There was a lot going on.

I was doing a Facebook Live with my grads, and a woman asked a powerful question about desire. She wanted to know what the difference was between a desire you think you want, and a desire that comes straight from your pussy.

This is such a good question on so many levels.

We are all bombarded, on the daily, with stuff that we think we are supposed to want – marriage, babies, career, money, clothes, cars.

And sometimes, we really do want all or some of those things.
But then, there is an even deeper level of tuning-in that requires a kind of surrender, a kind of quiet listening, and an inner attunement to the notes on the scale that we don’t normally pay any attention to.

If you can begin to hear these faint chords, that is where the most astonishing transformation lives. That is pussy calling

Now, when I say pussy, I am talking about more than just pussy. I’m speaking about attuning to your deepest feminine intuition, your most profound and pearl-like truth. Pearl-like, because it will begin as a pearl begins, like an irritating grain of sand in your moist, soft soul, and then, if you attune, it begins to reveal its luster, sheen, and value.

Last week, I spent eight days by my mother’s side, as she navigated some very rocky terrain. She was facing hip replacement surgery at age 95, and had been putting off the operation for over 10 years. While all this was happening, her younger sister was dying. My mother is defiantly independent, but even she knew that surgery and death are not places to travel unaccompanied, if at all possible.

I took her to see her sister, first in the hospital and then, a few days later, in hospice. I hung out in my mother’s hospital room for a week afterward, as she received the surgery and began the recovery process. By the end of the week, I was utterly spent and felt it was time to go home. I announced my departure, said my farewells, and the next morning, while doing my usual rituals and prayers, I tuned in to my pussy. And she said, “don’t go home yet’. I argued with her. My ego said, “I gotta go. I am exhausted. Drained. With nothing more to give. Rehab is good. The care is good. Bubbe is good.”

She quietly whispered, “Stay.”

My ego’s response? “Ooof. Such a bummer! Not what I was planning!”
But I know enough, by this point, to pay attention.
And I took my questioning and surprised ass over to the hospital. What followed was a relaxed day nothing special happened, I even had time to go to lunch with my bro, which was nice. That evening, I went back to the hospital to join my mom for dinner.

Around 7 pm, I got a text that my aunt had passed away.
Whoa. How to tell my mom? How to hold space for this passage?
My first thought – I have no idea what to do or how to do this.

I took her hand, and gently broke the news. She was in shock. I stroked her hair, feeling awkward and unqualified. I’d never lost a sister, never broken the news of death to someone. We were in a cold hospital room, with CNN blasting on the TV.

I checked in with my pussy.
Nature, she whispered. Ritual.

I turned off the TV, and turned off the lights, and took my mom over to the window and we watched the sunset. I played my showtune-loving aunt’s favorite song from A Chorus Line called “What I did For Love”. We sang it softly. There are special words to say when you hear the news of someone’s death, in the Jewish religion. I googled those words, and we said them. We recited the mourner’s kaddish together – the prayer for the dead. And I helped my mom to rend her hospital gown, which is a tradition in which you tear your clothing as a sign of mourning when you lose someone close to you. It felt right.
She turned to me and said, “I feel better now. That was good.”

I was so grateful I had listened to my pussy.
My ego wanted to go home.
But my pussy heard a deeper calling – the call for my soul to evolve into a new level of space holding, a new way to love. Instead of waiting for my mother to tell me what to do, I was holding the space for her, and guiding her, as she lost her only surviving sister, confronted her mortality at a deeper level, and began to face her own rehab.

It would have been fine if I went home.
My mom would have survived the news on her own.
But the opportunity was there for me to connect to my own growth, my own evolution, my own expansion. And that is what pussy always provides; an invitation to more YOU. This is not the path for everyone. It is for sure the road less travelled. Most of us are encouraged to not even contemplate our own, native intuition. Why? Very often, intuition pulls us off the road of our expectations and puts us on the path to an unknown destiny. But there is wisdom in the deep feminine.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “Suppose…the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true, to the body as a powerful and holy being?”

If I truly deeply trust my body, then I can trust myself, and as a consequence, the world becomes my teacher, rather than my enemy.

With so much love and pleasure,

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.