One of the most powerful organizing principles and pursuits at The School of Womanly Arts is the sacred and crucial task of connecting a woman to the importance and the innate power of her desires. In fact, one of the things my students become really, really good at is how to carefully feed and fuel a tiny desire, and allow it to bloom into a full-grown reality.
Creation is a woman’s sweet spot.
And while, as women, we might not have received a lot of encouragement or support in locating or attending to our desires while growing up, it is actually something we can excel at, given the right set of circumstances. And we can make the right set of circumstances for ourselves, once we know.
One of the necessities is having a powerful network of women who are willing to hold the desire with us, who believe in it for us, and keep us encouraged even when we fall into inevitable moments of doubt. These sisters can speed a desire along at a very rapid and remarkable pace. You might even say, in the right environment, desires will come to you at the speed of pussy!
Last year, the very last day of Mastery, as my 2018 class was about to graduate, someone called out from the audience, “What are your desires, Mama Gena?”
This was an unusual and very beautiful question to receive. I take so much joy from holding space for other women’s desires, but here, my amazing 2018 Mastery class was asking me! And holding space for me. I was very touched.
One of the things I shared was my desire for a beach house. New York City is a wonderful place to work, but my soul comes alive in nature, walking along the beach, swimming in the sea, riding horses. I have always longed for a place by the beach that I can call my own, a place where I can read, write, and catch up with myself. For many years I have been lucky enough to have summer rentals at the beaches in the Hamptons or the North Fork. I count the days ‘til the season begins and then, I work outside of the city as much as possible during the summer months. Always sad when I have to hand the keys back on Labor Day.
This year, a miracle happened.
And let me tell you how it happened. Because every time a woman is able to conjure her desire into reality, it becomes a helpful pathway for another woman.. The first step is always knowing what we want. The more clear we are, the more the Great Pussy in the Sky can custom deliver your dream. (Cue: this is a great time for you to make a desire list!)
After years of looking and renting, I indeed knew what I wanted. I like charm — so I wanted the house to be old and well-made. I wanted it to be in a small beach town that had a neighborhood-y feeling. It had to be walking distance from town and walking distance from the jitney, and walking distance to the beach, so Maggie and my guests could have easy access from the city. I needed a great coffee shop with internet, because when I write, I like to write at a cafe with ambient background noise. Writing at home is too isolating.
For about 10 years, I have been following the real estate market, and avidly house hunting. I love real estate listings and I am always checking online for what’s new on the market. In the past 10 years I have looked at dozens and dozens of houses. Sometimes I have shopped at places that were waaay over my budget, just for fun. (Anything that gets your desire juices flowing is fair game when you are in the process of conjuring something.) I checked out anything that was even remotely interesting.
This year, because it is the last year of the Womanly Arts Mastery program and I don’t know yet my What’s Next, my accountant told me it would definitely not be a good year to purchase a house. The idea was to wait and see how the next business model plays out, just to be safe. So, off I went in search of still yet another rental. Peter and I booked a cute bed and breakfast and we decided to make a fun weekend of it. But all the houses that my broker was showing me were just wrong wrong wrong. Kind of awful, actually. I hated all of them.
So, the next morning, I woke up very early and jumped online myself, looking not only at rentals, but at homes for sale. I found a charming little house that was unbelievably well-priced. It was the most reasonable house I had seen in all my years of searching. I texted my broker at 8 a.m., to get me in to see the place. A few hours later, she called and said that someone had an offer on the house, but it was conditional, so she could get us in for a viewing. As we pulled up to the house, a pickup truck filled with a family with young kids and dogs pulled out of the driveway.
The house looked as you might imagine a house might look on a lazy Sunday morning — chaos ruled. The place had not been painted, and there were lots of unfinished efforts at possible renovation projects. There were chickens and a pig in the backyard. It was overwhelming.
My realtor told me that since the property was under conditional contract, I would have to make a decision right away. As in, now. No problem. I knew what to do. Get out of my head, which screamed, “OMG what a wreck! How will I tackle all these projects?” and get into my pussy, who said, ‘Hmmm…there is something here…”. I held out for the pussy download.
While my head screamed, “Yikes!” Pussy said, “This house is perfect.”
It had been on the market for almost a year, and the owners were ready to sell, so the price was good. Living there with kids, dogs, pigs, and chickens, they had not been able to stage it, so it had been difficult for prospective buyers to imagine it differently. But pussies have x-ray vision. And mine wanted this house. (Fact: your pussy instantly integrates information from the hypothalamus, the neocortex, the peripheral nervous system, the conscious and the unconscious, intuition and instinct. Trusting her allows you to access a part of your truth that your intellect alone cannot access.)
I checked the numbers with my accountant who gave me the green light.
I called my realtor and put in a bid.
Ten weeks later, the house was mine.
Turns out my boyfriend Peter has a secret superpower for renovating houses. He knows plumbing! And electrical! He loves to garden!
This past weekend we had the joy of slapping about 40 different versions of ‘white’ on the walls, to choose the right one. We put an herb and tomato garden in the chicken coop. And we hired painters.
I am so grateful to the class of Mastery 2018 for asking the question, and for holding the vision for me. And I am beyond grateful to The Great Pussy in the Sky for the sweet, unexpected, better-than-I-could-have-dreamed manifestation.
So, sisters, what’s a desire of yours? And how will you help another woman realize hers?
Love,
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.