Who are you when it comes to stating your truth?
Your deepest, truest truth.

Are you a she-wolf? Proudly howling your truth at the moon?
A mad dog? Who rages first, and talks later?
A wolf in sheep’s clothing? With a smile on your face, and a secret dagger pointed at the world?
Or maybe you’re the “silence of the lambs” type? You simply can’t say. Don’t know. Lost your compass and your voice.

As a mom of a young woman, I have a big interest in this question.

How can we navigate the world with confidence if we can’t find our truth?

Peggy Orenstein wrote a book called, Girls and Sex, Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. She reports that half of young girls are now participating in nonconsensual sex with boys, in hopes that the boys will like them.

Not because they want to. Not because it brings them pleasure.

Orenstein says that young women are given no encouragement to understand their bodies, let alone their desires, and instead they grow up understanding sex as an act that is about pleasing others – rather than pleasuring themselves.

Imagine that. Women – the very portal to existence. The sacred entry point of human life on this planet – reduced to a convenience store, a service station.

A woman’s deeply seated confidence cannot come from how many degrees she has, what kind of job she has landed, or how well she is conforming to society’s expectations of her.

A woman’s sense of confidence comes from how she feels in her body.

And how she feels in her body is, in part, a legacy, passed from mother to daughter.

If she grew up with a mother who thought her own body was glorious, delicious, and wondrous, chances are, so will she. But that is an exceedingly rare perspective for a mama to have and to hold in this patriarchal world.

The other major piece of a woman’s confidence comes from learning to know and love her own instrument. Which is super hard in a world where women learn how to compromise before they learn to come.  

The generosity of woman is boundless.

It’s in our nature to fiercely create, care-take, love, embrace, appreciate.

But our custom has been to do all this caretaking from an empty well, rather than from a gloriously full tank – filled, prioritized, and nurtured by our dreams and desires. 

Fueled by a body that is known and loved and revered.

I’m interested in how this pattern influences our ability, or inability, to know and speak our truth. 

I notice that many of us, when faced with a decision or choicepoint – whether it be a day job, a blow job, a date, opportunity, or invitation – tend to take the attention off ourselves and put it on others. Or we fixate on societal expectations, rather than what’s happening in the present.

We wonder, what will he or she think of me? Will they approve of me? Will I be accepted? And we bypass our deepest truth without even noticing.

What we don’t know is that our deepest truth is something that not only we require, but the world requires. 

When we use our truth to make decisions, they become decisions that not only take us higher, but take everyone in our world higher. And when we bypass our truth, we take everyone down with us.

One of Ornstein’s proposed solutions is to pick up and move to the Netherlands, where sex is spoken of freely. Dutch parents, teachers, and kids talk about sex, birth control, pleasure, consent, and how to say yes or no.

And while an international move may not be realistic for most of us, it’s comforting to know that somewhere on this planet, progress is being made.

But how can each of us make progress, right now?

How can we – right here, right now – step more powerfully into our hell yes, or hell no?

The first step is the same step as when you want to uplevel your workouts, change your eating habits, or start dating: Tell everyone. Letting people know that you are on a growth spurt helps to make it real.

I challenge you to experiment with a commitment to your own truth. 

Here are a few tips to help: 

• Set the Intention: Tell all your friends and fam that you want to locate your inner truth more consistently, and that you are going to ask for their help with that. (You don’t need to know how you are going to do it, you just need to declare that you want to.)
• Vocalize your boundary: Tell your pals, family, and co-workers that from here forward, every time they make a request of you, you are not going to answer them in that conversation. Rather, you are going to practice checking in with yourself, and you are going to count to 10, or take a short break before you answer them. This requires bravery and patience on your part.
• Check-in with yourself: Then, you are going to head to the nearest private space to connect. Get in a few deep breaths. Place your hand on your heart, on your pussy, on your belly. Feel. Really just stop the train for a few seconds. And ask – feel – what is my deepest truth?

We, as women, are so accustomed to pleasing others, folding on our desires, compromising ourselves, taking one for the team, putting our families first, that we don’t give ourselves time to sink into the divinity of our own truth and experience the enlightenment from within.

It might be hard to hear much of anything at first, but I promise you, the more you do this, the more information you’ll get. It’s all in there.

A faint whisper turns into a dialogue, which turns into the greatest collaboration of your life – you and your higher power, working together as a team, to stand for your value, each and every day.

And by standing for your truth in this gentle yet powerful way, you are standing for a world of women and girls, to stand for theirs.

Hit reply to this email and tell me:

• Where is the easiest place for you to hear your deepest truth? Alone? With friends? Family? Strangers?
• Where is the most difficult place for you to check in and listen to what you truly long to say? At work? With your long-term partner? Your new lover? Your kids?
• What’s your edge? Can you find a way to step into a truth you’ve been sitting on?
• And how does it make you feel when you witness a woman stepping bravely into her power? Can you tell when she’s holding back? Can you tell when you are holding back?

For the girls of today, the women of tomorrow – it starts with you. In this culture, a commitment to your own truth is a revolutionary act.

With so much love and pleasure,

P.S. If you know a woman who has lost the thread of her truth, please forward this to her, and send her HERE to sign up for future blogs. And don’t forget to join me on Instagram (@mamagena) and Facebook for more ways to play!!

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.