A Women’s Guide to Power with Kasia Urbaniak

Amanda Testa(00:01):

Hello, and welcome to the Find Your Feminine Fire Podcast. I am your host, Amanda Testa. I am a sex love and relationship coach, and in this podcast, my guests and I talk sex love and relationships and everything that lights you up from the inside out. Welcome.

I'm so excited for this week's episode. I am going to invite you to tune in right now, if you can.. connect to a time in your life, maybe even this week where you have felt so mad or still weren't able to speak up for yourself or feeling like you're not enough and too much, and all the things or feeling like you have to please and always be good, do what's right at the expense of your own desires. This week I have the immense pleasure of talking with Kasia Urbaniak, she's the author of Unbound, A Woman's Guide To Power, and The Founder and CEO of The Academy school that teaches women, the foundations of power and influence.

And I just love the book, and I love all that she teaches based on her insights from her experiences as a dominatrix, as well as her training to become a Toaist nun, and the countless woman she has taught to expand their influence. She has a very unique perspective on power, and especially now more than ever, how important it is for women to step into their leadership and welcome Kasia I'm so thrilled to talk with you today.

Kasia Urbaniak(01:32):

Thank you for having me and thank you for the work that you do in the world. It's very important.

Amanda Testa(01:35):

Thank you. So I'd love to, to start with, you know, even before we started recording, just tuning into how now, more than ever, it does feel so important for women to speak up and to step into their leadership. And I know for myself that I have spent a lot of time and energy and work reforming my own good girl self, because I was raised in the south in Georgia as a Debutante. I mean so much un learning around so many, so many layers there, but it is so easy. I can catch myself falling into that. And I just love that constant reminder to, okay, what is real inside of you and how can you connect to that and come from that place versus trying to appease everyone else, trying to smooth things out. And so I know there's probably many women out there listening who can relate this. So thank you for helping us to reprogram ourselves, like get rid of this good girl conditioning so we can be in our own influence and power.

Kasia Urbaniak (02:32):

That was a question, right? I can respond. There was, I actually have this temptation right now to respond to this in a way I never ever, ever have before publicly in an interview. And I'll get to the thing that I would say normally describing good girl conditioning and talking about what it does and its impact and how it, how it affects our ability to even be heard. Even when we do say the thing we mean, even when we do say it loud, what happens, energetically, how it falls flat,  why it will ruffle feathers unnecessarily besides sexism.

But I think there's something really important happening that has to be acknowledged. And I wish that we were talking about it like collectively as a society before every business meeting, before every family meeting the fact that right now we're dealing with a global pandemic and watching through the screens and the windows, our planet falling apart has a very primal, primal, psychological effect that a lot of people won't take full stock of the full stock.

What this means is if you're, if you're familiar with yogic philosophy, the body, the physical body, the material world is represented by the root chakra, right? It's like the root chakra processes information on a material level, the most material level, it's also safety. It's also survival and it's also home. And when we have simultaneously this feeling that maybe our bodies aren't safe, maybe other people's bodies, aren't safe, our body, the root chakra home is insecure. And when we look at our home planet being insecure, not safe, that's going to hit us on that level. And the issue is that the real issue is when it comes to emotions and thoughts and communication, having fights with people, trying to get things done, the root chakra is the furthest away from the parts of our minds that speak and think and rationalize. So what that means is a lot of people are going to be having feelings of instability and insecurity, lack of safety, grasping, addiction, gripping, wanting to fix onto an ideology, wanting to know for certain, what's gotten that feeling of uncertainty makes sense on a logical level.

Kasia Urbaniak (04:40):

We don't know where we're going, what's going to happen, right? But on an energy body level, when I see even people walking around it's root chakra, perineum clenched, asshole clenched, it’s like the roots been cut and damaged and a lot of the aberrant and wildly inappropriate behaviors and strange thoughts and strange logic look to me like they're coming from, uh, from a, from a destabilized root chakra. Like we can't say mommy, I don't feel safe. Like there's no way for those deepest, deepest bodily feelings to translate well into thought. And the reason, one of the reasons I mentioned is like, this Academy is a school of power, power, power, but like power. Like there's one definition of power, which has everything to do with who has the most toys. And that falls flat. It really does like behavioral economics can get economics is, can argue with me and half, right?

Kasia Urbaniak (05:31):

If you're talking about human power, there are a lot of people who have a lot of toys that don't have the freedom to live how they wish and are under the influence of the power they have in such a way that they are trapped. They are not actually in a position to transform themselves. Their lives adapt to the changing times or society. And this root chakra mentioned, right? The thing I said, I was going to mention before, good girl conditioning power is in the body. Power is in how you're able to communicate, occupy space, who you can touch, move, and inspire and who and how and what you can offer that is well used and what you can receive. It has everything to do with relationships, power. Isn't a feeling it's not something you experience alone in a room. You can have a high and feel great about yourself, but like power is manifest.

Kasia Urbaniak (06:23):

Power is relational. Power is the result you see the community, you build the work that you do, the synergy you're able to create with your dreams, desires, fears, synergizing with those of others. It's a, you know, it's like movements that happen in our society. Whether they're destructive or constructive or some combination, the human power is most powerful when it's embodied individuals acting in concert. And that requires the most embodied individual in the room, tapping into that deepest wisdom and knowing how to transmit it, to get others on board, we're going this way. And I feel it I'm following. What's alive. I'm following what's in, what's in the life force because that's going to be the best decision, making the best thing for all involved. The most generative option, always what's alive. What's alive. Not what's right. Not what's wrong, but what's alive versus what's dead.

And y'all know what a dead choice looks like. The good on paper choice, the temporary guilty pleasure, but really screws you five minutes later, choice. Like you feel, you know, what's okay. And this is where women come in. We are uniquely tailored to feel what's alive. Even the way that we get erotically turned on. It's so nuanced because it's so discerning about what's relevant. What's alive. What's on point something slightly off point game off like game over. So, okay, so now I'm going to bring it back to a little bit more grounded level, right? The conditioning we receive in the name of goodness, that seems like it's no longer relevant because you can be a bad girl. You can be a business woman, but it’s still just as pervasive as ever. It's just taken on different masks, different outfits. Like a business woman could be the independent woman.

Kasia Urbaniak (08:02):

A good girl who's doing everything for everyone. Doesn't really ask anything of anyone. She's getting it herself. It's, it's silly to expect this kind of conditioning to disappear in a few generations, the entire system of how our entire economic system based on marriage, marrying well, are you going to be the kind of wife that's not going to ask too much, that's going to make the best with what she has. That's not gonna, that's not gonna compromise the patriarch. That's, you know, that's going to be easy to satisfy. So like, even these days, if a woman's like, yeah, I'm chill. I don't need much. I'm fine. I'm a pretty low maintenance. Not only is she probably lying. , (Laughter) That’s another manifestation of good girl conditioning, which at its essence really looks like, you know, a Victorian manual for marriage. It's massively outdated. But because we learn most of our things, not from the internet or books, we learn most of our things.

We catch them from our grandparents and we catch them in the air. Like that air takes longer to change and we can consciously change those things. We can consciously break out of good girl conditioning, but we have to be able to name it because I know so many women who are like, I'm not anybody's doormat, except if she really, really goes into that deeper signal that we talked about, that we want leading all things on everywhere on the planet, but you really, really, really taps in it can get scary because some of those truths and some of those desires are things that may not be the things they're supposed to be. If anybody listening, ever had an experience, like how many of us have had an experience where even in grade school, we didn't have to be told explicitly, but we knew what it was okay to like, and not like, like, and not like what, what music or TV shows or what jokes or whether it was okay to like the teacher and not what that said about you.

Whether you were like able to like members of the opposite sex yet, what that meant about you or the same sex, all of those. And even the most silly things like if you like yellow sneakers, like all of these. And when you start putting at this really early age conditions and very high stakes values on somebody's desire, somebody's sense of what's alive. You're crippling their primary navigation device through life. You're cracking their barometer. And so when the process of releasing good girl conditioning comes up, we start discovering things about ourselves that would be hard to look at in the beginning, especially through a moral lens. You know, there's a lot of really amazing things that happen. If a woman's willing to look at her desire for revenge, without an acting it, but finding it amusing and, and feeling the incredible passion and energy, even with the most twisted plots and then reclaiming the energy.

So it's not, you know, actually, if you look at I've done this work with thousands of women, but when you start looking at they're in a safe container, allowing them to go crazy with their revenge plots, what you actually start seeing is a really nuanced training of the other person to crack them and then elevate them.

Because after they're done with the punishment, they're sending their molesting stepfathers to therapy, and then they're making them save all the other women in the world. I mean, you can just keep going. What else, what else, what else it's like, you have to cure cancer before that's, before I'll talk to you, but only, only breast cancer. Anyway, I think right now, especially in this time of uncertainty, it's actually the best time to start training that and, and, and repairing that inner navigation device, because there aren't external conditions that are decidedly telling you one thing or another there's confusion.

Kasia Urbaniak(11:36):

And in that space of confusion and uncertainty, we can start tapping somatically into the feelings and, and, and that training starts on the most basic level. That training starts, you know, from, somebody who's listening to this, who has no idea what I'm talking about. It starts like day one, setting an alarm on your phone four or five times a day that has the message,  What are you feeling in your body right now? What are you feeling in your emotions right now? One word, right? I'm feeling cold. And that after a period of time getting good at that, it using that as in, you know, decision-making, there's the whole area of emotional alchemy and a kind of spiritual self-care that has to do with tapping into different emotions for information. But beginning with that, if we can't feel ourselves and we can't feel our desires, we can't feel our preferences and we can't be okay with whatever comes up, because it means that we're crazy, you know, screwed up or whatever. If we can't let ourselves have that, that ecstasy, of a human, if a human beings, daily requisite, daily diet of ecstasy, isn't met, it goes dark. And that's what we have. And the dark side of ecstasy of a human being doesn't have an ecstatic experience. Often enough, you get doom scrolling addiction to violence, screaming fights that would be better solved with sex. Like just really like high-intensity negative experience that reached the same pitch in the negative, that, and out of that, a liberating opening, ecstatic experience might.

Amanda Testa (13:04):

Yes.

Oh my goodness. And I think too, we are so conditioned away from tuning into what we need on that somatic level. Often I think about, you know, my daughter is nine now, but when she was in kindergarten and they would only let them go to the bathroom certain times and drink water at certain times. And I was like, no, you let my daughter go to the bathroom when she needs to go to the bathroom, because that right there is just turning you off from listening to your body's natural urges. Right. You can't even drink when you're thirsty. I mean, I think that making that note to self, like, what am I feeling right now? Oh, maybe I need to go to the bathroom and not sit here for another two hours at my desk. Those are things like a simple thing. But that to me is part of it sometimes. Right?

Kasia Urbaniak (13:44):

It's, it's absolutely essential being able to read basic body signals. I think also like that the loss of that, the loss of that, like, if you're like in a virtual world, in us as a zoom meeting or on the phone, you might forget that you need to drink water or pee, or like, even as an adult, I see a very strong link to that in the death of common sense. When people talk about common sense, what are they talking about? Oh, you know, the things we all agree on, the things we all know. No, no, no, no, because there's nothing we, that there isn't such a thing without the sense, the physical sense common sense is about, it may be hard for some people to see the link between knowing when you have to pee and going to pee and common sense. But that common sense occurs to you as knowing what, you know, as a felt sense experience.

Kasia Urbaniak(14:29):

Well, obviously it's a bad idea to put garbage in the ocean. Obviously it's a bad idea to treat all your neighbors with hostility, it's obvious I can just feel, it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right to put chemicals in baby food. You don't have to tell me what the chemicals are. It's just like arsenic in there doesn't feel right. This doesn't taste right. Like common sense. It requires proprioceptive anchoring it requires knowing what's going on inside of you. And if we don't understand, we can't tap in and up to know, like, it's time to sleep. It's time to eat. Like your nine-year-old has a right to be learning that. But part of the madness of the world is we have a world run by adults who don't not only don't know how to do that. There is a heroic reward. There's a heroic status to those who can bypass their signals, white knuckle things and projected imperviousness to the human condition.

Amanda Testa (15:23):

Right. I feel like right now, there's that sense in some ways of white knuckling through every day, there's just new headlines that are just devastating. And I think when you let some of those land on a body level, it's really hard to be like, all right, well, let me just get to work now. You know what I mean? It's it's, there is kind of maybe a collective in some sense, like, oh, you're dealing with all these things, but I don't have time to really deal with it. So let me just keep going. And that's not healthy either. Yeah,

Kasia Urbaniak (15:50):

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's also because of the way that we compartmentalize things, like you can't go to work with a broken heart because you shouldn't be crying, but like, you know, actually you can do all those things. You can talk and cry. Like you can do all those things.

Amanda Testa (16:03):

I feel grateful to be, you know, I think in the way that I am able to be in my work and show up, obviously can be a little different than a lot of people that have to go into an office or whatnot. But it's also,

Kasia Urbaniak(16:15):

Yeah, I have a lot of students who are -we had to scrap our planned semester. Cause there's so many things that it doesn't make sense to teach right now. I don't understand how other people are still teaching time management when our sense of time is like, or, or how to succeed. Uh, when our definitions of success have changed, there's a reason why we're making fun of billionaires who go to space. Like our values are changing. Like, I don't know what they're changing into. I don't have the definitive. I'm not the, you know, the Oracle who says we're going in this direction. But like, it's really obvious that the things that might've gotten, somebody really amped up and excited at life hack. It's just like, what?  What, are we still talking about the old world? And my job might be from the old world, your job might who's, you know, like, what is the point of doing those things anymore? Is this still, is it still relevant? You know, what's relevant. What's not relevant. We don't know that right now.

Amanda Testa(17:04):

Right. I love, you know, in the beginning we were talking about aliveliness and like, what is that? And how do you reconnect to that? And so amidst everything else, like tuning into your own experience and finding that that aliveness in you in some way, you know, you also mentioned that often there can be so many blocks to that. So curious if you would share a little bit more about that, if that feels okay.

Kasia Urbaniak(17:25):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the biggest energy zappers, one of them is the things that you're afraid to say out loud, the things that would sound so horrible, you're not even sure that you mean them because they sound so terrible. You can't say them, you can't communicate them because they're too dangerous. It's really, really important to find a person, a place where you can say that. And it's, it's actually even more important, it’s more important than you might realize to say it to a person. Human beings have had something like this. You know, there's a lot of groups that have exercises, like clearing exercise. We have things unsaid. There's, there's spring cleaning. There's many different groups that have versions of this, but it comes from a very human primal need. We have confession or some form of confession in churches, the ability to complete the circuit of the feeling, the thought to the words, and without consequence writing those things down and burning them as a substitute is better way better than nothing way better than nothing.

Kasia Urbaniak (18:33):

If you can have a confessional with somebody and say, I'm not meaning anything I say, I just want to go to town on some things, you'll have a turn, I'll have a turn, and we forget this ever happened. It releases something bodily, it makes energy available. Another thing is that speech can oftentimes tap into emotions. We don't know, we're having a lot of people that are tired when they're actually angry and they can't deal with what they're angry about. Being able to tap into those emotions, liberates a lot of energy. Now the whole process of how to do that and how to convert it into something beautiful and glorious is way more complex than I can give it a single answer, but a cheat is to play with different personas. So if you think about, if I were a bad girl, if I were a con artist, if I were a sexy slut, if I were a something that feels foreign and forbidden, but for some reason feels like it has a draw.

If I was the mistress of doom, if I was the goddess of death, if I was a tyrant, if I was a dictator to fill in the blank, choose one archetype and fill in the blank, what you would do in your own life right now, if you were a dictator, what would you tell everybody to do? How would you punish them? How would, what order would you say if you were a con artist, how much would you charge for this thing that you like what's too much. If you were a, you know, a femme fatale, who would you seduce and How, what would you, what would you look like on your zoom calls? And, and part of the reason for this is a much more playful way to start, like in the guise of play, which is one of the most healing things to, to start releasing some of these ideas and feelings and, you know, pretend is a very, very it's the basis on which all our great art operates, right?

Like in that free space. And I, and I would encourage anyone listening to try to actually try, like, what would it be like if I were, if I were bad, what would I do? And see the, sometimes the hesitancy with which all of a sudden, the amnesia, the blanks, and a little bit of pushing or goading, remembering a favorite villainous or something like that, then suddenly there's this whole emotional arc that develops, you know, from like difficult to playful to while to completely nonsensical. I would never do that. It's really fun to do some of these exercises in a group too, because when you hear other ideas, there's a lot of laughter. There's a lot of playfulness. There's, there's there's approval, there's approval for the ways in which some of these are expressions of hidden desire and hidden heartache.

Amanda Testa (21:00):

I think there's something so potent about the group and doing it in community, because I think there's that, first of all, the permission to go there, when you see someone else or inspired by someone else, also knowing that you're not alone in what you're experiencing, I think, and I'm curious, obviously in this day and age, it's harder to meet in person. Sometimes maybe you have some, maybe you have ways to do it that feel good, but it depends on where you are in the world and what not, but I'm curious, obviously there's zoom, but you know, for you and gatherings with other women, to be able to do this work, feeling that potency of being in person, doing it, how that feels so much harder when you can't be like in-person versus virtual, does that make sense? What I'm asking?

Kasia Urbaniak(21:42):

It does. And it's also really interesting because I've had, I've had a, a three-year investigation with this because before lockdown, before COVID I was busy writing my book. So there was a, I think a semester or two, where I went online, I taught online only so that I had more space to do that. And I, and so my, the process for me of moving from groups to not groups was in a sense more, more gradual. And I had more interruptions to experiment with and try to figure out how this works. How is this going to happen? Especially around the questions of transformation and community. Okay. Basic fact, right? You can be in a room full of people and not feel community. So it's not just being bodies in a room, discerning the thing that's going to make people who are not in the same room feel as connected as possible and feel as in community as possible, became the name of the game.

And I have a feeling that having distilled, one of the things, two of the things that I'm about to say is only going to make the future life gatherings and communities work even better in writing a book, I had to figure out how to do all this stuff that only worked in community, in book form for the individual woman. And one of the main things, especially when it comes to this topic is the biggest, biggest mind-fuck for women is feeling like these things we go through as women are our own personal experience, therefore our own personal failings. So the thing about freezing when somebody says something inappropriate or asks you a question, or, you know, in those terrible situations where something happens that you don't want it and want to happen, but you didn't exactly say no. Or you didn't say no loud enough, or you agreed to something you didn't want to agree to.

It could be anything but freeze the freeze, right? The most painful thing about the freeze is that when it happens on a low level, very few consequences, you're in an elevator. Somebody asks you, if you're married, you answer, you didn't mean to, right? Like you freeze right on that lowest level, low stakes, the most painful part of it, obviously isn't that a stranger asked you if of your marital status, it's the self betrayal piece. It's the feeling that you let yourself down. Why am I? So we can't trust myself. I can't stand up for myself. The moment women start hearing how their lives have been shaped by this phenomenon. And that it's, that it's pretty much universal that women freeze in a very specific way, men freeze too, but it's very different, the very specific way and why that happens and how that happens. All of the sudden the relate-ability right.

The relief to know that I am not the only one sharing this burden. I'm not the only one carrying this burden. And every single thing, it's like the good girl conditioning, the freeze, the repression of anger, the worrying about being bossy or needy, the pretending, you know, the negotiation against myself before I make an ask, like, I'm about to ask something. I know what I want. And I negotiate myself down before I open my mouth. There are so many patterns that I can tell you, almost every single woman experiences. No, it's not biological. Cause if it was you wouldn't be able to change it. And that's what I'm in the business of doing, you know, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of women no longer doing those things anymore. And not because of some kind of like arduous step-by-step behavioral change, but because of understanding how it occurred and knowing, and knowing a few basic practices to keep stay fresh, you know, because if it's in the air, it's going to, it's going to, if you can, you always stand a chance of falling back into it.

But anyway, the main point was that like community exists where there's true relate-ability and the relief like, and also where there's function when there's purpose, if the purpose of a group is to have your, your personal burden lightened, where you're psychologically relieved to know it's not just me, because you would spend 30 years in therapy, hacking away at a thing and be isolated and deprived of the beauty of seeing it happen 300 different ways exactly At the same time. And when you have those points of reference, it becomes so much easier to understand the nature of the pattern, the shape of the beast, the way that it operates, the way that it moves, how to tame it, how to handle it. Like until then we're all by ourselves, having conversations with ourselves about how we suck. And that's not what we need the opposite of what we,

Amanda Testa (26:02):

Right. It’s that internalized violence towards ourselves that we sometimes will, I will , I’ll speak for myself here, that I could be, I would never speak this way to another human, but to myself, it's like, okay, let me just be as vicious as I can possibly be. But then that brings back to the point of like embodying those fun alter egos, those other archetypes, like, well, if I really was to embody this totally evil inside of me, what would she do? And she, would she really take this out on besides me? Right?

Kasia Urbaniak (26:33):

Yeah. The thing you think to know about self-attack is that it's inherited. And one of the counter intuitive moves to do with it is to express gratitude to our ancestors for policing us for our own protection. And, you know, letting them know it's not necessary anymore. Women don't need that same kind of thing because that self attack is just like internalized freakishly restrictive care of the woman and the girl and the woman. It's like, not, it doesn't work obviously.

Amanda Testa (26:59):

Well, I think that that's true. And when you were speaking back to, you know, finding connection in, you know, a shared experience can be done in different ways. I personally miss in person. Cause I do. I mean, there is so much to be done virtually and it is so beautiful, but sometimes, and it's interesting cause there is that, like you say, even, I think I was talking with someone on the podcast recently about how it's kind of like there's this, the coronavirus or whatever it might be, right? There's the pandemic you're going about your day. You're doing as well as you can. But in, at somewhere in the back, it's like, there's this Hawk in your backyard and you're a mouse and it's like constantly flying around back, there's just a little bit of a threat at all times. I'm wondering, you know, what are some things that you can share to help you reconnect to your own life force your own sovereignty. In those instances, when you're feeling so much outside chaos,

Kasia Urbaniak(27:52):

This is going to speak to only a percentage of people, but it's worth trying, let yourself freak the out in rage, like, close the doors and just roar the lion's roar. The energy of anger. Again, this is not going to appeal to everyone, especially when you're tired, right? When you're exhausted. But the feeling that you might be under attack needs to be processed. Yes, it's most insidious when it's constant and low grade, but when it builds up the impact that it has on our bodies is like an actual attack. The purpose of anger is not to kill your enemy. The purpose of anger is to reestablish yourself as an individual with a right to be as you are. What do I mean by that? A lion's roar, a lion roars to say, I am, it's not anger. It sounds like that. Like anything that can get you into your root chakra, grunting kind of raw primal, right to exist as you are I'm here.

This is my territory. I am like hot blooded. I don't know if that's not going to be anger for everyone, but whatever can get you into that. Whether it's a certain kind of music, whether it has to do something with your hips, it's, it's that, that frequency of energy, that's very earthy and primal. And sometimes like, like arrgh, because human beings are the ones who can take information and turn it into a threat, more abstract, you know, somebody can insult your clothes and you can feel like your right to exist is compromised. Make you angry. Anger is supposed to be to defend you to like establish your beingness here. Like I even noticed that music is less Basey than it used to be. Like, we need that bass note. We need that bass note. So if you could think of anything, I mean, for some people it's going to be exercise, but I'm not going to say exercise because that tends to have a really restrictive, disciplined kind of controlling energy. Yeah. I mean, can we all get in a circle around a fire and pretend we're wild animals?

Amanda Testa (29:54):

Yes. I think that accessing that primal part, that wild nature can be challenging for the good girl. Right. Because it's not, what has been taught is how you are to be as a lady, but it's so freeing and incredible what happens when you are able to get into that part of you. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you come alive. Yeah,

Kasia Urbaniak (30:15):

Yeah. Yeah. And there, there are more delicate ways for the good girl to go into it. Find some hip hop that take a walk around your house, like stomping your feet, like you own the place. I mean, the body so important that way, this is like the most fun part of the academy and the live classes, especially is all the persona play. When you have, when you start embodying different aspects of yourself and different personalities or making them up, naming them, costuming them, giving them fictional backgrounds.

Amanda Testa (30:48):

Yeah. And two, when it comes to influence, you were talking earlier about how you can lead and how you can be led through connecting with someone's body and their embodiment of their belief or whatnot. I'm wondering, I think it just feels so important. And there was a point in your book that really struck me. I just remember reading this part and it gave me chills and just the power of when you're truly in your life force. And I think it was a story of a Taoist nun who had whole army turn away just from her presence. And I don't know the backstory of that, but I just love that visual and just that potency of what's possible there. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm wondering, you know, what does it take to try to hold more influence? Like if you, what are some of the ways that we can do that?

Kasia Urbaniak  (31:33):

We've talked about some of the ways to liberate some of the pre-existing energy and breaking good girl conditioning. And what that does is it makes more energy available, right? More options, more possibility, more range, less limited, less limited sets of behavior, less habituation. Okay. But in terms of power and influence with another person, one of the main stumbling blocks that we get into is not understanding the structure of power dynamics. So the Toaist Abbott, she was able to stay rooted, right? Really, really embodied had access to her own wellspring of natural energy connected to her own source, which you know, that is, that is a noble pursuit. Like learn how to do that. Just remove as much as you can, of the things that are in the way that were, that you inherited. Right. But then when it comes to the projection of energy and the receiving of energy, the power dynamic, like the simplest way to understand it is that the structure of a power dynamic is the structure of attention.

And that can sound really abstract, but it's really easy to understand in the context of something like the freeze, somebody asks you, do you like threesomes? Are you free tonight? I know you like it, don't you. Right. And you're there going uhhhh , What’s actually happening is somebody put their attention on you. The way women are conditioned on an energetic level is put attention in first. They take things in first, their attention goes in. So when you have somebody nail you with some unwanted attention, the instinct is going to be to go inside and check yourself, look for an answer. Right. And that's what, that's what part of what makes the freeze happen. If you ask a man an inappropriate question, nine times out of 10, what is he going to do? He's going to go inside to look for the answer. Is he going to go inside? No, he will immediately go outside. Why are you asking, what are you talking about? Who the hell do you think you are? Are you looking for a date? You seem pretty desperate, aren't you? That will be like this. It doesn't need to be taught, right? That also has, you know, there's pluses and minuses. If you have a default state of attention in, in a stressful situation, it's also going to mean that, you know, if your default is out, nobody can get in.

But when we're talking about just this default, just this default for women, those few seconds in the freeze can determine her career, her safety, her life, those few seconds matter. So we spend some time training how in those difficult situations to break through the freeze and put, put attention out, right. To put them on the spot. And then that's, that's just, that's just the beginning and the articulation of the principle itself, because actually most of us have trouble occupying an inward attentive state fully and an outward attentive state fully. And it's really in terms of relations. It's really one or the other that does have the magic. When a human being fully present, when a human being is fully present and embodied, their natural inclination will be to do power dynamics 100% correctly Right. And any time two people have had one of those amazing conversations where they stayed up until Dawn and felt like more intimate and more connected and more inspired than ever they were doing it.

Like we've all done it. What it looks like is being able to take turns, occupying a self aware state and an other aware state of attention in and attention out. And it's easy to see why it would be really good to be fluid in both and fluent in both in a situation like the freeze somebody puts you on the spot. You're frozen. You actually don't know that your attention is inward and that you're seeking the solution inward. So you're going even further inward. And you're wanting to say something, but you're thinking about what you say, instead of putting your attention, energy follows attention, the woo kind of energy, right? The woo kind of energy follows attention. When you put your attention out fully it energetically lands on the other person in a way that even the most numb person can feel. Dogs can feel it. Kids can feel it.

Humans can feel it, whether they know it or not. And when another human being is contained by your energy, they feel safe enough on a less than conscious level to submit, surrender and listen. And until some of those character qualifications are met, they can't fully let themselves receive the energy and understand and sink into it. The trouble is because of the way men are conditioned. There are, they're actually thicker. They need more pressure. It doesn't mean they need more attack. It doesn't mean they need harsher words. They need more pressure in order to crack. And the thing is that my, my dual education, as a, as a dominatrix and a Taoist nun, somebody who is studying the energy body, but also looked at what it took for some of the most armored men to crack and surrender, it was never an implement in the dungeon. It was never a harder or softer stroke.

Sometimes it had something to do with whether I could get inside their heads with something I said, but fundamentally that was only working if my attention and energy was there to find the thing and the actual act of just having my attention and energy. If I just looked at them and said, you're here, you’re kneeling, you are here looking up at me. I'm not saying anything clever that, that containment, that location, that the way that, and so without understanding that one of the things women need to learn is to do this fully. And I always get these objections. Yeah. Have by attention's out all the time. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. I don't mean serving all the time. I mean, when you want to influence, when you want to contain, when you want to move selectively doing this, not having your attention on everybody's needs all the time, because that's not the dominant state of attention.

That's scattered and outward. We're talking about specifically for getting through to someone and not knowing this ends up exacerbating sexist situations, or that's not the right way to say it. Like it creates a difficulty in something.. like a woman in a meeting, right. We know about this example of  woman says something in a meeting and a man repeats it and gets all the credit. A lot of the time what's actually happening is this pack of animals around a table is needing somebody to put their attention out dominantly enough so they all feel contained enough to surrender, listen and follow. The woman being trained her entire life to never do this. Even when she speaks with a degree of authority, not putting her attention out, owning the bodies of the men in the room, they won't shift into a surrendered state. So on some unconscious level, something's itching, something's itching and incomplete, and it becomes irresistible for a man.

Who's familiar with this itch to scratch it by repeating the same thing, but in a dominant state of attention to like drive it all the way home. I'm not saying sexism, isn't, it doesn't exist. And I'm not saying that men shouldn't like, look and watch. We should be aware of stolen ideas and stolen credit, but what the individual woman can do is, what I'm interested, because I don't want to wait for all these things to change, So I want to be able to say, this is what you do to increase your chances of being heard and getting through that, just because a woman uses the inward state as her default, the submissive surrendered state as her default doesn't mean she's mastered it enough to get it to be a nourishing, empowering, and powerful experience because that's another thing to be able to go inward. And that's, that's, you know, some of the earlier exercises, even though they seem outward, like if I were a bad girl or confessing or getting in touch with your darker sides, to be able to go inward and to read those signals and to know what you want and to be able to just speak it, plainly just admit it to yourself.

That's, that's a surrendered state. It has a magnetic quality that makes it easier for people to serve and for you to receive. So like when you get into that state where somebody is giving you a massage and they're sort of like reading you, that's a really good surrendered submissive state. We now have this thing that also is if a woman is wants and needs and is receiving that she's somehow lesser. And that she's somehow a weak woman. There's so much power and magnetism in the state of fully being saturated with what it is that you want and fully ready to receive it. We are really quick to reject offers of things that we even want even dumb things like, can I help you with that? No, I'm fine. Right? Like, it's almost like, no, I'm not going into that state. I'm not going into that state.

So we hover in this really powerless smush, this really powerless limbo between full dominance and full submission in terms of states, right? Not in terms of like whips, not ropes and webs in terms of states of attention and energy that we never fully connect with the influence, the other person and influencing them getting through to them. Uh, even when I was training dominatrixes they felt all of them when I train them, all of them, what I, first thing I tried to teach them was how to put their attention out. Even they who were inclined to do that kind of work were reticent to cross a man's boundaries in a way that a man is never, even to this day, even with me too and all that stuff, I never reticent.  They don't, we don't occupy this space the same way so long as we feel squeamish about like moving into somebody or moving or moving away from someone, moving into ourselves in the presence of another, if you want to, if you're getting a massage and you want it to be better than deepen your state of receiving deepen your sense of feeling that you have a chance of transmitting to them, guiding them wordlessly to go deeper and better in the ways that you like.

If you're in that state, you also won't mind using your words. When you have to, you won't have to think about the right way of saying you're doing it wrong because that's not where you are. You're just in the next hot spot. Oh, what about there that, yes. You know, I'm talking about massages, but it can be like the house of your dreams, that promotion, it's all, it's all, you know. And the greatest part is when you have a really confusing, stuck dynamic or an argument that happened 75,000 times, the same way, you can try saying something from a dominant state, at a submissive state, and oftentimes switching between the two and really stuck spot will have this kind of jiggle function that sets something loose that removes a block and creates a connection, gets things moving forward. But see, this is the thing like we are having human beings are at this state right now, where we have to like, learn how to do the things we knew how to do before we can name them.

Kids know how to do this. You watch kids playing, they do dominant and submissive extremely well. They switch all the time. They're fluid about it. You know, I'm the king, you're the queen. And you know, next, next moment, I'm the villain. And, and like, they don't even let reality get away, get in the way of the energetic need. That's presenting itself. I have the magic shield. It can penetrate it. Can't be penetrated by bullets. Now it can like, we're, we're changing the, the rules only to accommodate what's alive and keeping things alive. And like, you know, now I'm trapped and you are, you're the prison guard. Like that's how they play. They play fluidly and we have trouble with that. And we get even more in trouble with that when we carry the baggage of our gender training.

Amanda Testa

That's so interesting. Just thinking about that. He has with kids and how it is so challenging. Sometimes as adults, we have to retrain ourselves. And like you say, even, you know, in, you were talking earlier about, you know, kind of playing with that attention and some ways to do that. And it really is so interesting to note for just how you are at either one. Right. I think, and like you say, are you able to really surrender deeply and to receive and like really be in that space? Or what about it might feel hard or challenging and how can you work with this pieces that feel like they can't fully be there, let go, go in whatever it might be. Yeah,

Kasia Urbaniak (43:23):

Right. Yeah. This is the part that was that I do miss about live classes because in a live class, you know, we could have a student come up in the world in front of the room and receive a compliment, for example. And like, you can see somebody's energetic state and whether they're receiving even behind the “thank you.” Cause you can feel the, thank you that's kind of like a pushback. It's not ungenerous or unkind. It's just, thank you. It's like I'm full, I've popped. I'm I've received the compliment, but now I'm giving you something back or I'm pushing you away. And the thank you. And again, like in presence, you can feel it more easily. Somebody who says thank you in a way where the words thank you as part of what they're drinking in will oftentimes summon the next compliment. Uh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, and also you're an amazing cook. Ah, yeah. Okay. Let me take that and thank you. Thank you. Like you can feel it and you can see it in the eyes, the eyes that take in and the eyes that shoot back. I mean, even saying thank you to a compliment for some women is a major achievement instead of arguing with it or trying to explain it away, you know, oh, this isn't me. This is my makeup artist.

Amanda Testa(44:33):

Yes. Right. So good. I mean, I feel like I just want to keep talking. I love all your wisdom and I'm wondering, you know, maybe if there's one thing,  or if there's a question that you really wished I would have asked that I didn't, or just any last insights you'd like to share.

Kasia Urbaniak (44:50):

Yeah. I think, I think these days it's more difficult than ever for women to allow themselves to desire big and dream big and even take note of what they want when it's the attention is really being hijacked. But what we don't want, like what we want less of, or what we need or the break that we need or the context that we need. And it's, it's a shame because it's also exactly in this time of uncertainty, there's also, this uncertainty also means that there's something happening. And this is metaphysically difficult to, it's difficult to talk about like a rational person, but the structures, the structure of manifestation, the structures of reality are softer. This is a really good moment for anybody who actually really knows what they, what they love, what they desire, what they feel passionate about, what they want to create. It's a really good, there's a lot of space on this level of creation.

So long as you're able to do it without a lot of support from material reality right now. Okay. So that's a really fancy way of trying to say, do whatever you can right now to find the breadcrumbs of desires, to find unrealistic dreams, the things you have no way of knowing how you would ever make happen, the things you want to have in your life, divorced completely from how you would ever make that happen. Don't make it a goal because material reality is in flux right now. So how things will happen. We don't know that. And that's a plus not a minus. If you have this brilliant signal, this shining magnet in your energy field, what's going to happen in the next year or two, we'll be way faster than what it would have happened would have taken decade a decade, a decade and a half before this time, take advantage of the crumbling onus of these times and make the invisible dream as solid for yourself as you can, without, without engaging in any of the activity to make it happen.

I wouldn't say this during normal times, because it sounds like irresponsible, magical thinking, like believe that something's going to happen no create in your mind's eye and embellish it regularly and add to it and build that crystal mansion inside yourself right now, like not five years ago, and divorce divorce in every single way from, from the labor involved in making it happen, all the energy needs to go into what it's going to look like and feel like, and times will change and then times will change again. And there'll be a time where, you know, matter will collect around it or circumstances will align. And I'm saying this, I feel this really, really strongly about these times is the way in which they're unique. So if you get Unbound and you're reading the chapter on desires and and harvesting them, honing them, finding them all and all kinds of like unlikely places. Remember that, that actually right now, there are things about that, that I'm saying that aren't written in the book because these times are really unique in terms of desire.

Amanda Testa (47:49):

MMM and that feels good to think into and to feel into. And I love that invitation. So thank you very much. I'd also love if you could share where's the best place for everyone to connect with you. If they want to work with you and learn more, get the book, all that good stuff.

Kasia Urbaniak(48:04):

My website is my name, but it's easier to reach it through www.Weteachpower.com. I'm on Instagram. And my book is called Unbound. A Woman's Guide To Power from Penguin. And it's really, really, really comprehensive. It's a very, very thorough manual for training to become the woman who creates the world of tomorrow, like training now to create the new for ourselves and for each other.

Amanda Testa (48:31):

Thank you so much so important. And I feel every person listening needs to go out and get the book and really practice what it is inside so that we can have embodied the influence that we need to bring what we want to our existence. Right. Thank you so much. And I'll make sure to, to put all that in the show notes so that you can connect with Kasia, and thank you so much again for being here. We will see you all next week. 

Thank you so much for listening to the Find Your Feminine Fire podcast. This is your host, Amanda Testa. And if you have felt a calling while listening to this podcast to take this work to a deeper level, this is your golden invitation. I invite you to reach out. You can contact me at www.amandatesta.com/activate/ and we can have a heart to heart to discuss more about how this work can transform your life. You can also join us on Facebook in the group Find Your Feminine Fire group. And if you've enjoyed this podcast, please share with your friends, go to iTunes and give me a five-star rating and a rave review. So I can connect with other amazing listeners like yourself. Thank you so much for being a part of the community.