Dilshad 0:03

This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. I have a confession. I have procrastinated on recording this episode for far too long. Mostly because, as the title suggests, these are truths that nobody talks about. And in my mind, I was thinking, are we even ready to talk about this? Is this something I should talk about? Because it can hurt to speak the truth sometimes. It can really hurt. And the last thing I want to do is hurt anybody. But then I checked myself and I realized that when I came across these truths of what it means to be an empowered woman, it actually made me feel so much better because I understood the world and I understood myself and I understood my clients and I understood my family and I understood my friends. It was like I could really see the matrix finally. And so for the first second, it might have hurt. But then for the rest of my life, it was just a blessing upon blessing. And that's what I want to offer you today. I feel like empowered women are just not catered to enough, which a lot of people might think that's not true. But really, when I look at all the media, all the classes, all the content, all the education, and even all the therapy, it's aimed at people who are either not well or people who need to be empowered, which is obviously something that we all should cater to. But what happens to the people who are the strong people? What happens to life after empowerment? What happens to a woman to her life after she awakens? I don't feel like there's a lot of discussion around that. And I think the real reason why I'm doing this episode more than anything is actually because of my clients. Because one of the most heartbreaking things for me is to watch really incredibly empowered women either stunt their own growth or prevent themselves from becoming empowered. Or even women who are not there yet stop themselves from becoming empowered because they see the danger of it. Or they think that they should have their life will be easier and happier and people will love them. But that's not what they're seeing after they get empowered. And so they think they're on the wrong path, and they think that there's something wrong with them, and they think that maybe this path that they're on is just something that was sold to them as propaganda. And because they have this belief that if you're on the right path, things will be easier and happier, and people will love you. And that is not true. And because they face this, the discouragement can be very real and very high and very deep. It's so discouraging to think that after you've done all the right things, you've worked on yourself, you've made the effort, you've invested in your growth, in your care, in your everything from your education to your health, and you've done all of the work, and yet life doesn't seem to be rewarding you the way you thought it would. That being said, when you do get the rewards, they're really deep and very profound, more so than they would have been before you were empowered. So there is that dichotomy, there is that complexity here, and I want to address that complexity too, because the first thing we have to do, I think, is to just acknowledge two main truths. And if you just acknowledge this, it makes your life so much easier. And these are the two things that I feel like a lot of women who come into my work and we do one-on-one sessions, they just can't accept these two truths. But once you accept this, everything becomes so much easier. Truth number one, we are building a new world here. We are going through growing pains. And if I'm being really honest, more than that, we're destroying an old world. We're letting it go, we're letting it decay. That old world needs to die for the new world to come in. And so there are growing pains, there are destruction pains, there's the pain of decay and letting go that's also happening. That is the time we're living in. We are not living in the great kumbaya, we're not living in the great paradise. We are living in a world that we are actively building and actively destroying, both at the same time. So there are pains here. That's the nature of the world we live in right now. And the great truth, number two, is that you think that being empowered in this world would make you happy or living a glorious life. And it does make you happy, but not by society's standards, your standards. It makes you happy by your standards. And then when it also doesn't give you the rewards you were expecting, it really hurts. It makes you shut down because of the shock of that. It's the question is where's the great reward I was promised? Where is my kumbaya? And I've often said this, and this can sound really tongue-in-cheek, and it can sound maybe disrespectful to some cultures, but it's very true. I say if Jesus didn't have a chance of getting out of here without suffering for his intelligence, his rebellion, his truth speaking, then what chance do you have? It's it may sound defeatist to people who are still in that victim mentality, but it's actually a really great truth, right? If you are a rebel, if you're doing anything, even one thing different from other people around you, there will be growing pains. There will be stamina, endurance, and resilience that's required of you more than if you had just kept up with the status quo. Okay, you are the rebel of these times. That is what you are. And we're not rebelling for the sake of rebelling because it gives us an ego boost to rebel. It's because of another reason. Why be empowered at all? Right? If it's so difficult being empowered, why do we choose to be empowered? We choose to be empowered. And let me reintroduce yourself back to you. The reason you want to be empowered is because at the end of the day, push comes to shove at your core, deepest core, core, core, core. The core of you, at the end of the day, what you really love is you love love, you love life, you love sovereignty, you love mutual respect. Oh, mutual respect just turns you on. You love honor, you love freedom, you love prosperity, you love joy, and not just for yourself, for other people too. You want to look in the mirror and see joy on your face, but you also want to look at other people and see joy in their face. That's what you want. You might have made a whole lot of compromises in the past, and you might think that's not you, but actually that is you. You really stand for these things, even if you don't know you do. Deep down inside, that's the only reason why you would ever choose to be empowered, because you stand for them. This is the hill on which you will die on, even. And even if you've compromised before, at the end of the day, this is what you want to see in the world. And this is who you are. How do we not become a martyr to our own cause? How do we not have to go through the pain and suffering of being a rebel, if at all that is possible? How can we mitigate the risks that it comes with? How can we set ourselves straight so that we can walk the path that we want with dignity and with aliveness and with love? Because that is what we want, right? I think that it would be helpful to explain to you what it means to be empowered. Like who is an empowered woman? How do we define that? And so I'm about to describe this. And if you don't see yourself in this description, please now don't go into a shame or guilt spiral. It's not because you failed at life, okay? Some people are further ahead, some people are a little bit behind. That's just how life works, okay? Use this description. If you don't see yourself in this description, use this description as inspiration, as the mentor that you needed as a woman, but very rarely got, okay? So don't use it as inspiration instead of falling into a shame spiral. Okay. So this is how I would define an empowered woman. It is someone who takes radical responsibility for her own life. The blame game, the victim game, the fear games, maybe you feel it, but you do it anyway. You transcend it. You dream small and you dream big, and you have tried as much as possible to accomplish those dreams. Whether or not you've succeeded by society's standards, you have succeeded by your standards. You do indulge in everyday activisms, whether that is standing up for other women or just standing up for yourself. You have a high self-reliance. You're ready to grab life by the horns and kiss it, make out with it. You have high integrity. Now, again, you might have compromised that in the past, but still, you have a high internal standard. You have gone through an awakening of some kind, whether it's a spiritual awakening or any other kind of awakening, you have gone through it. And while you may have negative emotions and negative events happen, it still happens to you more at a surface level and might sometimes it might go deeper than that and it might affect you deeply, but you bounce back quicker than you ever did before. That is how I would describe an empowered woman. Now, if those were too vague for you, these are two questions you can answer to show you back to yourself that you are in fact an empowered woman. Okay, number one, if you are you the first woman in your family to blank? Are you the first woman in your family to have her own bank account, to have her own car, to have her own apartment? Are you the first woman in your family to leave the country and move to another one? Are you the first woman in the family to leave your home and make your living? Are you the first woman in your family to have a job? Are you the first woman in your family to refuse to get married until you found the one? Are you the first woman in your family to not compromise on your standards and wait for the one or not marry for financial sakes or to have children? Are you the first woman in your family to have children, to not have children? Are you the first woman in your family to give a public speech? Are you the first woman in your family? Do you see where I'm going with this? Because here is the reason why that is so important for you to name. Because what we're not doing here, by the way, is we're not shaming our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers. They were living in a time that they were living in where opportunities were not given to them. In our time, we are the first women to do all of these things. And when you think about that, we are operating from a template that was never given to us. We didn't have examples around us, we didn't have our greatest, the greatest women that we could admire and respect and work with. Very often, most of us didn't have that. We were making our own blueprint, we were making our own template, and we followed it. And not only does that take so much creativity, it takes strength, it takes courage, it takes stamina, it takes resilience, and it takes endurance. We endured. And that is how you can know that yes, in fact, I'm an empowered woman. It is a clue. And to name this is not only honoring of yourself, it's also honoring of your ancestors. It's like I'm carrying the baton, I'm carrying the torch from you. I stand on your shoulders. Thank you for paving the way for me so that I can do what I'm doing today. Most of us did all these things on a wish, on a prayer, on a hope, and on radical self-belief. We were riding on fumes and we were riding alone very often. This is how you know your level of empowerment. Are you the first woman in your family to have your own business? First woman in your family to have your own room. You see what I'm saying? These basic things that you think are normal in your life, even your mother and your grandmother didn't have it. And you've taken that and you've run with it. You've given it to yourself. I'm trying to think of sillier examples that are not so silly, but they sound silly to people who don't understand. I'm the first woman in my family to have her own cutlery. I'm the first woman in my family to have her own cutlery set, to have bought cutlery sets that are only for me, her own mugs that make her happy, her mug just for her. That's the level that I want you to think at. The first woman in my family to have her own dog. And when you see the level of firsts, the number of firsts that you are in your entire family, your mother and your father's side, then you can start to respect your own empowerment. You can start to respect your own empowerment. I'm probably, and in some of these things you might not have proof for, okay, but you can argue that it probably is true. I'm the first woman in my family to be able to drop a couple of hundred dollars on herself just for her self-care, for her, for her ongoing education, even. I'm the first woman in my family that took courses just to take courses for the love of it, for the education of it. Can you imagine my great-grandmother taking a course on learning to be an intuitive or learning to be a psychic? I'm the first woman in my family to do that on both sides. So this is what I mean. Don't take these small things, they're small to you, but to your grandmother, to your mother, they are huge. I want you to see that, okay? So that's how you can. I spent more time on this question than I thought I did, by the way. But I feel like it's such an important question to ask. Are you the first woman in your family to blank? The second question you can ask yourself to determine your empowerment is are you the woman or the mother or the friend that you would have wanted when you were six, seven, eight, nine years old? So imagine yourself six or seven or eight, nine years old, whatever age you want, just pick an age. Let's pick nine years old. Imagine yourself at that age, that little girl that you were, and imagine you met the woman that you are today. Would you admire her? Would you feel proud that this is the woman that you can be around? Would you feel like you want to learn from her, grow from her? Would you feel like you want her attention? Would you feel like you want her to be your auntie, your mother, your sister, your grandma? Would you feel that? If so, why? Because if you are the woman that you needed when you were that age, then you are an incredibly empowered woman. Period. Full stop. No arguments. I will not accept an argument from you. Do you hear me? No arguments. And yes, over time, this empowerment starts as an attitude. It starts as a personality and then it grows into a lifestyle. So then on the surface, you will start to see signs of empowerment. Like you're you have a lot of financial capability, better than the previous generation. You have a lot of social capability, a lot of social capital, you have a lot of networks, a lot of connections. So that empowerment moves from just being an attitude or just being a belief system into being an actual physical heaven-on-earth lifestyle. But I don't want you to think that just because that lifestyle hasn't arrived yet, that means you're not empowered, right? It's it definitely has to start as an attitude before it grows into a lifestyle. Okay. I don't think you can reach a point of empowerment and that's it. And then you stop being empowered and more empowered. There, there are always greater and greater levels of empowerment. Always. Okay, you will never reach the top. That being said, and before I say that, so you will always find more work to do on yourself. If you're looking for it, you will find it. But there comes a point where you don't need to do it anymore. There is a threshold that once you cross, you cannot go back. There's like an empowerment threshold that once you cross, you just cannot go back. And a lot of times we become empowered when we're in our 30s or 40s. Hormones, biology, play a big factor in this too. This is a biological truth. Empowerment is a biological truth, not just a spiritual one, not just a psychological one. And it's not just about getting older or having more experience. It's also about hormones and how your hormones have been affecting you. So I just want to name all of these things so that we're starting with a really clean, really aware state. Okay, because now I want to go into the specific problems that empowered women face and the solutions for them. And more than the truths I share with you today, there are so many truths. So I have to spread them across multiple episodes. In today's episode, I just want to, I want to lay the foundation, the basics, before we go into relationships and relationships with women, relationships with men, relationships with our parents. These are all separate topics. Today I just want to go through the basics with you so that you understand who you are and you understand what you're so dang good at, and you understand where you need to put your energy and focus. And like I said before, there's no one way to be empowered. But there are mindsets, emotions, and nervous system baselines that are in common. And there are common experiences across the board, no matter your race or your culture. Okay, so that's what we're dealing with here, the foundations. So the first problem, I would say, with an empowered woman is I try to organize these into battles. Like what specific battles do we fight? And so this first battle that we fight is the battle of holding on to her sense of self. Now, as an empowered woman, there are two things, there are two concepts, two psychological biases that I want you to understand so that you can understand where we're coming from. The first one is the just world hypothesis. The just world hypothesis says that we have a cognitive bias where we propose that the world is inherently fair, where people believe that noble actions are always rewarded and evil acts are always punished. And a lot of women have this cognitive bias, especially empowered women, where they believe that the world is inherently fair. And so, if, and I mentioned this before, if I do good actions, if I do the right thing, if I'm a good person, if I get empowered, I will get rewards. And when that bias is challenged, it can really make your sense of self shaky because you are empowered. Where's the reward? Oh, sometimes I get a reward, most times I don't. And so there's this constant feeling where you want the world to reflect your value, but you're seeing the opposite. And suddenly you see that there's this big divide between how people see you and how you see yourself. And that can be incredibly crazy making. And it makes it really difficult to hold on to your sense of self. And then after a point, you start to believe what other people believe about you. You can be the most strongest empowered woman, but a part of you will start to believe, oh, I am wrong. Oh, I am bad, I'm evil, I'm stupid, I'm messed up, I'm narcissistic, I'm selfish, I'm alone, I'm a I'm a loner, I'm an isolationist, I'm crazy. And then you actually start to believe you're not empowered. Because if you're if you were empowered, you wouldn't be all these things that other people say that you are. And I want you to understand that a lot of what you think is your personality are actually just reactions to the status quo. You're not stupid because you can't get along with the people around you. The people around you are engaging in acts that are not honest, are they not true, they're demeaning, and therefore you can't agree with them and you can't understand them. That doesn't make you stupid. That just makes you someone who is shocked at the state of other people's opinions or lives. It's a reaction, it's not a personality trait. If you get angry because somebody made a joke that was incredibly hurtful to your friend or to you or to an entire population of marginalized people, then that doesn't make you somehow disagreeable or not having a sense of humor. That's not a personality trait, that's a reaction to the status quo. Do you see that? And now I want to introduce you to a second concept. It's called projective identification. And this is one of the most messed up psychological complexes I've ever heard of because I experienced. It and for a long time I thought I was nuts. Okay. Projective identification is, I think it's a psychoanalytical concept, is how it's classified, where someone, anyone, will unconsciously project unwanted parts of themselves, feelings, traits, behaviors onto another person. And then the person who has received these projections then unconsciously starts to feel or act like those projections. Yeah, let that sink in. This is a thing. Look it up because I'm going to create a whole episode just on projective identification. You cannot help sometimes. Now, now imagine, right? Imagine if you saw another person or being who is constantly given the same message over and over again. After a time, you will start to act like it, even if that is not you. It's not you, but you're still acting like it is you. Okay. And this is one of the reasons why I advocate so hard for energy release work with women, with especially with empowered women. Do your energy release work, okay? Because it releases the kaka, the projective identification of other people. Okay, but I haven't yet finished the problem yet. Let's finish naming the problem, we'll go into solution. So all of this makes it really difficult for you to hold on to your sense of self because it's like it's almost like you're holding on to a string, a thread of your soul, and you keep getting blown this way and that way, or you keep getting whacked for holding on to this thread. And therefore, you also find very few teachers, coaches, mentors, and friends who can level with you, speak truth to you, who can really see you. So if you find very few people who can really see you, you obviously naturally might think there's something wrong with you, and there is nothing wrong with you. This is the thing, right? Just because you can't see your own worth reflected from other people, that does not mean you are the problem. And now, because of all of this, a lot of empowered women will avoid asking for help entirely because of this constant misunderstanding of who she is, because, and then there will be this other extreme they will go to is you want to be seen so badly because you're so tired of being ignored and misunderstood and misrepresented, that you want to be seen so badly that you will fall for the first person that speaks the talk, who talks the talk and use the right feminist words or the right who knows how to speak to an empowered woman in a way that she feels seen for the very first time. This is why a lot of empowered women will fall for the pickup artist, especially the ones that are that know how to speak to women like this. That wanting to be seen so badly for who you are, wanting the world to reflect your value, is such a very normal need, a very normal ask of the world. But you're just not going to find it as much as you think you will. And then the other extreme is because you've heard so much misrepresentation and so much misunderstanding of who you are, you will then stop believing compliments and good things about yourself when other people tell you you think that they have an agenda. Because there's been such little positive encouragement in your life because you've been riding on your own fumes for so long. Because you've had to, not because you wanted to, you had to. Okay, so I think we've understood this battle completely. Okay, so let's go into the solution or the practice. The first thing is if you dare, I would love for you to ask people what you're good at, what your strengths are. You don't need more criticism, honey. You've got a very nice inner critic in your mind. You didn't you don't need any more of that. This is one of the reasons why whenever I work with empowered women, the first thing I do is I make sure I tell them what they're really good at in my sessions. And this is something, if you're a therapist, a coach, or a healer, that's something you can do with empowered women is ground them in their own strengths and their own the best parts of themselves. You can, you can be the first person to really see who they are, pull it out of them and show it back to them. And now, if you're not a coach or a therapist or whatever, you can ask your friends, what am I really good at? What are my strengths? What are the things that I love to do, but I don't know I love to do? Because sometimes you don't know your own love. Now, the other thing you can do is just understand that you need stamina, endurance, and resilience. This is a need you will need. So anything that builds your stamina, your endurance, your resilience, which the first thing is your health, you want to put those systems in place. You really do have to become your own cheerleader and surround yourself with people who really see you. And look, it's impossible to find people who will see you 100% of the time accurately, but they may do it 70% of the time accurately. And that's good enough. That's better than having nothing at all. Okay. And again, there's nothing wrong with you. Sure, you can improve, but I think you're already functioning at a very high level. And if you don't believe me, go back and ask yourself the question: are you the first woman in your family to blank? Because what we're doing here is in the battle for your sense of self, we want you to win. We want you to have a strong, unshakable sense of self so that you can walk proud and you can walk with dignity. And nobody can walk with dignity if they don't have a sense of self. Okay, nobody can. Now, the other thing that I would recommend is build a beautiful home for yourself. And if possible, try not to live with anyone or get your own space, like your own studio, your own bedroom, or your own bathroom. So if you have roommates, make sure you have your own bedroom and bathroom. If you are living with a partner, make sure you have a small little space in the house that's just for you. Have an if you live by yourself, great, perfect. Build a beautiful home for yourself. Decorate it how you want to, fill it with things that you really value and treasure. Because just having, I think it was Virginia Wolf who said a room of her own, that every woman needs a room of her own. We always joke about men having a bachelor pad or they have their basement with their, I don't, I forget what it's called, their bachelor area. I don't know what it's called. But we never offer the same alone space for women. And so I want you to take up space by literally creating physical space for yourself, because that will help you develop that unshakable sense of self. The second battle is the battle of anger. So I've noticed two things. Either empowered women are really uncomfortable with anger, so they will turn it on themselves, turn it back on themselves. And this is because they believe in a just world, meaning life is fair. So if I'm angry, that means there's a problem with me. So either they do that, or they they get they're so angry that they just explode all over the place. Okay. Now there is this battle of anger, okay, because for number one, you have to understand that as an empowered woman, it is okay, and dare I say, even necessary to be angry. As in not that you need to be angry, but that when you see what's going on with maybe your friends or with the world or what's happening out in the world, and you don't get angry, I'm now questioning whether you're a psychopath. And this tendency of people, and it doesn't mean that you're exploding with anger, it just means that, wow, this is really messed up. Just to be able to say that and have that anger behind it, that is normal. That is needed. We're creating a society of psychopaths if we keep telling people they shouldn't be angry, they shouldn't get emotional, they shouldn't show any kind of humanity. That's what we're doing. Do you want to live in a society of psychopaths? No. So accept your anger. And if you think you're not angry, honey, I have news for you.

unknown 30:11

Okay.

Dilshad 30:12

So it's okay and even necessary to be angry. And a lot of times what I have seen, this is where it's hurt me, is that I've seen a lot of pseudo-empowered women then say that other women are low vibe or somehow not in tune with their intuition because they're angry. That somehow, so they will avoid anger because they think it makes them bad people. And you're not a bad person because you're avoiding anger. So you're not a bad person because you have anger. And avoiding it is just going to just again push it into your shadow. And the truth is, honey, your empowerment is it's literally directly tied to your anger. The things that make you angry are the things that'll make you creative and juicy and full of fire. But the only way you're going to be able to see that is if you actually work with your anger rather than avoiding it in yourself and other women. You know, my favorite thing to do is to sit with a woman that's raging when she's just a lot of my friends, a lot of my friends will sit with me and they'll be like, Dilshad, I am mad, I am pissed, I am angry, and I'm like, and they're like, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so angry. And I'm like, no, your anger is a bomb. It's a it's medicine for me. Because now I know I'm not the only one. Now I know that you have values that you are willing to stand for something, that there are things that'll make you stand for yourself. Because if you don't stand for yourself, you're not going to stand for me. So seeing you as a strong, angry woman, it actually could provide safety for another woman. Because if they know you don't play about your morals and your integrity or the safety and dignity of other people, then your friends will know that you won't play about their dignity, their safety, and their values. Some of the best things I've ever done for my closest friends is to get angry on their behalf. I have saved them from bad marriages, I've saved them from horrible men, I've saved them from making the wrong decisions at work because I helped them see the truth of what it was, because I got angry when they kept telling themselves that it was okay. It was not okay. It was not okay. And I got angry on their behalf, and suddenly that triggered them to see their own anger and the own internal compass that says, actually, this is not okay. Actually, I'm not okay with this. Actually, this makes me feel like crap. And this is not to say you're looking for trouble or you're not purposely consuming bad news just to be angry or watching horrif, horrific things on the internet just to get angry. But you're also not actively avoiding it because it will come out in dysfunctional ways. Sometimes it'll come out in any way from having anxiety attacks to having skin issues to having gut issues, like it could manifest in a whole bunch of other ways. I truly believe if more women worked with their anger, we would have less health issues. We really would. Now that we understand the problem or the battle, this is your self-care. If I could give you four things, okay, let's say five things. If I could give you a five-step plan for the empowered woman's self-care routine. Number one, energy release work. Oh my God, I cannot stress this enough. I don't know how many times I'm going to say this, but I'm going to keep saying it until everybody gets it. You cannot be you if you are busy being someone else. You cannot be you if you have the monkey on your back 24-7. You cannot be free and light and easy if you've got caca on your back. So energy release work, number one. Number two, sleep, eat, exercise, repeat. The basics of human existence. Do not ignore your sleep. Do not ignore giving yourself enough nutrition. Do not ignore exercise because exercise moves your lymph nodes, especially as a woman. We are more prone to stagnant lymph than men. And we repeat. Don't forget your basics. Number three, grounding. We've covered episodes on grounding before. And you know what? I will link supplemental episodes for everything I've talked about to this one episode so you can get the full experience. Okay, so don't worry. And number four, tune into your emotions more, not less. So that means tuning into anger more, not less. Actually, it's just four. This is a four-step guide. So, in tuning into your emotions, if you tuned into anger specifically, have an anger practice. That means going and beating things with a bat. Maybe you fill a trash bag with a whole bunch of discarded glass or pillows or whatever. You tie up the trash bag, you take it outside, and then you take a bat and then you beat it. And it sounds like it's a lot, but it will get you working with anger. One of my clients made one of the biggest transformations in her life after she just acknowledged how angry she was. It anger is beautiful. Anger is divine. It is divine. Look at all the goddesses that hold anger and do justice work with it. Okay? Okay, so I think you you get it. I will move on. The third battle is the battle of corruption. This is what I've noticed myself. I don't really know if my clients have experienced this as much, or at least we've never gotten around to talking about it. In the battle of corruption, what I mean by that is the best of you becomes the worst of you. The best parts of you get corrupted because they're seen by other people as the worst of you. It's almost as if people want to misunderstand you, and so they do. And like I said before, you're dealing with the negative projections of other people constantly, and over time you start to believe them. So your strength and your willpower becomes aggression. Your love becomes something silly and trite. Your sensuality becomes porn or sluttiness. Your truth becomes something that's too poetic or not valid because you spoke it. Or I heard this manosphere guy call it woman-ese, where women speak words and they call it woman-ese. They're just so wrong on so many levels. But that's it, it's like there's a corrupting factor. And this, of course, is related to the other two battles we just talked about. But that corrupting factor can again be very crazy making because you're like, am I aggressive or am I just strong? But I was not being aggressive. I was just, I just had an opinion on something, and so I declared it. How is that aggression? This has especially happened in my relationships, in my romantic relationships with men. There's that corrupting angle. It's the best parts of you become the worst. And that also means that when the best parts of you become the worst, you're a tangent to that, but still related, is that you're always put in a dichotomy or a polarity of virgin or whore. It's always one or the other. And that virgin or whore dichotomy, both of them are corrupt stances because you can't be a virgin and you can't be just a whore. You are so much more than that, but you get pigeonholed into this. I'm either this sweet, fluffy, innocent little damsel, or I'm this woman who is sensual and sexual and just constantly trying to tempt men into, I don't know, doing God knows what. And so that's how a lot of, especially male minds, will see females. And I'm not talking, please note I didn't say men and women. I said males see females. Because when somebody is no more than the product of their biology and their conditioning, societal conditioning and societal brainwashing, then they are just a male. They're not a man. That's how I make the distinction between a male and a man. So a male mind will look at you in this dichotomy of virgin or whore, good girl or bad girl, nice girl or mean girl. It will always be this corrupting factor. And instead of honoring your complexity, there will be a reductionism to a polarity of either this or that, and there will be a shoving into one of those two categories. So this big, beautiful, complex woman that you are gets reduced and reduced into almost nothing. This happened to me as early as high school, and actually I would say middle school. I was called a slut for reasons I still don't know. I still have no idea why people decided to do that. And I was just always this girl that no matter what I did, I was a slut. And again, this is what happened. So this is the battle of corruption. There's a corrupting factor of a woman's complexity and who she is, and the best parts of her become the worst parts. And this is something also you will see as an empowered woman. You will see other females in the public eye say that they're very empowered. And then they will do things like put up really pornographic pictures on the internet or the show off their bodies in ways that they might feel very empowered, but after a while, it's like to grab attention. They need more and more pornographic images. So now you're seeing that empowerment means exhibitionism. Are those two things even related? If so, how are they related? How are they not? So it comes. So now from empowerment comes this performing. Now you're performing womanhood. You're performing for other people as opposed to just being. And that's the result from this corrupting force that comes in when you're an empowered woman. And that's because the systems and structures are really not set up for you. You'd honestly, you'd get many more rewards if you were weaker, more agreeable, nicer, more makeup, more private parts showing on the internet. You would likely get more rewards from a society rewarding perspective, not from your own rewarding perspective. So, in this battle of corruption, what can you do? Like I said, go back. This question is very important. Are you the first woman in your family to blank? Okay. And the second question is, am I the woman I would have wanted when I was nine years old? So going back to those two questions is very important. And the third thing in this battle of corruption is to really just perform an acceptance ritual. Accept the society you live in. Just accept it. This is the way the world is. Okay. Learn to expect that this is what is going to be said to you. Remove the shock and the horror factor from it. Drop the resistance. See it for what it is and accept it. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it. But in order to really change it, you have to accept it. You cannot be shocked every time somebody sees your strength and says that there's something wrong with you for being strong. Because remember, you will not solve patriarchy in this lifetime. You will not solve misogyny in this lifetime. You will not solve the lack of feminism in this lifetime. But at least you can accept it, know that it's coming, that it may come, it may not come, but it is there, it exists. And at least some of us are not going through what our ancestors did. Imagine all the women that were burned at the stake just for having an opinion. Imagine all the women that were committed to mental institutions just because they had an opinion that differed from their partner. We're not going through that. So accepting, so the way you do an acceptance ritual, I'll probably do a whole episode on this, but really quick, you just write down, I accept that I was told that I am blank, even though I know that I am actually blank. And writing that statement down 10 times a day for 10 days, you will see that kind of ick, that kind of feeling of, how do you say that kind of a black tar feeling that you feel when you engage with other people who have these projections on what a woman should be, it will slowly start to just melt off you. And an acceptance ritual really helps. And a lot of empowered women think that because they accept something, that means it makes them weak. It's actually the opposite. If you accept something, it makes you aware and more competent and able to deal with it when it happens the next time and the time after that. And it also helps you advocate for other people around you going through similar things. The last battle I want to talk about in this episode is the battle of questioning systems. I didn't know how else to name this, but what I've seen in empowered women is that they almost don't want to accept or see the patriarchy. And therein lies their problem. They want to believe they're in a fair and just world, that the world was made for them. The problem with that is that you don't end up looking at the things that really hurt you and you ignore them, like things like the medical care, things like the gyms, education systems. They were not built for your empowerment. They were built to keep you a good little girl. Now, of course, there are exceptions to this, but to be able to question a system is an empowered woman's main source of empowerment. Empowerment. Because when you question a system, you begin to see all the things that were not made for you. Hey, I have four hormonal cycles a month. Can I really be consistent as a woman when I have four? Hormonal cycles a month? No, maybe consistency is not something I should expect from myself. Maybe instead I should expect change, expect to want to do different things during different phases of my cycle. Maybe that's something I would like to do. Maybe I would like to try that. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, empowered women don't ever look at patriarchy, but I'm saying that there is a fear that somehow, if you really look at it, you're scared you'll be angry. You'll you're scared that you will be hurt. You're scared that, you know, you will never be the same again, that you can't keep your heart if you were to keep looking at these systems that don't work for you. Looking at systems that don't work for you makes you more knowledgeable and more empowered. So ask yourself, what is a woman's way of going to the gym? What is a woman's way of getting educated? What are the things that support that? Maybe I should read more books written by women. It doesn't matter how you go about this, you just you're just acknowledging that there are systems you need to question. So I'll give you an example of one such system. If you have noticed that society for a very long time has tried to keep women externally obsessed in the form of weight gain, makeup, women are not allowed to get old. We're not allowed to look like our natural selves, our hair. Everything is being constantly scrutinized. Now, is this done for men too? Yes, but in a very different way and with very different results. So we're not going to go there for right now. We're just going to focus on women. We're constantly being told to look at our bodies with a magnifying glass. And it really destroys our inner peace. We either, this is the system of keeping women externally obsessed. So we either succumb to how society expects us to look, which means run this never-ending rat race where we spend our money, our hard-earned money, our time, our effort, our peace on just looking a certain way. Or we go the other direction and we become resentful and contempt enters our heart because we haven't questioned the system and we are not questioning it enough to know that this is just a system. It has nothing to do with our true value and who we are and who we can become. Questioning a system is a normal act for an empowered woman. So then the other thing that happens is that empowered women think that they shouldn't question the systems, that they should just go along to get along because what is wrong with me? Why am I noticing that all the textbooks I studied from in school were written by men? Is there something wrong with me that I'm noticing all these inequalities, that somehow I just can't go along to get along? And so then you blame yourself for questioning the system too. That's also something that empowered women will do. And I'm saying that this is natural. It is natural to question systems when you become empowered, because for the first time you're in thriving, you're not in surviving. And so you, of all people, should be questioning the systems because you have the capacity to question them. You're not living in survival mode, at least not a lot, not as most people are living in survival mode. So here's the solution that I will offer you. Study patriarchy. Study it in a particular field. Patriarchy in astrophysics. Just study it, not because you think it's going to make you angry and depressed, and you're expecting that. It may, but you're actually just becoming curious. It's almost like the know your enemy, but then it's not really an enemy, but like you're really understanding the nature and the fabric of the way systems and life has been set up. You can study the patriarchy of the Middle Ages in India. You can study, you can study patriarchy and spirituality, which is something that I actively study every day. And you're not looking for people to teach you that. You may have to just look at your own experiences to see: does this not fit me because of my personality, because of my gender, what's going on here? And if none of that appeals to you, you can study the patriarchy in you. You can study the patriarchy in you. For example, constantly being made to produce, be productive, this constant urge to be productive. One could argue that's a patriarchal force. And you can notice the patriarchy within you that says, where do I feel like I constantly need to produce and produce and get results and results where I can't, where I suffocate the life out of my very existence. You could call that a patriarchal force. Now, there are many ways to look at this, obviously, but studying the patriarchy in you is honestly probably the most spiritual act you can ever commit. Yeah. If there is you can even see the patriarchy in you as it comes to your relationships with other women. Or maybe the patriarchy and other women as they've related to you. For example, I've been in so many groups of women, not so many, twice, once in school, once in a recent job I had, where the women would gang up on me. And their whole basis of their relationship was gossip and just slamming down other women who were different from them in some way. That is a result of patriarchy. And you can look this up and go deeper into it. But again, for the purposes of this episode, this is the way you can study the patriarchy in you. And of course, another solution to this is to focus on your health, not so much your looks. And I feel like no more discussion is needed there, but your health is the one thing you will really miss when it's gone. And the last thing and the one way to study the patriarchy in you is admitting that it's okay if you don't have a big, fantastic, bright and shiny, glittery life. Because this idea of bigger and bigger and bigger is another aspect of patriarchy, and bigness is a trap. Enough is a blessing. Small and sweet is lovely. The loveliness of life, as opposed to the constant production and pushing and hustling and striving. We're talking loveliness. So tuning into the loveliness of life is in fact a solution to this battle. Oh, I lied. I have two more battles to discuss with you. Now I'm wondering if this episode is too long, but you know what? We're gonna do it. This is probably gonna be my longest episode ever, but here we go. The battle of big love and generosity. Empowered women, whether you realize it or not, you have a really huge heart and a really huge capacity for love, and you have a lot of love. That's actually one of the signatures of being an empowered woman is having a lot of love. In fact, one might say that you having a lot of anger is really you just having a lot of love because we get angry about the things that are destroyed that we actually love. You have this big love and you have this big generosity. And instead, very often your generosity and your big love gets rewarded with takers, not givers. There's no reciprocity, and that makes you shut your heart down because you want to share. You want to share so badly. You want to be of service so badly. Your big love needs a place to go. And sometimes I've noticed that empowered women make themselves wrong for this. They think, oh, I shouldn't want to be of service all the time because maybe I'm just being codependent, maybe I'm just being whatever. But the thing is, when you have big love, big love needs a place to go. And if you don't give it a place to go, you'll put it in places and spaces and people that are not reciprocating. And this understanding of reciprocity is essential to an empowered woman's health. But we very so very rarely do we have this reciprocity actually occur in our lives. So then we have this big love and we're generous and we give and give, but at some point we need to be reciprocated too. And so then we isolate ourselves because we'd rather have our peace. But the problem with isolating is that we still have all this big love and it has nowhere to go. And the other way I feel like we shut down our love or our generosity is by mitigating our own speech, our own voice. We shut our own voice down because you're scared of offending someone. You know, for a while, I didn't even want to say the word women because apparently saying the word women rejects people who don't identify with that word. So it's it's this constant feeling of you're going to be persecuted for your generosity, for your big love, for your voice. And so we shut down our heart and we shut down our voice. And that is directly tied to our creativity because our creative energy is big creative energy. We have huge creative energy, big love, big creativity, big generosity. These are all things that go hand in hand. So the solution is you love being generous. You love, you have big love. So what do you do with it? Create. Creativity is one of the very few places that you have real agency as an empowered woman. You can create, you can paint, you can do pottery, do whatever you like. But you can, this creativity will be your service. And you can show up in service in many areas. You can do volunteer work, you can do whatever it is you like, but you focus on service because it makes you happy, not because you're a martyr. And you practice speaking your story, no matter how horrible or untrue you can't you think your own story is. You have to trust your own experience and reporting that experience. Because trauma and resentment and contempt thrives in silence. Now, of course, we choose where we give our voice and we give our creativity. We do it with guardrails, we do it with some protection, but we have to do it. And if I'm being honest, this is one of the top battles that I find to be personally very irritating with some of my clients. Am I allowed to say that? Because I say irritating, but what I mean is it's, oh, why don't you get this? Because a lot of my clients have this big love and they have nowhere to give it. So they'll give it to friends and family and males that are just not good for them. And when I tell them, hey, you need a creative practice, creativity is your spirituality, they say things like, Oh, I'm not creative enough, or oh, I've never been good at drawing. And it's wow, there are so many ways to be creative. You just have to find one, pick one, or pick multiple, try many. This is something that I feel like because we're so stuck in this attitude of producing and producing, we forget to do creating. We forget to be in creation, not in production. And this is something that can really be such a deep, profound, beautiful rebellion if you were to tune into it. Your generosity, your big love needs a place to go. So let it go into your creation, into your babies. Not actual human babies, but the babies that you create with your art. One of the top books I've recommended to so many people is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. That is a book that can help you with this. Of course, I'm going to do episodes on creativity and all of that, but if you're a book girl, then Artist's Way, I would highly recommend that. But just accept that as an empowered woman, you have so much love. You almost can't even hold it in. I think this is also how you know you've gone through an awakening because you almost can't handle the insane amount of love you feel in your heart sometimes. But you have to give it a safe place to land. And then over time, you can find the people, the places, and the spaces where you can give that love to and ask for reciprocity or have it be given to you. For example, when I ask you for reviews or I ask you to rate the show, or I ask you to subscribe or follow the show, that's me asking for reciprocity. Does it poke at me a little bit? Am I a little bit embarrassed, a little bit shy to say that to you? Do I feel like you're gonna attack me for asking that? Yeah, I do feel all those things, but I do it anyway because I know that I give a lot through this podcast, and it is okay for me to ask for a little bit of reciprocity. That sits well with me. And I have to talk myself into that sometimes, admittedly. But this is where I feel like when you have a place to put your love, the act of creation itself gives something to you so you can feel that reciprocity. And when you feel that reciprocity and you practice it in safe ways, then you will feel safer asking for it and expecting it and gently asking for it. You're not demanding it from other people, and you're not so ashamed of your desire to be given to. In fact, your desire to be given to and the asking of it actually uplifts you. The last battle is the battle of AI. Oh, this is a new one I've noticed. So I have seen that a lot of empowered women are using Chat GPT and AI in place of friendships, in place of therapists, in place of people that they would otherwise connect to. They're using AI for these things. Now, I was even given this feedback because I was telling someone that I used to work with one-on-one that I'm finding it really hard to make friends, to have community where I live, etc. And her piece of advice, one of the pieces of advice was that just talk to AI. AI can be your friend, AI can understand you. And when she said that, it really just made me go, you know, I was like, oh my gosh, this is an actual solution that people are recommending. And while I understand, I understand why an empowered woman would want to work with AI because AI can be at her level, it can understand her, it can keep up with her speed, it can keep up with her processing. I totally understand that. I totally understand why somebody would want to do that. But I want you to also understand that this need for AI satisfies that big, beautiful brain of an empowered woman, but it does not satisfy the heart. And in many ways, and I still haven't fleshed this battle out where I can explain it more fully, but I have noticed it, so I wanted to mention it. This desire to focus on AI to such a great extent, sometimes with an empowered woman, is a desire to avoid taking care of her heart, to avoid feeling her emotions, to avoid opening up to people and taking intimacy risks. Just reminds me of a woman, you know, on Instagram. She talked about how she does rejection therapy, where all day, every day, she asks people for things like she asks a guy for his number, she asks for help lifting her groceries or something. And she's doing active rejection therapy because she's like, I'm so afraid of rejection. I got to put myself in places and spaces where maybe I'll get rejected, maybe I won't. But the point of her video, the energy of her video was not really about rejection. It was about opening back up after shutting down. In a way, she was taking care of her heart by building its muscle, by building its stamina. So, my advice to you when it comes to AI or any other future technology or person or event that happens in the future, it's very tempting to work with it because it's so good. It gives you the wisdom you want, or it says the things you want to hear, or it helps you process. Whatever it is that it does, fine. I'm not gonna argue with you on that. But what I will say is open up somewhere, anywhere. It doesn't matter where you open up, but open up in a place that is safe and beautiful for you to open up with, whether it's other humans, whether that's animals. You know, there's this whole trope of the single woman and her dog that's all over social media, and it is a trope and it is a stereotype, but it exists for this reason. It is a woman, and I've seen a lot of empowered women with their dogs too. It's an empowered woman doing her best to open up somewhere where it is safe. And sometimes we need to start with a dog. Sometimes we need to start with our closest friends. Sometimes it might be a poetry slam where lots of encouraging people are there, and that's where you open up a little bit and share your poetry. It just open up somewhere, anywhere. Practice opening up, whether you do it in the form of a dog or rejection therapy, but you just open up, take care of your heart. That battle for your brain will be constant. As an empowered woman, you will always have people battling for your brain, but also take care of your heart. You will also have the temptations of things that tickle your brain and make you want to learn more, make you want to fix more, make you want to discuss more, have more intellectualisms, and that's great, fine. I won't argue with you on that, but also take care of your heart. That was the last truth, lovelies. And there are many more truths, and I've segmented them out in terms of relationships with men, relationships with women, work, friendships, because this is a very complex episode. It's a delicate topic, but it's a powerful one. And so I want to address this as fully and as completely as I can. Before I end, though, hello, I'm gonna do the thing I said I was I called myself out on on reciprocity, in the spirit of this episode. And can I tell you what I'm about to ask is very difficult for me, like I said, but empowered women have given up on asking for help and reciprocity. And I'm not gonna do that. I am actively trying not to do that. And I think one of the reasons why we don't do that is we think that if people wanted to, they would. And I had that belief. And I thought that people are inundated and they're overwhelmed. And why should I even ask them if they wanted to, they would. But the truth is they are inundated and they are overwhelmed, and sometimes they need you to remind them to be reciprocal or to just give to you, or to just maybe just you want something, so you ask. Making the ask helps you just as much as it helps them. Now they know how they can help you, right? That being said, as you know, it's just me behind the show. I create everything, I put everything together. I've done the website, I do the recordings, I do the graphics, I pay for the editor and the hosting from my own pocket, and I'm super proud of that. So if you want to see more from this show, there are three very, very easy free ways you can support the show. Number one, you can subscribe to the show on your favorite platform. Yeah, just subscribing to the show is you supporting the show. So easy. You can leave a five-star review and it takes approximately 10 seconds to do. You can share the show or the episode with your friends or on social media, or you can tell me what you want more of and tell me what resonated and what didn't, because this becomes data for me to work with and it will help me truly serve. So far, I'm only drawing from my own life, my own clients, my friends, my family in my community, which is a very big pool to draw from. But I would also like to see what people outside of my community and outside of my circle think and feel with everything that I'm sharing, and what you would like to hear more of. And those are four easy free ways you can support the show. I'd really appreciate it. So, my darlings, stay tuned for more episodes on empowered women and their specific problems, but I will intersperse them between, you know, every other episode is probably how I will do this because I don't wanna, I don't want to flood your feed with just this one thing. I want to kind of do lighter topics, slightly heavier topics, like alternate them, but expect more of this in the future. Okay, my lovelies. May you stop being afraid of your hard earned fire and may you start to warm yourself by its flames instead. Much love to you. Bye.