Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena)
Reclaiming Radiance
April 3, 2017, New York, NY
Photographs by Bill Miles
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My mission is to awaken women, to turn women on, to have women truly live rather than play small. I must model that.
Regena Thomashauer, ‘Mama Gena’
Kristen: Regena Thomashauer, who shall forever forward be known as ‘Mama Gena’, is a revolution, a teacher, author, mother, and founder and CEO of the School of Womanly Arts, which began in her living room in 1998, and has since grown into a global movement, and a multi-million dollar business. She believes that women are the greatest untapped resource on the planet — and teaches them how to turn on their innate feminine power, to step it up, and to create a life they love.
She has appeared everywhere across mainstream media as an expert in modern feminism from NBC’s Today Show and 20/20 to the New York Times, and across pages of glossy magazines. She is the author of four books — most recently, the New York Times bestseller, puss*: A Reclamation. Thank you, Regena, for inviting us into your home and into this journey of your work, the story that’s led to here, and to this movement.
Regena: I’m thrilled to be here with you on this couch and to have a chance to impact your incredible audience and weave together with the magic you create — to see what kind of doors we can blow open for men and women with our collaboration.
Kristen: Let’s do it, sister! Clearly, we have to start with the title of your book, puss*: A Reclamation. As you say in the book, “It may be the most pejorative word in the English language. It’s the ultimate salacious smack to a woman’s dignity, used to hurt, humiliate, and fracture her humanity. puss* is the lowest of the lows, for men as well. Essentially, it’s the last thing any of us want to be called.”
So, what possessed you to call your new book, puss*?
Regena: I suppose, ultimately, the quick answer is to be badass, a provocateur.
Like any expletive used effectively, it serves as a smack upside the head of a culture that disparages, dehumanizes, and ignores — that does not value — the feminine. It’s time for women to wake up and step into our magnificence because no one is going to give us permission. A woman has to awaken in order for the world to then follow. Especially now in this culture, the voice of the feminine is so longed for, and so required, and so needed to bring the culture forward. I’m proud of standing in a radical spot of awakening. My intention was to invite people to be both pissed off with me and scared. Ultimately, excited and inspired, and to break through a new form of feminism, which is about embracing the whole woman.
Kristen: First of all, I want to make sure that people understand that when they think of the word, ‘puss*’ that this is not intended to be p*rnographic and not about being anti-male. Right?
Regena: Yes. Let’s look at the culture. I have taught classes for thousands and thousands of women over the last 2 decades. When I ask a room full of women, “What did your bits and pieces get called when you were growing up?” There is a fascinating array of answers. From 1/3 of the group we get things like kitty, cuckoo, purse, little princess, knish, coochie. Another 1/3 will say vagin*, which is actually anatomically incorrect.
And at least 1/3 of the women will say nothing. There was no name for that which is most essentially feminine. Now, if I have a room full of a thousand men and ask, “What did your bits and pieces get called?” They say, “Penis. What’s your problem?”
Kristen: Right. Like, hello?
Regena: We, as women, never have had an opportunity to locate and own the name and address that which connects us to our bodies and to our divinity. The true anatomical term for the exterior genitalia is vulva. That’s what I taught my little girl when she was growing up.
Kristen: Then there is the shame as well.
Regena: Completely. That’s the key. When there is hedging or a feeling of embarrassment there is no name to identify the heartbeat of your feminine reality. You feel ashamed to be a woman. And when you feel ashamed you’re disconnected not just from your femininity, but you’re ashamed to be a girl in a classroom. You’re ashamed to raise your hand and risk an answer. You’re ashamed to ask for what it is you want and need. That shame perfumes every aspect of a woman’s life. Thus we have an epidemic of self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-deprecation.
1 in 4 women are going to experience depression in her life. Only 1 in 5 will seek treatment. There are eating disorders that women have. 2 in 10 will have breast cancer. 1 in 10 women are going to experience heart disease. There are all kinds of shame-based, cortisol-based, physical problems that happen when a woman lives her life in shame, because she hasn’t begun to value who she is on this planet.
Kristen: I listened to you in an interview prior to the release of the book. You were commenting on being worried about what you were even going to tell your mother and teenage daughter about naming this book puss*. How did that go down with them?
Regena: I really didn’t want to call it puss*. It’s scary to write a book — you’re putting your life on the page. My daughter was going to college when the book was coming out. I thought, Oh. That’s all she needs is to have everyone on campus saying, “Your mom wrote the puss* book.” Same concern for my mama. I had to really reconcile my love for these women who are so close to me with my purpose — what I am here for:
My mission is to awaken women, to turn women on, to have women truly live rather than play small. I thought, “Well, I must model that.”
Kristen: [holding up the book] So you can see that my copy is weathered and worn because I have toted it around with me as I read it. It’s a magnificent book — but I’ll be honest with you, I was a little uncomfortable carrying it around in public.
Regena: I’m glad.
Kristen: I was interested in observing my own reaction to that. I traveled with it and had it on planes, trains, in restaurants, and on treadmills.
Regena: With the cover?
Kristen: Yes.
Regena: I intentionally made it a little more mysterious underneath the actual book cover — it’s more innocuous, all white, but I made sure that the title, puss* was in gold.
Kristen: Well, I purposely left that cover on so that I could check in with why I was sensitive about it.
Regena: Yes!
Kristen: I left it on the table while I was sitting in restaurants or held it high while on the treadmill at the gym. I definitely got some raised eyebrows and curious stares.
Regena: That’s good.
Kristen: You were banned on Facebook and despite that went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestselling list upon release. I want to know, one, how you ever talked a publisher into naming a book puss* and two, how you timed it with a certain video that was simultaneously going viral featuring Donald Trump? [smiling]
Regena: When I say “puss*”, I am not talking about p*rnographic puss*. I’m talking about puss* as a way of walking in possession of yourself. It’s a way of standing in a power that is untouchable because you are so connected to your deepest intuition embodied, feeling a profound sense of who you are that is so vulnerable and yet impenetrable. It’s about being turned on rather than turned off because most of the women in this culture have been taught to turn off our sensual truth and our sensual light.
You are sensitive to your body, to yourself. You are listening to what people would call intuition, but it’s deeper. puss* is deeper than that because if you think about it, the cl*tor*s and its 8,000 nerve endings integrate more information than any other part of your body. If you’re tuned into your puss*, you’re integrating information from your conscious, your unconscious, your peripheral nervous system, your neocortex, and your hypothalamus.
All of that is working on your behalf, like a proper little brain, sensing and empowering you. Women have this thing where when you’re feeling truly yourself, you can sense things. You think “I haven’t talked to my friend in a while,” and then the phone rings. There is something operating where you are so tuned in — you get to the subway platform, the train comes.
Kristen: All green lights.
Regena: Yes. I have been teaching this content for over 20 years. At this point, my puss* is on high volume. I don’t really have a choice. I’ve got to listen. When it became really clear that this was the only title for this book, I knew who I wanted my publisher to be. I only pitched it to two publishing houses. Everyone said yes to me, which so shocked me.
Then when the book came out, it was the next week and Donald Trump was offending women internationally. To be alive with a sexual predator in the White House — we live in extraordinary times that are making extraordinary demands of both men and women. The Washington Post called me for an interview. The most conservative newspaper in this country called me to interview me and ask, “What’s up with the puss*?” They published it.
This is what’s available not just for me — it’s available for every woman who listens to her truth. That’s why I’m so excited about this book because it’s a roadmap for a woman to start connecting to her deepest intuition and then making those relevant actions that will only take everyone in her world higher. When women are living piped into their truth, it is the best ally that a man or woman could have.
When a woman is shut down, she is not listening to her intuition. She is cutting that off. She is compromising.
She is angry at the world. That’s an extremely unpleasant woman to be around. We all have girlfriends like that.
Kristen: I also think we don’t even realize how we’ve distanced ourselves — and what part of us is turned on and what part of us is not. When I say turned on, I’m referring to those intuitive powers and that connection to the world around us.
In the book you talked about your childhood. You said that the job description for women was nothing you wanted to sign up for. “Delicious wasn’t a word I associated with being a woman. What I saw in my mother’s life and in the lives of the other women in the neighborhood was nothing I wanted for myself. I saw women who were self-sacrificing, who ignored their own needs, who gave up their own happiness.”
Regena: Well, if you think about it, “Women learn to compromise before they learn to cum,” quoting an incredible woman named Claire Cavanah. We are taught to take care of our husbands, take care of our families, take care of our kids, take care of our bosses, and take care of everyone in the world. Then the crumbs are left for us. Yet we’re supposed to provide magnificence to whomever we encounter.
Women have learned to say yes to this level of compromise. Your boss wants you to work late, “Sure, absolutely. I would love to work. I’ll get in early. I’ll work late. I’ll take on another project.”
Kristen: …and you can pay me less.
Regena: White women make $.70 on the dollar, African-American — $.63, and Hispanic women — $.53. We’re already compromising and we haven’t even gotten our paycheck yet. This level of accepting less as enough, it’s never going to work, not for men or for women. When a woman reverses that and begins to pay attention to her body to her feelings and to her intuition — then in a job interview when she is asked to work 14 hours a day in a cubicle with fluorescent lighting — her intuition will have her say, “No. That’s not going to happen for me. I’m going to pursue something further. I’m going to plant my dream in different soil. I’m going to stand for something better.”
It’s really key for a woman to begin to pay attention to her pleasure, above all other values. Why? Because when she can breathe that sweet clean air of taking care of herself, even in small micro ways, she begins to fill out her cells differently and stand for herself in the world, and guarantee her own happiness.
Then she changes not only her trajectory but also the future of the girls of today, the women of tomorrow. She begins when her pleasure is handled. She is a true partner with her man. It changes her mothering because she is not angry all the time. It’s a whole different paradigm, a different portal from which to live. I’m extremely vigilant both about my pleasure, as well as making sure that women understand the importance of theirs.
Kristen: It’s not just sexual pleasure. Pleasure comes in the form of ritual, buying a beautiful face cream for yourself, languishing in a bath with candles, buying yourself flowers.
Regena: It’s choosing to value yourself. As women, we have not recognized that we have never been given that choice. We were always in a ‘less than’ position in service to the patriarchal values. It is essential for a woman to begin to realize, I am divine. I am the life giver. In order to live my fullness, in order to live the full-dimensional truth of what it means to be a woman — I must explore every dimension of my magnificence — the way I flirt, the way I dance, the way I stand inside my value. That is a whole world away from where most women live.
Kristen: You included the Grimm’s Fairytale of ‘The Handless Maiden’ in the book which illustrates the unfortunate truth of how far too often women forget their own power — how a woman won’t step into that power for herself, but she will do it in a heartbeat and can move mountains on behalf of another. This certainly demonstrates that there is nothing like the power of a mother. Do not mess with a mama and her babies!
Regena: Right. ‘The Handless Maiden’, very quickly for those of you who haven’t experienced that fairytale, is about a young girl whose father, in exchange for financial success, promises to give his daughter to the devil. Then when the devil comes to collect the daughter, he cuts off her hands and gives those to the devil and keeps his handless daughter. She is now powerless in her life because she has no hands, yet goes on to marry the handsome prince and has a baby. It was only when the baby falls in harms way and she goes to rescue the baby from drowning, that her hands restore.
So many women grow up with a sense of powerlessness. It’s not just ‘The Handless Maiden’. I kept my daughter from ever seeing a Disney film. There was no Cinderella in my house. There was no Snow White. There was no Little Mermaid. But it didn’t matter because she saw them at all of her friend’s houses. [laughing] Cinderella has to fit into the glass slipper so that the prince will love her. Snow White is completely unconscious until the prince kisses her. Then he takes her to his castle, to live his dreams. Little Mermaid actually commits suicide because she has traded her voice for her legs so that the prince would love her — but he doesn’t love her. He falls in love with another. She then jumps into the water and becomes sea foam because she is not attractive enough.
We wonder why women are so crazy. We always try to fit in or look differently or give up something to receive love. It’s just a nightmare out there.
Kristen: What do you want women to reclaim?
Regena: To understand that we, as women, have a sense of our own divinity that’s connected to this incredible body that gives life. That our feelings, the full range of a woman’s emotions is as breathtaking and beautiful as the range of Mother Nature.
Every aspect of the weather is beautiful and necessary for growth. Every aspect of a woman’s emotional range is imperative for her presenting herself and her evolution as a woman, starting from the most intense rupture that throws her flat on the ground in ecstasy. In fact, the degree to which a woman can rupture is the degree to which she can live her radiant happiness and magnificence. It’s really important for women to connect to their intuition, their intuitive power, to their voice — to connect to saying what is their truth.
Women are so powerful in terms of creating and standing for community. It’s not just individualism that’s important to a woman. The dominating culture right now is patriarchal — one of rugged individualism. Everyone is on their own. Profit is the goal. Me, me, me.
Kristen: Work, work, work.
Regena: To bring feminine values into the culture will create a balance that is so wonderful for everybody because there is masculine and feminine inside both men and women. We want to simply bring the world and ourselves into more balance.
Kristen: In ancient societies, people revered the feminine. They knew the feminine was sacred. I want to know how the patriarchal societies took over and why the hell we went along for that ride. I had never heard of those goddess stories that you share in your book.
Regena: I know. Isn’t that amazing? I agree. I was so shocked when I started to become aware of this ancient goddess tradition that all of us are from. Riane Eisler wrote some incredible books about this: Sacred Pleasure, The Chalice and The Blade. There is also the work of Maria Gimbudis and that of Joseph Campbell.
There was a time you and I would have bowed before the divine feminine.
Originally, in prehistoric times, we didn’t even know guys were involved in the creation of life. It just seemed that somehow, magnificently, a woman’s body would swell and a baby would appear. What more profound being is there to revere than she who creates life?
The feminine was worshiped. In ancient Egypt around crop planting time, all the Egyptian women would stand on the edge of the field and then pick up their skirts. They would flash their puss*es at the earth and then beseech the earth, “May these crops grow as high as our puss*es.” That was blessing the earth.
Even 200 years ago, if we were in Russia and being chased by a bear, in order to stop it we would simply flash our puss*es at the bear and the bear would run back. If we were seaside in Ireland, in any seagoing town a thousand years ago, and our husbands were going out to catch the fish for the day, we would flash our puss*es at the sea to make a calm voyage. If we were angry with our husbands, we would pee in the sea because that would create a storm.
There were some women who were thought to have so much power in the matter of life, creation and protection. There is this prehistoric painting on the side of a cave that shows a hunter capturing prey. If you follow the arrow, it goes directly to a drawing of his woman’s vulva; he knew the power came from her to allow him to be effective in the world and to bring food home. It was a different way of being. Now, women are absolutely ignored and taken out of the equation.
Kristen: We also have to own our language and the power of the terminology we use. When we say things like, “you’re whipped,” or “you’re a puss*,” or “man up,” or “suit up.”
Regena: Absolutely — particularly in the corporate world where women are told to ‘man up’ in order to push through.
Trevor Noah has this wonderful clip in his new show on Netflix where he talks about how puss*es are actually so strong. They push out babies. They bleed every month. They’re this perfect ecosystem. Whereas a co*ck, if it just gets in a cold temperature, it shrinks. If somebody gives it the elbow accidentally, it’s in agony. The structure of the feminine is so much more enduring and powerful. The truth is that women have been taught that they have to disconnect from everything feminine.
We shut our sensuality down because we think that it’s not welcomed or we’re criticized or degraded or told that we’re slu*ts if we feel or behave in a way that’s living into our sensual light. It’s a complicated thing. You actually have to be a badass to live your truth and to recreate a world where the feminine is valued and honored. You have to lead. There is only one way to do it and that is by leading that way.
Kristen: Nobody was telling me any of these things when I was growing up. Nobody was telling me about intuition. No one was telling me to trust myself. No one was telling me about sex. No one was telling me what to call anything. It was total on-the-job training.
Regena: Exactly.
Kristen: We have to create a new conversation for our young girls so that they’re brought up in this culture. Then we have to have a conversation to reroute women who already have subscribed to the preexisting paradigm.
Regena: That’s right. That’s why the classes at the School of Womanly Arts are all by women, for women, about women. We used to be taught by our aunties, our mamas, our grandmas to value the feminine. Now, that’s not the case. That’s why in my school, it’s women of all ages, from 18 to their 80s or older.
Kristen: I was really fascinated with your writing about the courtesan. Tell us how the role of the courtesan has been an influence for you and the School of Womanly Arts.
Regena: I literally started the School of Womanly Arts when my daughter was born. I felt such a sense of responsibility to the girls of today, to the women of tomorrow, to what was I doing as a woman to make sure that the world understood who and what a woman is. I felt so much responsibility and gratitude to my ancestresses for making me possible —understanding for the first time what that meant in a new way. I remember this day when I was holding my baby and trying to figure out nursing. There was a movie, Dangerous Beauty, which happened to be on TV.
It was the story of a woman in Venice in the 14th century. Women in those days were completely powerless — they were a property. They had no ability to own money or own land or be in any way self-determining. If you did not have money, the choice was the convent or to become a courtesan.
There was a scene where a mother was giving her daughter a bath. She said, “If you want to give pleasure, you must know pleasure.” I was like, my God. Women, we know nothing about our own pleasure. No one teaches us about our own pleasure. Yet we are supposed to take care of our husbands, our families, and our bosses. We’re supposed to be able to provide all of this for others. Yet we don’t do the investigation or the research on our own.
That inspired me to begin to research the courtesan and what that meant because I saw that there was a discipline of women at one time that prioritized uncovering the practice of what it meant to be a woman.
In that research, I located the work of Susan Griffin who wrote a phenomenal book, The Book of the Courtesans. In reading that book, I learned that it was actually the courtesan that gave rise to feminism. Why? Because the courtesans were living in a time when women actually had no political power, no personal power, except if you were a courtesan — then you were permitted to be educated. You were permitted to read books, write poetry. You were permitted to learn things: music, art, swordplay, riding a horse, things that were otherwise kept from women. Courtesans were permitted to own their own property and to go out in public dressed as they pleased.
The women who were wives saw that. They were like, “Wait a minute. We want that power. We’re actually angry that we don’t have that power.” Feminism was born out of the anger that started with the inspiration of these women who were living so large in a time when that was not likely or even possible for other women.
Because feminism was born out of anger, those aspects of the feminine were what were retained.
When you’re breaking through, it’s not just a glass ceiling. It’s a cement ceiling. All you can do is use your power to break it open.
Our early founding foremothers of the feminist — Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman — all those women couldn’t afford to pursue or even pay attention to the art of the feminine. They were breaking through the ceilings that all of us are benefiting from now. Anger was the legacy of feminism. Now we have the capacity to pay attention to the majesty, the magic and the art of being a woman embodied and connected to her sensual fire and her sensual source. That was the secret of those courtesans.
It is so important for a woman to be able to dwell in the house of her desire. She can only stand in that from a life that is powered by pleasure. And by doing so she can create and invent solutions and make things into existence that could never have existed before, such as the New York Times bestselling book called puss*, or world peace, or companies that will elevate and expand our ability to survive as a species. It’s phenomenal, the power of women — she who gives life.
Kristen: Speaking of which, in a brownstone in 1998, you heeded the call…
Regena: Once upon time, I recognized that women had no idea about pleasure. It was resulting in a lot of anger, a lot of self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-deprecation. All around me I saw a woman attacking herself, a woman not knowing how to create a true, vibrant partnership with her man, a woman mothering her children but left feeling worn out, drained, worn to a thread. I saw this happening not just with women who were career and working moms; I saw this happening with women that were full-time mothers. I didn’t see a woman who was not completely stressed and maxed out.
It’s an epidemic now where women are just working and working and not balancing, not even knowing that balance is possible or necessary. I thought, I have to do something to bring forward this conversation. I have to leave a legacy in this world. I have to have women understand who they are. So I started the School of Womanly Arts because I was a mama. I just had a baby. I just thought, “Okay. I’ll call it Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts.” I had no idea it was going to stick.
Then as things happened, somebody who had been taking classes mentioned me in a Vanity Fair article. The next thing I knew, Alex Witchel from the New York Times came to write this piece on me that was front page in the ‘Style Section’. The school was maybe a year or two old. Suddenly, I had 12 offers to write my first book. I went from a tiny 12-person class in my brownstone to today, where I just held a recent event at the Javits Center in New York City for a couple thousand women.
Kristen: Can you give us a snapshot of what the experience of the School of Womanly Arts is like?
Regena: It is the greatest education for a woman on this planet, which means it is both terrifying and irresistible. There is something that is not intellectual that provokes them to come. It’s almost like a calling. An intuition gets awakened in them that they must open doorways that have not yet been opened for them. They’re realizing the limitation of what the culture has taught them about being a woman. Coming to the School of Womanly Arts changes everything. Why? Because it teaches a woman to value herself in a way she has never been valued, teaches a woman to speak for herself in a way she never has.
Kristen: First of all, she has to make a commitment of going and spending a weekend and doing something for herself.
Regena: Oh my gosh, for most women, they have never done that. They have lived their lives in service to other people or obligations, but have never given themselves a weekend to pursue themselves and to ask: What do I want? What do I long for? What would light me up? What would bring me joy? How can I surrender to loving my emotional craziness or my emotional rage? How can I learn to really locate what it is that I was put on this planet to do with this life? What’s my legend and how can I live it?
There are so many people that have so many expectations of us and for us. Our parents want us to do certain things, to be successful or to demonstrate to them that they’ve been effective. Following what the culture has as expectations for women is very often quite limiting and crushes a woman’s dreams and desires rather than expanding them.
The school is really for a woman who wants more. She just feels like she is more than this. She wants to find out what that is and then live that.
I have women who come to the school because they feel like they haven’t been valued at their job. Or maybe they love their job and haven’t stood for being financially compensated for the work that they’re delivering. Maybe it’s a woman who has a book in her that she needs to write or some kind of business she wants to launch or maybe she is in a marriage that’s at a dead end. She wants to know whether she should complete the marriage or find a way to revitalize it. Maybe she spends so much time on her career that she hasn’t found love. She doesn’t know how to open that soft side of longing and attraction and desire inside of herself. Maybe she wants a baby. Women who long come to the School of Womanly Arts and they find sisterhood.
Kristen: The energy in that room must be absolutely incredible.
Regena: We had this amazing experience recently at the Javits Center. Because I had not done an event that was that huge before, I wondered how that would be. As it turned out, I would come into the room and women would already be dancing in the aisles. We were just so thrilled to be together and honoring an aspect of the feminine that hasn’t commonly been honored and hearing each other’s stories.
It is key to have a woman share where she has come from because most women have experienced abuse — either physical abuse, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse. They have been ignored. They have been overlooked.
Kristen: Stuff it down, stuff it down, stuff it down. We don’t talk about it.
Regena: Exactly. This is a place where we’re going to celebrate every side of you. Every side of a woman is honored to remind her that her voice is necessary and essential for this world to evolve.
Kristen: Sign me up!
This past week, in honor of my birthday, I decided to gather an intimate group of women for dinner to celebrate. I hopped online and ordered 7 copies of your book to gift each of them — because I think this message is so vital.
Regena: Thank you — and happy birthday!
Kristen: It’s such an important conversation that serves an incredibly diverse population of women.
Regena: That is so true. People always comment to me, “This is the most diverse room that I have ever seen.” It’s diverse in every way. I won’t take anyone younger than 18, but I have a lot of moms sending me their daughters or vice versa, daughters who come and then they bring me their mamas or their grandmas.
My mom, who is 92, helps. She works for me and she assists because sometimes the content of the class can be emotionally moving and stirring. You need to sit next to a grandma and just have her rock you in her arms for a little while. We have women of diverse economic backgrounds driving from the burbs in their station wagon or saving their cash in their change jar after they bartend downtown in New York City. Half the class is from Europe or all over the country. It’s women of all colors, ages, and sizes — all of us longing to live the fullness of who were born to live.
Kristen: Often in this patriarchal culture, women have downloaded this awful belief that we see each other as ‘other’. You’re going to take my man. You’re going to take my job. Feeding into the notion that there is not enough to go around.
Regena: Part of the content of the class is talking about sisterhood and reframing what it means to stand in sisterhood. I know it’s possible. My dream is to live in a world where every woman who looks another woman in the eye sees sister and stands for sister, wherever she lives, whatever country she is from, whatever her background, whatever her circ*mstance. We are all sisters.
When we live that way, we elevate. There is no question. That is a different place to stand in your life, a way to live that is not just personally gratifying, but elevates the conversation of what it means to be a human being.
Kristen: You cracked me open in that final chapter. There is a passage that speaks to the power of the sister goddess activism: “A sister goddess promises to see a sister every time she looks in another woman’s eyes. She knows that no matter if she is under a burka in Afghanistan, sitting in a lounge chair at the Beverly Hills Hotel, crawling through rubble out of a recent bombing in Syria, setting her foot on a red carpet in Cannes, cleaning a bathroom, or running a board meeting at a Fortune-500 company, every woman on this planet is her sister. Everyone woman on this planet is a goddess.”
Regena: Thank you so much for choosing that. I know that can happen in this lifetime. I know it can happen that fast.
Kristen: I’ve also witnessed it with women who have gone through your school and your Mastery class. It’s a beautiful thing. As one sister goddess rises in her success, she’s got one arm back pulling someone forward with her.
Regena: That is right.
Kristen: I have been the recipient of those arms. And I have been inspired to do the same.
Regena: Yes!
There is no greater pleasure actually than standing for another woman in that way. The difference is that we are standing powerfully in our pleasure first so that reach back is not from a sense of emptiness or mutual victimization or feeling like, “Oh, it’s a terrible world. I need to cling to you.” Instead, we are saying, “I am magnificent.”
Kristen: …And so are you.
Regena: We are in the act of recreating this world. I want you to experience your magnificence, too, so come on up here baby.
What happens as a result of that is something incredible. When you step into your radiance it creates the light for me to step into mine. I am able to step into a bigger version of myself because of you stepping into a bigger version of yourself.
Kristen: No commiserating here.
Regena: Exactly. It’s taking us each to an unknown place where our voices are heard, valued, honored. We are each living the legend we were born to live and making more space for other women to live theirs.
Kristen: Women often sadly cut each other down. What about just owning it and strutting in our power and instead of walking down the street sizing each other up, glancing at another woman in admiration and acknowledge that she looks great. You go girl!
Regena: That is living as a woman turned on. Turned onto her power, turned onto her voice, turned onto her body, turned onto her sensuality, turned onto her impact, turned onto the privilege of being a woman. That turns on other women. If you’re filled with self-doubt, you’re turning everyone onto self-doubt. If you’re filled with radiance, then what you’re doing is reclaiming not only your space in the world, but igniting other women to reclaim theirs.
Kristen: So it’s no surprise to me that Dr. Christiane Northrup said, “Regena is a woman whisperer. She will wrestle a woman to the ground if need be, to get her to give up her resistance, and to own her desires and pleasure.”
I want to thank you for this wonderful book. I want to thank you for going there. I want to thank you for owning it. I want to thank you for the school and for all the women that you impact and all the future women that you are going to impact.
What’s the Mama Gena dream now? What’s your vision for yourself right now, for the women you know, and for the women to come?
Regena: That’s a beautiful question. Personally, my vision for myself is about my new partnership with an incredible man. I love him so much. I could just cry. I feel so nourished and so loved. It already fuels me with even more of a space of generosity and a power to stand for women in an even bigger way because I’m being stood for so profoundly. I’m so looking forward to experiencing this spill over to the work I do.
I would love for the school to continue to grow in the graceful way that it’s been growing, and for puss* to get into the hands of millions and millions of women internationally. Just for more of us to connect and stand in our radiance and continue to light up this magnificent world we live in.
Thank you for giving me a chance to be with your audience and connect with your women. I so deeply appreciate that.
Kristen: Well, we are so honored to be here with you today.
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