normally find our negative feelings wrong, instead of right, this exercise will give you a beautiful sense of space and ground.
3.) Share your insights in the comments below:
• What have you noticed about the ways we have each been taught to be emotionally disconnected from our truth?
• How has this disconnection gotten you into trouble?
• How has connecting to your truth helped you?
• What are ways that you have observed women experiencing their disconnection in a global way?
Next week, we’re going to take this a step further. A huge step further. In fact, without this next key, you won’t get very far with channeling your emotions in the direction of your dreams.
Here’s to you, and every drop of your emotional truth.
See you next week,
Regena Thomashauer, aka “Mama Gena”
The School of Womanly Arts
Regena is a feminist icon, a teacher, a speaker, a mother, a best-selling author, and creatrix and CEO of The School of Womanly Arts.
PS. Have you registered for The Experience, our intro weekend, on December 2nd & 3rd in NYC? We’ll be diving way deeper into your emotional truth and so much more – through embodied exercises and tools you’ll use for a lifetime. This event is my gift to the community, and it’s the absolute best way to feel first-hand what this work is all about. All the details are here if you want to find out more.
PPS. Want to keep reading? Click here for Part Two, check out Part Three right here, and complete the series with Part 4.
