“I find that a lot of the women are coming my way because they’re kind of sick of this female empowerment idea where a group of women comes together to love themselves and fluff themselves up in isolation and then go out to meet the real world and find themselves finding comfort to retreat, place to land, but without relationally knowing how to do something different, how to give the gift of self-awareness to another man. There’s also a lot of anger there. I think we’re angrier than ever. We’re breaking through a lot of nice girl, good girl behavior.”
— Kasia Urbaniak
“The most effective language to use is a question. And the most effective question to use is a question about the communication that was spoken.” - Kasia Urbaniak
Learn more about Hello Freedom at https://terricole.com/160
Terri Cole: This is Hello Freedom and I'm your host Terri Cole. For almost two decades, I've been a licensed psychotherapist and transformation coach. On this show, I'll bring you simple strategies based on practical psychology, inspiring expert interviews, and my own insights and observations from my time on the frontline of the fascinating worlds of entertainment, empowerment, and mental health. Now let's get going with today's episode. Well, hello and welcome to Hello Freedom. I am your host Terri Cole. I have a really special and exciting episode today. I'm so into it and I'm so glad that you are here hanging out with me.
Terri Cole: I have a really special guest today. I've been really interested in boundaries. Of course, you guys know if you've been following me for a minute, you know I've been talking about boundaries for the past couple of months. I'm leading into ... I just recently the Boundary Challenge and then I had the Boundary Masterclass and moving into my course that's starting right now, Boundary Bootcamp. In my research to see what are other people talking about with boundaries and power, I came upon this woman named Kasia Urbaniak. She's the founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence.
Terri Cole: I was like yes. Her perspective on power is really unique because she made her living as one of the world's most successful dominatrices while studying power dynamics with teachers all over the world. It's like she was so lit up by these concepts, she just went all over the world. During that time, she practiced Daoist Alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines, including Medical Qigong and Systemic Constellations.
Terri Cole: Since founding The Academy, so this is a place where you can actually come and learn for women, she founded it in 2013, so she's taught hundreds of women practical tools to step into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces and wider communities. I was interested in how the Me Too, this emergence, this powerful emergence after the Harvey Weinstein debacle came out that obviously had been going on for decades. This is when her stuff really blew up in a more public way. We started talking about that and she actually had a course at The Academy called Cornering Harvey. Her whole theory is basically when women learn to communicate powerfully, they get what they want.
Terri Cole: The interview is really interesting. She's giving you tips on what to do if you are in a situation, a conversation and you're feeling small, kind of unsafe due to a sexually suggestive comment, right? How to not just dismiss that because you're really dismissing yourself when you don't handle it. She gives so many interesting amazing tips in the interview, and she also has a verbal self-defense camp for women. The training of course is not just verbal. It's physical as well. Basically she really helps us understand why we go blank or shut down and basically hope for the best in that moment, right, where it's almost like we have this freeze.
Terri Cole: She teaches you how to get unfrozen so that you can actually move forward and do something that would be productive. I really, really hope that you enjoy this incredibly enlightening interview with Kasia as much as I enjoyed interviewing her. Welcome to Hello Freedom.
Kasia Urbaniak: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Terri Cole: You are so welcome. Kasia, you do a lot of different things. I'm super interested in your work. I feel like what you're doing now around boundaries and you've been doing it for a long time even before this, but I feel like the Me Too thing almost put your work in the limelight in a way that perhaps it wasn't before or differently. I don't know. Was there an impact on your work?
Kasia Urbaniak: Oh, there's a definite impact. There's a definite impact because it ended up being a small percentage of the curriculum needed. It was required that it be highlighted and spoken about and put forth in the most practical applicable way possible, so that people listening to a podcast or an interview or even just getting a mention of something in an article who walk away with something tangible and usable right away because there's a great deal of urgency at this moment for people to be able to do something differently.
Terri Cole: Yes. That is a true story. The foundations of power and influence. This is basically the foundation of your work with women. Can I just ask you how you got interested in doing this work personally?
Kasia Urbaniak: Well, it's kind of a funny story. I spent most of my adult life, maybe 17-18 years, being a very unusual and successful dominatrix. At the time, I was doing that to fund my studies to become a Taoist nun.
Terri Cole: Oh my god. Wait. Your day job was being a dominatrix? Right on. Okay.
Kasia Urbaniak: I mean functionally like my four days a month job was being a dominatrix for a lot of the time and then traveling around the world and seeing who I could study with that would teach me things that I didn't know were possible. One of the cool things that happened in that long time period of going back and forth was that everything I learned in the monastery about martial arts and Medical Qigong and healing and body reading inadvertently became something I was practicing and using as a dominatrix.
Kasia Urbaniak: That seems like a funny translation, but it actually isn't at all because it's a very specific way of being able to see deeply into people and to see when they're being moved and when they're not, where they're stagnant and stuck and where there's movement, which is the basis of all Chinese healing. I found that I could do a lot by triggering different states of mind and consciousness and I could do a lot by noting where someone was stuck. If it was an organ of the body, it always corresponded to an emotion and a story, so I could use that in the role plays.
Kasia Urbaniak: I found that growing up it was a really interesting thing to start when I was 19 and to have a group friends that wasn't having this experience, watch them interact with the men of the world, and me having these really intense, profound, transformative experiences in a dungeon informed by a monastery. The growing difference between their interpretation of what men do, what men mean by what they do and what they can do about it and my experience I never in a million years thought I'd be teaching. I just felt lucky like I had a hidden secret until I met Ruben Flores, who's my business partner in crime, who is a humanitarian who work for Doctors Without Borders for many years.
Kasia Urbaniak: The most unusual thing happened. The first thing we met, we started talking about power dynamics. I spoke about them as I understood them from a place of the extremes of sexuality and human influence. He spoke about them in terms of negotiating borders and dealing with really high stress situations in war and high conflict zones. It was through that six month conversation we discovered so many universalities that when I started sharing what I was finding about this, it was the people reading what I was writing that started asking for workshops. In the beginning, I was a little bit reluctant.
Kasia Urbaniak: But once I started and it was just Me Too, it was when Trump got elected, that was the first big redefinition of the school and expansion and then Me Too, just forget about it. It's just like everybody wanted a tool for what to do when somebody confronts you in a way that makes you lose your voice. You can tell women to speak up and speak out and more women are speaking up and speaking out, but speaking up and speaking out in real time when your body freezes actually requires something.
Terri Cole: Yes.
Kasia Urbaniak: Because with Me Too, there's a lot of men in the world who went, "Okay, but nobody told me. Maybe I should have known. Well, that's not what I meant." Right? We're not talking about extreme predators now, but we're talking about huge communication gap.
Terri Cole: Yup. What I think is really amazing about this whole process is that the need, right? What do they say? A necessity is the mother of invention. It's like the need just got so jacked up and our ability to ignore what's been happening, our ability to make it okay because it was so extreme when Me Too first came out. Of course, I used to be a talent agent for many years before I became a psychotherapist. I mean any women ... Alex Jamieson says something similar like, "We've all been traumatized by something that has to do with being a woman and having someone feel like it's okay to proposition you in a business situation to talk about your ass."
Terri Cole: I remember I was renting ... Well, renting. It was like an illegal sublet that I was in. They sold the building, so the guy wanted to take care of me, yeah, with no strings attached, not. Anyway, I go into his office. As I'm leaving, he gives me this amazing apartment, rent stabilized, and he smacks me on the ass on my way out. I was like, "Well, it was his apartment. I could probably punch him in the face, but I'm probably not going to." I mean that was a different scenario because actually I just felt like he was an idiot, but my point about where you are is that this dialogue and this conversation and what I'm teaching in my courses and I'm what talking about in the tribe that I have, it's now.
Terri Cole: It's not tomorrow and it's not for someone else because we're all having these experiences. I'm really interested in you sharing when a woman finds herself in a situation where someone is inappropriately bringing sexuality or focusing on the way they look as opposed to their skillset or what's on their resume or whatever it is, what do you suggest in real time that they do? What is it that we say and how do you handle the fight/flight freeze reaction in the body? How do you teach people sort of out of that experience?
Kasia Urbaniak: Okay. I have a definite answer to that question, but I also want to back track just a little bit because one of the things that became really obvious in teaching verbal self-defense, which is what we call exactly this, was that when we're teaching business negotiation in the school, when we're teaching opening the relationship conversation, when we're teaching how to have a Velvet fucking Divorce, when we're teaching how to deal with power dynamics in families, in all these different situations, the one weak link, the one place that no matter what I teach, no matter what they get, no matter how much they do, the one thing, the one weak link is if they freeze and they don't know how to get out of the freeze, then everything they've learned is useless.
Kasia Urbaniak: You can have that conversation in your head about all of the things that you're going to say next time you see a person and you can sit there and have strategies, write emails. You can never anticipate what they're actually going to say. If you freeze, you're fucked.
Terri Cole: Yup.
Kasia Urbaniak: Because, you know, dynamics are living things. The second thing I want to say about the freeze itself is very few men or people in high status positions, because this works between men and men, this works between all people, it's there's a particular type that happens to women more often, but any status differential can make a person freeze. Most men or people in high status positions do not know how to recognize when another person's frozen. The problem with this is that human beings are social creatures and they don't learn through a set of rules. Like right now there's a lot of and has been anti-sexual harassment trainings for corporations.
Kasia Urbaniak: They're all like videos and "this is what you shouldn't do." Most people don't know what they're doing unless they get immediate feedback. We learn socially. The freeze stops people from learning socially, the way they learn best, what behavior is effective. If somebody freezes and the person who's not frozen continues, what they see is that their behavior is effective.
Terri Cole: Right.
Kasia Urbaniak: This implies blame in some ways on the woman and they don't mean that.
Terri Cole: Right.
Kasia Urbaniak: This is a very neutral problem. If people in high status positions and men are to be reeducated, they have to be reeducated in real time. They have to know the effects of their actions, the impacts of their actions in real time. They have to know what doesn't work. They have to know what works. They have to be able to feel what's happening on the other side. In the freeze, it's absolutely impossible. It's such a common experience. It's worth mentioning how universal it is. When I teach a class, in the beginning, the first thing is like have you ever had that moment where you feel frozen and stuck in your place and you have a million words running around in your head, but you can't seem to get out a single one?
Kasia Urbaniak: Then you're saying to yourself, "I'm going to say something. I'm going to speak up in five seconds, four, three two. Okay, wait. Okay. No." You miss the moment. Sometimes it's not an egregious sexual violation. Sometimes it's a moment where you can advocate for yourself in a way that gives you a raise or in a way that your idea gets in the room and heard. That moment's missed, that moment's missed forever. Maybe it doesn't seem like such a big deal, except women, we tend to have these. In the beginning of the class, they can note one or two that happened.
Kasia Urbaniak: After the classes, they go through their days, they're like, "Holy fuck. This happens to me 20 times a day."
Terri Cole: Yeah, totally. The awareness.
Kasia Urbaniak: "20 times a day I don't say it, and then I beat myself up for not saying it." But when you recognize what happens in the body, neurologically what happens in the body, it's so clear that in that moment the priority is to get out of the freeze. It doesn't even matter what you say, how you come across because you need access to your language, to your agency. The basis of what I teach is based on power dynamics. In my world view, power dynamics are based on attention. Women have a tendency to be taught to put their attention inward on themselves. Not just how they look and how they are, how they sound, how they seem.
Kasia Urbaniak: There's a tendency to reward girls for how they seem, how they are, how they speak, and there's a tendency to reward boys for what they do, right?
Terri Cole: Yup.
Kasia Urbaniak: Their attention's out. The moment they get the reward, their attention's out. The moment we get a reward, our attention's in. The main thing to do when you freeze is to move from the state in which your attention is inward to the state where your attention is outward and use language. Now the most effective language to use is a question and the most effective question to use is a question about the communication that was spoken. In all truth, if you're frozen, you can say something like, "Where did you get that tie," and that might not be an effective offensive tactic in terms of conversation or negotiation, but it will break the freeze.
Kasia Urbaniak: It will. You'll be able to say something afterwards. In some of the trainings we do, we have some stock answers. Did you know that a question might make a woman feel uncomfortable? What exactly do you mean by that, as usually is the case.
Terri Cole: What's interesting about what you're saying with the question is that and if you're feeling a lot of women feel this fear of asserting themselves, that doing it in the form of a question actually is really brilliant because A, it's true. You are asking them if they knew that this might feel offensive to a woman, but it's easier than ... It's not effective, of course, to go on the attack to be super agro about it, but just asking. There's one thing that I teach people to say is, "Why would you ask that?"
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. The other thing that a question does because the shifting status in the power dynamic occurs when there's a tension, when you ask somebody a question, you don't just put them on the spot. You draw their own attention inward. Your attention's on them and their attention's on them. The release of pressure from that is what breaks the freeze. Make them think for a second. They go into themselves. They energetically retreat. You have space. You could breath for a second. You can even run for the fucking door, but you won't be able to run for the door if you're frozen and stuck inside yourself.
Terri Cole: Right.
Kasia Urbaniak: It has multiple purposes. There are more provocative pointed clever ones. There's softer ones. Some questions are just so outrageous, some approaches are so outrageous that they deserve a more confronting question back. There's also safety considerations.
Terri Cole: Yes, indeed, but let's just say the safety ... You felt like there was enough safety to do it. What would be a more aggressive response back to someone?
Kasia Urbaniak: Well, give me a suggestion. Ask me an uncomfortable question or say something provocative to me.
Terri Cole: Okay. It's a job interview.
Kasia Urbaniak: Well, a job interview doesn't really allow me to be that provocative.
Terri Cole: That's a good point. Okay. Okay.
Kasia Urbaniak: I can try.
Terri Cole: Well, in job interviews though, I have lot of therapy clients who've come in and have like someone ask them questions that they're not allowed to ask. You know?
Terri Cole: Like are you married? Do you plan on having children?
Kasia Urbaniak: Are you proposing? Do you find that your more successful employees are married, divorced, or single?
Terri Cole: Oh, so good. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great come back because it's direct, but also diffusing.
Kasia Urbaniak: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Terri Cole: You're actually asking a real question as if what he was saying ... It's funny. I always say to clients like, "Well, take someone at face value," right? Like if someone says to me, "I'll take them literally," so it's almost like instead of being offended by coming back with the question, you're making them think, putting it back on them, like you said, bringing their attention inward, but requiring something from them.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are very soft answers to that. Do you know if discussing my marital status is legal in this interview?
Terri Cole: I loved your innocent face on that. Those of you who are watching this on YouTube, did you get that? Look it up. I'm not sure. See? You started The Academy. This is ...
Kasia Urbaniak: Do you want to try a more provocative one?
Terri Cole: Yeah. Let's. Okay. Let's say we're out socially and what would be really inappropriate that would ... Just someone approaching you for your number, but you're like having lunch at Panera or somewhere. Someone coming right up at your table and saying, "Hey, can I get your phone number? I'd like to take you out."
Kasia Urbaniak: What are you going to do with it? What do you have in mind? What kind of date would you see taking me on? Would it be worth my time?
Terri Cole: Well, I wouldn't ...
Kasia Urbaniak: What makes you think I'm interested?
Terri Cole: That's the question.
Kasia Urbaniak: Do you like approaching women you don't know? Is this a strategy that works for you? I don't know how many success you've had. What makes you so bold? I would love to know how to be that bold. We collected a lot of these questions and some of them are so egregious like did ... There was just some really great ones. I mean some obvious ones like, are you into threesomes, and then some that are like, do you think being Black helped you get into Harvard? Do you think being beautiful made you successful at business?
Terri Cole: Wait, hold on. You froze for a minute. What do you say if someone says, "Are you into threesomes?"
Kasia Urbaniak: Well, the first when you don't know what to say just to get out of the freeze is, "Why would you like to know?" Following it up with, "Are you accustomed to asking questions like that? Do you realize a question like that would make a woman feel uncomfortable? Is it your intention to make me feel uncomfortable? Does it excite you to make me feel very uncomfortable? Is that the kind of man you are? Are you the kind of man that goes around asking women he does not know if they're into threesomes? Does that work for you?"
Terri Cole: Yeah, good. So good. Everyone of them. If you only could get one of those out, like you said, you break the freeze. Just knowing there's one step I can take when I feel this way and having a few questions and of course, you have an online course though, correct?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. The Verbal Self-Defense Dojo. We have all these creepy guys come up and say awful things and strategies to practice. A lot of people who play karaoke style, they sit around one computer yelling at the screen, "Look. I got one. I got one."
Terri Cole: Oh god. I love it. You actually hire actors or you're like, "Hi. Do you want to be the inappropriate guy in the subway today?"
Kasia Urbaniak: No. Most of them are images of incredibly sleazy men.
Terri Cole: Okay. Good. Hire someone for that. Are you finding that women ... I mean clearly you are, but is there a different quality of what we're seeking in wanting to be empowered in this way, in this moment in history and in time?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yes, I do. It's an edgy thing. I find that a lot of the women are coming my way because they're kind of sick of this female empowerment idea where a group of women comes together to love themselves and fluff themselves up in isolation and then go out to meet the real world and find themselves finding comfort to retreat, place to land, but without relationally knowing how to do something different, how to give the gift of self-awareness to another man. There's also a lot of anger there. I think we're angrier than ever. We're breaking through a lot of nice girl, good girl behavior.
Kasia Urbaniak: It's a little bit like anytime you're doing something for the first time, anytime you're doing something new and you're carrying a lot of either desire or anger or accumulated energy, it's going to be messy. It's going to be messy. I try to give women the kinds of tools that are as damage-proof as possible. Effective, practical, but ones that won't create unnecessary detonations. I like it. Personally I like it that we're sick of being good girls. I like this bad ass quality of warrior woman. One that is not fighting against everyone, but fighting for a different kind of world.
Terri Cole: Yes, exactly. That really is an important distinction and discernment to make, but the disease to please that we've been saddled with, some people saddled more depending on culture, family of origin, community, tribe, whatever it maybe, is something that we have to change our own minds about what it means to be female and how power is not unfeminine, right? Unfeminine, feminine. This is about being a human and being able to stand in your power. I find with the work that I do, which is Boundary Bootcamp and Real Love Revolution are my two big things, but so much of it is all about self-knowledge, self-love, and speaking authentically, learning how to draw boundaries with ease and grace.
Terri Cole: Speaking what's on your mind and having the language for that. What I'm finding is that women are really attached to the fear that becoming a boundary ninja or a boundary master as I say will be experienced negatively within their circle. I'm like, "Yeah. I mean maybe, but this is life." Every relationship is a dance as Dr. Harriet Lerner would say. You change your steps. The other person's going to be like, "What are you doing? Hey. I do this. You do this. Why aren't you fucking doing that," but eventually the new normal, the new dance, the new movement can become normalized. Like that homeostasis can come back.
Terri Cole: In the moment that we're in now, we've got to be okay in the apple cart being tossed over. It's an opportunity I think to change what we're doing that doesn't work. I was taught that men are people to manage. No. I mean I didn't marry someone I needed to manage. Thank God, but saying like these are things that as women, it's all about are you okay? Don't let them know what's really going on. At least in my growing up experience, it was very much like, "Don't tell dad that mom is over here in the trenches with us in the real deal." I have three older sisters and I remember thinking I never wanted to get married, and I didn't get married until I was 35 and I had like 25 years of therapy.
Terri Cole: I was thinking, "That just looks like yuck. That just doesn't ... Why?" That's like being like I can't wait to have a meh life?
Kasia Urbaniak: Right. Right. Right.
Terri Cole: Can't wait to sign on for that forever. No, thanks. The changes, I see that that's something that people come in with before the Me Too thing exploded. That it's so common. I've been a psychotherapist in New York, in LA and wherever for the past 20 years and I have seen it changing. But I got so excited when I was diving into your work because I love how succinct you are with what you're saying and with what you're teaching. The broad strokes don't work. It's like being in a relationship and saying to your husband or your boyfriend, "You need to be more sensitive."
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. That actually doesn't mean anything.
Terri Cole: I don't know what you're saying and I don't know what that means. Then having the courage to want to get your needs met to the degree that you're willing to be vulnerable and that you're willing to say what that is without shame, maybe with a little of trepidation and fear and that's fine because the more you do it, the easier it gets, but this whole thing that men can read your mind and that we should be flattered by someone's attention to our body and to "our beauty" or whatever it is, it's an old paradigm. It's an old story of our value being about the way that we look. I feel like that's changing, but I really do appreciate you're very specific, which I like because it doesn't help us.
Terri Cole: We know we need boundaries. We know if we're in that situation, we need to say something, but we don't know what to say.
Kasia Urbaniak: It drives me crazy when people say, "Find your voice, stand in your power," because again there's no instruction manual that comes with that. It's a few words that make us feel bad for not knowing how to do it, but knowing when it's there and not knowing how it happened.
Terri Cole: Totally. Thanks for letting me know I'm failing at life. Way to go. Awesomeness. Tell us a little bit about your Self-Defense Dojo.
Kasia Urbaniak: Before I get to that, I really wanted to talk to you about what you just said about the people pleasing, the pleasing disease, right? That's what you called it?
Terri Cole: Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Kasia Urbaniak: One of the things that I found is changing women's minds about what no means, saying no and hearing no. Hearing no comes up when ... In the courses, they are encouraged to ask for more. They're afraid of hearing no, so they pretend that they want less than they do. They mediate requests before they come out of their mouths to the point where if they want Japanese but they think the other person wants Italian, they go for something in between as their highest request.
Terri Cole: Yes.
Kasia Urbaniak: Getting a no, receiving somebody else's resistance, we train to understand that that is a huge gift. Because the moment somebody says no, what they're actually doing is showing a spot that's covered over in order to protect something they care about. My students when they hear somebody say no, they go, "Game on. Fuck yes."
Terri Cole: Right.
Kasia Urbaniak: Not because they think they're going to win and crush that, no, but they're going to find out something really important about what the other person cares about. When they start getting more accustomed to hearing no and then working through that, finding out the reason and allying with it and how much can get generated from that, they're much less afraid to say no themselves because they know that they're saying no because there's something they value that they can protect and feel much more legitimate about speaking. I mean sometimes just no is warranted, but to continue the dynamic and the dialogue and those two things allow for a lot of nice girl behavior, a lot of pleasing disease to stop.
Kasia Urbaniak: Because what the two parties are doing is that they're exposing something greater than what's on the table at the moment. Something more precious.
Terri Cole: Yes.
Kasia Urbaniak: That's exciting.
Terri Cole: That's what creates the whole thing with real intimacy. With what I'm teaching in my courses, so much of it is about that when you really get that saying yes when you want to say no is not being nice. It's lying. What you're then doing is robbing the people who love you the most the opportunity to actually know you.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. Oh, that's so good.
Terri Cole: Right? How can they authentically love you if you really never allow them to authentically know you because you're too busy trying to manipulate what's happening to avoid conflict at all cost, to make sure no one's ever mad, to make sure nothing's uncomfortable. It's okay. The thing is I always say, "At the end of your life, you're not going to say like I wish I lied more. I wish I hid my true self more." It's so painful, this existential loneliness that I see in women who will come into my practice or my courses in their 60s and their 70s. They spent their life with the disease to please, which actually is a phrase that Dr. Harriet Braiker coined like in the I'd say late '90s.
Terri Cole: She's now deceased, RIP, but she had a great book that was called "Curing The People Pleasing Syndrome." So brilliant. Her whole theory is about why we do it then. The fact that it's still so relevant now is like actually kind of a total bummer because you're like, "Okay. That was 20 years ago. Okay." We need the explosive getting Harvey in the corner, Me Too thing to make actual movement. For my students, it's very egodystonic for them to think of themselves as a liar, for them to think of themselves as blocking the intimacy that they really so consciously want. It's really revealing this unconscious material, these downloaded blueprints that have been impacting their ability.
Terri Cole: When we get there and they really get that they're getting in the way of what they want, but you can unlearn it and learn something new and do something different and be brave, because in the end of life, you're not going to regret the risks that you took. It'll be the living small, letting this bullshit emotion like fear run your life when the reality is that just being alive is we will be filled with fear. Make friends. Put your arm around your peer and be like, "Okay. You're never going anywhere. I'm never going anywhere. Give me the keys to my life. You can go, Violet. I'm driving."
Terri Cole: You can't have that feeling and that fear of rejection and all of those things be this main decision-making thing. I find that with so many of the women, who especially come into my Boundary Bootcamp course, fear has been driving them for so long and autoimmune disorders and cancer and weight gain and exhaustion, all of these things, because your true self is like, "I'm dying in here. Somebody come and get me out." You know?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. So beautiful. Brilliant. Thanks.
Terri Cole: It's interesting. So much of what we do is so aligned even though we do it differently. When I turned on, I was like, "I'm listening to every podcast. Who is this person?" I'm so psyched that you were able to come on the show and share so much of your very unique wisdom because your life has been unique. Your path has been unique. What you've been willing to do for knowledge, which is so interesting because so much of the time people are like, "Can't wait to build my platform. Can't wait to get my offering together," and your whole thing was like, "No, no. This is my life. I'm doing this."
Terri Cole: You were committing, but what a gift for us who are not going to go in the female Daoist monastery to become a nun ... Did I mix those up? Did that all happen in one place?
Kasia Urbaniak: That's right. Yeah, absolutely.
Terri Cole: Right? But how beautiful that you are generous enough and feeling called in some way to be of service to share this information for us because where would I ever know it from? I mean maybe other sources, but not your particular brand. I want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I hope that you will come back. You guys who are listening, don't worry. You'll have all the information that you need to get your Verbal Self-Defense Dojo course, so you know what to do when you're in a situation, how to ask a question of an inappropriate question. That's going to be our first line of defense, but I really want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. I so appreciate it.
Kasia Urbaniak: Thank you so much and thank you for the work you do.
