Becoming Unbound: A Conversation Between Kasia Urbaniak & Dr. Valerie Rein
This conversation with @drvalerierein, author of #PatriarchyStressDisorder, was such a pleasure. I hope you enjoy it too.
We explore…
What power is and isn’t (it may surprise you)
The universality of #patriarchystressdisorder, how it impacts a woman’s power through The Freeze and ‘Good Girl’ behaviors.
How we can reclaim our power to become #womenunbound and the unique opportunity the pandemic presents for this reclamation.
And much more!
Connect with Dr. Valerie Rein:
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Valerie Rein: I was watching your TEDx talk, and it's interesting timing because right now I'm doing a series here on Instagram Live talking about trauma, how patriarchy stress disorder shows up for women, and particularly unpacking what I call prison guards. These are trauma defenses that fall into different categories, depending on the intensity of that trauma or stress response. Ranging from peace, fight, flight, freeze, and then shutdown and summarization. Today is the day I will be talking about freeze. Of course, that is what you talk about in your TEDx talk. Here's the line that you said that really hit me.
“It's not just about the bad things that happen. It's about the beautiful things that never happen. These are some of the costs of going into freeze.”
Do you want to talk more about that?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. I also wouldn't feel right beginning to speak with you without acknowledging you and your work. What I feel is one of the boldest and bravest things that you've done, that so many other people venturing into this territory miss, is the universality of this experience for women. You come from a distinguished background, being educated, and can talk about trauma, stress, and the somatic nervous system that I cannot because I don't have that background. What I got so excited about when I realised that you exist in the world is you're speaking so loudly and so articulately with the message that a woman going through this, a woman is not alone. One of the greatest unintentional tricks pulled on women suffering from the impact of patriarchy, which is all women, is that these symptoms, these problems, are individualized, personalized, and reserved for, for example, individual therapy. My psychological problems. I have trouble asking. I don't fend for myself. I freeze easily. I'm weak. I don't believe in myself. I don't stand up for myself. I don't ask for what I need. I hide when I'm hurt. I pretend I'm not mad. I, I, I. My problem. Now I need to go talk about my parents. The thing is that when you get a room with enough women, one grew up wealthy, one grew up poor, one was loved by her father but not by her mother, one was loved by her mother but not by her father. Yet even the ones that appear different – one damsel in distress and one hyper-independent, nothing in common – neither of them know how to ask.
So bold to call your book Patriarchy Stress Disorder and your work, to just call it out. It's not you, it's us. It's not me, it's us. And once the patterns are revealed, then we start being able to look in more effective places.
Why did I freeze? We're bringing up the subject of the freeze. There are so many costs. The bad things that happen. The good things that don't. If it is not acknowledged that there is a patriarchal condition, a context in which women will freeze, then the individual, a woman, will say to herself, ‘I froze and I suffered this consequence. This is what happened to me. This is what didn't happen to me. Now I'm going to 10 minutes later, 10 days later, 10 months later, punish myself for it.’ And again, I’m not qualified to speak about trauma, but it feels like compounding the trauma, through self-attack, ‘Why didn't I? Why am I so weak? What is it about me that? Why can't I stand up for myself?’ It ends up echoing through time, rather than getting undone. The doorway to that is acknowledging its universal context. And this is what you do. So I want to say that first.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Thank you, sister. I appreciated it, and I am happy that the universality is so resonant. Really the most powerful, and my favorite feedback that I've been getting from women around this conversation, around Patriarchy Stress Disorder, has been, ‘Thank you for naming and giving words to what I felt my entire life trying to figure out what's wrong with me.’ I've been on this journey my entire life. My entire journey has been driven by the question, ‘What's wrong with me?’ Two graduate degrees in psychology. Right? That gives you a little bit of an idea of the dedication that I brought to figure this shit out. The surprise discovery that the answer to the question has been nothing. So universality.
Kasia Urbaniak: One of those features, and if we're talking about the freeze, one of the observations that I made time and time again, especially because of the structure of The Academy, the school that I run, for most of its life, up until the pandemic, the nature of it were live classes that were very demonstration and exercise focus. So we could all observe the physical behavioral habit patterns of women over and over again. Something became very apparent quickly before there was even a philosophy around the school, just a desire to understand. We had men volunteer for classes so we could do work with them and comparative work, and you could watch it like in a laboratory. The moment attention was put on a woman – she was questioned, even positively questioned – a little bit heavier than was comfortable energetically, her whole body would turn inward. Whereas if you put a man in that same situation, almost 98% of the time, his attention would turn outward. So what does that mean? A very simple example: an uncomfortable question or a compliment. What do you do for a living? We're play-acting and still, the tendency is for a woman to go inward to find the answer. ‘Do you like having lots and lots of sex?’ Inappropriate question. Inward. ‘What do I say? What do I do?’ The tendency for him is like, ‘Why are you asking?’ Attention out.
This tiny detail, unmissable if you're looking for it but if you're not looking for it, almost impossible to notice, is the entire structure of how a power dynamic basically crushes a woman. What makes her freeze is that self-conscious, self-attacking, self-aware inward energy when she is put on the spot will compound on itself. It's not just a question of catching her off guard and having her freeze. She will stay stuck there. There's a long understandable history as to why we would do this. The entire system of reward and belonging has to do with moments when attention is on ourselves. How we are, how we look, how we sound. And it's not so with men. Little boys, what they're achieving. That outward-inward thing ends up being very important in the context of something like the freeze. Being aware is the first thing, the universality. In the moments of freezing, the moments after freezing, especially the low stakes freezes, being like, ‘Oh, I froze, my attention went inward.’ First loosening the grip of that by completely releasing any self-punishment. ‘Oh, this is part of the fabric of being a woman in the patriarchy today. Being a woman of the pivot, this is the moment I notice it's not my issue.’ That does so much of the work. The second thing is starting to break the freeze by practicing especially in low-stakes situations. You know, a neighbor in the elevator asks an inappropriate question. Practicing in these small ways can be really powerful. The somatic bodily freedom and expansion that happens when you can say, ‘Why do you ask?’ These small moments start to reshape the landscape.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I love that so much and it gives me chills. I have had two strands of recognition listening to you: one has to do with PSD, and one has to do with how therapists are trained and how it all trails down to power. Very interesting.
About PSD – Patriarchy Stress Disorder for those who are not familiar – women have been conditioned, well, women have had to survive, and to survive we need to check ourselves. It’s that inward attention. I'm checking myself. Am I going to say the wrong things? How am I going to come across? Is there going to be an attack? Women are checking. For men, they're not typically in danger. They're not typically in a state of survival so they have the freedom to be outwardly focused. I talk about how this as the greatest privilege that men have.
Kasia Urbaniak: Wow.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Right? It’s that privilege to actually be saved. The culture believes them. They get constant positive reinforcement in a lot of ways in which they show up. They believe it’s very important what they have to say. So there is that. That's how that power dynamic is set up. There's such inherent inequality, not only because women have not had their rights. Like women's bodies have not belonged to us. Nobody has cared about what we've had to say, and more than that, it has been punishable when we’ve spoken up. The resulting differential in how we feel safe or unsafe, male, female, and people across the gender spectrum, that's the basis of inequality there from the biological, physiological standpoint.
Now thinking about how therapists are trained. That actually gave me pause and gave me like – oh, gasp! Therapists are trained to ask questions to be outwardly focused. I used to say, you can't win with a psychoanalyst because they're always gonna put it on you. ‘Oh, what did you ask that? How did your mother mess you up?’ Unfortunately, sadly, there is retraumatization that happens in therapy through this power differential. It kind of compounds when a woman who is already carrying PSD in her system comes to a therapist, who is also unconsciously perpetuating that power, and not giving enough space for her power. I feel the purpose of healing is to help humans reclaim their power. You just helped me realize my core issue with therapy when that power is practiced unconsciously.
Kasia Urbaniak: Right. This reminds me of some of the studies they did on women and confidence. Not the parts where women rated their competence way lower, and men rated their competence way higher than the actual test results. The part where if a woman was asked how well she thought she did, her self-assessment went all the way down. If a man was asked how well he did, his self-assessment went all the way up. Just the question, ‘How well do you think you did?’, would make a woman crumble. Now I'm thinking about the dynamic with a therapist if they're not conscious of perpetuating that power. ‘Why do you think you did that, woman?’ ‘I don't know. It's probably because I'm screwed up.’ ‘Why do you think you did that, man?’ It might have a different impact.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Interesting!
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. This isn't in the book, but I did a pretty exhaustive study of cult leaders at one point in terms of power dynamics because there are aspects of the gaslighting of women that are cult-like. They couple it with the shame. If you have a question, the first thing they do is question you for having that question and couple it with shame. ‘Are you resisting? Do you have an issue with this?’ This is how they completely quash dissent.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I'm getting hot. Yes. This gaslighting coupled with shame is the core of gaslighting. Making you wrong. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, you're wrong. You're making shit up. Your reality is invalidated. How that's used throughout patriarchy and of course, in cults. Wow.
Kasia Urbaniak: It doesn't really take much. One of the most rewarding things about the work I get to do is all of the low-hanging fruit. All of the easy wins. So much of this lives in a very thinly veiled shadow of assumption. Making oneself wrong the moment someone asks a question. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘I don't know. Maybe because there's something wrong with me.’ There's a whole category of things that live in that thinly veiled shadow that once you see it, it's the low-hanging fruit. The quick wins. A lot of women have difficulty asking for what they need and want. If you have a woman, this is The Asking Practice in my book, as an assignment write down 20-100 things she could ask specific things of specific people. And not ask. If she's just aware and starts using her imagination – desires, needs, people, couples in sentences –what starts to happen is the woman's oftentimes destructive self negotiation actually starts to work in our favor. When she thinks of 100 things that she could ask but isn't, she will automatically start asking without any effort for some of the things off that list. It'll just happen by itself. There's a lot of things like that.
When we look at it consciously – and again this is why I love you and adore you – we need to first make this universal. That's the first key. Once we start looking at this as not our own individual problem, it becomes so much easier to see. ‘Oh, if she's not asking, she's not asking, these are all the things I theoretically could ask for but put no pressure on myself to ask.’ All of a sudden the world starts looking different.
Freezing. The moment we start taking it out of the realm of personality. Personal. ‘I'm not confident. I don't love myself.’ Self-attacking, self-monitoring, self-policing. Once we start looking at that voice as universal, and not making ourselves wrong for it, not attacking ourselves for attacking ourselves, we can speak back to it. We can say, ‘Actually, I am not only competent, but I'm also a badass when it comes to this.’ ‘That's silly. Why would I slap my own hand for putting the toothpaste cap on wrong? I am fabulously messy,’ or whatever the case.
Dr. Valerie Rein: What I really loved, I just wanted to emphasize in what you said. Making these lists of questions. The way we approach working with Patriarchy Stress Disorder and other traumas. Because essentially, trauma is an experience that made you feel either physically or emotionally unsafe and that overwhelmed your resource, and then created trauma adaptations going forward to keep you safe. Some of those adaptations are not speaking up, holding back, having that inward talk, all of those adaptations to keep us safe. So in healing trauma, we help to establish safety by working with the nervous system. Embodied safety. I so love your practice of writing down the questions, because preparation goes a long way in establishing safety.
Kasia Urbaniak: Oh, wow. Yeah. I can see that.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Now in some situations, women can be over-prepared and get stuck in endless preparation without making a move. For example, somebody who's already over-educated, ‘No, I need to read 10 more books before I can give a talk.’ Right? That kind of thing would be an example of a trauma adaptation. I call them prison guards. It's keeping you stuck. But the preparation starts with making the invisible visible. ‘When I freeze, I can't find words. But why is that? Is it because I don't know what to ask? No, bullshit, I do.’ And preparing. So when you come, it’s kind of ingrained. It's already in your body. It's already on the tip of your tongue.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. I discovered the power of that working as a dominatrix. Sessions are generally an hour, like therapy, and they're mostly based on language. A lot of people who don't know what a BDSM session looks like, it's mostly talking. It's mostly the dominatrix talking. What is she going to say? There's a man on his knees. What is she going to say?
Dr. Valerie Rein: Makes you a great public speaker.
Kasia Urbaniak: She's gonna ask questions. ‘You like being on your knees? Don't you? What are you doing here? Was that resistance? Did you look at me? Eyes on the floor. Why did you do that so slowly?’ Constant questioning.
Dr. Valerie Rein: That's fantastic. It trains that ability to really see somebody. And you know what? It's very interesting because when you truly see somebody when that somebody feels truly seen, it actually makes them feel very safe.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Right. And when we feel safe, we can experience pleasure.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah, that's true.
Dr. Valerie Rein: You know, I've been so fascinated with what feels like right to be a dominatrix. I would love to understand that internal experience a little. I have a funny anecdote from my own life trajectory. The roads not taken. When I was setting up my private practice in New York City, I got an email from someone that read along these lines. ‘I've heard that therapists can be very strict, and I've been a really bad boy and I deserve punishment. I was wondering if I could book an appointment with you and compensate you at the rate of $400 an hour.’ And I was like, ‘Shit!’ The roads not taken. I didn't end up taking that that offer but it still gives me like a good good pick me up. If all else fails, there are so many paths to have fun and bring value.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah, it can be an amazing feeling.
We've been exploring the subject of over preparation at The Academy. One of the things that we're finding is that if a woman instead of preparing to do a good job prepares to have a great time in advance. Preparing to have a pleasurable experience and handles doing a good job inside of it, tends to temper the kind of over preparation that creates anxiety. That's been really fun. It just came out of a course that we finished teaching on confidence a week ago. It was a spontaneous discovery because the subject of over over preparation and confidence go together.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, hell yes. I love that. When you're preparing to have a great time. So again, that if you remove that self evaluation, ‘Am I doing a good job? Am I not?’ You know if your having a good time.
Kasia Urbaniak: It also it also flips who's the center of the experience, who the experience is for. Even if I'm giving a speech, if I'm preparing to do a good job, I'm only thinking about their evaluation. If I’m preparing to have a good time, I'm central to the story. If somebody is having a good time, they tend to contribute more than just their work, but their their love, their passion, their joy, their good energy. Their nervous system is at a place where they're less likely to feel attacked and more likely to collaborate and play. We could really use that right now. I think all of us on the planet could use more play. It might sound self serving, but preparing a day, a life, every task as a way to have more enjoyment.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, yes. I love that so much.
I really want to talk more about power and unpacking that. I've been exploring this in a whole new way in my own life and practice, and understanding that I did not use to understand what power was and how it felt. Of course, in the systems of oppression, power is power over somebody. If you have more power, somebody has less power. That's the whole messed up view on that. Maybe that is part of how it can play out but it maybe doesn't have to. I recently had an experience that showed me a whole different dimension of power.
I recently started working with horses. Horses are big animals for over 100,000 pounds and if you try to like force them into something you'll quickly understand that kind of power does not work. What works is the power of connection to yourself, connection to your body, connection to your intention, and connection to the horse. I was in a round pin with a horse at liberty, so there were no lead ropes or anything. The horse is there. I'm there. She has a really big alpha mare and she knows it. I'm tasked with asking her to move around, to start walking and running. My trainer’s like, ‘Go ahead and make an ask. Communicate your intention and energy.’ I start communicating. Nothing. I tap in a little deeper. Nothing, nothing at all. My trainer asks, ‘What are you feeling right now? What are you feeling in your body?’ I'm like, ‘Well, I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling ineffective. Nothing is happening.’ And he's like, ‘Gather everything that you're feeling and really go there.’ I gathered everything that I was feeling and that actually required a lot of vulnerability. I dropped into a deeper level of conviction and decided to make an ask from a deeper place and bring out more of my power. And I did. And she started going fast. She was a little pissed because I brought so much energy. She was like, ‘I didn't really want to do it. But okay, I'll play.’
It was eye opening how vulnerable it felt to go into my power. It was vulnerable. That was not something I knew about. I thought being vulnerable is when you cry, or when you allow others to see you in your weak moments or in your anger. But the vulnerability in power…that was completely new to me and completely shifted my relationship and understanding of what that is. So I would love to hear you speak about your experiences with power and if you've come across this power vulnerability dynamic?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. So there's a lot I want to say. First, just to acknowledge working with horses. I don't think there's been a class at the academy where one student didn't have a breakthrough or a story about understanding true power and communication through an experience with a horse. The human body doesn't lie, but we can be disconnected from it. Animal bodies are not disconnected from it. And the fact that a horse is so huge, right?
Dr. Valerie Rein: They don't bullshit.
Kasia Urbaniak: They don't. And actually, if we closely examine human bodies, in the most subtle form, it's the same thing.
You talked about this feeling of vulnerability when it comes to accessing the kind of power over a horse.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I thought I was going to die. Ironically, well maybe not ironically, we all teach what we're here to learn. I'm my own student who catches up to the content like two years into me teaching it. But ironically, that's what I talk about. Patriarchy and a woman's relationship with her power. It does feel like mortal danger stepping into our power. The trauma all along. For me like experiencing that actually was very eye-opening. Like I'm gonna die, literally, if I go and reveal my true power at this moment.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. And I think that anytime – and I'm sure you've seen this too – we start moving closer to describing the embodied experience, the experience of the body, suddenly language becomes slippery and tricky. So what's vulnerable? Because we have a lot of ideas, and the feeling is the feeling. You can have the feeling without knowing how to describe it. One thing is the almost linguistic assumptions about power and being in control, being in power, have a tensing quality. Like, I am going to use squeeze my fist into my knuckles turn white right. Our ideas about power on a bigger scale, in the political realm, mirror the mental assumption that's absolutely false. The way you can't bullshit a horse, you also can't bullshit reality for very long. Right? So a tyrant, a dictator, uses the white knuckle force to oppress. It's not power, but because of how we think about things, we might say that dude has all the guns, all the money, is shooting people, and owns everything. But we all know the greater the tension, the more fragile and temporary that power is. The people revolt and another one takes its place. The cycle continues.
When we talk about power, I think one of the fundamental misunderstandings we have is basically what power is. I'm not saying that true power is actually a soft, loving power. I mean cold, hard reality. It's not effective. It's not powerful or energy-efficient to oppress a nation as a tyrant. Having power over another human being with force, manipulation, shaming – what that does is the person you have power over, just like the people you have power, are not at liberty to share their deepest resources, their talents, their passion. They're not absolutely on board.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oppressing women through patriarchy. Oppressing people of color through racism and control.
Kasia Urbaniak: In terms of the cold, hard definition of power, the oppressor is depriving themselves, as well as the rest of society, of the resources that would be available. So it's actually not powerful.
So back to the horse. That feeling of vulnerability, or that feeling of mortal danger. Your territory: trauma, stress, reaction. To be in a powerful communion as a top, as someone in charge, with an animal, requires connection to oneself. It requires a complete circuit of energy. The energy is moving through you into the horse. You into the people you're leading. You into the submissive.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Love this.
“Anything that’s not alive with a current of energy of the life force is not powerful.”
Kasia Urbaniak: You as a parent, as somebody who's in charge. And the reality is that we do occupy poles of power. Sometimes we are students with a teacher, and sometimes we're the teacher with the student. The misunderstanding around power is that anything that's not alive with a current of energy of the life force is not powerful. You have to plug something into a wall to get the electric current. When there's power, there's connection.
Dr. Valerie Rein: If it’s not alive, it’s not powerful. I just want to just make that connection to the freeze – when we disengage, when we're not in our body. Oh, so good.
Kasia Urbaniak: The pantomime of power: artificial structures, the performance of power. That's not alive. All we have to do is have eyes to see how that does not work. It doesn't last. It doesn't work. The feeling of vulnerability, you could say nervous aliveness or newness, of being powerful in a top position.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Realness. I love realness.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. It's not that different from being in the opposite position. When you open yourself up as somebody who's following. One may be more accustomed to one position or the other, but both require connection. Both require that current, and that's the moment where the synergy and the magic happen. Where you're having a psychic experience with a horse, or two people coming together are able to create far more than one plus one because that current is there. Sometimes that means one person's in charge and one person isn't.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Or sometimes it's like a figure eight. Passing it back and forth. There can be a lot of power inequality. I think that this kind of power is not commonly practiced in our society. What power inequality actually looks like. You lead then I lead.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. In some ways, it's maybe getting worse on a bodily level. It's hard. People aren't even making eye contact. You have to bend cues, receive them, really be present with somebody.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh gosh, I don't want to end on this note. The reality is that there is so much disconnection and trauma. This is actually one of the symptoms of trauma. Disconnection is one of the telltale signs of trauma: to be disconnected from yourself, parts of yourself, the wholeness, disconnection from the world, from the other. The pandemic has brought up so much intergenerational trauma. It has been so traumatic. I don't think we’re even beginning to understand how it has deeply impacted us on a physiological level and what it means. But again, I don’t want to leave it all want like a depressing note.
Let's talk about how people can come out and play in restoring their power and reconnecting to themselves. How they can play in your community, where they can find you? What breadcrumbs can we leave for people in terms of that rediscovery of themselves in their power?
Kasia Urbaniak: I don't know what to say right now. Riffing off the pandemic, one of the best things that’s happening is that a lot of people are experiencing a path to embodiment and a path to feeling. Coming out of this time period, especially women, are learning to trust what they feel. The extra edge of pain, fear, or attention. In a lot of ways, we have a leg up on the men who are conditioned and trained to not feel in a way that presents an advantage.
I think going forward, between what's happening to the planet, the body of the earth, and what’s happening with technology, there's a counter pull. I think women are the pioneers of the frontier of that counter pull. Being in the body, of feeling, of trusting nature and natural processes, trusting what the feeling sense internally says about any decision, mundane or profound.
There's been this really strong split between self-development and activism. I'm doing something to improve my life, or I'm doing something to improve the world. To improve the world is sacrifice. To improve my life is being selfish. Here, we stand up this wonderful, fruitful crux. You listen to yourself and your body to make mundane, selfish, or selfless decisions. It doesn't matter. The moment we do that, we are remaking culture, we are influencing other women, and we're making decisions that are more in harmony with what is needed all around. It's this wonderful practice of caring for oneself and everything at the same time by listening to the deepest parts of ourselves. One of the most beautiful discoveries is the collapse of ‘selfless’ and ‘selfish’. Those two distinctions don't exist if you're embodied. It only exists if you're disembodied. If you're half out of your body, you can be greedy and never satisfied. But if you're in your body, you get full.
“One of the most beautiful discoveries is the collapse of ‘selfless’ and ‘selfish’. Those two distinctions don’t exist if you’re embodied. It only exists if you’re disembodied. If you’re half out of your body, you can be greedy and never satisfied. But if you’re in your body, you get full.”
On that note, if anybody listening is interested in hearing more about the exercises or games I would suggest to explore living from an embodied way and shamelessly occupying your own power, you can read my book Unbound, or go to our website.
This is going to be a really fascinating few decades for humanity, and women occupy an important part in that. And I feel honored that you invited me to speak with you.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, gosh, I feel the same way. I feel grateful to women in our communities who have been tagging us in each other's posts saying, ‘We want to hear you two in conversation.’ What a gift. I could talk to you for years, and I hope we will.
It’s such a perfect time to have this conversation. I'm sharing a series on my channel right now on trauma, reactions, adaptations, and later today, I'm going to be talking about the freeze. It all comes together so beautifully.
I love what you said about this collapse of the delusion of ‘selfish’ and ‘selfless’. It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher, whose name escapes me right now, who said, ‘We only need morality because we cannot love’. To me, that is that ultimate bridge. Morality is something external, but when you love from a deeply embodied place, you can do that wrong. That's power.
Thank you so much for this. I look forward to more opportunities to play together.
Kasia Urbaniak: Thank you so much.
Support is Sexy Podcast: How to Get Over "Good Girl" Conditioning and Own Your Power with Kasia Urbaniak
“You have no say in what you want.
You have no say in what you want.
You don’t make your desires. You have no say in what you want.
You do have a say in what you do about it.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher
Connect with the host:
Elayne Fluker
Instagram: @elaynefluker
LinkedIn: Elayne Fluker
Support is Sexy
Instagram: @supportissexy
Read the transcript:
Intro: Hi all, welcome to a new episode of Support is Sexy. My name is Sarah Tulloch and I am Elayne’s content coordinator. Today I will be introducing our guest Kasia Urbaniak. Kasia is the co-founder of The Academy, a company that teaches women to increase their power, agency and influence in all areas of their lives. While it looks like she has it all figured out now, Kasia had to fight to get to where she is and who she is today. For the first six years of her life, she grew up on the road surrounded by musicians. But everything changed when she had to go to school for the first time ever. Sitting in a classroom for eight hours a day was a huge shock to her and it kick-started her rebellious personality into high gear. She needed to do things differently. She wanted to live a different life than the one her school was pushing her towards. So Kasia rebelled and she kept rebelling until she found the new and exciting life that she was looking for. Cut to today. Kasia became a professional dominatrix, has practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, and founded The Academy with her partner, Ruben Flores. In this episode, Kasia tells our host, Elayne Fluker, how she used rebellion to find freedom and The Academy's mission to increase women's power wherever they go. Now here's our host Elaine Fluker and our guest Kasia Urbaniak.
Elayne: So Kasia, thank you so much for joining us for an episode of Support is Sexy. I'm excited to chat with you today.
Kasia: I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you.
Elayne: Of course. So our first question for you. When did you first fall in love with entrepreneurship?
Kasia: Oh, well, I don't even think I knew I was an entrepreneur or had a business until years in. I was raised by musicians, spent the first six years of my life on tour with them, and always thought of myself as an artist. When school began, it was definitely a series of artistic social experiments. It wasn't until my business partner – and at that time life partner, Ruben Flores – was like, ‘Hey, I think we have a business. I think we need to do some documents.’
But there is a great similarity between the self-employed musician and the entrepreneur. Namely, you're creating things out of thin air, you're responding to people and you're consistently having to check conventional wisdom against your own common sense, experience and intuition. So I am an unexpected entrepreneur.
Elayne: I'm so intrigued by your life on the road for the first six years of your life. How do you think that shaped who you are as a person today and as an entrepreneur? You just shared some of the similarities.
Kasia: It shaped my life in such such such profound ways. You see, on the road, me and my little sister, who's only a year and a half younger, traveled with the band and the roadies, and there was an incredible sense of purpose. My parents are jazz musicians so they gigged a lot and it was mostly throughout Europe. A new city every night or every three nights. Together we all saw ourselves as an essential part of the collective. So it might have been a really silly job, like in every train station I knew where the french fries were so that was my job as a five-year-old.
Elayne: That is a very important job, even today.
Kasia: When they were carrying all the equipment, I would carry the tambourine. There was an organic sense that I was not only part of the whole but useful and important. When normal parents or parents in different circumstances struggle with getting their kids to bed, there was no trouble with getting me and my sister to bed because we were tired and we were getting ready for the next day.
Now here's the pivot. Here's the crazy part that happened. I had to start school. I was sitting in a strict, Catholic school in first grade at a desk facing forward for eight hours a day with other students. The difference between me and them was that I was in absolute shock. It was like a fall from grace. It was I didn't understand why I needed to be there.
Elayne: Did it seem almost like a punishment?
Kasia: It was more than punishment. It was absolute confusion. I didn't understand why I needed to sit. Because of my earlier upbringing, these questions would organically arise in me. Why do I need to sit here? Why do I need to say back what they said to me? Why can't we run around? Why can't we talk to each other? It made school confounding and difficult. I think from that moment, I started looking for a new way to do things. So even at a very young age 10, 12, 14, I became very obsessed with is there another way? I would play this game where I had a sheet of computer paper and on each sheet, I would design a country with its own laws, its own flag, and I would get my classmates to sing the national anthems and later on the currency…we had crazy ideas together. I was obsessed with finding a different way because, in grade one, I was very shockingly introduced something that nobody could explain to me why we were here, why we were doing this, what we were doing.
Elayne: It's interesting because in the first six years of your life you’d done what a lot of adults hadn't even done. A lot of travel and going to different cities, like you said, a new city every day. It's not something that most children experience before the first grade so I can imagine that was an adjustment. You talked about creating your own countries and those things in school. How would you describe your personality overall, would you say that you were very much a leader?
Kasia: Because of the circumstances I was in, I was more rebellious than I was a leader.
Elayne: Did people label you as rebellious or do you think now looking back that you are more of a leader?
Kasia: No, I was clearly antagonistic. I was a rebel. I wasn't just saying, ‘why do we have to do this?’ I was like, ‘I'm not doing this. I don't know if I can actually stomach doing this.’ I was a very difficult student that way. I was obsessive and completely unrealistic. I was very intellectual and heady which also befuddled all my teachers because I was a terrible student. I remember there was one moment when my mother was losing her mind because everybody in class was reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was reading Hamlet. I was like, ‘Hamlet is much more interesting.’ I was inappropriate but also kind of shy. People don't expect this about me but I'm pretty introverted. And obsessive about finding another way, not taking things at face value. Wondering if there's another way that human beings live and organize themselves. Being unrealistic and sometimes inappropriate are two qualities that stayed with me from childhood to this day, and I'm very grateful they never got trained out of me.
Elayne: Yeah, I say that about entrepreneurship. At least for me, in my experience, it's believing that the impossible is possible and figuring out the impossible possibilities. It's impossible, but let's see if we can figure that out. How can we make this a reality?
Kasia: Especially things that are needed. A lot of things that are needed and we don't know how to. They're necessary, there's a need for them, and they seem impossible. If there is a need for it, ‘the how’ is usually found one way or another.
Elayne: I always say, ‘Let go of the how.” Look at the need first and the possibilities.
Was there a point in your journey when you realized that conventional nine-to-five was not going to work for you? You told us in the beginning that you and your partner got to a point where you said, ‘Okay, we have a business here.’ But even before that, when did your entrepreneurial journey really start?
Kasia: That's difficult to say. When did my entrepreneurial journey start? Okay, this is gonna sound kind of wild.
Elayne: We expect that. You're a rebel.
Kasia: When I was maybe 16, I read the Dune books, you know, Frank Herbert's sci-fi Dune books. There's a big movie coming out on the first book of the series. It's this intergalactic saga, but in it, there is a secret society of women that are pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes. They're called the Bene Gesserit. The leaders of the Bene Gesserit are called Reverend Mothers. When I was 16 and people were having conversations about what you want to be when you grow up, I was like, ‘I want to be a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother.
Elayne: Of course.
Kasia: I even remember saying things to my guidance counselor like, ‘I want to write essays, but I don't want to be an essayist. And I want them to go out immediately.’ Basically, I was describing blogs before blogs existed. This school that ended up getting started – almost against my will – very very much feels like my dream of being a Reverend Mother in the Bene Gesserit. It definitely feels like a secret society of women becoming powerful. Not so secret society now, but it definitely has that mystical, magical, wonderful feeling of women doing incredible things. I remember in the early days of the school, some of our women were in some pretty high power positions. They would use our tools for asking to make an outrageous ask, and we would see the result in the evening news and be like, ‘Oh, she did it! Now there's this particular program now that wasn't there before.’ Or, ‘There's this big business decision was made to shift everything. She did it!’
Elayne: Tell us about the school so everyone knows what you're referring to. This is your school, The Academy, right?
Kasia: Yeah.
Elayne: Tell everyone about that how that works and how it came to be.
Kasia: The Academy is a school for power. And we're really careful to use the word power, not empowerment. Empowerment is a wonderful word, but we want to be clear that we teach women tools of claiming and gaining power, and it's not a feeling of being powerful. It's not something that you do alone in a room or just in the class, you feel powerful. You can actually show that you have the skills to have your impact show up in the world. You have powerful relationships with people where what you're giving is honored and what you receive is the thing you want.
It started in the wildest, weirdest, most magical, wonderful way. I have 17 years of experience being a professional dominatrix while I was studying to be a Taoist nun. Which meant I was learning martial arts, I was learning medical diagnosis, I was learning how to body read people and on this spiritual path. To fund it, I was a dominatrix. It profoundly impacted how I did these sessions in a dungeon because I was practicing my Taoist skills in body reading, in moving people's energy in this unconventional context.
When I met my business partner, Ruben, he had just spent close to a decade working for Doctors Without Borders as a humanitarian building field hospitals in war zones. Our conversations about what power is in his context, even in a situation where he has to negotiate the ability to build a hospital in a hostile territory and negotiate with people, none of whom speak the same language. How much the body, your energy, your presence, how you use your attention, how that translates into power. These were experiences I'd been having in the monasteries and in the dungeon for years. This conversation started out as: How does one communicate power? Specifically, what are the stumbling blocks that women come across when it comes to making a powerful request or a command? What are the stumbling blocks when wanting to be heard or have your tender needs met?
So we started experimenting in our living room. We started inviting couples and women to come over, and we started these experiments. Interventions in their communications, pointing out things that each one was doing or not seeing that they were doing. I started writing some of the findings on Facebook, and the women who had come to the living room for the experiments and the ones who were following along with my writing started asking for a workshop. Both Ruben and I were like, ‘We want to be artists now. We don't want to teach.’ They were like, ‘Workshop! Workshop!’ We reluctantly did the first one, but there were eight times more people signing up for the first one than there was room for. We were like, “Great. This is gonna be a side gig.’ It turned into the most intense six-year laboratory experience of my life.
One of the things that entrepreneurs and artists have in common, that I see in the school so much, is that you really can't do it alone. We learned so much from our students. We learned so much from what happens in this process. It's never a singular lightbulb idea that you then pay others to execute the vision. There's this dynamic organic process that happens with people that is so much more powerful when it's inclusive. It's collaborative.
There's a synergy that happens. It becomes a living organism, and that living organism has a heartbeat. What's great about a business that feels like a living organism is that it has the ability to provide more and sustain itself, to create momentum. It's not planting one seed that creates a fruit. It's planting one seed that creates a fruit that has more seeds that keep growing and growing and growing. That may be a little esoteric, but the thing is if the artwork or the project or the business has a heartbeat, it has its own needs, it has its own essence, and it also provides a lot more.
Elayne: What would you say that being a dominatrix for 17 years taught you personally about the dynamics of power?
Kasia: It taught me a lot. It taught me a lot about men too. It taught me a lot about how much a power dynamic is built on how you use your attention. In animal hierarchies, the alpha has their attention out on everyone and is giving instruction and the submissives. The followers are paying attention to themselves to check whether they're following orders or not. If they're currently in line or not.
One of the big themes I talk about in my book, Unbound – A Woman’s Guide to Power, and in the school is something we call good girl conditioning. We’re basically taught from a very young age to pay attention to how we are, not what we're doing. To check ourselves, to police ourselves, to self-attack ourselves if we're falling out of line, and that is a very inward submissive state of attention. If a woman in a powerful position is communicating with a man in a power position, the tendency will be that his attention will be out and he'll be giving instructions regardless of the nature of the conversation, and she will have her attention inward checking herself.
“The communication that happens with words is one level of communication. Where the attention is and how it feels is the second level of communication. That second level of communication is so important because if the words tell the other person what to think, the second level of communication tells the other person how to feel about it. ”
The communication that happens with words is one level of communication. Where the attention is and how it feels is the second level of communication. That second level of communication is so important because if the words tell the other person what to think, the second level of communication tells the other person how to feel about it.
Back to your actual question, which is what did I learn in the dungeon? What I learned happened when I started training other women at the dungeon to become dominatrixes. I saw the places where they stumbled. Their attention would be too inward. It would be like, ‘Here I am performing a powerful pose. You’re a bad boy.’ But their attention was actually not sinking deeply, strongly onto the client, the submissive. I noticed there's an absolute reluctance for women to, even with their attention and questions, invade the space of a man. That it feels very taboo. Yet it's very natural for men to do so. It's very natural for mothers, for example, to do that with their children. It's not a foreign state of attention following a new thing. It's about when we use it and how we use it. That's one of the things I learned.
The other thing is a long list of myths about what men think and what men do and what men want.
Elayne: You know you're going to have to share your top 3 myths with us. Teach us your ways, Kasia. But before you do, thank you for sharing this idea of attention. About women focusing so much on their performance and what they're doing as opposed to – let me know if I got this wrong – not even just that they weren't focusing their attention on the client but they also had hang ups about invading that space. I think that speaks to women's conditioning or good girl conditioning, us being conditioned not to invade a man’s space. If you think about even in a corporate setting, not speaking up, someone mansplaining something to us and not feeling empowered to say, ‘I already know what that means.’ As you were explaining it, I was thinking about how many times I've personally been in that situation when I'm unaware of it, but hearing you say it I was like, ‘Wow, that's an example of how a lot of us feel like we need to exist.’
Kasia: Yeah, and I have to add something to that. When you do this thing that I'm saying can feel like we're being invasive. It's also an act of power. It's an act of influence. But it's also an act of love. It's an act of caring. We've done these experiments where we tried to break down Woman in a Meeting syndrome, what is it going to take for a woman to get heard? When a woman kills it in a presentation and has a whole room captivated versus when her words fall flat or she's talked over gets shut down and doesn't know how to recover. This isn't a game of blaming women. This is just the reality of how many of us, not all of us, were raised and the impact of that.
To have your attention and instruction out fully, there's something magical that happens to the body of the other person or people, which is they relax. You can see it visibly, their bodies shifting to a submissive mode where they're able to listen and receive. They're able to hear the instructions, the information. Until they shift into that mode, they're not following. They're still sitting there leading with their own opinions or leading in some form. They don't recognize you as leading at that moment. When a woman can put her attention out onto one person or onto a group in that powerful way and speak, it is an act of love. It is an act of caring, ‘I am holding all of you, it is safe for you to release everything you're thinking about, relax into listening to what I'm saying, and receive, consider and hear the message that I am transmitting with my words, my mind, my emotions, my body, my being, my presence.’ That element of presence, that element of authority, that element that all those pieces people talk about as confidence. People talk about all these other ways, and they miss the most important part, which is how much of your attention is out in order to hold people so they feel safe enough to surrender into listening? Can we trust this alpha leader for one comment, for one minute, or for an hour, for a presentation? Can we trust her to take care of us? If she exhibits that she's paying attention to the whole pack or to that whole being, there's a visible shift that happens in the body, they relax and can listen with all of themselves.
We are rightfully terrified of men. We have traumatic experiences. The thing is you don't need to overcome all of those things in order to do these practices. In order to spend 10 minutes, five minutes, one hour getting your message across, getting what you need, getting what you want, getting your request deeply considered. If you remember to use your attention in a way that's kind of unconventional for most of us in certain settings.
Elayne: Beautiful. These are things that The Academy teaches?
Kasia: Absolutely.
Elayne: How would you say, for those who are listening, that we can step into that power, whether it's for a minute on social media, in a presentation in a board room, or whatever the setting is? How do we step into that power and show that we are focusing our attention on the room or the recipient of whomever our message is meant to reach? Are there some tips or steps or practices that people can do starting today? I think people might be having a harder time with this because we’re not even in a room with a lot of people right now, because we're talking during the time of the pandemic, so people really need to know how to communicate their messages.
Kasia: There are a few levels of answer to this question, as there are a few levels of training in order to be able to hold a room powerfully or get your message heard. The really simple trick, the most superficial one, is to maintain the level of curiosity about where other people are at. Curiosity has this wonderful quality of reaching inward towards others – so it guides your attention inward towards others – but not coming to any conclusion. So while you're speaking, maintaining curiosity is really helpful, paradoxically, in coming across in an authoritative way.
But I would say that the precursor to that is the inside job. The inside job has a lot to do with identifying what you want very specifically, precisely, and honestly. We have a lot of tools and exercises around desire and asking for that purpose. When a woman is very clear on what she wants out of that presentation, what she wants out of that job, what kind of synergy she wants among her team, when she's clear on what she wants, and it's right-sized – meaning it's big enough to get her up in the morning, it's big enough to make any fear or hesitation worthwhile – then most of the job’s already done. Because the rest of it is, ‘I have this incredible gift even if it's a request opportunity to share, look what you could get out of it.’ Once you take care of the inside, you can just focus on leading others to where you want them to be.
That is a question that I could answer with the entire curriculum of the school, The Academy. When you find yourself stuck in a situation where you're inside, inside, inside, and can't get out. Asking someone else a question can oftentimes help break that pattern because they have to pay attention to themselves in order to answer the question, and you have to pay attention to them in order to get the answer. That's also a little trick, but we need more than little tricks.
Elayne: We need the curriculum. We need to sign up for The Academy.
Kasia: This isn't me pitching, but there is a lot of information and exercises in the website itself that women can get for free without paying a dime. Just because right now the world needs powerful women leading the way. I mean, what more evidence do you need? Just look at the countries that are coping best with Covid19.
Elayne: They’re all led by women, absolutely.
Kasia: 50/50 isn't even enough. Men, you're wonderful. Now step aside. Let us take a turn for millennia. We won't even need that much time. We have wonderful things to do.
Elayne: You're right, we could probably do it in half the time. You're so right and you're definitely not pitching. I’m an advocate for what I've seen of The Academy from the outside looking in. I was looking at your website again today before our call and diving into your blog posts. What you talked about with asking, I mean this whole podcast is around the importance of women, especially successful or ambitious women, knowing how to ask for support so I do want to dive into that.
Before we move on, I do want to ask you, based on your experience, what are one or two myths that a lot of women have about men, the dynamics of power and how this misunderstanding might be holding them back?
Kasia: Yeah, one thing is the assumption that men don't want to serve. What I mean by that is what I’ve found, especially in heterosexual relationships, and I know we're talking about business, but it ends up translating. What happens is the man wants to make the woman happy but doesn't know how. The woman, with her conditioning and training, will either say really vague things that are not actually instructions. Like, ‘I want you to respect me more. I want more quality time. I want you to be more affectionate with me.’ Those sound like requests but they're not. How do you know what ‘more affection’ means? How do you know what respect means? How do you know in order to lead someone? The best relationships, whether they're professional, romantic, between two women, or family members, are the ones where people take turns leading and following so they can learn from each other in a conversation. The listener doesn't stay listener the whole time, they switch. The listener and the speaker take turns.
The assumption is that men are kind of a ‘no’ to doing a lot of things for women, but the truth is women withhold a lot and they're not specific with their requests. So say ‘more affection’ could mean two hours of cuddle time, watching Netflix without any other electronics. It could mean something very different. It could mean a particular kind of sex. It could mean taking out the trash. Say in this heterosexual marriage, the man is constantly guessing, he's trying to serve but he doesn't know whether it's a bouquet of flowers or taking out the trash that's going to make her feel loved and respected. He's lost. So that's one thing. If you know how to make an ask that feels good, that lights you up when you ask and is specific enough – has a beginning, middle, and end – so when it's done, you can actually test if that's the thing you wanted. You can go, ‘Oh wow, yet he did that.’ That's one thing. It raises them up. Men love to get it right.
Elayne: Yeah, remember an ex of mine. We're still friends. One of the things he told me is the hardest thing for a man is to feel like he's disappointed his woman again. We're talking about heterosexual relationships in this case, but he was like feeling like you’ve disappointed them or didn't live up to something, that is one of the most difficult things. So as you said, even if it's a lack of clarity around what you really want and you are disappointed, they can sense you’re disappointed. Neither one of you is communicating why. It can be tough.
Kasia: Yes. Also when the asks do come out, they're usually in the form of complaints. ‘Why don't you ever?’ A lot of the requests end up being not inspired or big enough. They're the kind of asks that get you from below zero to zero. Like, fix this thing that's wrong in our dynamic or in our professional relationship, right? It's not the one that's big enough to create inspiration. It's much more exciting to move into something that feels a little bit more outrageous, that's generative, that could create a new vision and new adventure than it is to ask for one that goes from the negatives to a baseline. ‘Okay, now that bad thing no longer exists. It's okay.’ It's like the carrot isn't juicy enough.
I could go on and on and on about the things I learned in a dungeon about men. One of them just had to do with bodies, body image, and body shame. Men love lots of different kinds of bodies.
Elayne: That there's not one particular ideal.
Kasia: No, it's something that we really strongly carry, I think.
Elayne: The dungeon. Is that what you refer to as a particular place, or does that just reference whatever space you’re in as a dominatrix?
Kasia: A professional dominatrix works in a dungeon just like a postal worker works in a post office.
Elayne: Got it. I want to talk about asking and the power of asking. I know this is something that's very much a part of your work. The power of women; knowing how to make an outrageous ask.
So how do you personally define an outrageous ask? And how do we get the courage to make those kind of asks?
Kasia: It's hard to talk about that without talking about the good girl conditioning that makes asking difficult.
Elayne: Okay.
“If a woman listening finds asking difficult or finds a particular kind of asking difficult – whether it’s financial, erotic, tender and vulnerable, or things that sound bossy and controlling – there’s a reason for it.
It’s not your own personal psychological weakness. It’s not a lack of confidence. It’s not a lack of self-love.
It is millennia of training.”
Kasia: If a woman listening finds asking difficult or finds a particular kind of asking difficult – whether it's financial, erotic, tender and vulnerable, or things that sound bossy and controlling – there's a reason for it.
It's not your own personal psychological weakness. It's not a lack of confidence. It's not a lack of self-love.
It is millennia of training.
For so long, the most a woman could hope for, the best and only place where she could channel her dreams and ambitions, was to marry well. In order to be a good candidate for marriage, there are certain qualities and conditionings that we have unconsciously promoted in order to be a great candidate for any marriage. We are still living that paradigm because things only changed and are changing right now. It's only been a few years in terms of human history. A good girl is good natured, cheery and accommodating. She does a ton of invisible labor. She's never too much. She never outshines anyone. She also never falls behind. She responds in a timely fashion. She never keeps anyone waiting. She's always two steps ahead. She definitely, definitely, definitely is low maintenance, super resourceful, can make do with whatever the household has, doesn't ask because she doesn't need, she makes do. She's easy to handle. She's not a burden. She's an asset. And she's really great at maintaining the status quo.
There's nothing bad about being of service. There's nothing bad about any of these qualities. My personal issue with them is when they come up without being chosen. If we are of service, but we are not consciously aware of it, there is no choice. Without awareness, there is no choice. Where there's no choice, there's just servitude.
That's exactly what comes up when women are faced with asking. They're in this double bind. They're afraid of being too much and too little at the same time. Bossy and needy. They're afraid that if they ask they'll be in debt. Afraid that asking makes them look weak. If they ask in a powerful way, they come across again as bossy. There is a feeling that they should be able to do it alone, to be resourceful enough. This also translates into the masculine John Wayne myth that you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, which is physically impossible and a total lie because men have invisible support systems everywhere. One of which is wives, right?
So in the school, and if there are some adventurous listeners listening right now, we do this exercise called The Asking Practice. Which starts like this.
Read the sentence, “I could ask _____ for _____.”
And you fill in the first blank with the name of a person, and the second blank with something you want or you think you want. It is incredible what comes up when a woman does this exercise. These are just imaginary asks, you don't have to ask them in real life. It's so confronting just to write down 50 or 100 imaginary asks. All of this stuff comes up. ‘If I ask for this, I will look like this.’ ‘If I asked for this, I will be in debt and I will have to repay the favor.’ ‘If I even admit that I want this, they might do it and I don't want to give them the satisfaction.’ The entire landscape that holds all of these outdated mental ideas starts getting released. With it a lot of emotion comes.
As that list grows we have them do asks that specifically are needy, specifically are bossy, specifically are financial, erotic, tender. Ones that are practical, ones that would make you seem lazy if you had somebody else do it for you. Remember, this is just an inventory in the imagination.
Right now, I'm teaching a class called ‘Ask Anyone of Anything at Any Time.’ So this is very topical. It's such a huge inner expansion that happens. Working through how all of a sudden you don't remember anybody's name anymore. The imagination dies. You have to bring it back to life.
You asked a specific question about what we call an outrageous ask. An outrageous ask is big enough to change the relationship, to change the status quo. It changes the role of the other person. A lot of women think that men – and again, I don't mean to be specifically talking so much about men, because this curriculum works with power for women with everyone – but in the case of men, a lot of women think that if they ask less of a man they're doing them a favor. Your asks indicate the kind of role you're putting them in. Ask less of them. Many of my students find that they have been putting their significant others in the role of useless worm couch potato. Not making an inspiring, big enough, outrageous ask that would have him show up as a hero or show up as somebody phenomenal in their lives.
Another thing is finding the right size ask. Remember how I mentioned before the ask takes you from a complaint to zero, everything's okay. An outrageous ask goes above that so that the ask creates an inspired opportunity. What's outrageous to one person is not going to be outrageous to another person. This is a body test. Do I want this? Does this feel compelling, exciting, and terrifying? Am I likely going to get a no to this? Which is also another exciting opportunity. So those are some of the qualities of an outrageous ask because they're game changers. They change the status quo. They change the relationship.
“This is a really good time with what’s happening in the world for people to balance and redefine their relationships with everyone in their lives. Asking is a great way to do it.”
This is a really good time with what's happening in the world for people to balance and redefine their relationships with everyone in their lives. Asking is a great way to do it.
Elayne: Do you think when you have women do the exercise of filling in a name and then an ask, even though as you said it's just imaginary or an exercise for the imagination, do you find that most women get more caught up on the person they're asking or what the ask actually is? I ask that because I think sometimes it is the ask itself, sometimes it is worry about the judgment of the person that we might be asking, or sometimes it's both. I just wonder if you've seen women get caught up on one part or the other more?
Kasia: The specific nature of this exercise is to open up the inner landscape. So we encourage women to include as many names as possible, as many requests as possible, and branch out even to your third grade teacher because this is an exercise in the imagination. If they're getting caught up on a particular person or a particular ask, it's because they're not asking broadly enough, in terms of what they could possibly want, or who they're including – who makes the cut, who doesn't make the cut. Usually the first thing is you only get family members, significant others, co-workers. The people who are closest and not going further out. It's actually easiest to practice some of these things with people who are a little bit further out. The idea is to open up the inner landscape. Every woman will see something in this exercise that has her go, ‘Wait a minute, this is an imaginary prison. I could totally ask that. Why? Hmm.’
The other thing in the class is, we give instruction that nobody actually make any of the asks for the first week or two, depending on how long the class is. And the cool part is, in those first two weeks, the things that are written are oftentimes offered by the person that was on the list.
Elayne: They put it out into the universe.
Kasia: Yeah, I mean, you could have a magical approach to this. Like, ‘Wow, that's such a coincidence.’ But really what you do when you do that is you clean up your inner signal.
Elayne: Yep.
Kasia: You regard the other person. It's very easy for, especially the most powerful, independent women who have done it by themselves and do everything, to regard others as how they've shown up in response to that. Useless. Once you put someone on a list and start regarding them as potentially not useless, how the subtlest signals get sent and received start to change. You become more open to receiving that and they can feel that it's safer to offer some of that.
Elayne: They can sense that even if they don't know that you've just done this exercise where you put their name on the list.
Kasia: After doing this exercise with 1000s of women over the years, we have not had a single class where the first two weeks things on the list did not happen by themselves. It always happens.
Elayne: I believe it. I remember a friend of mine, Dawn Shadrick – I took this workshop, called Momentum, in New York a few years ago, changed my life totally – and we were talking about relationships. She told me about creating space in your life when you're looking for a partner. Even from the point of, ‘Do you have room in your closet for this person to be in your space? Where does this person fit into your life?’ In my mind, I was thinking, ‘What do you mean? That doesn't make sense?’ I'm being more practical, like they're not gonna move in right away. But it was this idea of in your mind, in your energy, just like you just said, creating space for this person that you want to come into your life.
Kasia: That is the perfect metaphor.
Elayne: And I am very conscious of that now. My closet has a little bit of room in it. Somebody could squeeze in there.
So I want to ask you, Kasia, before you go. We've talked about asking making an outrageous ask, but what about hearing, ‘no’? How do we handle ‘no’ and how do we not think that ‘no’ says whatever we think it says about us?
Kasia: First thing, how one feels about ‘no’ is dependent upon your previous experiences with it. So getting my students to have positive experiences with the word ‘no’ is challenging, number one.
To backtrack a little bit. Remember that I mentioned that we are raised to police ourselves? We are raised to have our attention inward? Women will often times default to an inward state of attention, which can be beautiful because it means we tend to be more attracted to meditation, yoga, and inward practices. But also the dark side of this is that when we hear ‘no’ we don't hear no to the request, we hear ‘no’ to us. The pain of hearing not just ‘no’ to the request, but, ‘You had no right to ask.’ So what we need to do is uncross those wires, and have a woman have a positive playful relationship with the word, ‘no’.
How do you do that?
Well, the first thing is realizing really basic truth. When somebody says ‘no’, most of the time it's not because they're trying to be a jerk. Most of the time, it's because it's bringing up something that may threaten something they want to protect, something they care about, something that's important to them. It doesn't matter if it's unimportant to you. It's important to them. Their vanity, order and the rules, or something much more tender. So when someone says ‘no’, I'm not saying to go violate without consent and go, ‘Why not? You're stupid.’ Right? I'm saying ‘no’ is actually where a very new conversation begins. Because if they're saying no to protect something they care about, that is an opportunity for an immense amount of intimacy. You wouldn't call it intimacy in a professional situation; in a professional situation you’d call it potential for collaboration, for strengthening the relationship, for understanding what the goals are. When you're faced with ‘no’, the first thing to do is make sure you're keeping your attention on them. When a woman hears ‘no’, her tendency is to attract all of our attention back onto herself, feel the pain, go, ‘ow’. The other person feels energetically dropped. If you stay with them and get curious. Don't use the words, ‘Why not?’, because those words feel very attack-like. But get curious about what this ‘no’ is trying to protect. What does this person care about that this ‘no’ is necessary for?
If you show care and interest in the thing that they're trying to protect, a lot of the time the ‘no’ will vanish on its own. The person themselves will feel safe enough with your request that their ‘no’ becomes a ‘yes’. Other times you have a desire, they have something to protect meaning they have a desire, you can start a new conversation that gets both of you what you want and you're on a whole other level.
“Here’s the thing about getting a ‘yes’. It’s already part of the status quo. It’s already there. The land of ‘yes’ doesn’t have a lot of transformation in it. It’s great to get yeses. It’s even better to get ‘no’. ”
Here's the thing about getting a ‘yes’. It's already part of the status quo. It's already there. The land of ‘yes’ doesn't have a lot of transformation in it. It's great to get yeses. It's even better to get ‘no’.
When you get ‘no’ and can navigate that skillfully, you start creating really powerful relationships with people. Really powerful ideas. Something new can be generated. Getting a ‘no’ is better than a ‘yes’.
My oldest students, when they hear ‘no’, they go, ‘Hell yes. Let's get in there. Let's find out. Let's get to work.’ This requires a little bit of practice and training because the first part is to not contract into the body.
Elayne: And you also said not to ask, ‘Why not?’ So how do we show our curiosity to that person instead? If the question isn't, ‘Why not?’, what could be a follow up question?
Kasia: There are some softer suggestions, but always depends on context. It's hard to come up with universal answers, but I'll offer some that tend to be a little bit more universal in personal settings.
‘How did it make you feel that I asked you that?’
When you ask, ‘How did it make you feel that I asked you that?’, they can start revealing a little bit about whatever it is that came up for them that had them say ‘no.
‘How does this request sit with you?’
‘What is it about this that makes ‘no’ a good answer for you?’
A lot of the work will be done by having your attention out and by asking curious questions about the person in a way that has them feel safe. The more attention you have out, the more you project that you care about the conversation you're having, you care whether this is going to hurt them or not, the more likely they are to open up.
If this is hard to imagine, just imagine this in reverse. Imagine somebody asks you something and you say ‘no’. Saying ‘no’ is hard sometimes. Now imagine how you would like to be approached. What’s behind that ‘no’ might be very difficult to talk about. You’d rather just say ‘no’ and have it done away with. If somebody is going to approach you and say, ‘Hey, I really care about why you said no. I really care about what it is that you said. What does this mean for you? What is this doing? Is there any way that you could reveal a little bit more so I have a better understanding of what your desires needs, plans, goals, agendas, where you sit with this.’ Wouldn’t that feel amazing instead of just saying ‘no’, or giving a false ‘yes’? And then feeling obliged and weird?
Elayne: Yes, I think too. It's so important. I love that you mentioned to not say, ‘why not?’ Because when you put it into reverse, if I say ‘no’ to something, which is already hard enough, and then using ‘why not?’, then it's doubly hard because then you feel like you have to explain yourself. Which is why I think sometimes people even avoid saying anything. If you reach out to someone, and that's my biggest one of my pet peeves, if you reach out to someone I'm always like, ‘If the answer is no, just tell me.’ That's hard enough, but what people might be fearing is you saying, ‘Why not?’ You know what I mean? That's really so they're like, ‘I'm just not going to say anything. I'm just not going to respond.’
Kasia: Absolutely. It’s not just about taking care of people. The goal is to get what you want, right? We know that tyranny and force doesn't work. It works in the short term, but not in the long term. The ideal way to get somebody to ‘yes’ with something you want, is with their actual consent. With all of them
Elayne: And for them to feel good about it.
Kasia: Yes! So that they want to do it, so that they can contribute their genius, their talents, their time, their heart, their work, their faith, their belief. In order to do that, you have to meet them on all those levels. It seems like a lot of work; it's just an investment up front that gets you so much more in the long term.
Elayne: Last question about this. What do we miss out on by not making an ask? What do you see women especially miss out on because they're afraid to ask for support or make whatever the ask is? They're doing everything themselves, especially as we talked about successful, ambitious women, which are women I speak to. I think sometimes we think, ‘I'll just do it myself. I'm the only one that can do it right.’ Or all these other reasons that we don't make the ask, but how do you articulate what we're really missing out on when we don't make those asks?
Kasia: The cost is tremendous. It's huge. As a last question, this could be an entire interview.
One is we think that if we ask and hurt someone, it's worse than the pain they suffer, the pain the world suffers, the pain the other person suffers by not being asked. You do so much damage to relationships by not asking, so much damage to the nature of a workplace by not asking as you carry the charge of that energy anyway.
One thing that also happens is independent women who have to do it all alone are less likely – they're starting angry and resentful, trying to hide it, white knuckling it – to have anything to contribute to other women who are also following their path.
The biggest cost is that an ask is a confession of a desire, and if half of the world's population struggles with confessing their visions, their dreams, their ideals, their desires, what we have is we're missing half of the world's population’s vision for the world, vision for how a workplace should be, vision for how love should look, how family should look, how religion should look, how all of it should look. Everything is born of desire, and asking is how you invite somebody to see it to collaborate with it. Asking is how you confess it how you expose it. You can use asking, you can use the word ‘inviting’, you can be bossy and say ‘commanding’, whatever it is. That information withheld is one of the most precious hidden resources that we're not tapping into.
Women are doing a lot. I want them asking a lot. I want them speaking a lot from their deepest, most outrageous, most radical, most self-expressed, most unreasonable desires. This is the time to be unreasonable. These are crazy times and it's time for women to be unreasonable.
Elayne: Unreasonable gets stuff done.
Kasia: Yes.
“Women are doing a lot. I want them asking a lot. I want them speaking a lot from their deepest, most outrageous, most radical, most self-expressed, most unreasonable desires. This is the time to be unreasonable. These are crazy times and it’s time for women to be unreasonable. ”
Elayne: So in closing, if you think over your life and career and you had the chance to thank only one person whose support was critical to you, personally or professionally, who would that be and what would you say?
Kasia: Oh wow, there's so many candidates to choose from. I would choose my father. My father was born in Poland during World War II and broke out from behind the Iron Curtain to become a jazz musician who played with Miles Davis and lived around the corner from Carnegie Hall. He's the ultimate unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic person who made the impossible possible. Having that as an example, more than anything else. He has always questioned the rules. He challenged all the record companies. He got into all sorts of trouble. Watching him as a girl and then as a woman, first horrified and embarrassed, and then seeing the sense in what looked senseless, how he just keeps on and kept on being completely unrealistic, following his dreams and his heart, forcing everyone else to adjust to what was most alive. Not to some arbitrary agenda, but to what really had a pulse.
What was beautiful, and I think in watching him, I learned how to worry less about the rules and breaking them and more to question the existence of why they're there in the first place. Because right now there's a lot of rules, especially implicit rules that need breaking.
We need a lot of bad girls to break a lot of rules.
“We need a lot of bad girls to break a lot of rules. ”
Elayne: That’s right. Beautiful. Now, what are the ways that we can support you and tell everyone? I'm sure people want to know about The Academy. Would tell everyone where they can go to find out more about you?
Kasia: Thank you my website is www.weteachpower.com, and on the site is my newly released TED Talk and ways to buy my book, Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power.
Elayne: Excellent. Kasia, thank you so much. I feel like I have so many more questions and so many things we could dive into. You such a vast experience, and you are definitely a woman after my own heart helping other women, especially those who are in positions of power, progressive, or ambitious, to know how to make an ask. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Kasia: Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful.
Elayne: Of course. Now before you go, what's a parting piece of advice from you to our listeners about anything?
Kasia: You have no say in what you want. You have no say in what you want. You don't make your desires. You have no say in what you want. You do have a say in what you do about it.
Elayne: Very good. That's a good one to leave us with. Thank you so much.
Unknowing Podcast: Unbound with Kasia Urbaniak
“Ultimately, this is the goal. That vital feeling to be fully awake. This is why we have to shed our good girl bondage and the compression that comes with it. This goes past congruence and the ability to communicate in a clean way. In a contracted state, it is not only difficult to fully access our power, but it’s hard to feel fully alive.”
Cover art by Marfa Madee
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Podbean
Listen on the Unknowing Podcast site
Read the transcript:
Introduction (Brie): It's interesting to me that we're not trained on power and power dynamics. We spend a lot of time talking about power and power dynamics. We certainly experience the effects of power and the consequences of power when not held well. We're not taught the subtleties of power in our own bodies, or how to wield it, how to utilize it toward creative ends, and co-create in power so that we can have power with as opposed to just power over, which is the dominant paradigm. As a woman growing up in a religious paradigm, I can attest to the fact that I, at least in my experience, was trained how to submit to power, how to defer, deflect, be nice, be good, be sweet, be kind, but definitely don't stand in your own power. Don't shake things up. Don't ask questions. Don't live the questions. Certainly don't get curious about what works, what doesn't. And to follow that inner curiosity, instinct, and intuition into a more wild and expansive life force affirming reality.
Most of us women who broke out of those containers had to do it the hard way and the old way, but there is somebody out there who is actively training women on how to break free and become unbound, how to unknow all the very unhelpful training that many of us women received. Her name is Kasia Urbaniak, founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. I met Kasia through a mutual friend, who within a month of meeting me said, “Oh my god, you remind me so much of my friend Kasia, you have to meet each other. It's just weird.”
After meeting each other on Zoom, and having a couple of conversations, Kasia generously invited me to sit in on a couple of her classes at The Academy and I was blown away. Kasia is an incredibly unique and masterful teacher. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she worked as a professional dominatrix, practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines which include medical Qi gong, and systemic constellations. Since founding the Academy in 2013, Kasia has taught over 4000 women the practical tools and embodied knowledge on how to break free from the stories, lies, narratives, and tiny boxes that most of us were trained to be sweetly in. Kasia has also written a book called Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power. We will be discussing some of the topics in her book in this conversation.
When I'm interviewing an artist, I like to remind all of you that just because you don't consider yourself an artist doesn't mean you don't have a lot to learn about the path of creative possibility by listening to a particular artist. I'm going to say the same thing now about Kasia. If you don't identify as a woman, this is not a podcast episode just for women. There’s a lot for us to learn on the path of creative possibility about unknowing, about power, about the unhelpful categories that many of us were trained in, to label things as good and bad, and then miss out on the opportunity to alchemize that energy toward creative ends.
So grab your notebook, you're gonna want to write down some things because there's a lot of embodied wisdom coming your way. With that, let's dive right in to Episode 12 with Kasia Urbaniak.
Brie: Kasia, thank you so much for being on Unknowing today. I usually like to begin by asking my guests about the first map that they were given when growing up to make sense of their reality. This has a way of setting us off in a particular direction and course. So to begin, would you share what map you were given? What lens were you handed to interpret your world?
Kasia: Two things come to mind, but can you tell me a little bit more about what kind of map you're looking for? What do you mean by map?
Brie: I kind of like to leave it open. For some people, it'll be like, “This was my spiritual upbringing.” For some people, it's like, “I had a scientist for a dad and a teacher for a mom and that impacted me in this way.” So whatever first popped into your mind.
Kasia: What comes up for me is a radical violation of a map I had that I didn't know I had. When I was born, my parents who were musicians were touring quite heavily. So even though I was born in New York, my little sister and I were on tour with my parents until about the age of six. This is the map, right? The map that I didn't know was a map. This is what I thought all reality looked like. My mom, my dad, me, my sister, the band, the roadies, the other musicians. Every day, two days, three days, a different European city, trains, hotel rooms, bars, clubs, vans. The main thing was all of us in this small tribe had a common purpose. It was to get to the next gig and make a show. My sister had a place, I had a place, even if I was carrying the tambourine or looking after luggage, or figuring out where the french fries were in this German train station. And it was kind of amazing. Even though you would think that was a chaotic time, it wasn't. Everything made perfect sense. Everyone had a place, we were together all the time, we were doing a thing.
Then all of a sudden, I'm in New York in a Catholic elementary school and I'm sitting in a damn chair all day long. There are these people in the front of the room telling me things. I don't understand why I have to do anything. At that point, my English isn’t that great, but even if my English was flawless, I still wouldn't understand why I have to sit. I was a terrible student, and I was miserable. The fluorescent lights, the sitting. I’d already had a different map for what humans were supposed to do with each other. I didn't understand why I wasn't in the same room as my little sister. I didn't understand where my parents were.
That upset fundamentally shaped me. I think it invigorated this very rebellious stance. Why are we here? What's the point of this? Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Answers like ‘just because you're supposed to’ weren’t enough to satisfy my previous experience in what it was like to do something together.
That map transition, or map violation, was one that defined essentially the rest of my life.
Brie: So wild, because I find that for so many of us it's the ruptures that become the birthplace of something that becomes a core search. It's like that initial rupture of ‘why am I being forced into a system of education or a version of reality that's suddenly very square, very rule-oriented?’ So with that search that began inside of you, walk us through how you wound up deciding to study Taoism at the same time as you became an incredibly successful dominatrix. How did you get from starting to ask ‘why’ to those deep core experiences in your life.
Kasia: I think what you say about rupture is right on. The holy unhappiness I felt through all of my school years, the crushing unhappiness and misery. I watched my parents go through something similar, but I didn't know that at the time. The energy that was required to be touring musicians and Polish immigrants. Their belief in the American Dream was in some ways purer and stronger than most, but there was an almost toxic, ambitious drive towards success in the music industry. The point of why we were doing anything at all was something that I was looking for without even knowing it.
I read a lot as a kid, and was drawn to books even when I was 10. On any alternative spiritual path, especially since I was going to Catholic school. I was sneaking home books on pagan stuff and witchcraft. It’s almost a cliche and a bad joke that it was time to pay for college and I was like, “Why do I have to go to a cheap school?” Making money as a dominatrix was something that was just about as anti-everything I was around that I could think of.
Initially, Taoism drew me because it was so magical. It had a promise of things that were very supernatural and metaphysical. Later on, it matured into a different kind of practice understanding. The miraculous healings, the exorcisms, the witchy-wizardy parts of Taoism were the things that drew me in first.
I don't know if that answered your question.
Brie: It completely did. It makes perfect sense in so many ways. Maybe this beginning, baptismal, experiential first map that you had, in which wildness, creativity, and alternative possibilities were welcome was the true north that you were then trying to find in your explorations. To say, “I don't believe that this is the only way. I don't believe this is the only system. I will not play by these rules. I will be the bad girl and break these rules. And I make a lot of money doing it.” Something in you – that deep, rebellious urge seems to be tied to a deep knowing. I'm fascinated by this. When I first told you about the concept of this show, you were like, “Oh my god, that's so Taoist. I can't believe that the Unknowing is so Taoist.”
Could you connect the dots for those who may not be as familiar? How is that connection there? Why was that something you said to me?
Kasia: Oh, yeah. This also makes me want to add something to the previous question, this is a good link. Even though the rebellious paths that I chose look wild and sometimes strange, the drive behind understanding why actually made me a practically driven person. What works despite what people say? What actually works? Certain roles in society promise something, does it work? If it does works, what does it work to achieve? Do I want that? What's practical? To me, the way to be the most compassionate person involves a hell of a lot of practicality. What actually works? I think one of the fundamental truths is that we want to know, cognitively and mentally, a lot more than we actually need to. At the expense of the wisdom and information that arises for us at the moment, that blossoms for the next few steps. That is a really beautiful way to navigate the world.
So when you're talking about Unknowing, you're talking about, at least for me, breaking the conditioning. Breaking the pointless rules that lead you to places you don't even want to go. This won't make you happy. In just a basic sense, Taoism is practical. It's the foundation of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and a huge percentage of martial arts. How to heal your body, how to heal other bodies, how to defend yourself.
Working as a dominatrix was an absolutely fascinating interface with human beings and power, and it was also a really practical way to make money. It was a practical way to start exploring all the things I didn't like about the way I was being put into a box as a woman, and test them out. There's this almost social, scientific, experimental part of all of these things that I think have to do. We are human beings on this planet and we don't even really know what that means. We don't really know what it means to be Kasia or Brie, or a person. We don't really know where we are. What do we know? How much do we need to know in order to make the next move and to see the results of that?
The magic of being alive on this planet is that you don't know. But you can, in a unique, isolated moment, see and find out. It's not knowledge to be captured. It's a conversation with the universe where you say something, you do something, and the universe responds. You don't get to know where the rest of the conversation’s going. You just know that you heard back from the world, ‘oh this is the thing.’ The insecurity and fear make us want to turn that response into a fundamental truth. How cool is this, the Tao Te Ching begins with the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. It's the fundamental disclaimer of integrity. Like it's saying, the moment we start talking about this, it's never always going to be true.
Brie: It’s such a koan. Your brain just kind of self-combusts. Short circuits.
Kasia: I had personal curiosities and personal interests. I wanted to be an incredibly powerful woman. I wanted to understand the things that were in my way. I wanted to break through the things that were in my way. I felt incredibly trapped and wanted to understand everything. I wanted to know everything, I wanted to study everything, I wanted to strategize over everyone. In that maybe misguided, but really honest desire to be the most powerful woman in the world. I had to be humbled and schooled by the world by facing the results of everything that I tried. Seeing that I didn't need to preemptively understand everything, I only needed to have a basic way of operating. A basic positive regarding curiosity about how to look at the responses that the world hides.
Brie: It's so powerful to me listening to you talk about this shift from this colonial need to subjugate reality with a form of oppressive knowledge that can then create and determine a sense of certainty, versus the kind of radical simplicity, an internal posture of humility that says, “I don't need to know. I just need to be really, really freaking awake and aware so that I can track where this life force is moving and be in conversation with the universe moment by moment.” That's such a different posture. That's a completely, radically other way of talking about knowledge than how society is set up. Which is like, academically, you're considered to be an intelligent, knowledgeable person, if you know all of this information up in your head.
Kasia: Yeah, and here's my favorite part. The idea that colonial subjugation is bad and the radical simplicity of humility on the inside is good isn't even necessary because it's a question of what works. We just know. Anyone with eyes who's curious and really interested in the subject of power and being able to make things happen in the world. If you look at that mindset, of utter control, and if you look at tyranny in an amoral way, it becomes really evident that it doesn't work. The amount of force required when you break people's free will, when you take what is inherently wanting to be birthed inside of them, their energy sources, when you try to crush and oppress people, it takes a tremendous amount of energy and wastes the energy that's inherent in them. So even in this kind of cold-hearted, neutral way, looking at what works and what doesn't work, it's actually the synergy between human beings that creates all of the stuff we want. The way of looking even at how we use our resources and the ways we go to war. We have these metrics that make it look like those things spell success, but those metrics are false. The GDP, how wealthy a person is when they have lots of money. It doesn't take that much to see that it just doesn't work. It’s easy to see the person who has their head full of facts doesn't necessarily make the best decisions.
Brie: I love the practicality of how you're describing this path, this way of life because it just doesn't work. If your head is full of information and it's clouding your ability to be in the moment and connect with life force and yourself, let alone how to influence and dance with others to create beautiful possibilities. It's like, oh yeah, that doesn't work. That doesn't work.
I want to ask you about how you're training people to learn the things that work, especially your work with women. This is really how we met as me witnessing you in your full glory on your throne and teaching and bringing it to your class at The Academy, which is the school that you founded. The first time I witnessed your teaching, it was on Zoom, and I'm sitting there and you're getting going, and you're talking about the importance of connecting with rage. I'm like, yeah, yeah, we should all connect with our anger. Sure, yeah. And you single out a student, you asked her to connect with her rage. She got amped up, but it was still like a polite 5. She was still somewhat apologetic, even in her body posture. She was shrugging her shoulders and giggling a little bit and kind of on the spot, but there was something in her and you felt it. You knew was there from all of your experience, you could feel that life force in her and you were like, “Nah, I'm not gonna let you get off the hook.” So you kept prodding her until she finally got there. I will never forget what I witnessed because when she touched into her rage, she was able to be so clear in her language, but also her whole body posture changed, her shoulders rolled back, her chin lifted up, and suddenly she recovered her sovereignty. It made me weep because it reminded me of that movie, Hook. Where Peter Pan comes back as a full adult and one of the lost boys comes up to him and grabs his face and starts manipulating all the extra skin until he can kind of see his old friend. And he goes, “Oh, there you are, Peter, there you are.” At that moment with that student, it was like, “Ah, there she is, there she is.”
So talk about this process of aligning with that life force and your work with your students and helping them find that themselves.
Emotions into Power – Online Course
Through over 60 videos and practical assignments, learn the crucial skills of emotional alchemy that form the foundation of unshakable influence.
Kasia: Yeah. In founding The Academy and in working with women, to break a lot of the specifically gendered social conditioning, the good girl behavior, all of that, I've gotten to witness such extraordinary beauty and miracles. But what I treasure the most is something that feels repeatedly verifiable to me.
Human beings don't have to be good because we already are good. What works is fundamental goodness. All we have to do is be true. Now, those words can be misconstrued 100,000 different ways. My anti-morality stance is a challenge to the idea that we're inherently sinful beings who need corrective behavior. Let me draw back to that example and then move back to that spot.
Rage can be incredibly destructive, so we don't want it. We have a cultural practice of perversely, almost in a pornographic way, allowing for particular expressions of rage and violence, but strongly regulating where it's allowed. You can make a movie where 10,000 people's heads are chopped off, but watch your goddamn tone if you're in a meeting, right? We have a highly regulated relationship to rage and very little understanding of it. The idea is social control; to hijack the power that rage provides to use it for military purposes. But everywhere else where it occurs naturally, tamp it down. This implies that human beings have evil in them.
This is what happens on a practical level I see happen with the women in my class and rage. I have yet to meet a woman who isn't on some level furious. The most tamped-down rage looks like a lack of life purpose and a lack of energy. Maybe this is a coincidence, but also a high incidence of autoimmune diseases. A lack of clarity, sex drive, purpose, sleepiness, resignation. Now, because I have 1000 tests of encountering a woman in this stage, and testing what happens is their rage underneath. We'll call this phase one rage. When phase one rage becomes phase two rage, it's the kind of rage that we're most afraid of socially. It's a little bit like the way a foot falls asleep, you don't know it's asleep when it's asleep – this is phase one. The moment you start shaking it though, you shake it up a little and it hurts. It feels uncomfortable, you can't use it, and you don't have control over it. So phase two rage socially is that thing that we're freaked out about, especially with women who are holding millennia of rage. In phase two, you hurt people, you don't have control, you're destructive. There's a lot of energy, but it's going all over the place. So tamp it down, back to phase one. Most people are oscillating, moving back and forth between phase one and phase two. It becomes like a pendulum. It becomes cyclical. It's like, “Oh, I shouldn't be mad. Oh, but I am mad.” It’s good to pass through phase two in a safe space, in community, or in private, not with the object of your rage. There's something that happens where all of a sudden the things that you're fighting against, the things that your anger wants to stop, start transitioning into, “I want to break through this because I see a vision for something better.” The amount of energy that's unavailable to a human being because they're in phase one rage, that they start feeling as uncontrollable and cumbersome in phase two becomes passionate, direction, clarity. It's that thing you witnessed when she got to the other side. All of a sudden, she went from wanting to yell to a grounded, embodied voice speaking in an unshakable, undeniable way.
We have this funny habit when it comes to emotions, right? The ones that are perceived as negative, it's like you put a biohazard sign on them. Some of them are too tumultuous to just observe, observe, observe, observe, right? Even that idea is far more evolved and more Eastern. Suppress the bad ones, control them, hold them away from people. Definitely don't get to the other side of them. Don't rage and scream until you find your passion point. Then the positive ones, take them for granted. Something good happens? Oh, I'm fine. I'm good. Let's move on. Let's move on to the next problem. The incredible energy available when a positive emotion surfaces, it's not like, “Hey, I feel fantastic about myself today, I got this beautiful gift, or I did this phenomenal thing.” So the energy that's there is also not directed, amplified, cared for. If we go into the premise that human beings are fundamentally sinful, born with original sin, that the body is bad, that's the things that come through us are bad or good.
“If we are distrustful of what arises within us, we are more likely to be disconnected, disembodied, and also not shepherding and managing the negative and positive emotions properly. ”
Brie: Looking at you Augustine.
Kasia: The need to be regulated, the need to be highly controlled. If we are distrustful of what arises within us, we are more likely to be disconnected, disembodied, and also not shepherding and managing the negative and positive emotions properly. The amount of beauty that's possible if you wield the beauty of your positive emotions and alchemize your negative emotions. That distinction is only necessary because we made it. You don't treat everything exactly the same. You don't treat a child the same way you treat a pet or the same way you treat a friend. Those raw emotions that are negative only have become the monsters they are because they get locked into a closet. They get worse and worse and worse and worse the longer they stay. If you don't believe me, listen to how a woman talks to her partner after 10 years of resentment. It might be quiet, but those poison arrows, those vicious comments can cut an artery. The longer it stays hidden the gnarlier it is. The more it requires the process of moving from phase one, phase two, phase three.
When I say human beings don't need to be good because we are good so all we have to do is be true, is a huge oversimplification of the processes that happened when we come to know ourselves again as good therefore trustworthy.
Kind of a side note, but since the theme of religion is coming up if you look at the seven deadly sins, they are only problems if you're disembodied. Greed, for example. Greed only works if you're not embodied enough to feel what you've received and hit a point of satiety. So the problem with greed isn't greed. The problem with greed is disembodiment. If you were there in your seat to receive what your greed got you, you get full. It’s a natural, metabolic function. It's a spiritual metabolism. You go out, you get praise, you fully receive it, you celebrate, you say, “Yes, I did that fantastically. I am great.” Suddenly, vanity, pride becomes less of a problem. The same thing with gluttony, self-regulating. We're self-regulating beings. When we are in our bodies, we are in harmony with the universe, we participate in nature's self-regulating processes. Rage, which we already talked about. Wrath, a sin. It's only a problem if you're not embodied enough to feel the passion and where it directs and leads. Name any of them. It's the same thing over and over again. If you're there to receive what is already yours, the self-regulating mechanisms of satiety and appropriate hunger kick in, and suddenly even Buddhist ideas of craving and aversion are going out the window because we're self-regulating.
This is the beauty, with all of the dramatic problems in the world, to be able to work with a woman and uncover her fundamental innocence which leads to a tremendous amount of power and influence. Who would have thought that inherent goodness and innocence lead to her being able to get outrageously legendary things in the world? To have a feeling of influence. It's a wonderful thing to be watching over and over and over again, those guilty pleasures, secretly delicious but maybe a little wicked desires that we have. Pursuing them is not only not wicked but requires us to be exactly as we are. It leads to goodness for everyone.
Brie: It's stunningly beautiful to listen to this worldview shift that you've given your life to. Full stop at: can we just accept our inherent worth and goodness? Can we please correct this terrible anthropology that religion and certain platonic philosophies have yielded? I'm stunned by this insight that you've just offered here. You've got the 7 deadly sins, and you're like, “Well, if you’re just in your body, if you trusted this vehicle of incarnation as capable of manifesting something sacred, then those issues are no longer issues.” That alone, I could just stop right there. That's a podcast, let’s just hover on that.
But this idea of following the life force and trusting that goodness. It seems so simple, and yet again and again we default to this smaller, lesser, disembodied life. We stick to familiar patterns. We herd into social constructs. I pulled this from your book, Unbound, which I enjoyed living in for the last week preparing for this podcast. You’re giving examples of successes and breakthroughs your students had, you say, “none of these solutions came out of the grind.” So it wasn't a forced, top-down, here's what we're gonna do. “It came from inspiration, byproducts of the imagination, creativity, experimentation, and ingenuity. They came from following life force. Ultimately, this is the goal,” you say, “that vital feeling to be fully awake. This is why we have to shed our good girl bondage and the compression that comes with it. This goes past congruence and the ability to communicate in a clean way. In a contracted state, it is not only difficult to fully access our power, but it's hard to feel fully alive.”
This reminds me of some of the koans you were saying earlier, because on the surface, you're like, that sounds really obvious. But then to live it, to actually have the courage to break those patterns, is a whole other thing.
I just want to reflect back that I'm in one of those places of profound unknowing, where the following of life force has taken me into doing something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I might be dead broke in a few months, but I have never felt clearer, happier, or more in my body and more here on this planet. Harmonizing with the harmonies of the world. It's like that kind of like bliss, right? I don't say that in a disembodied way. I'm just really having a lot of fun. The funny thing is, for a long time, and you know this because we've been friends for a while now, I've wanted to break through, break out, and do my own thing and start doing my own creative projects and honor these creative expressions in my life. But I just kept shrinking back or holding back because we're taught that a courageous, creative life is not practical. It's not how things are done. The universe came along and kicked my ass and set me on this course.
Sometimes the universe intervenes, right? Sometimes the universe is like, “okay, gonna help you break through this limiting belief that you have about yourself,” but what practice would you offer listeners to help us get in touch with desire? And maybe reconfigure our relationship with desire that has gotten warped through our unhelpful societal training?
Kasia: Yeah. So the first thing is changing how we regard desire, to begin with. We make new year's resolutions, we set goals, even as kids some of us are asked to make Christmas lists, right? There's this kind of illusion that we make our desires. We try and articulate our desires, yeah. But we don't make them. You don't sit down and commit to wanting vanilla gelato. You can't make yourself be attracted to men if you're attracted to women. You can’t make desire.
Brie: We can't manufacture it.
Kasia: No, but we regard it like we do. If we have a ‘bad’ one, or if we have a ‘good’ one, we have certain feelings about ourselves. So the first thing to do is to change our regard about how desire works. I am not making these desires, they're coming through me. I have no say in what I want, it happens to me. Now, I do have plenty of say in what I allow myself to see. Next level. How I articulate the guesses I make about what will satisfy that. When you have an urge for vanilla ice cream, for example, you're referencing something in the past. It may not necessarily be something that's existed before, the actual desire may be calling for something that's not on the menu, not ever been seen on this planet, right? Desire comes up, we have say in whether we acknowledge it, we have say in our skill level and making educated guesses and experiments about what will satisfy it, we have say in whether we do anything about it at all, but we don't have any say in what comes up. Judging ourselves on the basis of our desires is utter nonsense. It makes no sense.
If you have what seems like a very wicked desire, like revenge or destruction, this is a moment where all of the Eastern practices in detachment and observation are so helpful, right? “Oh, I have a wicked desire. This has nothing to do with whether I'm a good person or not. What is this telling me? How do I engage with it?”
This is going to sound nuts, but I do a lot of work with revenge in my classes. The desire for justice, to punish, and to destroy people. When we go into that impulse, oftentimes, when we start alchemizing it, the actual essence of the revenge is so generous. So many women will go, “I want my toxic father to go to therapy. First, I want him to pay, and then I want him to fix, and then I want him to grow.” There is a generosity that can develop there.
Desire. The ones that seem kind of wicked are the quickest ones to be shut down, and they’re also the ones that are most useful to look at. If you don't look at them without judging yourself, that often ends up playing out anyway in less than conscious ways. We end up hurting people, and then it's messy. It's not skillful. The result isn't exactly what we want.
The guilty pleasures, those are all clues. I have a student who was asking me about self-discipline. She runs a business, and she wants to spend less time watching TV shows. I asked her if there's a particular show, and she watches RuPaul’s Drag Race. She wanted to stop the hours of watching RuPaul’s Drag Race a day. We looked into it, and this seems like a small thing but it's a really good direction. She has a business where she guides women through the wedding process of being brides in a holistic and beautiful way. When we leaned into what she likes about it, we had to look into what her desire was saying. She would’ve never looked at binge-watching a TV show as something positive. So we looked into it. She realized that the archetype of the drag queen is so relevant to the woman who's transforming herself as a bride, creating a performance in community, living out loud, and having the kind of celebration wedding experience that absolutely showcases every single woman's unique fabulousness in a theatrical way. All of the sudden, she saw that she was doing research. Being able to accept that had her radically reinvent how she approaches her work, her business, and her success in her business. This is another one of those things where even the small petty things that we beat ourselves up for being wrong about are very likely intelligent signposts. Meet those signposts consciously, in a loving way, and ask ourselves what purpose they’re serving instead of categorizing things – trying to get rid of one category and holding another as good. Utilizing everything. How can you rage? How can you use your laziness? What is it telling you?
Writing down your desire is super important. We have a fun exercise that we call The Bad Girl Protocol where you write down, “If I were a bad girl I would ______.” And ‘bad girl’ – I know it's infantilizing, but it's on purpose. “You're such a good girl. You're such a bad girl.” The way that that evokes those very fundamental, early punishments and rewards. The idea is you let loose your writing this on paper. You can destroy the paper, nobody has to look at it. If vile and really twisted things come up, you never have to look at them again. You can look at them and start getting curious. What is wanted here? What's the desire here? Oftentimes things will pop up that are absolutely totally good and loving. “If I were a bad girl, I’d get nine hours of sleep.” “If I were a bad girl, I would tell my sister to break up with her partner.” You name it.
“One of our favorite sayings in The Academy is imagination over effort. When you’re stuck and doubling down on a technique that hasn’t worked for you in the past, you think, ‘This didn’t work. It’s probably me, I have to try harder.’ Stop, take a step back, and think, ‘is imagination going to be better here than effort?’”
I think the most important thing is understanding that your transmission receiver of desires, not to create tricks of them. You create a lot in your life. You're co-creating your reality with the rest of the universe. It's one of the most beautiful paradoxes and mysteries. We could find 100,000 different angles into getting women to start loving all of themselves and human beings start believing in themselves. There’s talk about the life drive versus the death drive – we're on a suicide mission. There’s so much shame in the toxic narcissism of the archetypal man, and there's so much resentment and self-attack in the patterning for women. We are beautiful. Trying to become good and beautiful actually disgraces are already inherent existing beauty. That's why unknowing – not know how to be good, not knowing how to be successful, not knowing how to be better. It's also one of my gripes with a lot of the self-development stuff that I've seen out there in the last 20-30 years. Become better. Try harder. One of our favorite sayings in The Academy is imagination over effort. When you're stuck and doubling down on a technique that hasn't worked for you in the past, you think, "This didn't work. It's probably me, I have to try harder." Stop, take a step back, and think, “is imagination going to be better here than effort?”
Brie: It's stunning. Those words are such an invitation for a radical social shift. As well, collectively, how we do life, how we have understood reality as needing to be this effort-filled, conquering, subjugation, disembodied bodies disembodying other bodies.
I want to begin to wrap up the conversation by talking about what you've already named embodiment and attention because you say that asking questions is a dom's superpower. I want to ask you about this about imagination and creativity because some of those power dynamics that you were describing in your book and that I've witnessed you teaching in your class – are we not also engaged in a similar relational power dynamic with the universe itself when we place ourselves in a receptive state, but then place the attention outward into possibility, into what is beyond even what we think we can know? Is that how this exchange becomes a dance of creativity? Is that how we move with, as opposed to trying to conquer or be in that grind that you mentioned is a waste of energy and life force?
Kasia: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. For listeners, that may be too subtle and nuanced to grasp what we're talking about, but that's exactly right. As a solo human being the dominant and submissive states of attention apply exactly how you described. It's why we have prayer versus meditation.
Brie: I was just gonna say it reminds me of prayer!
Kasia: Right? All traditions have both contemplative practices. Basically a conversation, you speak and you listen. In meditation, you're listening and waiting for something nonspecific enough to stay open. You don't close down around an answer. But that's exactly right. You have a conversation with reality. You listen and you speak and you don't do both at the same time.
Brie: This attention to the body, and I love one of your phrases, you say, “follow your feeling sense.” This attention to the body, this recognition that we need this relaxing into our inherent goodness and return trust to the power of our volition and desire for participation. Trusting your desires, paying attention to what they are, getting curious about what they are, not labeling and judging ourselves so much.
I'm really glad you brought up the self-help work because in my experience a lot of the contemplative and mystical strands and streams that are bringing people out into these bucolic settings for these amazing retreats to find enlightenment or whatever. A new map. Like, “I got it now. I have the answers.”
How can we reorient our curiosity to continue to learn helpful practices, whether they be spiritual or otherwise, and not make ourselves into projects? How do we relax into allowing it to be something that helps us come back to the fullness of being alive and trusting ourselves?
Kasia: Well, I love making everything a project. So I love myself as a project. I love myself as a creative. I think you might be referring to…
Brie: The self-attack maybe.
Kasia: Yeah. When a student enters the school, sometimes they enter and they’re a little bit like in the doctor's office waiting room, what drew them in was pain. As they're sitting in the waiting room, they're secretly hoping that their pain gets worse, or they're mad that their pain is getting not as bad because they've come to the doctor to heal the pain. Some want to amplify an already-existing skillset. It's just natural that pain is a driver, right? Especially in our world. Very few of us have a great orgasm once and want to investigate it so we can have that all the time by ourselves, with others. We don't do that. Pain is a natural driver.
Here's a concept and an exercise, especially for women. Self-attack belongs to all humans, but I teach women so it's more responsibility for me to talk about women. For generations, women have been policed. Watch yourself, watch yourself, watch yourself. A lot of it is out of love. If it's possible for a woman to be sexually assaulted and then blamed for wearing a short skirt, she better watch herself, right? If your mama cares about you, especially two generations ago, but even today, she's going to tell you to watch what you wear. Then we grow up and the self-policing kicks in now that we're not policed. We're policing ourselves. Watch yourself. Am I too quiet? Am I too loud? Am I giving off the wrong signal?
Here's the beauty of the average woman's incredibly strong and complex self-attack architecture. We are capable of noticing every little detail of the things we do and finding how they can be dangerous or wrong. Doing something that's 97% perfect and harping on the 3%. Giving a speech, flubbing a line. We are capable of finding the smallest detail and finding it wrong and attacking ourselves for it. That also means that that same architecture can be used to find every single detail of how we did well and right. That self-awareness, that painful architecture, can be used in exactly the opposite way. What it takes is giving yourself permission to celebrate yourself. Oh no, vanity! I'm not just talking gratitude lists. I'm talking like, “I am such a badass. I am so amazing.” Tracking your victories. Remembering your victories and wins. The things you do, not just the things that are lucky to come your way. We've learned how to do that and it’s important too, but I'm talking about strengthening the muscles that tend to be weaker. It could be going from getting out of bed two hours after waking up to an hour and 30 minutes after waking up could be a victory. It could be that you run your whole household. It could be that you do invisible labor, you confronted the people in your life that are benefiting from it and got them to shoulder some of the weight. It could be anything but it has to be the thing that lights you and you alone up.
When we celebrate something that works, we're teaching our bodies to go for more of that. When we ignore it, that information isn't transmitted. We learn better from reward than punishment. You can beat yourself up for something until the cows come home, but it's only going to make you bodily, somatically more drawn to that thing. It means that you get a really strong somatic impression when something negative happens, but very little. There's a part of the brain and body that just tracks experience, not positive and negative. A huge leap in success and a huge failure is going to track similarly. What we want to do is start creating strong impressions for the things that we want more of.
There's a song we have in The Academy about self-attack because here's the thing, the moment I start talking about self-attack, it's very likely that you if you've committed to attacking yourself less, you will attack yourself in the next 10 minutes, and then attack yourself for attacking yourself. “I’m so hard on myself.” “I cannot give myself a break.” Then it's the architecture of an anxiety attack, a shame spiral, any kind of pernicious emotion that won't let loose is shaped this way.
I'm angry. Now I'm angry that I'm angry.
I'm scared. Now I'm scared that I'm scared.
I’m attacking myself for attacking myself.
So we have a song.
🎶 Self-attack is so boring. That monologue leaves me snoring. I've heard it all before. I don't need it anymore. I already know where it’s going. 🎶
Brie: Amazing. I want everybody to learn that song. Can you imagine the lives that we would lead if we really practiced that and believed it? To just drop that inner attack and drop that tool of self diminishment?
Kasia: Yeah. In the “in case of an emergency break glass” box, what should be inside is not a fire extinguisher or an ax, but something outrageous, playful and ridiculous. Because at the end of the day, that's the best thing to use in an emergency.
Brie: That sense of humor almost breaks the spell that our judgmental beliefs can hold over ourselves. In your classes, you do such an incredible job of learning how to somatically imprint individually and together. You have your students celebrate the shit out of each other. When somebody says, “Hey, I did this!”, everybody's like, “You're amazing!” At first, it feels like, “Okay, this is just ridiculous and over the top. All I did was remember to eat today.” But what you're saying is that it takes that repatterning, it takes that level of us beginning to understand, as you were saying earlier so profoundly, these emotions are messengers and we keep trying to neuter them. We neuter the negatives and the positives, and we're missing out on harvesting deep, profound wisdom, growth, and life force.
Kasia: Yeah. I have to add this because you just reminded me of one of the sneakiest ways in which our conditioning influences us. What it's okay to celebrate, what it's okay to like, what it's okay to be happy about, what success looks like, right? From the time we're in grade school, we know what's cool to like, what's not okay to like, and what's okay to want, what's not okay to want. In celebrating, there is an authentic, completely uncontrolled, quick flash of what lights you up. I stood up for myself today. I did this today. If we're not careful, we can miss it. We have such a strong patterning about what success looks like, and that celebration is very much warped and mangled by it.
Brie: The invitation to celebrate all those things that light us up is also your sneaky and masterful way of teaching us how to learn to pay attention to life force, watch where it's going, and begin to move in the direction of those desires. Which I think is so crucial for us, especially for this community in this podcast, if we're talking about the creative path of possibility. We’re going to need to examine some of these practical skills that you offer us.
Kasia, I want to close this immense conversation that has so much wisdom that I feel like I could listen back to this conversation like 17 times and still be like, oh my god, and then that. You reference the conversation that's happening under the conversation, like learning how to read life force and attention. So where is unknowing calling to you these days? Like what conversation is unmaking and remaking itself in you right now? Where's your own edge if you're willing to share?
Kasia: At this time, that's a really big, unique thing because a lot of my biggest desires for a long time have been around how I want to engage with the world. The world is radically changing before my eyes, and the places I wanted in it, I don't think they exist anymore. I don't think they're there anymore. To be a certain kind of person, to have a certain kind of reputation, influence, or lifestyle. I'm in the biggest period of Unknowing in my life. I'm going to fly to New York next week, but I don't know where in the world I'm going after that. I don't know if I'm staying for more than a week. I know that I have to keep putting myself in an environment where I'll be able to feel things that will tell me what to do next. I mean, we don't know what's happening, right? I mean, do you?
Brie: I don’t have a friggin clue.
Kasia: It's not static, it's moving quickly. But it's almost illegible.
Brie: This conversation is making me think about dance because in our friendship, but in your work, you are always inviting me to tune into the body in the present as a way to open up what's possible. You can't really do a pirouette if you're not feeling your body. If you're not aware of what's happening and if you're not moving with the music. So what I hear you saying is that you're okay not knowing because there's a sense of, I'm going to keep paying attention. I'm going to keep tuning myself in to that desire and pay attention to what is waking it up, and I trust it.
Kasia: Yeah and also, in any given moment, there's always something you do know. When somebody says I'm confused, I don't know, what they're referring to is wanting to know more than they need to know right now at this moment. You do know something. That open attention to knowing what you know, and allowing yourself to be the witness of all the false knowings to achieve that state of Unknowing is one of the best navigational ways of going about things I know of.
Brie: Thank you so much, for taking the time to offer such practical, embodied, revolutionary, breakthrough, universe-shifting, paradigm-breaking perspectives and insights. You are one of the true masters that I know and I'm just so thankful to have you in my life. But I'm thankful that my listeners could learn from you in this conversation.
Kasia: Thank you so much.
Outro (Brie): We're learning to become free from the stories, the ideas, the beliefs, the patterns that are holding us back. We are learning how to become unbound, and discovering the power of living the question and asking why, and following what works. I really loved that.
Here are a few pieces of true north wisdom I'm taking with me from this conversation.
Early on in the conversation when Kasia said we want to know a lot more than we cognitively even need to. I kind of love that. I feel like maybe a lot of our unhappiness, frustration, and overall malaise are caused by the overwhelming amounts of information that are coming at us. We really don't need all this information so I'm taking that as a cue for myself to limit the amount of input that's coming in. Also to remind myself to rest and relax in the sensations of not knowing. That I can trust it. That the only tools I need are the tools that help me be radically awake and present so that I can tune into my body and feel where the life force is moving to be in a reciprocal conversation with the universe, as she said so beautifully.
Another piece of true north wisdom. I really liked when she was sharing with us about the process that she takes her students through, and I've witnessed it, from phase one to phase two into phase three. I liked how she described that oftentimes many of us stop at phase two. That we feel an uncomfortable emotion and we start to feel the sense of loss of control that that emotion overwhelms us with. But instead of falling through into phase three, which is the breakthrough into raw potential energy that can be utilized or alchemized into a creative end, most of us fall back into suppressing, tamping it down, or pretending it's not there. I certainly don't know anyone who does that. I hear that’s something people do. Other people. Other people do that. If you are somebody who practices meditation or some form of self-regulation, this is why it's useful. It's useful on the path of creative possibility. Because as creatives, as folks who want to critique the bad by manifesting the better, we need to learn how to fall through that phase two, how to not let that overwhelm, stop us from moving through into new territory with that raw energy. Even though it's uncomfortable, even though it doesn't feel good, even though it's hard. So many of us were taught to be afraid of, dismiss, or be ashamed of the raw energies of emotions that we run backward. One of my teachers talks about it in terms of stewing. She says, “Sometimes you just need to stew in something instead of moving away from it. Move into it. Sense it in the body, and then allow the stewing to reveal the potential of where that energy could be employed or utilized.” Or as Kasia said, get curious about the emotions and the feelings that are coming up. Maybe there's something deeper that needs to be explored or uncovered. There's no way to discover what that thing really is about if we're not willing to actually go there, face it, and feel it.
That's it for today's episode.
Now, I'm going to stand in my own power and sovereignty and be unbound and talk to you really quickly about this show. Unknowing is brought to you entirely because of patrons. It's been such a gift to be able to have these conversations and to be able to bring them to you. I am definitely spending a full-time job amount of time on this show. It's my priority to be able to bring you the conversations that I hope will help you on the path of creative possibility as you live your own unknowing journey. So in order to continue to do that, I need your help. We're in this together. So if Unknowing has been meaningful to you, if this conversation impacted you in any way, I'd like to encourage you to consider becoming a patron. You can also give a tax-deductible donation to Unknowing. As we round the bend toward the end of the year, and you consider your year-end giving, I hope that you'll consider the show. To find out how to become a patron or how to donate you can visit Unknowing.org. You can also rate this podcast and share it with a friend.
Finally, as the poet Rilke says, Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. I'm trying right along with you.
The Radiance Project: A Woman’s Guide to Power with Kasia Urbaniak
“We’re not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed.
Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas.
Right now, she gets to have her requests land.
Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not.
Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze.
Right now.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Read the transcript:
Heidi: Hey friends, I'm Heidi Rose Robbins and this is Episode 208 of The Radiance Project, a podcast of astrology, poetry, inspiration, and very good company. I cannot wait to introduce you to my very good company today. Her name is Kasia Urbaniak and she is the founder and CEO of The Academy. It's a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Kasia’s perspective on power is totally unique. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she has worked as a professional dominatrix practice Taoist alchemy and one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines, including medical Qigong and systemic constellations. Since Kasia founded The Academy in 2013, she's taught over 4000 women practical tools to step into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces, and wider communities. Her new book, Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power was just released this March. And for our astrological purposes, Kasia is a Cancer Rising, Cancer Sun, and Virgo Moon. Kasia, welcome. I'm so happy that you're here.
Kasia: I'm so glad to be here.
Heidi: I was given your book, or I was told to buy your book immediately, by our mutual friend, Alex, and I have to tell you that I read it back to back twice. I sometimes have this feeling right at the end of a book that I say to myself, “I'm gonna go back right away and start at the beginning.” And I was that hungry for it. So I first want to thank you for writing it and tell everyone who's listening to immediately buy your copy. But I thought I would just ask you, as it's a big deal to birth a book, it's only been out for a month now. How are you with the release of this book? How is it been in the last month? I imagine you've been talking to many people.
Kasia: One of the things that I'm really present to the journey of the book is really interesting in terms of time and the world. I've been wanting to write a book for ages. And the founding of the school, The Academy, happened because I was writing an advice column on Facebook. The women asking for advice asked for a workshop and my initial reaction was like, “Hell, no, I'm never being a teacher.” But I do want to write this book. And so I'm going to host some free Q&A sessions in my home. Initially, the idea was one Q&A session, so I could find out what they were most curious about in the writing of this book, it was meant to just get information for a book.
The response was so huge. We ended up hosting four Q&A sessions and couldn't fit on anyone else. There were still people wanting more. So I decided to teach a class and around the time of the beginnings of Me Too the word of the school exploded, and I got a book deal. So in writing the book, I had all this stuff prior to Me Too that I wanted to share. But I also wanted to make sure that the women who were reading this book, Unbound, were given the tools and techniques that are practical in the moment to deal with difficult conversations, violations of boundaries, and things in the context of Me Too would be really useful. Then the world explodes. The pandemic comes and I had a moment last year when I was like, is this still relevant now as we're heading towards reemergence? Now as we're heading towards this time where we're going back to a world we left behind?
What suddenly was a moment of doubt, turned into a moment of the greatest clarity, which is, as women are returning to the workplace, as women are returning to life as normal, this is the best opportunity to renegotiate everything. Child Care, salary work from home, boundaries with partners, all of that stuff. And suddenly I'm sitting there and being like, how did this miracle occur? That this handbook for how to redraw the landscape of your life, have every difficult conversation with power and playfulness, how to be able to basically redesign the architecture of power and of relations in your life is exactly what's needed. So as we draw closer to that moment of actual re-entry, the kinds of questions I'm getting, the kind of interest that I'm getting is exactly geared towards this renegotiation and it just feels like divine perfection that is happening the way it is right now. Even with the pandemic, the book was delayed three times. Its delay was even perfect.
Heidi: Perfect. It was perfect. Yeah, you know, it's funny, Kasia, when I look at your chart, you have Cancer Rising and the Cancer Sun. And in soul-centered astrology, there's this beautiful phrase for Cancer that says, “I build a lighted house, and therein dwell.” And Cancer is the great mama producer that wraps her arms around something and says, “I will nourish this, and I will protect this and I will grow this.” And so often people have schools or companies that they are fiercely protecting and growing. And I thought to myself, I wonder how long this has been in her psyche. And I think I read somewhere that when you were nine years old, you're already saying something about a school, like you had a vision of a school. Is that true?
Kasia: When I was nine, I had an obsession with creating nations. So I was a little kid and I was in school, and I had this giant stack of computer paper and each one had a format. And it was the name of the country, the language they speak the currency, how they parent, and the national anthem, and I’d get the kids in school to start a band to sing the national anthems and design the flags. In one of them, you traded parents, and in one of them, you lived in three houses.
Then in my teenage years, I read Frank Herbert's, Dune, and then all of the books that followed. I got obsessed with the secret society of women that intergalactically control everything called the Bene Gesserit. I have to found the Bene Gesserit! That’s what I have to do!
Heidi: I love that. Yeah. I mean, this idea of the countries, that’s so connected to the Cancerian energy to because Cancer is always saying, like, who is home and what is home and where is home?
I think it's fascinating because your work has so much to do with this idea of attention. And one of the things about your chart is that you have this exquisite sensitivity of the Cancerian energy that can feel every change. And yet you also have this Virgo moon that can articulate with precision, exactly every change that you feel and sense. So it's this incredible marriage of the intellect and the ability to bring it into form with language. And yet, your whole body and being is just absorbing and receiving every moment. I just so appreciated reading how you work, how you're constantly adjusting to the other. The flow is dynamic, and it marries to your chart so gorgeously.
I'm curious, Kasia, one of the reasons that you created the school that you've said is that you wanted to help women move through good girl conditioning. I think you even say that most badass women 1% of the time are going to fall into the good girl conditioning or arr not be able to respond in the moment in a way that they want to respond. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about good girl conditioning, and then the version of good girl conditioning that's like, I'll have it all but it means I have to do it all. I would love you to just riff on good girl conditioning because I can certainly use it.
Kasia: First to contextualize good girl conditioning so that the individual woman listening to this who feels like she secretly is a good girl too much of the time, lets people walk over her, doesn't say what she needs, doesn't say what she wants, doesn't advocate for herself, freezes, self portrays, auto responds in nurturing and caring when it's not her place to or when she doesn't get anything out of it.
So first the exoneration, we have to keep in perspective what we're talking about in terms of women's rights. It’s incomplete in terms of the span of human history, it started five seconds ago. In 1974, a woman still couldn't get a credit card in Connecticut without her husband's signature. So let's be real here. How do people learn? We are not born as individual complete human beings. We learn so much from the social fabric of our times. And no matter how you change laws and legislation, our social being learns constantly, especially when we're children, but throughout our entire lives from a whole mass of unspoken education.
“Contextualizing good girl conditioning is really important first to know, it’s not you. It’s not your individual thing. It’s collective. And it’s not a flaw. It’s a script made to be rewritten for these times.”
Let's go back. Good girl conditioning would have been very helpful if the only way a woman could make her dreams come true, realize her ambitions, have control over her life – which still exists in many countries – but up until very recently, the way she had access to anything was to marry well. Right? In an environment where the only real self-expression of ambition and desire you can have is to marry someone with the means, and maybe the temperament to allow you a little space to do so, then becoming marriageable becomes one of the most powerful tools a mother, a grandmother, or anybody can argue with. Many of our grandmothers are still alive on this planet. Right? And this is the thing: we know the patriarchy comes from men, but it also comes from women. It also comes from how we educate each other. And a lot of the time it's not explicit, it doesn't need to be. Most “good girls” don't have to be told that it is your place to serve others first. They don't need to be told to over apologize. “You’re too emotional ask but ask nicely.” Sometimes it's explicit, “your skirt is too short.” But for every time it's explicit, there's all this time that it's not. So contextualizing good girl conditioning is really important first to know, it's not you. It's not your individual thing. It's collective. And it's not a flaw. It's a script made to be rewritten for these times. And putting into context that these times are just starting to happen. So being a woman of the pivot, the reliever of the tapestry is an opportunity that's only present now. So what geniuses we all are to be born at this time.
It's really important to say this because there are a lot of feelings of self-attack and attack of others that can come with the phrase, “I just want to fucking get rid of my good girl.” When a mother, grandmother, or a man, if anybody polices you, tells you how to behave, not like this, like this, watches out for you. Oftentimes, it's a legacy of love. It needs to be overturned, it needs to be changed, but if someone in your family knows that if you were to short a skirt, and something happens to you and you're going to be blamed for it, then the way that she can protect you is to tell you your skirts too short. What happens as we get older is the policing turns into self-policing. Now we're constantly on guard and vigilant. “Is it too short? Is it too long? Am I too mousy? Am I too bold? Am I asking for too much? Am I too pathetic and needy and weak?” So in the context of that, what are the qualities that make a woman marriageable in 1878? Intensely resourceful, low maintenance, doesn't need much, definitely doesn’t address her desires. When it comes to needs to get something done for the family, she can advocate to a degree but her job is to be resourceful – like in the sound of music, make kids clothes from curtains. And when those kids’ clothes are outgrown, I don't know make it into a soup. That's like the superpower of the marriageable woman from 100 years ago.
So where does that leave a woman today who is both part of a family in a position to receive, in a position to lead, and also in a position to provide? Well, what happens is the intense hesitation around asking, requiring, or creating an environment where other people don't just meet our needs, but show up and respond to our desires, our visions, our dreams. The woman who goes, “I’m no good girl, I'm a badass. I get everything I want.” But is she doing it all by herself? Is she the independent woman who doesn't ask but goes and makes it happen? And how many of those women who don't want to seem like damsels in distress and don't want to seem too bossy, in response to this compression, end up being intensely isolated, overworked, exhausted, frustrated, trying to hold it together, trying to hold it down? Also, being so competent, suddenly finding yourself that you're surrounded by people who need you and not people who feed you, resource you. That imbalance leads to a lot of evidence that no good deed goes unpunished.
I see this a lot with heterosexual marriages where this competent independent woman – because of her conditioning and it's faultless – never allows her partner to rise to the occasion by not asking for 100% of what she wants. He becomes more and more useless, she becomes more and more angry and distant. He gets more and more evidence that he can't make her happy. So why bother even trying, she'll never be satisfied. And then sometimes he goes and finds somebody else that he can feel useful with. It's one of our current patterns, a modern narrative.
Heidi: The exercises in your book are so profoundly useful. You said you approached all of this with a great spirit of curiosity, like how will this turn out? And how will this turn out? And I'll give this a try. You have centralized these exercises, and they just have power. One of them that really struck me was the exercise about asking. I had never, ever done an exercise like this. Maybe you can tell us about it. Because I wrote for pages and pages, and I was like, Oh my God! It was a revelation. So tell us about the asking exercise.
Kasia: So a couple of things, there's a flood of things that are coming into my mind simultaneously right now.
One of them is, I started the school with a man, Ruben Flores, who worked for Doctors Without Borders and had a lot of experience in war zones, where people didn't speak the same language and needed to negotiate. Really difficult, you know, flying bullets, really scary. And I have a background in both studying Taoism, and in wanting to be a Taoist nun, and as a dominatrix. And in the overlap between all of those three things was the kind of power that lives underneath the spoken word. Power Dynamics, which is a whole conversation about attention.
But in the context of the asking practice, in our first class ever, I came to him and was like, I have a genius idea. I know the first exercise we're gonna do, it's gonna blow them up, they're gonna freak out, they're gonna lose their minds, they're gonna have amnesia, they're not going to know what's going on. They're going to write a sentence that says, “I could ask ____ for ____”, and they're gonna fill it with a man's name and a request. And he was like, “Oh my lord, we are screwed. We are so screwed.” Then we went into the first day of class. And I could see his jaw dropping towards the floor because they’re all sitting there, notebooks, “I could ask ___ for ___”, and I'm like, “Any man.” “I don't have any men. I don't know any men.” “Not just the ones that you're bonded with by blood, like anybody, guy working at a cafe, like anybody.” Amnesia. Panic. “I don't want anything. I don't need anything. I'm not gonna ask for anything.” All of that stuff comes up all of the architecture of the superstitions, the fear, the red flags. I say, “Hey, this is an imagination exercise, you don't have to ask anything. We're writing on a piece of paper.” And all of the emotional alchemy that happens in that moment, when you're confronted with the idea of, “Hey, maybe I can sit on a throne for a moment, and imagine myself as being able to receive everything I want.”
Now women tend to, because of their conditioning, have a different response to each other's needs and desires. It's not that it’s better, it's just different. You can make a very non-request-oriented statement like, “I'm cold,” and a woman will be more likely to ask you if you need a sweater or should she close the window. Whereas a man's conditioning requires that sometimes you need to be more explicit, “Could you turn off the AC?”
So we're doing this imagination exercise, and I'm just asking them to spend a moment imagining that every single man out there who needs an explicit request is waiting to serve the Queen. And that thought is confronting enough that writing the requests of the specific people without sharing any information with any of them, has a tendency to orient two things. One: this sounds quite magical, but it's also pretty logical. If you're ready to receive a hug, so you're stressed out and all you want is to be hugged, and you're angry that you're not getting that hug. You're all over you're frustrated, right? If you go, “Oh, I could receive a hug,” all of a sudden you become immensely more huggable. So one of the things that feels like magic in the classes after the asking practice: they will find that they didn't make the requests, but they got the offers without ever having making made the requests.
Heidi: Oh my gosh.
Kasia: The second thing is it tunes their consciousness into a state of awareness of where and when that might be available. So asking becomes easier. And then there's the third category where they look at something they're sure they're gonna get a no, but they sit with it long enough to say that it's worth saying that it's wanted. And not only do they get a yes, but they also get a thank you. Because in the span of that particular class, we also do an exercise where they have to ask all of these men to think of them at a particular time. “Can you just think of me wish me luck, I'm taking a test,” or whatever they want to say. Some of them start with two people and some of them get to the place where they have asked 100 people. And here we have a moment in the class where, whether it's 20, or 100, women at the same time, are aware that over 1000, or 2000, men are thinking of us in this moment. Even that level of receiving has such a powerful impact. And it shows the invisible taboo of women wanting, desiring, having an appetite, having a money appetite, a sexual appetite, wanting things! How taboo that actually is and how scary asking can be. But what happens is because it's so scary and so taboo, the woman who does it, it's like low hanging fruit, she's winning all the points in the video game. She's getting gratitude. And the role of the “useless man who's become a worm” suddenly is elevated to provider, a knight in shining armor, a good support, or a good friend. All of the hidden love that people have towards us, a desire to serve, male or female, regardless of gender, suddenly has an avenue of expression. And we start being available to the proof that we are loved and not alone. Part of good girl conditioning and part of the patriarchy is isolation for all men and women. Isolation, isolation, isolation. The absurdity of the way that we live. I remember having this revelation in my apartment building. I was sitting there and looking for a stapler and I have four. But I was also thinking before I found the first of the four, which is absurd in and of itself, that I live in an apartment building with 120 apartments, and probably each one of them has a stapler. How crazy that is! We're all a nation of one, or a nation of two. I’m my own travel agent. I'm my own cook. The isolation is so absurd and wasteful and painful.
Heidi: Yeah. Kasia, one of the things that deeply moved me around this asking was the letter that you shared that you wrote to Ruben at a certain moment when you were about ready to start The Academy, I've never read anything like it, it made me cry. I cannot believe the power of this ask. And the fact that the answer was yes. I could tell the story, but again, would you tell the story because it's potent. I have to reflect to you that it gave me goosebumps. It was a liberating letter for women. So tell us about it.
Kasia: I think it's such a beautiful, metatextual, spiritual, symbolic experience. And that's how the school got started. Ruben and I were dating at the time, we were living together. He was on hiatus from his mission. Talk about the knight in shining armor. I don't know how many people how many babies were vaccinated, how many people's lives got saved because of the hospitals he built and the work that he did. So he's used to being this hero, right? And here we are in a New York City apartment. He's on hiatus. We're living together. And I am utterly consumed by looking for a path in my life. He's on hiatus, but I'm on a bigger hiatus. His main complaint in our relationship was that we didn't do enough normal things. We didn't go out enough. We didn't have enough friends. We didn't have enough time together. We didn't go to the movies. Everything was high intensity and kind of chaotic. His request, his desire, what he asked me for was not only utterly reasonable, it was totally stabilizing and mature and actually kind of amazing for a man to be like, “You know what, we need to live differently, this lifestyle isn't working.” And I thought about it. And I was like, “Okay, I'm going to take time away from this chaos and make myself feel calmer by going on dates and having movie nights and doing normal things, taking weekends to go on vacation.” And something in me was like, “I already don't have enough of what I need in order to make my dreams come true. Yes, that might be calming, yes, that might be rational, reasonable, adult, even romantic, but it doesn't sit right with me.” And I just sit with myself. I was like, I don't want a good boyfriend. I want a revolutionary who has my back and puts all of my needs first, just me, for at least a period of time. Making my dream come first. It sounded so selfish. And I realized that I had to tell him that we are going to die a slow death if I take even more energy and attention away from my dream and pour it into a nice, good, stable loving relationship. I wasn't going to break up with him over it, but I was going to say, hey, I need someone who's gonna give me everything they’ve got and even more to make my dream come true. And I can't even totally define my dream. So I wrote him this email saying, “I totally get how nuts this is. I need you not to be a good boyfriend, I need you to go way beyond that or we're going to die a slow death.” I even made a list, I was like, “I need you to be on the case of making my dream come true even more than I am, I need you to give me everything you got until I crossed the threshold. And when I crossed the threshold, and I'm in that seat and doing my thing, I have no guarantee that I'm going to be able to do the same for you. This isn't fair, it's not a tit for tat, it's not ‘make my dream come true and I’ll make your dream come true.’ I don't know what's going to happen then. But I really want and need. And this is the only way I see.”
I sent it and it was going to be 24 hours before I came back to the apartment and saw him and I was a wreck. I sent it and I was like, I just exploded a relationship with one of the best men I've ever met in my entire life. The one who's only asking me for more meaningful time together. That’s the kind of request you want to hear from a man, and this is what I'm coming back at him with. What I didn't know is that in our relationship, he was choosing between going back to a war zone and having a better time with me. When I made that request, I essentially asked him to go to war with me. That bigger ask, that 100% of what I needed and wanted. I walked in and he was chopping onions and he looks at me, I look at him and I see his face. He's like, “Yes, let's do this. I'm giving up everything. I'm not going back to the field and this is going to be worth it. This has gotta be worth it. Let's take on the world.”
And that's how the school started.
Heidi: It's just the most amazing story. Thanks for writing that letter. You gotta have women who are paving the way and asking on a more public level, right? But in an intimate relationship, it's almost more terrifying. Can I really ask this of an already good and decent and wonderful man?
Kasia: I don’t know exactly what you're referring to when you say women are asking publicly but if you're talking about asking publicly in terms of better behavior and women's rights. For reconciliation, admission of guilt when it comes to violations of sexual harassment or misbehavior, there's the degree to which we're still not asking for enough. We're making the kind of ask that's just like, let's make this thing as it is better. And the bigger ask, the bigger vision, could be closer to matriarchy. I don't know. Don’t just behave better. Step aside. I'm taking the steering wheel.
Heidi: Well, actually, that's a sort of perfect moment to ask you. I'm sure that a lot of people have a lot of curiosity about your work as a dominatrix. But I have some curiosity about your spiritual teacher. I have a curiosity of both, of course, and they intersect in this amazing way.
I know you’re a quester, I know that you went on great spiritual searches, but it sounds like you found a teacher in this monastery in China. That was your teacher and I'm wondering if you might share a little bit about how you knew she was your teacher. And any experiences with her that inform this moment?
Kasia: Well, actually, I hate to disappoint, but she was one of many teachers, and it was a teacher, a man, who led me to her. And then it was another teacher that was not a Taoist that helped me contextualize a lot of what I learned.
What was really remarkable about this Taoist Abbot, this Taoist nun, was the piece about what the animal of the body requires. Meaning, how do you get a woman's presence to feel powerful? How do you give her access to more grounded calm energy, especially grace under pressure? What are the missing pieces? And one of the biggest pieces for me and this is, this was a huge, wow, unexpected revelation: this celibate nun owned her sexual power.
Now, “this celibate nun owned her sexual power,” is a sentence one can misunderstand on many levels. So here's the clarification. What I saw first was a woman who, and and those women in her training had the same quality, was that when you looked at her when you were in her presence, you felt like what you were looking at was a top 8% of an iceberg. Not the icy quality, the solid quality of being rooted 90% underground. You could not feel like you would tip her over; the magnitude of her presence was immense.
There's this incredible story that everybody would tell about her. Decades ago, when the communist military forces came to tear down the monastery, she just stood at the edge of this plateau as the troops were coming in and she stared at them. They got so frightened that they turned around and went away.
What is it that she's doing? Is it a metaphysical energetic thing? And there was like a much simpler answer. That, in contrast to so many women that I knew – I was one of them – that we’re accustomed to this high chest breathing, high center of gravity. In working to lower my center of gravity, I had to contend with the release and the reckoning of all of the sexual trauma that a woman experiences. And I don't even mean that the overt abuse. I mean, unwanted sex. I mean, the fear around it that's culturally ingrained. So even dropping my breath, and getting rooted meant an ownership of my sexual power. And it dawned on me, so delightfully, that here was this woman who owned her sexual power, and there was nothing sexually performative about her. She wasn't needing to show that she had “owned her sexual power” by behaving any particular kind of way. It was entirely bodily. It was entirely there, not in her performance but in her being. That fuel, that lifeforce that comes from the creative sexual centers was perfectly connected with all of the rest of her and so well integrated. That filament nun could stand there and rock the world with the strength of her root.
That was in 2007, maybe, and it took this path of power in a profoundly new and fruitful direction. How I was in the dungeon, how I trained other dominatrixes, how I engaged with people. Making the rooted nature of the animal of my body, my nervous system, a priority by taking control of pacing in conversation by studying the power dynamics. When do I freeze? What happens? Where does my energy go? I had to study for seven years before I could even visit her. The profound training, attention, and sensitivity to what's happening in the moment made it really clear that there was this architecture that anyone could tap into.
Heidi: You tell the story in your book about the moment you had, it wasn't with her, but with another teacher. And then you go back to the dungeon and you have this revelation about attention. Was that after you had studied with her or was that was before?
Kasia: Before.
Heidi: Could you tell us a little bit in whatever story you like about how you discovered how these two worlds were of a piece and how they dance together and what united them? It's such a beautiful, unusual meeting of these two worlds.
Kasia: A simple, practical example of something I got from the meeting of these two words worlds had to do with training dominatrices. I started working as a dominatrix because I needed a job that paid well enough for my studies, both spiritual and university. But I didn't feel comfortable faking it. It wasn't innate and natural to me. I would say that I was kind of born more people pleaser and a caretaker than I was an authoritarian with rigid roles and demands. So I was faking it and I tried to understand what it would mean not as much as possible. I found that in order to take control of a man twice my age a lot. Totally different status and experience. What was required was that my authority, my energy, my attention, landed in his body. And I know that sentence sounds esoteric, but I mean, quite literally, that my attention landed in his body. I wasn't, Hi Mr. So-and-so and you've been a bad boy. In my own world, I needed to profoundly affect this human being. And one of the ways that I could do that most successfully was by asking questions and tracking the responses. I could put my attention on him well enough. So I could say something catch-all, like, “You've come here to be punished, haven't you?” And then see that his chin went down a little bit. “Alright, you seem ashamed, you're ashamed, aren't you?” Right. And then moving, moving, moving, tracking, moving, tracking, that would encourage my attention to land so strongly, and energy on him, that his body would shift. I started to recognize that moment of the shift, the moment when he went from his dominant outward performative space into his inward obedience following space. Into surrender. And I could see that this was not a subtle thing. It was a shift in a body.
When I started training dominatrixes, I noticed that every single one of them struggled with this, even the ones who believed or felt that they were innately dominant, sexually, innately. And the interesting thing about working as a dominatrix in this professional setting is that there's no sex allowed. You are spending an entire hour creating an experience that's supposed to be captivating, powerful, and erotic, without touching anybody, aside from the people who have you know, bondage fetishes, or want this particular kind of physical experience. But mostly, it's psychological, energetic, and verbal. That component cannot be understated. All of the dominatrixes struggled with this. They couldn't get the other person to shift into that state. Because the fear of men is so conditioned and ingrained that there's a retracted quality of their attention. It only goes so far, sometimes it meets the face, but it doesn't go all the way. Hold them strongly enough. Especially, big, burly men. They need that pressure to be strong enough for them to feel safe to surrender. So a lot of the tools I started using to train them to be better dominatrixes, I later ended up using in The Academy.
One of the amazing things that happened, I think it was like 2014 or so, there was a whole slew of women starting to talk about women in a meeting syndrome. Women in a meeting syndrome being the thing where a woman says something, she doesn't get credit for it, then a man restates it. We started getting intensely curious and experimenting with why this might be happening. And through no fault of anybody’s, we started observing that in a group when somebody's speaking, in order for everyone to receive the message they start behaving like a pack. In order to receive the message, they have to feel like they're in the submissive, surrendering state. They have to shift. Once they shift, they’re listening to a voice that they will register as authority.
What a woman will do, because of her conditioning, because of a lifetime of being cut out, she will tend to mumble the idea into her cup. Even if you correct the language the energy has to go with it. If you say, “I think that,” you're moving the attention to yourself. We want to take the attention and grab every body in the room and have them shift into a surrendered state. So what happens is, even if she doesn't use that language, her energy won't wrap itself around the whole room (except for when it does and it works). That idea will be lingering in the room, the energy of that idea will be lingering in the room and it'll start to irritate the space. She said it but she didn't land the goal. She didn't get everyone to shift. And that irrepressible urge to get rid of that irritant in the space, the thing that's incomplete, the thing that's hanging in the air, will summon another man to restate it in a way that has everybody's body shift because he's been trained to dominate since he was in diapers. Everyone shifts and hears it, and then they remember and feel, “Oh, he's the one who said it. He's the one who noted it as a good idea out of all the ideas here.” And then it lands for everybody. Except for the women in the room who are familiar with this phenomenon and are like, wait a minute, he just restated what she said. A lot of people won't even notice.
“We’re not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed.
Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas.
Right now, she gets to have her requests land.
Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not.
Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze.
Right now.”
This is where it's such a win. For a woman to understand this, she doesn't have to undo her entire psychological background. All she has to do is practice with attention. It seemed like I accidentally stumbled upon a secret that solves so many problems and doesn't require a lifetime of undoing damage done, or going back into time and reckoning with things in the past. We're not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed. Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas. Right now, she gets to have her requests land. Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not. Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze. Right now.
Heidi: And that's such a huge gift that you give in the book right away is the tool for breaking the freeze. It's got this incredible simplicity to it. And yet, it's full. How do you break the freeze when a man is coming at you and saying something inappropriate or dominating?
Kasia: What we're talking a lot about is the dominant state of attention when you want to own a room, and the submissive state of attention, the surrendered state so you can receive. So the example of being ready to receive a hug is the submissive state of attention that allows people to approach you and give you what you want. So both are really important. Women will put their attention out and be vigilant, but not necessarily dominate, and women will put their attention in, but not necessarily tap into the desire of what they want.
What happens when a woman freezes? And all of us freeze and what's crazy-making is oftentimes we don't know when we're gonna freeze. It could be something little or something big. We can kill it on a large scale, go home, have somebody in the elevator ask us if we have kids, and be frozen, right? It can be anything. The thing is that when there's tension, stress, or a panic, a woman will tend to default to an inward state. Somebody puts somebody asks her an inappropriate question, she'll go inward and think, “what did I do to give this person the wrong idea? What do I say? What's the answer? Why am I in this situation?” Very inward. What we have is a dynamic where somebody’s attention is outward on you, and you have your attention on you and you're pinned with that. Double attention pinned.
The easiest way to break the freeze is to direct your and the other person's attention outward. We have this incredible tool in language, called a question. Asking a question that will direct their attention to them. In a pinch, you can say, “Where'd you get that tie?” But somebody asks you, “Do you like threesomes?” And you could say, “What is it that has you asking that question? Are you taking a poll? Do you realize how inappropriate that question is?”
Sounds so simple. And simple it is. Ask a question. If you can question their question, great. If you can question their existence in asking that question even better. But break the freeze by putting your attention out. Don't go in, don't self examine, at that moment when you feel pinned, put your attention out.
“The reason breaking the freeze is simple but not easy is that in the attempt of this, we start realizing how ingrained the default state of attention being inward actually is.
”
The reason it's simple, but not easy is that it's in the attempt of this, we start realizing how ingrained the default state of attention being inward actually is. I saw this when teaching a roomful of 600 women. I tell the women, “I'm gonna ask you an inappropriate question.” And the questions really vary in severity. Sometimes it's just, “How are you? What do you do for a living?” Sometimes it's, “What kind of sex do you like? Do you want to go out on a date? Did you only get your job because you're attractive?” It’s all over the place. I come up to them, and I ask them a question, landing my attention on them. The first woman always answers the question. Second woman may catch herself. Third woman freezes, but they will say, “Oh, I froze.” The breakthrough moment is woman four or five comes back with a hard-hitting, “Who do you think you are?” Everybody roars and laughs. As I ask more and more women, they collectively start to feel it. They start calibrating. When it's an intensely invasive question, they'll give a sharp back-off kind of question. “Who do you think you are? Do you realize how sensitive that is?” For the softer meandering ones or for the ambiguous ones, they answer back with the right kind of pressure. You know, her boss at a bar says, “Shall we continue this meeting up in my hotel room?” And she goes back asking, “What is it that we can do in your hotel room that we can't do right here?” The calibration starts to happen.
And then when you start feeling that you can have control over where the attention is, the agency and being, the leading the following, a lot of the fear, a need for safety in high stakes conversations for us go away. Because you can trust yourself to move in and out of that state as you see fit and to use the tools to move back and forth.
Heidi: And actually, to enjoy it. Sometimes if you’re lashing out or if it's defensive, there's still something left over inside that feels like, “Oh, I didn't enjoy that.” But you can choose a question that keeps feeling at ease in your body. I would assume as you get better and better at this.
I'm gonna shift gears here for a moment because part of this podcast is poetry. And I would love to share a poem with you that I wrote five years ago. I don't often share my own poetry, but I'm going to share this one. I think when I wrote it, I didn't know a woman that was fully living it. And after reading your book, I'm like, “Huh, I think Kasia’s doing some of this.” But this poem it's not just one woman, it’s all women. I want to read it to you and I invite you to have a moment to breathe and take it in.
She Skirts the Rules
She will never walk the straight and narrow.
Her hips are wide with care and her stride leans into new electric, undiscovered.
She won't stop for fear or ignorance barring her path.
She is water flowing around every river rock.
She is fire burning, what outlives its time.
She knows what is under her skirt, but never flaunts her power, just moves with a grace that doesn't need words.
The wake she leaves behind says all she needs to say.
She loves what is hers to love with ferocity and tenderness.
Her touch soothes and ignites.
Her love demands that you stay awake.
She celebrates silence, works from a still point.
Wholeness pours forth from quiet eyes.
She skirts every rule.
Milks every no into not so absolute.
Welcomes rough seas and finds her song in the darkest hour.
She is resolute and reaching, sports a crown or an apron, wears whatever disguise she must to offer her soul self.
Nothing will impede the ocean of her bounty.
Nothing can contain her.
There are no rules to hold her magnificence.
So love her irreverence, improvisation, improbable victories.
Love her brashness, her bold, her rougher edges.
Open your arms in gratitude for all she risks to crack us open.
That we may each ever more deeply, freely be.
Kasia: That's beautiful.
Heidi: Thank you. As I'm reading it, I can feel all the ways through the book that you are embodying a lot of this. One of the sentences that I was just registering now is this idea of milking every no into not so absolute.
Kasia: Yeah. I thought about this exactly when you said it in the poem. One of the mottos of the school, or the phrases that our students say over and over again, is “Use everything.” Negative emotion, anger to passion, sadness to tenderness, outside obstacles, see the opportunity, renegotiate boundaries. The construction noise that starts at six o'clock in the morning, use that. Is that an opportunity to go practice your skills of influence? Is that an opportunity to start getting up earlier in the morning? Is that an opportunity to learn about local politics and advocate? Is that an opportunity to learn about a quiet place, maybe you want a quiet place in your house and soundproofing? Low stakes example. But there are many high-stakes examples of using everything, and I thought about astrology for a second. I don't know that much about it, but word on the street is that Aquarians are about to have a rough year because Saturn is doing its thing. What’s cool about astrology is that the idea behind it seems to be very much use everything. If Saturn is going to be messing with you for a year – and you can correct me if I get any of this stuff wrong – if the hard, discipline, boundary-filled energy of Saturn is present, then it's a phenomenal year to get your medical tests, to do a detox, to start cleaning your house, to start being really clear in your communications. That is such a profoundly loving, alchemical, powerful approach to life. Welcome this energy. How do I use the patriarchy to my advantage? How do I engage in a world that's falling apart? Do I become a healer? Life has so many profound gifts to offer us if we can see, not through positive thinking and glossing over things, where the real opportunity is. And that the life experience can be profoundly rewarding. And not one where we feel like we're a ship battered by the waves, but surfers.
“Life has so many profound gifts to offer us if we can see where the real opportunity is. ”
Heidi: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, for sure. And just to say, Saturn, I think is one of the greatest planets because it is a doorway of opportunity. Because you are tested, because there is pressure, because you have to grow up in some way, because you have to mature in some way, because you have to show up for yourself in some way. And that's a blessing as much as people want to complain about it and go, “Oh, that's so hard. I'm being squashed. This is ending in my life.”
Kasia: We have an epidemic of untested men running the planet. You have someone like our former president who needed somebody to put him in his place. Who never got tested. I'm speaking about people I don't know personally. But I can see that true confidence comes from knowing what in yourself you can rely on and testing comes from that. It's a contact with reality. Where I think the earth ship of planet Earth has gone awry is untested men being in the driver's seat.
Heidi: Yeah, that's well said. Absolutely. And you know, it's interesting, Kasia, the Saturn energy even in your case. At the end of last year, you had Saturn opposite your rising sign and your sun sign. It was this incredible preparation for what you're doing now.
Kasia: Wait so last year was supposed to be bad for me?
Heidi: Not bad, it was you better show up and do what you said you're gonna do.
Kasia: What about this year? Is it better?
Heidi: Yeah, this year you have the progressed moon in Aries which is a whole new chapter of your life. It's like, go go go. Come forth with a lot of commitment and bold ideas. That particular thing only happens once every 27 years, and you are in it. And it's at the top of your chart. It's your book, it's how you're going to be heard and received, and it's a very exciting time. So yes, it's a kickass year.
I have one more question for you and then I'm gonna let you go. The podcast is called The Radiance Project. And so I always ask my guests at the end, if they might share one radiant moment. That might be a moment when the light broke through the clouds. That might be a moment when you're like, oh, wow, something is moving through me that you know, but just a moment of light that you that is coming to you right off the top?
Kasia: What kind of radiance is it? Are you talking about a revelation, an insight, a breakthrough?
Heidi: Your Virgo Moon is taking over.
Kasia: I'm on the spot and I'm speechless. I'm gonna ask a question.
Heidi: We actually had a moment. I would just say to you exactly what it means for you. For me, when I think of radiance I think of the heart as a sun. This feeling when you're standing in this sun.
Kasia: I got one. I received furniture that I needed to put together but the instruction booklet was missing and it wasn't available online. I couldn't find it anywhere. It was an incredibly frustrating series of days. I was like, and now this, and now this. Now I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this. I sat there upset about everything that wasn't working in my life and I was looking at this pile of pieces. And all of a sudden, looking at that pile of pieces, I realized that the pile of pieces was telling me how it needed to be put together. It revealed and held in its design all of the things I needed to know. I didn't know the whole thing. I didn't know how it was exactly how supposed to look. But as I started picking up the pieces, I was like, “Oh, this piece wants to go here. And this piece wants to go here. And this piece wants to go here.” This was like 20 years ago. And this sentence rang through, which was everything's an open book test. Everything reveals the answers you need to know in front of you, you just need to look at it. From assembling furniture, I can see the person in front of me, the task in front of me, the formula, the rulebook, the instruction manual, the tips, the hacks, the guides, they're really not necessary if I'm looking at the moment as the Braille, the language. It contains within it all of the answers. And it actually really informed the way that we went about creating the curriculum for The Academy. We looked at women, listened to what they wanted, what they were suffering from, watched them, tried things. “Oh, this is how this wants to work. This is how this comes together.” That was my moment of radiance.
Heidi: It's brilliant. And it really is how you have grown the school. This perfect, very practical moment. But I love that. Okay, that's perfect.
Do you want to tell our listeners about where to find you or invite us into anything that's happening because you're teaching a lot right now?
Kasia: Our website is my name, but my name can be hard to spell. So you can also get there by going to weteachpower.com.
We're offering eight classes this semester:
Empathy
Power with Men
Power with the Erotic
Unshakeable Power of Desire
Unshakeable Confidence – Breaking the Spell of Self-Doubt
The Obligation Detox
Power Dynamics
So we have a lot of curriculum coming up for the rest of this semester and then more to come in the fall. The book is called Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power. We're doing a lot of fun things so come check us out.
Heidi: Please order the book, Unbound – A Woman’s Guide to Power, immediately. It really is a life-changer. Men and women alike. Kasia, thank you so much for spending this hour with us. I know how busy you are and I'm really grateful for this time with you.
Kasia: Thank you. It's such a pleasure.
Esther Perel Discussion Group | Good Girl Conditioning and Becoming Unbound
Watch the full interview on YouTube here.
Read the transcript:
Leah: Welcome guys. I'm here with Kasia Urbaniak. I know this is a much-awaited conversation.
“The whole book Unbound is about breaking out of the good girl conditioning in the body, in the mind, and the emotional field without waiting for the world to change.”
Kasia, I can't remember where I first came across your work. It was in November of this past year. Maybe it was a suggested YouTube video after I watched something else, but I learned about you and was just so drawn to your work and your message. You just this week came out with a new book.
Kasia: That's right.
Leah: Unbound. I bought a couple of copies for friends for their birthdays coming up. I’m an audiobook person so I got my version on audiobook, but I got hardcover copies for friends. I'm always curious, like with the book-writing process, I feel like it's a journey in itself. And I'm curious what came up for you in writing this book.
Kasia: I almost feel like it's a magical, paradoxical, karmic land situation where starting the school and writing the book were similar in the sense that everything I was trying to do I ended up being confronted by.
Leah: Oh of course.
Kasia: So the book writing process. You could say it took two years, you could say it took five years. You mentioned the thing about Esther (Perel’s) take on eroticism as being linked to vitality. One of the things that helped me was returning to that even in the vocal booth of recording the audiobook. Every step of the way; the work of The Academy on asking, on legitimacy, on not worrying about asking for the 35th correction, the arguments about the photographer and how it should look. All of it, I'd have to go back to the book I was writing and be like, “Oh, this is how I do it.”
Leah: Yeah, it's funny. I just bought my first home. And I feel like this home has been a really great teacher and mirror to me as well. Just all of the decisions that come up, negotiating credits with the sellers, and even the design process. The drain of making decisions and this balance between being okay with stuff and creating this beautiful space for yourself. I feel like my home has been one of my biggest teachers for myself this year.
Kasia: Right. I’m not surprised.
Leah: Amazing. Okay, so you talked a little bit about what came up for you in the book writing process. And I'm curious specifically, what good girl conditioning came up for you? And maybe for anyone who's unfamiliar with that term, since it's such a foundation and cornerstone of your book if you can explain it in your own words.
Kasia: Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to acknowledge that this is a discussion group around Esther Perel’s work. One of the things I love about her work is that you can feel, taste, touch, and see. That although she's incredibly intellectual, and incredibly smart, and there's a very strong mind component, you can feel, see, taste, touch, and understand that everything comes out of practice. Practice.
When The Academy got started, I had 1000 ideas about good girl conditioning, about what was going to work, about asking, about negotiation. And I had to throw them all out the window. What ended up winning out were the things that showed up in the room that worked.
Good girl conditioning is a concept that mentally is kind of easy to understand, in the sense that you take a look at the arc of human history and that women have had some kind of rights for maybe 50, maybe 100 years, maybe 20, depending on how you define it, right? And even if you are generous and say, 150 years, that's really an eyeblink. Most people, most women will have grandparents who were raised in a very different world when it comes to gender, if not parents, right?
Leah: Yeah.
Kasia: So if you have an entire cultural history that's bent on a woman being able to thrive and succeed survive in society based on basically one factor, how marriageable she is. How high up the social ladder she can marry, can she find a partner that will do all this stuff? That will make it tougher to express her dreams? What you have is the fabric of social behavior and social conditioning around a woman being marriageable.
What are the qualities in the patriarchy that would make a woman marriageable? Low maintenance, accommodating, harmonizing, putting other people first. Never, never, never, never looking better than everyone else, but also not falling behind. Being incredibly resourceful, not asking for anything, but making the best use of what she has. And suddenly you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that's a really antiquated idea.” But you see our current predicament and women's behavior – and not even women's behavior. Our own unconscious bodily tendencies still move in the space of either wanting to be all those things or an exact rejection of those things. I'm not going to ask for permission, I'm not going to ask for help. I'm not going to receive anything. I do it all myself. Screw that. I'm totally independent. And then being really exhausted, tired alone, isolated, doing the job of 20 people, getting 20% of the credit. Either way good girl conditioning can be addressed in the present moment in our present culture in a way that speaks to an individual woman's experience as related to history. Instead of talking just about, very important, but sexism, right? There's something we can do to break out of this thing that was passed on to us by our foremothers and forefathers. So that's kind of a long definition of good girl conditioning, but it lives in the body and we teach it to each other. The whole book Unbound is about breaking out of the good girl conditioning in the body, in the mind, and the emotional field without waiting for the world to change.
Leah: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know why I thought of this. Maybe kind of because of how you set the stage. But my grandparents on my mom's side were Holocaust survivors. And so I think my mom really received not just like the good girl conditioning, but the fear and the scarcity that came with that. Yes, women have good girl conditioning, but if you're in a family that has experienced trauma, or racism, or other challenges, then that's layered on top of the good girl conditioning as well.
Kasia: Yeah. You know that there have been these great studies recently about epigenetic trauma, trauma being passed down genetically. People who argue, “Oh, women are free now. There's no reason why we should have any kind of conditioning from the past,” don't understand. Actually Holocaust survivors were the sort of the core of this study, that they found that there was a genetic impact on children of Holocaust survivors that hadn't never had that trauma, but it was genetically affected. Certain gene sequences were turned on or off in accordance with the trauma pattern.
Leah: Yeah, I believe that I feel like the embodied trauma that you're probably not even conscious of. And then there was like, the conscious messages that you got because of the trauma as well.
Kasia: That's true, it becomes a vicious cycle. But here's the core of what's really important for me to say. I have this path. This is this unique conjunction between studying to be a dominatrix and training to be a Taoist nun made me really sensitive in the space of studying power dynamics. Really subtle and sensitive. What I saw was a huge missing piece in how we understand power connection, power dynamics, and this architecture of power, right? The thing that I want to say more than anything else is when it's going perfectly well, when we are in our natural state of sharing attention and sharing power and taking turns being on top and taking turns receiving and being the certain the surrendered submissive state, when it's working and singing and working particularly well, that's when we don't notice it. And when it starts falling apart, it's usually to the detriment, though not always, of whoever has a lower status in society, women's conditioning in particular. But when it fails, it fails both parties, and then we have 1000 explanations for why it's happening, and not the one that has to do with attention. Not the one that has to do with the architecture of how this works.
So another Esther Perel thing that I think is brilliant, is it doesn't matter what your partner says to you, if you're in a romantic relationship, it doesn't matter what your partner says to you. And I hope I hope I'm paraphrasing this correctly. If you don't think that your partner cares and is existing for your best interests and cares about your well-being, anything they say will be interpreted or can be interpreted as an attack. This noticing points to the conversation under the conversation, that's always the most important thing there is. How do you transmit the information, “I care about you, therefore, when I say one of us should take out the trash,” it's not an attack? How do I transmit that? By paying attention to you. Where's the weight of attention. By seamlessly shifting that attention back and forth, when I'm talking about myself, I'm talking about my experience, my attention’s on myself. My attention is on you, and what ends up happening is the energetic construction of victimhood. And vice versa. So anyway, I'm getting into the mechanics of it, but when it's working, it's the best fuck you've ever had. The back and forth, it's the best conversation you've ever had. That's when the power dynamic is fluid, the switching is happening. It's the brainstorming session that's generating phenomenal ideas, where you don't even remember whose ideas were whose anymore. You can't even log the IP rights because you're just so connected and moving in the dance. The point is that despite conditioning our natural state, you see how children shift roles. One minute you're a magician, one minute, you're the enemy, you're the then you go from the villain to the hero, it doesn't matter. All of a sudden I have an invisible shield that protects me from bullets. Reality doesn't get in the way of the energetic need of the dynamic. And it's beautiful to watch. It's just phenomenal. It's where the magic of human synergy comes in.
Leah: I thought of a great improv show or a great jazz improv trio. That magic that happens with that spontaneity.
I don't know why I thought of this when you just shared what you did. But I was a huge Governor Andrew Cuomo fan. I don't know if you're familiar with him at all. You're nodding a little bit. Okay. So during the pandemic, he was in the spotlight for kind of like really taking control in New York City. And I was really turned on by him, and I think a lot of people were. You couldn't listen to an interview, whether it was like Chelsea Handler or Jada Pinkett Smith, talking about like, don't bother me during Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing every day. He had every eligible woman interested in his status, etc. And then I think just this month, really bad allegations have come out around sexual harassment and there's a new one coming out every day. It just struck me. I was so disgusted when I heard this news, because he's someone with obviously a tremendous amount of power, and sex appeal. And yet he's, if the allegations are correct, choosing to prey on people who don't have power. I was just curious to get your perspective, what makes someone who's seen as very sexually attractive, and very “eligible bachelor”, what went wrong in the whole power dynamic that they chose to take advantage of these situations?
Kasia: There are two issues that come up for me immediately, and one of them is the way we pay attention to and how we talk about people who do great things, do terrible things, how we publicly decide and change our minds about what behavior is acceptable, what behavior can be talked about, what behavior can't be talked about. So like, let's leave that aside for a moment.
I can't speak to Cuomo at all right? There is a required level of nuance that we’re culturally not ready to get into. We're not we're very quick to conflate a person's horrible or potential criminally illegal behavior with who they are. You know how in a relationship, they'll say, punish the behavior, not the person? We're nowhere near that. And I understand why. So not Cuomo. But I know that there are many men who have had the experience of being told their entire lives to shut it down, don't have feelings, numb out so that you can sacrifice your lives and go to war. So you can fight for us, kill the bear. And then at the same time, are also being told, you're numb, you're dumb, you're not picking up the signals, you don't know that you violated someone, you can't see the signs. We have a situation where a lot of men are in a position where they have been conditioned not to notice. I'm not talking about the straight-up predators and aggressors. I'm not talking about those who've committed crimes or who have, I'm not even talking about the fact that like our shifting values are a good thing. That we care about these things now. There is something about educating men and not being so quick to murder them.
Now, in terms of power dynamics, the reason I mention this is you asked me about Cuomo is I can't speak to him, but the idea that because he's attractive and sexy, that he would have to use power dynamics in order to get a woman or get something. It has nothing to do with why that happens. It happens because of numbness and sheer stupidity, or it happens. because the pleasure is not in flirting with a woman or getting her it's in pitting her, violating her, making her feel less than, and stupid. One is incredibly nefarious and one is incredibly innocent. And we don't have the social skills to separate or to even talk about those things. So everyone's either exonerated, and it’s “boys will be boys” or everyone goes into the bonfire. We actually need to develop the skills at some point of being able to evaluate these things and think about them.
Leah: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I totally get that. It's a great point too.
I have so many questions for you. Well, this was a nice segue. You had done an interview on the podcast, The Unmistakable Creative, and you had shared men want to know how to feel more, and women want to know how to do more with what they feel. And I'm curious if you can explain that and share where each, meaning men and women, can start.
Kasia: Yeah, that interview was one of my first, it was quite a few years ago, and I would correct it and say men need to feel more. Not want to. Some of them. Some of them do, some of them don't. And women want to know what to do with what they feel has to do with our opposing conditioning. So it's not even so gender binary, it's more what's asked of us and what's expected of us, right? This is like a big picture statement, right? If we step back, we're looking at a civilization based on the Judeo-Christian flow of thought, which can really tend towards ignoring the body, disembodiment, rising above the body. That also means rising above emotions, rising above feelings, this whole trend of hyper-productivity and stoicism. Here are your hacks on how to turn your 8-hour day into a 40-hour day. Produce, produce, produce, produce. This is all to override embodiment. Now, where women sit and where men sit in terms of conditioning is, for better or for worse, we've kept more of our embodiment. We’ve kept more of our embodiment, right? Women are allowed to have feelings, even though they're diminished and made to feel crazy for having them. I don't know if it's biology or what it is, but time and time again there's more space – even if it knocks a woman down the totem pole – for her to have a more embodied experience. We are all moving in a disembodied direction. That override is not good for men or women. It's quite terrible for men and women. Women are sitting on these signals and gaslit into craziness about being able to feel out that it's time to change a schedule or commitment or change a deal or adjust to the seasons, adjust to the moment. All great sex, all great parties are all about being able to feel the rhythm, feel the moment, feel that. This is the movement of the lifeforce. We’re a civilization that's trying to dominate. Nature, women, body. All the life speaking to us, telling us, guiding us.
Now, when it comes to men and women in a heterosexual pairing, what we have is the thing that's hard to say, which is, we think men are idiots. They think we're angry bitches. We're sitting on all of this information. Right? Not understanding why they don't get it. And they're on the other side being like, what's the deal? What's all this about? What's all this chaos? What's all this feeling? What's all this about? Why is this such a big deal? Because we're standing on different levels through our conditioning of how embodied and how we engage with what comes up for us in any given moment. It’s one of the most important things to understand if we're going to survive as a human race and live in harmony with the life force. On the individual level, it's exactly how you get Unbound, feel more life, understand what to do with the signals. Use your empathy as a superpower, not as a curse. Understand where the heat is, where people are coming from, how to move with it, and live your life in accordance with that. There's nothing better, there's nothing better, there's nothing better. There's no amount of success that's joyful when it's bereft of life. There's no formula that leads you to a deader option that can satisfy. There's nothing better than living with the life force and living in accordance with it. My biggest dream and hope for humanity is that as women decondition from the disembodied programming, we become wilder, we lead the way, we lead men, we lead children, and we lead us all through a way of life that is spontaneous, that's alive, that's that in honor of what's alive. The decisions you made when you bought your house, it's the things you were confronted with when you say your house is your teacher. It's how you choose something when logical information doesn't really do the thing to guide you in one direction or another. It's being at the right place at the right time. Knowing what someone needs or what you need in a given moment. It's being in conversation with the universe in a really deep and profound way. I don't think there's anything better.
Leah: Kasia, I'm having the biggest chuckle, because for anyone who's read your book, there's a whole section on the noisy neighbor. And that was what led me to buy a house.
Kasia: That’s amazing!
Leah: I was having the most horrific experience with a noisy neighbor, and an unresponsive management company. And as I was reading your book, I was trying to think back about the energy that I approached my neighbor with. It's hard when you're sleep-deprived, you're pissed off, and you're cranky, to bring the finesse that you suggested to the moment. But the good news is, it was such a painful experience, I was pretty happy in my old place, and I never would have been in an uncomfortable enough position to move out of it. And this is just the most beautiful space and I could be here for 20 years and be happy as a clam. So maybe it's good that I completely fucked up the, “how to approach a noisy neighbor and get what you want.” Because I love the situation I'm in now. So that's a whole other kind of lesson.
Kasia: There's so much I want to say about that. First of all, it's clear that your house was the most alive next choice, it was more alive than winning with your neighbor. Also in that example, I say it's better to tell your neighbor to fuck off and turn that shit down than it is to try to be really nice. And that's where we get into trouble with trying to get it right. Congruence wins. When what you're feeling and how you're speaking and where your attention is are aligned, it always turns out better for everyone. But it's not a prescription for getting it right or wrong. It's like, you got your house.
Leah: 100%.
Kasia: That's the thing. Life moves in mysterious ways. We’re happier when we know how to follow it.
Leah: Agreed, 100%. I was just having such a chuckle with that example. I wanted to ask you, going back to that last quote about men want to feel deeper, and women want to act on how they feel. I'm curious if in your sessions as a dominatrix if there were any moments where men were allowed to feel really deeply through that container that you created. And then as a follow-up, I'm curious what stops women from acting on how they feel? I know, they're two different sides of the coin, but just kind of brought up curiosities about both.
Kasia: First question, every single session I've ever done. Every single session I've done has been about creating a safe space so that my clients can feel more deeply. Using language, story, and direct instructions to lead them into a place where they can feel even more. Literally, some of the basic location tools in the book in terms of how to track in a conversation, how to keep track of what's happening, and have influence, came from sessions. I was like, the stereotypical thing, “On your knees, head down,” right? And then suddenly I noticed there was his sadness there. So I'd say, “You did that quite slowly. You seem quite sad.” Sigh. “You sighed. Is there grief?” Tears. Right? Locating someone step by step. So every single session.
When I started training dominatrixes, it was really interesting because a lot of the women who were being trained were quite young, I was quite young, they were quite young. A lot of them were doing it for money. There was a percentage who were naturals, they loved this kind of thing. They were meant for it, destined for it. I wasn't, I wasn't a natural dominatrix at all. I had trouble ordering water in a restaurant. I didn't want to bother the waiter. When I was training them, I saw the same thing I saw over and over again, which is, there's a huge difference between a performance of power where the attention is all on the self, and a demonstration of power, where the attention’s on the other. And the difference is huge. Because if I go, “I am so powerful, I am mistress of the dark, you are a bad boy.” Versus if I look and just say simply, “You are here.” Much softer statement, totally neutral. “You are here, you heard that I saw you hear that you are here, your head is tilted downward.” That is so much more powerful. So what I saw is the hesitation and shifting the attention outward.
Men tend to feel more comfortable moving, maybe less so now out of fear, but men tend to feel more comfortable moving into a woman's space. Women tend to feel very uncomfortable with moving into a man's physical space. Giving him the wrong idea. It translates in attention. We'll even, not fully, put our attention out on a man. Here's the problem. In the animal kingdom, how you declare yourself as alpha is not by puffing out your chest. If you look at wolf packs, if you look at all of these organizations on the most basic level, the alpha is the one that has their attention out. All of the submissives are the ones that have their attention on themselves to see if they're following, if they're getting it right, getting the instructions.
Women on a basic attention level will tend towards incomplete outward attention. Just enough outward attention to see if they're in trouble, if they're wearing the right dress at the cocktail party, just enough to see if anybody needs anything, just enough to see what's happening, like a vigilance. But not enough to shift to a dominant state. Because in the dominant state, your attention is landed so fully on the other that they feel it. They shift into a self-aware surrendered state. In the dungeon, I saw this over and over and over again. Then when I became a teacher, I saw “women in a meeting” syndrome. A woman is not owning a room because she's been conditioned to not put her attention and wrap it all the way around everybody there. She says a great idea, and somehow nobody really hears it until a guy says it. Yeah, it's sexism, but it's also energetics. He's been taught his entire life to stick his energetic penis out. And she's been watching herself. “Okay, I'm here and I'm in charge,” right? But the attention is not fully out. Just on the primal animal body level, it makes all the difference. Do you trust that you are well held? Everybody knows how to do the dominant state of attention. Everybody knows how to do the surrendered state of attention. Not everybody knows what it is. Not everybody can do it on call. Forgive the stereotype, but watch a mom figure out what's going wrong with her kid. She's got that kid held. Right? Even just a minute. How many of us are driven crazy by moms who in the moment of mothering have their intention inward even though they're speaking about you. It's like a mom that isn't there. You don't feel well held by. Business, sex, friendship, partnership, creative pursuits, or making an ask, understanding attention dynamics makes all the difference. You move from something transactional to something synergetic where both people get more out than they've put in.
Leah: I had a total a-ha moment when you were talking about training young dominatrixes. So I’m a pole dancer; I dance almost every day. At the studio, there are a lot of the up-and-coming newbie instructors, and they're wearing zero clothing and they have these model bodies. And there's the owner of a studio, I think she started like a decade ago, we all call her Dede. Dede will show up, she has a very nondescript body, a body of someone you'd see on the street. She usually wears sweats and a hoodie. And I feel so held in her presence. It’s like she knows exactly why each person is there. This person is there are because they're a mom, and they're trying to reconnect with their sexuality. This person is in her 20s and she’s trying to get guys. This person is a former gymnast and is trying to connect with her sense of athleticism. Right? This person is just looking for a fun way to tune in to music and be playful and silly. She knows everyone's why. There are 15 moving bodies in a room and she has her eye on every single one. There's a new person in the back, and she's telling her how to do the basics. There's an advanced student in the front, and she's giving her advanced modifications. She's cracking jokes. It's really kind of hard to put into words, the feeling of being with her, but it's really like nothing else you've experienced. You can go into a class with a newbie instructor and they have the right music and they have the right moves, and I just find myself looking at the clock and just not being in it. And then I go to one of Dede’s classes and it's euphoric. So when you describe being held, I'm like, yep, that's it.
Kasia: That is a phenomenally perfect, accurate, and beautiful example. So high priestess, Dede, is an excellent dom and knows how to place her attention. We do this exercise at The Academy that takes about five minutes. All the women pair off, and they do this exercise where they practice putting their attention on the other, while the other person practices deeply receiving attention. It's done with very neutral language. What happens is after a few minutes, a flow begins where even the most concrete-minded woman starts becoming so deeply intuitive that this woman that she's never met, who she is describing, she starts to get images and feel psychic about. This is a few minutes, and then they switch. After the exercise, both women feel like they just had a spa day, but also feel like in that five minutes so much deep information was transmitted not through language. If I say you have brown hair, it's such a basic neutral language experience. They practice without Dede’s skill, without Dede’s magical experience, being like Dede and being held by Dede, because we all have that natural capacity. Good girl conditioning is what teaches us how not to use it. Because those newbie instructors are probably doing what so many of us have been conditioned to do. To be self-aware, to be confident. “Being confident.” Not using our attention confidently, not regarding others with confidence. It's a huge difference. I love that example. Such a good one.
Leah: Thanks. Is there anyone in your life where you feel super held with them?
“You don’t have to be incredibly well-loved in order to feel incredibly well-held. But to feel incredibly well-held is an essential ingredient in being well-loved.”
Kasia: Everyone. I am around great people but also I need to be well held every day, many times a day. I put my attention out so much that receiving attention is very important. And it's not because it's spontaneous, it's because I ask. I ask for it. So there are three people watching this right now and they already know, like my friends, my people, they already know that the moment this is over their job is to spend 10 minutes telling me only what was great. Only what they liked. I'll ask my partner, “I need 10 minutes where you hear me vent, and then afterward, tell me how cute I looked,” or, “tell me you want to be with me,” or, “I need 10 minutes to tell you about this idea that I think is genius, I want you to spend five minutes afterward shooting my idea full of holes.” And the timing aspect is super important. “We're stepping out of the real world, and we're creating a magical container where I need you to shoot my idea full of holes, this idea is going to go up against a firing squad, I need you to be the bully, the attacker, I need you to play with me for five minutes after I tell you for 10 minutes.” This is something I do every day, and if I didn't those emotional needs and those relational needs wouldn’t be met. I would bounce around in my head between my thoughts and feelings. You don't have to be incredibly well-loved in order to feel incredibly well-held. But to feel incredibly well-held is an essential ingredient in being well-loved. These are practices and skills that anyone can do.
Leah: I just had a realization. I don't have people who, the way you've designed your life, what you just described, I don't have that. But maybe consciously, maybe unconsciously, I've created daily routines where for example, I mentioned the pole example. I have a fitness community that I'm a part of. I noticed that I tend to be drawn to instructors, where they just excel at words of affirmation. “You're amazing. You're doing awesome.” They're super challenging, but also so acknowledging. So like, at noon, I know for an hour I'm going to have Austin cheering me on. I'll have 30 other people who are in this virtual fitness community. He has team challenges where he'll have us go off-camera and cheer one person on as they're doing push-ups. I’ve designed my life where I get these bursts of words of affirmation, or energetically being held.
Kasia: I get passionately angry and fiery in such a delicious way anytime I hear anything in this area of like, “You're not supposed to care what people think.” I get the idea. Give zero fucks. I get the idea. It's just not real. It's not how human beings are designed. And this push towards sociopathy. We worship sociopaths. These incredibly wealthy or powerful people devoid of feelings who don't need compliments. Guess what, it's an illness. It's not healthy. To want affirmation, to want compliments, to want praise. I understand that not depending on what people think and going your own way is super important to fulfilling your destiny and not following the herd and all of that, but every human being needs – because of the nature of the landscape we live in, women especially – need to be seen, praised, adored, worshiped, complimented, affirmed, all of it. And the thing is, it doesn't have to happen by accident. Like you, you can put yourself in environments where it's part of the structure. Or you can literally ask for it. Call it what it is: a word bath of love. You can hear my rage. It's just not fair. We have that temporary hit. We hear, “Give zero fucks. Don't care what people think.” I don't care what people think…lasts about 90 seconds to 90 minutes. And then we're like, “Oh, there's something wrong with me because I care. I care if I hurt people's feelings, I care.” What we need is to move past that and start talking about how to care for ourselves. What place to put all those things in. Otherwise just lying, rewarding people for we're cursing empaths, worshipping sociopaths. We don't need any more disembodiment in this world.
Leah: I'm laughing because I'm kind of sleep deprived this week. I'm the type of person where if I feel deeply during the day, it will keep me up at night. And I watched the Meghan and Harry Oprah interview. I guess it was on Sunday night or Monday. And I felt really saddened by the racism that I experienced through it. I know people perceived it very differently, so I'm owning that what I observed was a lot of racism. I mentioned my family's history, Holocaust survivors, and so I'm very sensitive to that. So I slept horribly that night, and then I put a post in the group about it the following day, and it led people of color in the group to feel unsafe, which made me feel again to feel upset and sad. It can be challenging to feel really deeply. Even if you'd like to be asleep, the emotions that get stirred up prevent you being able to kind relax and rest. Do you experience that?
Kasia: I can say so much about that, and the interview that you're referring to. When we feel deeply and it keeps us up at night, when we feel deeply affected by the news, deeply affected by something that happened. When we feel deeply, that's our being, not only receiving information and processing it but generating energy in order to act in accordance. We are designed to have an experience, and not just think about it and feel it. Up until very recently, every thought led to an activity. You think about human beings all the way back. Human beings didn't just have feelings and think about things. You had them, so you did stuff. You feel deeply and energy is raised for an activity, right? Our bodies were not designed with the internet in mind. Our bodies were not designed with the news media in mind. Where you see things and feel things but feel like you can't do anything in response.
Now you think about that kind of behavior. You feel deeply, you see these people, you relate to your own personal history. Why are you awake at night? Why are you feeling deeply? Because something in you is speaking to do something about it. And you got to post about it, but we are designed to match the intensity with the action. So an action that matches that intensity would have satisfied you and given you a good night's sleep. Now let's put that to one side.
Then there's the activity we do that we call “work.” That's not motivated by deep feeling, but that we have to whip ourselves into shape and generate the motivation to do. The production-oriented machine kind of way of being in the world that we're all expected, to greater or lesser degrees, to do doing something when you don't feel like it. And then not being able to do something when you deeply feel it. Which motivational source is better?
So if you ask me, does that happen to you when you feel deeply and you can't sleep at night? Isn't it hard to feel deeply? No. Yes, but no. Because feeling deeply, and of course, I've had the luxury of spending the last 20 years of my life designing my life this way so that what I do and what I feel deeply match and match intensity. Okay, but that's not entirely true. Sometimes I'm absolutely overwhelmed with feeling and need to take some time to figure out how to take this energy and make art out of pain. Make a message out of the passion, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
“We pay attention to how women are and to what men do.”
The other thing that I think is interesting about the interview that you're referring to, what stood out to me the most, is this whole thing that I keep saying about how when it comes to women, we pay attention to how they are and we pay attention to what men do, not how they are. Right now Prince Harry is trying to protect his partner. But what is Meghan? Is she a liar? Is she a fraud? That's huge. And we're missing that the main story here is about him. His being, his feelings. We’re ignoring his feelings. He lost his mother to the intensity of the press, to criticism. The entire narrative, in essence, is that he lost his mother and now he doesn't want the same thing to happen to his partner. But the focus is on her not on him. Why men aren't allowed to have a deep feeling and we're criticizing her for who she is, when she's tangential to the story when it's about him. That's where the meat is. That's where the life is. And we're just like, “Who’s she?”
Leah: I just got full-body tingles when you said that. But 100%. Yeah.
Kasia: Can you imagine what that would be like? You’re a kid and your mom dies in a tunnel because the paparazzi’s chasing her. Then you're with a woman and you see the same thing starts happening. That's big.
Leah: Can I just take a breath? Okay, so I'm looking at the clock. Do you have a hard stop right at the hour?
Kasia: No.
Leah: You had a line in your book and it goes, well, it wasn't phrased this way, but the idea that men don’t like dominant women. I feel like it's shared throughout culture and it’s seen as true. I'm curious to hear your perspective on that. Do men dislike dominant women?
Kasia: That sentence can be taken apart and dismantled on at least three different levels.
I'm loving this Facebook comment: “A boy loses his mother, but we talk about her mental health.” That's exactly right. I just had to mention it. This comment says it better than I did.
Men don't like dominant women. Okay. First, define dominant woman. Because if you're in a compressed state, good girl conditioning is manifesting in your being and your attention. You're trying really hard not to be too much, and not too little. Not too quiet, not too loud. Not too sexy, not too uptight. You can see this caginess in the body when you get compressed. So, if a woman tries to be authoritative, dominant, but she's in this state, it's going to feel bad to her and to everyone. Oftentimes, she's pushed into this state, so it's not not her fault, but she's in the state. She sounds bossy, not like the boss, right? It's like the thing we talked about. It's not her fault. If you're describing that as dominant behavior, then men don't like dominant women, but neither do babies, butterflies, cats, dogs, or women. We like ourselves in that state. So that's the first dismantling of that sense. Men don't like dominant women. If it's true dominance, it's different than if it's compressed dominance. If it's compressed dominant through the good girl filter. If it's compressed, surrender and submission. “Yeah, I'm totally fine.” It also feels like shit to us and everyone else, including birds, bees, any creature with a nervous system that can pick up a signal.
Next thing, everybody loves a good Dom. Everybody loves a good Dom. Dede, your example of a good Dom. Everybody loves a good Dom. Men, women, children, birds, bees, everyone.
Now, aside from that, there's an entire category of men who like only dominant women. And they don't all go to dungeons, a lot of them just marry strong women.
So it's bullshit. The main thing is that all human beings, or anything with a nervous system, struggle with incongruence. We are much more vibe-oriented than we know. And it's not that mysterious. It’s a little more complicated over zoom, attention dynamics. I'm looking at you as we're doing this interview, and it definitely gets more complicated in a virtual space. But it's not that complicated, because we all know how to do it. We all know when when it feels good and when it feels right.
Leah: How would you define a good Dom? Meaning, one who's whose energetics are aligned? How would you put that into words?
Kasia: A really simple way of putting it into words is if I'm talking to you about you and what you are to do. Giving you instructions, suggestions, making a request of you, but in a dominant form, my attention is on you. So I'm looking at you now. “Oh, did you understand that?” I'm watching and I'm seeing if the words landed. I'm catching to see if maybe you misunderstood something or something rubbed you the wrong way. That's a good Dom. That's like a Dede being like, “not only do I see that you're here, I see the way in which you are here. I know what you're asking for, I know what your body's asking for.” And with just some clean, fully out attention practice, we all start being better body readers without knowing why, without knowing how, without a book, it’s just organic. I don't know about men, because I don't teach them, but women are phenomenally fast at picking this up.
Leah: Yeah.
“A really easy way to avoid your own energetic sovereignty and authority is to be vague. ”
Kasia: And a good Dom also makes really specific asks, or gives really specific instructions. It's not like “love me more, respect to me more, or work harder.” It's like, “You're gonna call me every Thursday morning for 10 minutes, and ask me how my day was.” It's specific. It's like, “We're going to have dinners on Fridays, it's going to be date night, you're going to surprise me with a new restaurant each time, I'm going to surprise you with an erotic fantasy, each time written on a piece of paper.” Fucking specific. So that you know if it happened or not. A really easy way to avoid your own energetic sovereignty and authority is to be vague. So that you don't see it when people fail you, you don't see it when people renege. It's not obvious, you don't know if they did it or not, it's a way of hiding.
So a good Dom gives really specific instructions, a good Dom pays attention and puts her attention out. But you can also get everything you want by being a phenomenal Sub. By being phenomenally surrendered. Absolutely unconcerned with how people are going to meet your desires and be so in love with what you want, that you just magnetically make everybody want to fulfill every request you haven't even spoken.
Sometimes, especially for women who are growing up in these tumultuous feminist times, can even be more powerful. It’s debatable whether one is more powerful than the other, but living in the absolute beauty and enthusiasm of the things that you want and carrying that signal. I use this example because it's so simple. You could really want a hug because you're stressed out. You could want a big, grounding bear hug because you're stressed. And if you're sitting with the stress of how much you want that hug and how shitty you feel, anybody who could be a hugging candidate is gonna have to climb over all of those signals in order to give you that hug you need. But if you take a moment to be like, “Whoa, it would be so awesome to receive a hug.” All of the sudden, the chances of somebody not even knowing why, they decided to come up to you and give you a big bear hug, increase exponentially, you all of a sudden become huggable. And that energetic language, that language of just attention, I'm paying attention to myself in the thing that I want. It changes my signal. It changes the approach pattern of people. You're fun to make happy, you're fun to please, you're fun to worship, you're fun to adore if you're a really good Sub. If you're really good at being ready to receive all that you want.
Leah: It’s funny because as you're sharing that I was thinking about some of the men that I've been most drawn to. I'm definitely not drawn to stereotypical macho men. But they share a couple of things in common. When we have a conversation, they'll remember everything, and then they'll use little bits to make jokes about in the future. That's kind of like being held in a sense.
Kasia: Absolutely. Not in a sense, in the sense. They're paying attention.
Leah: I'm not drawn to someone unless they have a great sense of humor. One of the things that struck me about your book is you talked about the manifestation of the mastery of power is playfulness. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that?
Kasia: Oh, yeah. On a really basic level, when I see students in The Academy, start to roleplay really high stakes, difficult conversations with playfulness, they're ready to graduate. When you understand attention dynamics enough you can afford to have fun. Every interaction isn't make or break, you like getting into trouble because you know you can get yourself out, you're not afraid to take risks because you know how to get yourself out should anything go wrong. There isn't so much weight on a single interaction or a single ask. Nothing is that devastating, everything is negotiable. There's movement, you’re process-oriented versus final result-oriented. Which doesn't mean that it's all about the journey and not about the results, because I want all women to get what the fuck they want. I want them to actually get those things. It's not just like, “have fun doing it.” But when you're having fun doing it, it means that you're willing to experiment. There's no way to have a meaningful collaboration, relationship, negotiation with anyone if you're not experimenting. If you're trying 19 times to get something to land the 20th time, to make it through those 19 times, if you already know it's going to take 20 tries, and you're having fun experimenting, you're an unshakeable, influential human being.
“Women are trained to be absolutely terrified of ‘no.’ There’s this intense thing that happens where energetically when we receive the word no, it’s to our being, not to our request.
So we won’t even ask or venture into territory where we could because it’s not a rejection of the thing we want, it’s a rejection of us.
That has everything to do with attention dynamics. Women’s being is always front and center.
”
Once you get the game, once you get that ‘no’ is not an insult, once you get how erotic conflict can be and what comes after, how not breakable relationships are, then a sense of humor and playfulness is native to that. It just comes with it. We’re trying shit, you know? We're gonna get somewhere phenomenal. Women are trained to be absolutely terrified of no. There's this intense thing that happens where energetically when we receive the word no, it's to our being, not to our request. So we won't even ask or venture into territory where we could because it's not a rejection of the thing we want, it's a rejection of us. That has everything to do with attention dynamics. Women’s being is always front and center.
Leah: When you are describing that playfulness, I immediately thought of Esther. She has she embodies that sense of playfulness. I also thought of – have you ever seen the movie The Thomas Crown Affair?
Kasia: I don't remember that was a while ago, I might have.
Leah: You have to see this.
Kasia: Was that with Catherine Zeta Jones or is that a different one?
Leah: She's been in those types of movies. But there was an original, and then the sequel was with Pierce Brosnan. He loves art, specifically Magritte. He's an art collector, and there was a famous piece that was stolen and he's involved in catching the thief but also possibly being nefarious in other ways without giving away too much. And there's this amazing erotic tension between, oh who was the female lead? Someone throw it in the comments. I'm blanking on her name.
Kasia: Was it like Rene Russo? I'm just like shouting out.
Leah: It was! Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan. There were incredibly high stakes for one of the biggest paintings in the world. And the two of them together are just so playful, loving the chase. Loving messing with each other. And it reminded me so much of that as well.
Kasia: Yeah, really makes me want to see that scene.
Leah: Amazing soundtrack to that movie as well. Good call on Rene Russo. She's devastating in that.
Okay. We have to touch on this. You've made it very clear that you can't talk about power without touching on sex. And it reminded me of this quote, it's attributed to Oscar Wilde, but some people say it wasn't actually him. “Everything is about sex. Except sex. Sex is about power.” So curious to hear your thoughts, why can't you talk about power without also talking about sex? You had shared in the four-week masterclass you did, about how you learned so much about eroticism from the celibate nuns that you studied in the monastery. I'm curious if you could then share what did the celibate nuns teach you about eroticism?
Kasia: First and foremost, we start by defining power, because right now, this is changing, but in most universities, when you talk like in behavioral economics or macroeconomics, you talk about power as the person who has the most toys. Those are accessories to power, those can be taken away. The kind of power that can move mountains, the kind of power that does not depend on resources. Martin Luther King Jr. power, fucking Gandhi power. The kind of power we're talking about lives in the body. It's animal bodies communicating with one another. It's the difference of whether you're invisible or not. When you decide to be visible, you're visible. You get heard, you get seen, you get followed. We're talking about that kind of power.
Animal bodies communicating with one another. What is one of your greatest energy sources in terms of presence? Your sexual fire. When I went to China and studied with celibate nuns practicing Taoism for decades, one of the things that were astounding about them was almost impossible to put into words. The human female body I was looking at felt like it was the top 10% of an iceberg that went deep into the earth, like 90% of their bodies were in the earth.
There's a famous story about the abbot who ran that convent, when the military came to tear down the monastery complex, she just stood on the edge of this plateau, looked at them, spooked them, and they all turned around and went on their way. That anecdote, I believe, because I was in her presence. Like, whoa, the magnitude of this human energy field is just unthinkably large. Then I realized, not only through the fact that we were doing a lot of alchemical meditations that had to do with the female hormone system, ovaries, reproductive system, I noticed that they breathed really low. What I mean by that is quite literally, like from the womb. This high chest breathing is so common for us. Moves our center of gravity up, makes us easy to tip over in a martial art sense. It also means that the energy we project is not that powerful. What happens to women start practicing some of these lower belly breath practices like I did? The first thing that comes up is all the sexual trauma. Those of us who didn't have, concrete rapes or stories like that. Repeated sexual compromises. All of us had it. Unwanted sex. This is training from celibate nuns. That's why I say you can't separate sex from power when we're talking about this kind of power. Because it's like having one of your fundamental biological batteries cut off by 80%. So when you walk into a room, the sound of your voice, all of the things that people pick up about you, feel you, end up being faint, the pulse is weak. If sex is suppressed, cut off, diminished. They go together.
It's different for men. What is a man using his sexuality? Is he wearing a business suit standing like an erect penis with an arrow pointing to his crotch? Maybe. So integrated in our perception that we don't even think about it?
For women, it's entirely different. She can act sexy. But that means that first there's a disconnect, and then there's a mimicking of what was taken away.
Leah: If you had to try to capture what it was that made the nuns that you just described so magnetic? Besides the groundedness, the deep belly breathing, that unshakable quality, are you able to point to anything?
Kasia: You know how you see in a nature documentary, a panther walking? Or even if you have a house cat, actually, you can see it. There's no part of their body that's deadened or asleep. Their arms and legs are not separate. They're one integrated individual; their whole system is fluid.
You study pole dancing so I'm sure that Dede probably notices moments where somebody's arm isn't in the game.
Leah: It's every single part of the body. She'll give us cues around how to accentuate it. I joke because even the feet – you think pole dancing is swinging around a pole – half of the class is her teaching us how to point and flex our feet at specific moments to draw attention to them.
Kasia: So that integrated body, in their case, felt like an integrated way of being with their environment. The whole world, the impeccable sense of timing of what to say when and at what volume. So clearly not pre-thought. It's like being a great jazz musician but with your entire being. It's an incredible feeling.
“There’s so much information available right now. You can learn so many things. But the things that are of the most value have to do with recollecting and remembering the things we always thought we knew. Unlearning. Unknowing. Getting back to the aliveness.
”
And again, we're coming kind of back to this idea of embodiment, because you and I are in a situation where because of when we were raised and where we're growing up, and how, as women, we're studying how to point and flex our feet with Dede in order to put the attention on the right place, because we forgot what we always knew. There's so much information available right now. You can learn so many things. But the things that are of the most value have to do with recollecting and remembering the things we always thought we knew. Unlearning. Unknowing. Getting back to the aliveness.
Leah: This is unrelated, but someone was making a joke about how Oprah has an avocado farm in her home. I think it was like James Corden, the comedian, he's like, “You know you've really made it when you've gone back to becoming a farmer.” Back to the basics.
Okay, before we close I have a couple of really interesting group member questions that I wanted to share with you. We have a women's group that runs every Saturday. We've been talking about good girl conditioning in anticipation of this conversation. One woman shared, she lives in San Francisco, it was a beautiful sunny day, 75 degrees outside. She was wearing a sun dress and didn't feel like wearing a bra. She was walking down the street and this guy calls out. He says, “Well, someone knew what to wear today. Nice bouncy tits.” A lot of what you do at The Academy is helping women in moments when they would normally freeze, shut down, or stay quiet to have a voice. You have a whole system for this. I'm curious if you can quickly share this system? And then what you might have done in that situation?
Kasia: Absolutely. So the public comments, the walking down the street and having somebody catcall or notice you. How many of the women listening have noticed that sometimes it's really intimate like, “Nice bouncy tits.” Sometimes it's like, “Hey,” or sometimes it's like, “Nice hair,” something that shouldn't actually generate the degree of freakout, feeling of violation, feeling of attack.
“One of the things that tend to make us feel violated is knowing in advance that we can’t protect ourselves from it and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s a lie. That’s our conditioning.”
One of the things that tend to make us feel violated is knowing in advance that we can’t protect ourselves from it and there's nothing we can do about it. And that's a lie. That's our conditioning. When somebody puts their attention on us, we will tend to keep it stuck there. That reaffirms a power dynamic of the catcaller being the dom and us being the sub.
Leah: Yeah, 100%.
Kasia: The thing that will feel better is when it's safe, right? I know there are some situations where catcallers are not catcallers, and it's not a safe situation. It's a dark alley. You don't want to try this then. But if you try to flip the power dynamic by putting attention on them for a minute, you do it a few times, you start feeling in control of those interactions. When you start feeling in control of those interactions, they don't phase you as much. Sometimes they can be an opportunity for having fun. The best thing to do is to ask them a question. Why? You could put attention on them by saying, “Yeah, nice shoes, nice comment, nice mouth. Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?” It's the question that you ask them that's going to move their attention on themselves, even for a split second, that's gonna flip the power dynamic. “Are you a fashion critic? Are you a boob expert? Do you enjoy making women feel uncomfortable?” Any one of those. Ask them a question and keep walking. It's gonna feel like you're more in control. Because it's the being pinned, feeling of speechlessness, it's that freeze, that ends up hurting us more than anything else. We mostly don't care what people say, so why is it so disempowering? It's because we get stuck, and then we feel like we can't trust ourselves to defend ourselves. Then we're mad that people like that even exist.
Leah: Yeah. What are your thoughts on that counterargument? “I'd rather not give them any attention? Not give them the time of day? I don't want to like acknowledge their comments.”
Kasia: That's a legitimate argument. Except for, how often does that work? This dynamic is kind of fucked, because very often, not always, sometimes it's an innocent compliment, right? Sometimes it's a nice smile, but if it's nefarious they're going to have liked silenced you and getting your goat. They might repeat. They might try even harder. So yeah, sure. You get to decide, but if you're in a place that's safe to experiment, on a public street, turn it around and ask them a question. See how it feels. You might feel very sassy, very proud of yourself. You might get a laugh. Laugh at yourself.
Leah: Right. Yeah. And again, it goes back to that idea of once I’m able to be in a state of playfulness, I can handle whatever comes at me, right? I'm not taking it so seriously.
Kasia: Yeah. Oftentimes there's a lot of cluelessness on the other side. Sometimes it's difficult for the catcaller to know that they're doing something bad, something wrong. And they're put on the spot and questioned. “Is this a pickup line that works for you?” They have a moment where they're publicly having to question themselves. Maybe that didn't work so well.
Leah: Right. Even just that retort sends a message to yourself that you don't have to take that seriously, which is half the battle.
Kasia: Yes, very well said. Absolutely. Because it's the conversation we have with ourselves that’s actually the most brutal.
Leah: There was another example. This was inside of a dance club, and there was a guy wearing sunglasses who sits down next to where one of our group members was dancing. She was enjoying time with her friends, and he was just staring at her. And she found out later he'd asked if he could take a picture of her. What would be a good thing to say in that situation where you have someone who's looking at you in a way where you're not really able to enjoy yourself because of it.
“I want women to trust their instincts more and more and speak their truth more and more. But saying so isn’t going to make it happen. ”
