The Radiance Project: A Woman’s Guide to Power with Kasia Urbaniak
“We’re not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed.
Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas.
Right now, she gets to have her requests land.
Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not.
Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze.
Right now.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Read the transcript:
Heidi: Hey friends, I'm Heidi Rose Robbins and this is Episode 208 of The Radiance Project, a podcast of astrology, poetry, inspiration, and very good company. I cannot wait to introduce you to my very good company today. Her name is Kasia Urbaniak and she is the founder and CEO of The Academy. It's a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Kasia’s perspective on power is totally unique. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she has worked as a professional dominatrix practice Taoist alchemy and one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines, including medical Qigong and systemic constellations. Since Kasia founded The Academy in 2013, she's taught over 4000 women practical tools to step into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces, and wider communities. Her new book, Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power was just released this March. And for our astrological purposes, Kasia is a Cancer Rising, Cancer Sun, and Virgo Moon. Kasia, welcome. I'm so happy that you're here.
Kasia: I'm so glad to be here.
Heidi: I was given your book, or I was told to buy your book immediately, by our mutual friend, Alex, and I have to tell you that I read it back to back twice. I sometimes have this feeling right at the end of a book that I say to myself, “I'm gonna go back right away and start at the beginning.” And I was that hungry for it. So I first want to thank you for writing it and tell everyone who's listening to immediately buy your copy. But I thought I would just ask you, as it's a big deal to birth a book, it's only been out for a month now. How are you with the release of this book? How is it been in the last month? I imagine you've been talking to many people.
Kasia: One of the things that I'm really present to the journey of the book is really interesting in terms of time and the world. I've been wanting to write a book for ages. And the founding of the school, The Academy, happened because I was writing an advice column on Facebook. The women asking for advice asked for a workshop and my initial reaction was like, “Hell, no, I'm never being a teacher.” But I do want to write this book. And so I'm going to host some free Q&A sessions in my home. Initially, the idea was one Q&A session, so I could find out what they were most curious about in the writing of this book, it was meant to just get information for a book.
The response was so huge. We ended up hosting four Q&A sessions and couldn't fit on anyone else. There were still people wanting more. So I decided to teach a class and around the time of the beginnings of Me Too the word of the school exploded, and I got a book deal. So in writing the book, I had all this stuff prior to Me Too that I wanted to share. But I also wanted to make sure that the women who were reading this book, Unbound, were given the tools and techniques that are practical in the moment to deal with difficult conversations, violations of boundaries, and things in the context of Me Too would be really useful. Then the world explodes. The pandemic comes and I had a moment last year when I was like, is this still relevant now as we're heading towards reemergence? Now as we're heading towards this time where we're going back to a world we left behind?
What suddenly was a moment of doubt, turned into a moment of the greatest clarity, which is, as women are returning to the workplace, as women are returning to life as normal, this is the best opportunity to renegotiate everything. Child Care, salary work from home, boundaries with partners, all of that stuff. And suddenly I'm sitting there and being like, how did this miracle occur? That this handbook for how to redraw the landscape of your life, have every difficult conversation with power and playfulness, how to be able to basically redesign the architecture of power and of relations in your life is exactly what's needed. So as we draw closer to that moment of actual re-entry, the kinds of questions I'm getting, the kind of interest that I'm getting is exactly geared towards this renegotiation and it just feels like divine perfection that is happening the way it is right now. Even with the pandemic, the book was delayed three times. Its delay was even perfect.
Heidi: Perfect. It was perfect. Yeah, you know, it's funny, Kasia, when I look at your chart, you have Cancer Rising and the Cancer Sun. And in soul-centered astrology, there's this beautiful phrase for Cancer that says, “I build a lighted house, and therein dwell.” And Cancer is the great mama producer that wraps her arms around something and says, “I will nourish this, and I will protect this and I will grow this.” And so often people have schools or companies that they are fiercely protecting and growing. And I thought to myself, I wonder how long this has been in her psyche. And I think I read somewhere that when you were nine years old, you're already saying something about a school, like you had a vision of a school. Is that true?
Kasia: When I was nine, I had an obsession with creating nations. So I was a little kid and I was in school, and I had this giant stack of computer paper and each one had a format. And it was the name of the country, the language they speak the currency, how they parent, and the national anthem, and I’d get the kids in school to start a band to sing the national anthems and design the flags. In one of them, you traded parents, and in one of them, you lived in three houses.
Then in my teenage years, I read Frank Herbert's, Dune, and then all of the books that followed. I got obsessed with the secret society of women that intergalactically control everything called the Bene Gesserit. I have to found the Bene Gesserit! That’s what I have to do!
Heidi: I love that. Yeah. I mean, this idea of the countries, that’s so connected to the Cancerian energy to because Cancer is always saying, like, who is home and what is home and where is home?
I think it's fascinating because your work has so much to do with this idea of attention. And one of the things about your chart is that you have this exquisite sensitivity of the Cancerian energy that can feel every change. And yet you also have this Virgo moon that can articulate with precision, exactly every change that you feel and sense. So it's this incredible marriage of the intellect and the ability to bring it into form with language. And yet, your whole body and being is just absorbing and receiving every moment. I just so appreciated reading how you work, how you're constantly adjusting to the other. The flow is dynamic, and it marries to your chart so gorgeously.
I'm curious, Kasia, one of the reasons that you created the school that you've said is that you wanted to help women move through good girl conditioning. I think you even say that most badass women 1% of the time are going to fall into the good girl conditioning or arr not be able to respond in the moment in a way that they want to respond. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about good girl conditioning, and then the version of good girl conditioning that's like, I'll have it all but it means I have to do it all. I would love you to just riff on good girl conditioning because I can certainly use it.
Kasia: First to contextualize good girl conditioning so that the individual woman listening to this who feels like she secretly is a good girl too much of the time, lets people walk over her, doesn't say what she needs, doesn't say what she wants, doesn't advocate for herself, freezes, self portrays, auto responds in nurturing and caring when it's not her place to or when she doesn't get anything out of it.
So first the exoneration, we have to keep in perspective what we're talking about in terms of women's rights. It’s incomplete in terms of the span of human history, it started five seconds ago. In 1974, a woman still couldn't get a credit card in Connecticut without her husband's signature. So let's be real here. How do people learn? We are not born as individual complete human beings. We learn so much from the social fabric of our times. And no matter how you change laws and legislation, our social being learns constantly, especially when we're children, but throughout our entire lives from a whole mass of unspoken education.
“Contextualizing good girl conditioning is really important first to know, it’s not you. It’s not your individual thing. It’s collective. And it’s not a flaw. It’s a script made to be rewritten for these times.”
Let's go back. Good girl conditioning would have been very helpful if the only way a woman could make her dreams come true, realize her ambitions, have control over her life – which still exists in many countries – but up until very recently, the way she had access to anything was to marry well. Right? In an environment where the only real self-expression of ambition and desire you can have is to marry someone with the means, and maybe the temperament to allow you a little space to do so, then becoming marriageable becomes one of the most powerful tools a mother, a grandmother, or anybody can argue with. Many of our grandmothers are still alive on this planet. Right? And this is the thing: we know the patriarchy comes from men, but it also comes from women. It also comes from how we educate each other. And a lot of the time it's not explicit, it doesn't need to be. Most “good girls” don't have to be told that it is your place to serve others first. They don't need to be told to over apologize. “You’re too emotional ask but ask nicely.” Sometimes it's explicit, “your skirt is too short.” But for every time it's explicit, there's all this time that it's not. So contextualizing good girl conditioning is really important first to know, it's not you. It's not your individual thing. It's collective. And it's not a flaw. It's a script made to be rewritten for these times. And putting into context that these times are just starting to happen. So being a woman of the pivot, the reliever of the tapestry is an opportunity that's only present now. So what geniuses we all are to be born at this time.
It's really important to say this because there are a lot of feelings of self-attack and attack of others that can come with the phrase, “I just want to fucking get rid of my good girl.” When a mother, grandmother, or a man, if anybody polices you, tells you how to behave, not like this, like this, watches out for you. Oftentimes, it's a legacy of love. It needs to be overturned, it needs to be changed, but if someone in your family knows that if you were to short a skirt, and something happens to you and you're going to be blamed for it, then the way that she can protect you is to tell you your skirts too short. What happens as we get older is the policing turns into self-policing. Now we're constantly on guard and vigilant. “Is it too short? Is it too long? Am I too mousy? Am I too bold? Am I asking for too much? Am I too pathetic and needy and weak?” So in the context of that, what are the qualities that make a woman marriageable in 1878? Intensely resourceful, low maintenance, doesn't need much, definitely doesn’t address her desires. When it comes to needs to get something done for the family, she can advocate to a degree but her job is to be resourceful – like in the sound of music, make kids clothes from curtains. And when those kids’ clothes are outgrown, I don't know make it into a soup. That's like the superpower of the marriageable woman from 100 years ago.
So where does that leave a woman today who is both part of a family in a position to receive, in a position to lead, and also in a position to provide? Well, what happens is the intense hesitation around asking, requiring, or creating an environment where other people don't just meet our needs, but show up and respond to our desires, our visions, our dreams. The woman who goes, “I’m no good girl, I'm a badass. I get everything I want.” But is she doing it all by herself? Is she the independent woman who doesn't ask but goes and makes it happen? And how many of those women who don't want to seem like damsels in distress and don't want to seem too bossy, in response to this compression, end up being intensely isolated, overworked, exhausted, frustrated, trying to hold it together, trying to hold it down? Also, being so competent, suddenly finding yourself that you're surrounded by people who need you and not people who feed you, resource you. That imbalance leads to a lot of evidence that no good deed goes unpunished.
I see this a lot with heterosexual marriages where this competent independent woman – because of her conditioning and it's faultless – never allows her partner to rise to the occasion by not asking for 100% of what she wants. He becomes more and more useless, she becomes more and more angry and distant. He gets more and more evidence that he can't make her happy. So why bother even trying, she'll never be satisfied. And then sometimes he goes and finds somebody else that he can feel useful with. It's one of our current patterns, a modern narrative.
Heidi: The exercises in your book are so profoundly useful. You said you approached all of this with a great spirit of curiosity, like how will this turn out? And how will this turn out? And I'll give this a try. You have centralized these exercises, and they just have power. One of them that really struck me was the exercise about asking. I had never, ever done an exercise like this. Maybe you can tell us about it. Because I wrote for pages and pages, and I was like, Oh my God! It was a revelation. So tell us about the asking exercise.
Kasia: So a couple of things, there's a flood of things that are coming into my mind simultaneously right now.
One of them is, I started the school with a man, Ruben Flores, who worked for Doctors Without Borders and had a lot of experience in war zones, where people didn't speak the same language and needed to negotiate. Really difficult, you know, flying bullets, really scary. And I have a background in both studying Taoism, and in wanting to be a Taoist nun, and as a dominatrix. And in the overlap between all of those three things was the kind of power that lives underneath the spoken word. Power Dynamics, which is a whole conversation about attention.
But in the context of the asking practice, in our first class ever, I came to him and was like, I have a genius idea. I know the first exercise we're gonna do, it's gonna blow them up, they're gonna freak out, they're gonna lose their minds, they're gonna have amnesia, they're not going to know what's going on. They're going to write a sentence that says, “I could ask ____ for ____”, and they're gonna fill it with a man's name and a request. And he was like, “Oh my lord, we are screwed. We are so screwed.” Then we went into the first day of class. And I could see his jaw dropping towards the floor because they’re all sitting there, notebooks, “I could ask ___ for ___”, and I'm like, “Any man.” “I don't have any men. I don't know any men.” “Not just the ones that you're bonded with by blood, like anybody, guy working at a cafe, like anybody.” Amnesia. Panic. “I don't want anything. I don't need anything. I'm not gonna ask for anything.” All of that stuff comes up all of the architecture of the superstitions, the fear, the red flags. I say, “Hey, this is an imagination exercise, you don't have to ask anything. We're writing on a piece of paper.” And all of the emotional alchemy that happens in that moment, when you're confronted with the idea of, “Hey, maybe I can sit on a throne for a moment, and imagine myself as being able to receive everything I want.”
Now women tend to, because of their conditioning, have a different response to each other's needs and desires. It's not that it’s better, it's just different. You can make a very non-request-oriented statement like, “I'm cold,” and a woman will be more likely to ask you if you need a sweater or should she close the window. Whereas a man's conditioning requires that sometimes you need to be more explicit, “Could you turn off the AC?”
So we're doing this imagination exercise, and I'm just asking them to spend a moment imagining that every single man out there who needs an explicit request is waiting to serve the Queen. And that thought is confronting enough that writing the requests of the specific people without sharing any information with any of them, has a tendency to orient two things. One: this sounds quite magical, but it's also pretty logical. If you're ready to receive a hug, so you're stressed out and all you want is to be hugged, and you're angry that you're not getting that hug. You're all over you're frustrated, right? If you go, “Oh, I could receive a hug,” all of a sudden you become immensely more huggable. So one of the things that feels like magic in the classes after the asking practice: they will find that they didn't make the requests, but they got the offers without ever having making made the requests.
Heidi: Oh my gosh.
Kasia: The second thing is it tunes their consciousness into a state of awareness of where and when that might be available. So asking becomes easier. And then there's the third category where they look at something they're sure they're gonna get a no, but they sit with it long enough to say that it's worth saying that it's wanted. And not only do they get a yes, but they also get a thank you. Because in the span of that particular class, we also do an exercise where they have to ask all of these men to think of them at a particular time. “Can you just think of me wish me luck, I'm taking a test,” or whatever they want to say. Some of them start with two people and some of them get to the place where they have asked 100 people. And here we have a moment in the class where, whether it's 20, or 100, women at the same time, are aware that over 1000, or 2000, men are thinking of us in this moment. Even that level of receiving has such a powerful impact. And it shows the invisible taboo of women wanting, desiring, having an appetite, having a money appetite, a sexual appetite, wanting things! How taboo that actually is and how scary asking can be. But what happens is because it's so scary and so taboo, the woman who does it, it's like low hanging fruit, she's winning all the points in the video game. She's getting gratitude. And the role of the “useless man who's become a worm” suddenly is elevated to provider, a knight in shining armor, a good support, or a good friend. All of the hidden love that people have towards us, a desire to serve, male or female, regardless of gender, suddenly has an avenue of expression. And we start being available to the proof that we are loved and not alone. Part of good girl conditioning and part of the patriarchy is isolation for all men and women. Isolation, isolation, isolation. The absurdity of the way that we live. I remember having this revelation in my apartment building. I was sitting there and looking for a stapler and I have four. But I was also thinking before I found the first of the four, which is absurd in and of itself, that I live in an apartment building with 120 apartments, and probably each one of them has a stapler. How crazy that is! We're all a nation of one, or a nation of two. I’m my own travel agent. I'm my own cook. The isolation is so absurd and wasteful and painful.
Heidi: Yeah. Kasia, one of the things that deeply moved me around this asking was the letter that you shared that you wrote to Ruben at a certain moment when you were about ready to start The Academy, I've never read anything like it, it made me cry. I cannot believe the power of this ask. And the fact that the answer was yes. I could tell the story, but again, would you tell the story because it's potent. I have to reflect to you that it gave me goosebumps. It was a liberating letter for women. So tell us about it.
Kasia: I think it's such a beautiful, metatextual, spiritual, symbolic experience. And that's how the school got started. Ruben and I were dating at the time, we were living together. He was on hiatus from his mission. Talk about the knight in shining armor. I don't know how many people how many babies were vaccinated, how many people's lives got saved because of the hospitals he built and the work that he did. So he's used to being this hero, right? And here we are in a New York City apartment. He's on hiatus. We're living together. And I am utterly consumed by looking for a path in my life. He's on hiatus, but I'm on a bigger hiatus. His main complaint in our relationship was that we didn't do enough normal things. We didn't go out enough. We didn't have enough friends. We didn't have enough time together. We didn't go to the movies. Everything was high intensity and kind of chaotic. His request, his desire, what he asked me for was not only utterly reasonable, it was totally stabilizing and mature and actually kind of amazing for a man to be like, “You know what, we need to live differently, this lifestyle isn't working.” And I thought about it. And I was like, “Okay, I'm going to take time away from this chaos and make myself feel calmer by going on dates and having movie nights and doing normal things, taking weekends to go on vacation.” And something in me was like, “I already don't have enough of what I need in order to make my dreams come true. Yes, that might be calming, yes, that might be rational, reasonable, adult, even romantic, but it doesn't sit right with me.” And I just sit with myself. I was like, I don't want a good boyfriend. I want a revolutionary who has my back and puts all of my needs first, just me, for at least a period of time. Making my dream come first. It sounded so selfish. And I realized that I had to tell him that we are going to die a slow death if I take even more energy and attention away from my dream and pour it into a nice, good, stable loving relationship. I wasn't going to break up with him over it, but I was going to say, hey, I need someone who's gonna give me everything they’ve got and even more to make my dream come true. And I can't even totally define my dream. So I wrote him this email saying, “I totally get how nuts this is. I need you not to be a good boyfriend, I need you to go way beyond that or we're going to die a slow death.” I even made a list, I was like, “I need you to be on the case of making my dream come true even more than I am, I need you to give me everything you got until I crossed the threshold. And when I crossed the threshold, and I'm in that seat and doing my thing, I have no guarantee that I'm going to be able to do the same for you. This isn't fair, it's not a tit for tat, it's not ‘make my dream come true and I’ll make your dream come true.’ I don't know what's going to happen then. But I really want and need. And this is the only way I see.”
I sent it and it was going to be 24 hours before I came back to the apartment and saw him and I was a wreck. I sent it and I was like, I just exploded a relationship with one of the best men I've ever met in my entire life. The one who's only asking me for more meaningful time together. That’s the kind of request you want to hear from a man, and this is what I'm coming back at him with. What I didn't know is that in our relationship, he was choosing between going back to a war zone and having a better time with me. When I made that request, I essentially asked him to go to war with me. That bigger ask, that 100% of what I needed and wanted. I walked in and he was chopping onions and he looks at me, I look at him and I see his face. He's like, “Yes, let's do this. I'm giving up everything. I'm not going back to the field and this is going to be worth it. This has gotta be worth it. Let's take on the world.”
And that's how the school started.
Heidi: It's just the most amazing story. Thanks for writing that letter. You gotta have women who are paving the way and asking on a more public level, right? But in an intimate relationship, it's almost more terrifying. Can I really ask this of an already good and decent and wonderful man?
Kasia: I don’t know exactly what you're referring to when you say women are asking publicly but if you're talking about asking publicly in terms of better behavior and women's rights. For reconciliation, admission of guilt when it comes to violations of sexual harassment or misbehavior, there's the degree to which we're still not asking for enough. We're making the kind of ask that's just like, let's make this thing as it is better. And the bigger ask, the bigger vision, could be closer to matriarchy. I don't know. Don’t just behave better. Step aside. I'm taking the steering wheel.
Heidi: Well, actually, that's a sort of perfect moment to ask you. I'm sure that a lot of people have a lot of curiosity about your work as a dominatrix. But I have some curiosity about your spiritual teacher. I have a curiosity of both, of course, and they intersect in this amazing way.
I know you’re a quester, I know that you went on great spiritual searches, but it sounds like you found a teacher in this monastery in China. That was your teacher and I'm wondering if you might share a little bit about how you knew she was your teacher. And any experiences with her that inform this moment?
Kasia: Well, actually, I hate to disappoint, but she was one of many teachers, and it was a teacher, a man, who led me to her. And then it was another teacher that was not a Taoist that helped me contextualize a lot of what I learned.
What was really remarkable about this Taoist Abbot, this Taoist nun, was the piece about what the animal of the body requires. Meaning, how do you get a woman's presence to feel powerful? How do you give her access to more grounded calm energy, especially grace under pressure? What are the missing pieces? And one of the biggest pieces for me and this is, this was a huge, wow, unexpected revelation: this celibate nun owned her sexual power.
Now, “this celibate nun owned her sexual power,” is a sentence one can misunderstand on many levels. So here's the clarification. What I saw first was a woman who, and and those women in her training had the same quality, was that when you looked at her when you were in her presence, you felt like what you were looking at was a top 8% of an iceberg. Not the icy quality, the solid quality of being rooted 90% underground. You could not feel like you would tip her over; the magnitude of her presence was immense.
There's this incredible story that everybody would tell about her. Decades ago, when the communist military forces came to tear down the monastery, she just stood at the edge of this plateau as the troops were coming in and she stared at them. They got so frightened that they turned around and went away.
What is it that she's doing? Is it a metaphysical energetic thing? And there was like a much simpler answer. That, in contrast to so many women that I knew – I was one of them – that we’re accustomed to this high chest breathing, high center of gravity. In working to lower my center of gravity, I had to contend with the release and the reckoning of all of the sexual trauma that a woman experiences. And I don't even mean that the overt abuse. I mean, unwanted sex. I mean, the fear around it that's culturally ingrained. So even dropping my breath, and getting rooted meant an ownership of my sexual power. And it dawned on me, so delightfully, that here was this woman who owned her sexual power, and there was nothing sexually performative about her. She wasn't needing to show that she had “owned her sexual power” by behaving any particular kind of way. It was entirely bodily. It was entirely there, not in her performance but in her being. That fuel, that lifeforce that comes from the creative sexual centers was perfectly connected with all of the rest of her and so well integrated. That filament nun could stand there and rock the world with the strength of her root.
That was in 2007, maybe, and it took this path of power in a profoundly new and fruitful direction. How I was in the dungeon, how I trained other dominatrixes, how I engaged with people. Making the rooted nature of the animal of my body, my nervous system, a priority by taking control of pacing in conversation by studying the power dynamics. When do I freeze? What happens? Where does my energy go? I had to study for seven years before I could even visit her. The profound training, attention, and sensitivity to what's happening in the moment made it really clear that there was this architecture that anyone could tap into.
Heidi: You tell the story in your book about the moment you had, it wasn't with her, but with another teacher. And then you go back to the dungeon and you have this revelation about attention. Was that after you had studied with her or was that was before?
Kasia: Before.
Heidi: Could you tell us a little bit in whatever story you like about how you discovered how these two worlds were of a piece and how they dance together and what united them? It's such a beautiful, unusual meeting of these two worlds.
Kasia: A simple, practical example of something I got from the meeting of these two words worlds had to do with training dominatrices. I started working as a dominatrix because I needed a job that paid well enough for my studies, both spiritual and university. But I didn't feel comfortable faking it. It wasn't innate and natural to me. I would say that I was kind of born more people pleaser and a caretaker than I was an authoritarian with rigid roles and demands. So I was faking it and I tried to understand what it would mean not as much as possible. I found that in order to take control of a man twice my age a lot. Totally different status and experience. What was required was that my authority, my energy, my attention, landed in his body. And I know that sentence sounds esoteric, but I mean, quite literally, that my attention landed in his body. I wasn't, Hi Mr. So-and-so and you've been a bad boy. In my own world, I needed to profoundly affect this human being. And one of the ways that I could do that most successfully was by asking questions and tracking the responses. I could put my attention on him well enough. So I could say something catch-all, like, “You've come here to be punished, haven't you?” And then see that his chin went down a little bit. “Alright, you seem ashamed, you're ashamed, aren't you?” Right. And then moving, moving, moving, tracking, moving, tracking, that would encourage my attention to land so strongly, and energy on him, that his body would shift. I started to recognize that moment of the shift, the moment when he went from his dominant outward performative space into his inward obedience following space. Into surrender. And I could see that this was not a subtle thing. It was a shift in a body.
When I started training dominatrixes, I noticed that every single one of them struggled with this, even the ones who believed or felt that they were innately dominant, sexually, innately. And the interesting thing about working as a dominatrix in this professional setting is that there's no sex allowed. You are spending an entire hour creating an experience that's supposed to be captivating, powerful, and erotic, without touching anybody, aside from the people who have you know, bondage fetishes, or want this particular kind of physical experience. But mostly, it's psychological, energetic, and verbal. That component cannot be understated. All of the dominatrixes struggled with this. They couldn't get the other person to shift into that state. Because the fear of men is so conditioned and ingrained that there's a retracted quality of their attention. It only goes so far, sometimes it meets the face, but it doesn't go all the way. Hold them strongly enough. Especially, big, burly men. They need that pressure to be strong enough for them to feel safe to surrender. So a lot of the tools I started using to train them to be better dominatrixes, I later ended up using in The Academy.
One of the amazing things that happened, I think it was like 2014 or so, there was a whole slew of women starting to talk about women in a meeting syndrome. Women in a meeting syndrome being the thing where a woman says something, she doesn't get credit for it, then a man restates it. We started getting intensely curious and experimenting with why this might be happening. And through no fault of anybody’s, we started observing that in a group when somebody's speaking, in order for everyone to receive the message they start behaving like a pack. In order to receive the message, they have to feel like they're in the submissive, surrendering state. They have to shift. Once they shift, they’re listening to a voice that they will register as authority.
What a woman will do, because of her conditioning, because of a lifetime of being cut out, she will tend to mumble the idea into her cup. Even if you correct the language the energy has to go with it. If you say, “I think that,” you're moving the attention to yourself. We want to take the attention and grab every body in the room and have them shift into a surrendered state. So what happens is, even if she doesn't use that language, her energy won't wrap itself around the whole room (except for when it does and it works). That idea will be lingering in the room, the energy of that idea will be lingering in the room and it'll start to irritate the space. She said it but she didn't land the goal. She didn't get everyone to shift. And that irrepressible urge to get rid of that irritant in the space, the thing that's incomplete, the thing that's hanging in the air, will summon another man to restate it in a way that has everybody's body shift because he's been trained to dominate since he was in diapers. Everyone shifts and hears it, and then they remember and feel, “Oh, he's the one who said it. He's the one who noted it as a good idea out of all the ideas here.” And then it lands for everybody. Except for the women in the room who are familiar with this phenomenon and are like, wait a minute, he just restated what she said. A lot of people won't even notice.
“We’re not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed.
Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas.
Right now, she gets to have her requests land.
Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not.
Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze.
Right now.”
This is where it's such a win. For a woman to understand this, she doesn't have to undo her entire psychological background. All she has to do is practice with attention. It seemed like I accidentally stumbled upon a secret that solves so many problems and doesn't require a lifetime of undoing damage done, or going back into time and reckoning with things in the past. We're not waiting for the world to change, for sexism to end, for all of us to be healed. Right now, she gets to get credit for her ideas. Right now, she gets to have her requests land. Right now, she gets verification about whether it landed or not. Right now, when she freezes, she gets a tool for breaking that freeze. Right now.
Heidi: And that's such a huge gift that you give in the book right away is the tool for breaking the freeze. It's got this incredible simplicity to it. And yet, it's full. How do you break the freeze when a man is coming at you and saying something inappropriate or dominating?
Kasia: What we're talking a lot about is the dominant state of attention when you want to own a room, and the submissive state of attention, the surrendered state so you can receive. So the example of being ready to receive a hug is the submissive state of attention that allows people to approach you and give you what you want. So both are really important. Women will put their attention out and be vigilant, but not necessarily dominate, and women will put their attention in, but not necessarily tap into the desire of what they want.
What happens when a woman freezes? And all of us freeze and what's crazy-making is oftentimes we don't know when we're gonna freeze. It could be something little or something big. We can kill it on a large scale, go home, have somebody in the elevator ask us if we have kids, and be frozen, right? It can be anything. The thing is that when there's tension, stress, or a panic, a woman will tend to default to an inward state. Somebody puts somebody asks her an inappropriate question, she'll go inward and think, “what did I do to give this person the wrong idea? What do I say? What's the answer? Why am I in this situation?” Very inward. What we have is a dynamic where somebody’s attention is outward on you, and you have your attention on you and you're pinned with that. Double attention pinned.
The easiest way to break the freeze is to direct your and the other person's attention outward. We have this incredible tool in language, called a question. Asking a question that will direct their attention to them. In a pinch, you can say, “Where'd you get that tie?” But somebody asks you, “Do you like threesomes?” And you could say, “What is it that has you asking that question? Are you taking a poll? Do you realize how inappropriate that question is?”
Sounds so simple. And simple it is. Ask a question. If you can question their question, great. If you can question their existence in asking that question even better. But break the freeze by putting your attention out. Don't go in, don't self examine, at that moment when you feel pinned, put your attention out.
“The reason breaking the freeze is simple but not easy is that in the attempt of this, we start realizing how ingrained the default state of attention being inward actually is.
”
The reason it's simple, but not easy is that it's in the attempt of this, we start realizing how ingrained the default state of attention being inward actually is. I saw this when teaching a roomful of 600 women. I tell the women, “I'm gonna ask you an inappropriate question.” And the questions really vary in severity. Sometimes it's just, “How are you? What do you do for a living?” Sometimes it's, “What kind of sex do you like? Do you want to go out on a date? Did you only get your job because you're attractive?” It’s all over the place. I come up to them, and I ask them a question, landing my attention on them. The first woman always answers the question. Second woman may catch herself. Third woman freezes, but they will say, “Oh, I froze.” The breakthrough moment is woman four or five comes back with a hard-hitting, “Who do you think you are?” Everybody roars and laughs. As I ask more and more women, they collectively start to feel it. They start calibrating. When it's an intensely invasive question, they'll give a sharp back-off kind of question. “Who do you think you are? Do you realize how sensitive that is?” For the softer meandering ones or for the ambiguous ones, they answer back with the right kind of pressure. You know, her boss at a bar says, “Shall we continue this meeting up in my hotel room?” And she goes back asking, “What is it that we can do in your hotel room that we can't do right here?” The calibration starts to happen.
And then when you start feeling that you can have control over where the attention is, the agency and being, the leading the following, a lot of the fear, a need for safety in high stakes conversations for us go away. Because you can trust yourself to move in and out of that state as you see fit and to use the tools to move back and forth.
Heidi: And actually, to enjoy it. Sometimes if you’re lashing out or if it's defensive, there's still something left over inside that feels like, “Oh, I didn't enjoy that.” But you can choose a question that keeps feeling at ease in your body. I would assume as you get better and better at this.
I'm gonna shift gears here for a moment because part of this podcast is poetry. And I would love to share a poem with you that I wrote five years ago. I don't often share my own poetry, but I'm going to share this one. I think when I wrote it, I didn't know a woman that was fully living it. And after reading your book, I'm like, “Huh, I think Kasia’s doing some of this.” But this poem it's not just one woman, it’s all women. I want to read it to you and I invite you to have a moment to breathe and take it in.
She Skirts the Rules
She will never walk the straight and narrow.
Her hips are wide with care and her stride leans into new electric, undiscovered.
She won't stop for fear or ignorance barring her path.
She is water flowing around every river rock.
She is fire burning, what outlives its time.
She knows what is under her skirt, but never flaunts her power, just moves with a grace that doesn't need words.
The wake she leaves behind says all she needs to say.
She loves what is hers to love with ferocity and tenderness.
Her touch soothes and ignites.
Her love demands that you stay awake.
She celebrates silence, works from a still point.
Wholeness pours forth from quiet eyes.
She skirts every rule.
Milks every no into not so absolute.
Welcomes rough seas and finds her song in the darkest hour.
She is resolute and reaching, sports a crown or an apron, wears whatever disguise she must to offer her soul self.
Nothing will impede the ocean of her bounty.
Nothing can contain her.
There are no rules to hold her magnificence.
So love her irreverence, improvisation, improbable victories.
Love her brashness, her bold, her rougher edges.
Open your arms in gratitude for all she risks to crack us open.
That we may each ever more deeply, freely be.
Kasia: That's beautiful.
Heidi: Thank you. As I'm reading it, I can feel all the ways through the book that you are embodying a lot of this. One of the sentences that I was just registering now is this idea of milking every no into not so absolute.
Kasia: Yeah. I thought about this exactly when you said it in the poem. One of the mottos of the school, or the phrases that our students say over and over again, is “Use everything.” Negative emotion, anger to passion, sadness to tenderness, outside obstacles, see the opportunity, renegotiate boundaries. The construction noise that starts at six o'clock in the morning, use that. Is that an opportunity to go practice your skills of influence? Is that an opportunity to start getting up earlier in the morning? Is that an opportunity to learn about local politics and advocate? Is that an opportunity to learn about a quiet place, maybe you want a quiet place in your house and soundproofing? Low stakes example. But there are many high-stakes examples of using everything, and I thought about astrology for a second. I don't know that much about it, but word on the street is that Aquarians are about to have a rough year because Saturn is doing its thing. What’s cool about astrology is that the idea behind it seems to be very much use everything. If Saturn is going to be messing with you for a year – and you can correct me if I get any of this stuff wrong – if the hard, discipline, boundary-filled energy of Saturn is present, then it's a phenomenal year to get your medical tests, to do a detox, to start cleaning your house, to start being really clear in your communications. That is such a profoundly loving, alchemical, powerful approach to life. Welcome this energy. How do I use the patriarchy to my advantage? How do I engage in a world that's falling apart? Do I become a healer? Life has so many profound gifts to offer us if we can see, not through positive thinking and glossing over things, where the real opportunity is. And that the life experience can be profoundly rewarding. And not one where we feel like we're a ship battered by the waves, but surfers.
“Life has so many profound gifts to offer us if we can see where the real opportunity is. ”
Heidi: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, for sure. And just to say, Saturn, I think is one of the greatest planets because it is a doorway of opportunity. Because you are tested, because there is pressure, because you have to grow up in some way, because you have to mature in some way, because you have to show up for yourself in some way. And that's a blessing as much as people want to complain about it and go, “Oh, that's so hard. I'm being squashed. This is ending in my life.”
Kasia: We have an epidemic of untested men running the planet. You have someone like our former president who needed somebody to put him in his place. Who never got tested. I'm speaking about people I don't know personally. But I can see that true confidence comes from knowing what in yourself you can rely on and testing comes from that. It's a contact with reality. Where I think the earth ship of planet Earth has gone awry is untested men being in the driver's seat.
Heidi: Yeah, that's well said. Absolutely. And you know, it's interesting, Kasia, the Saturn energy even in your case. At the end of last year, you had Saturn opposite your rising sign and your sun sign. It was this incredible preparation for what you're doing now.
Kasia: Wait so last year was supposed to be bad for me?
Heidi: Not bad, it was you better show up and do what you said you're gonna do.
Kasia: What about this year? Is it better?
Heidi: Yeah, this year you have the progressed moon in Aries which is a whole new chapter of your life. It's like, go go go. Come forth with a lot of commitment and bold ideas. That particular thing only happens once every 27 years, and you are in it. And it's at the top of your chart. It's your book, it's how you're going to be heard and received, and it's a very exciting time. So yes, it's a kickass year.
I have one more question for you and then I'm gonna let you go. The podcast is called The Radiance Project. And so I always ask my guests at the end, if they might share one radiant moment. That might be a moment when the light broke through the clouds. That might be a moment when you're like, oh, wow, something is moving through me that you know, but just a moment of light that you that is coming to you right off the top?
Kasia: What kind of radiance is it? Are you talking about a revelation, an insight, a breakthrough?
Heidi: Your Virgo Moon is taking over.
Kasia: I'm on the spot and I'm speechless. I'm gonna ask a question.
Heidi: We actually had a moment. I would just say to you exactly what it means for you. For me, when I think of radiance I think of the heart as a sun. This feeling when you're standing in this sun.
Kasia: I got one. I received furniture that I needed to put together but the instruction booklet was missing and it wasn't available online. I couldn't find it anywhere. It was an incredibly frustrating series of days. I was like, and now this, and now this. Now I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this. I sat there upset about everything that wasn't working in my life and I was looking at this pile of pieces. And all of a sudden, looking at that pile of pieces, I realized that the pile of pieces was telling me how it needed to be put together. It revealed and held in its design all of the things I needed to know. I didn't know the whole thing. I didn't know how it was exactly how supposed to look. But as I started picking up the pieces, I was like, “Oh, this piece wants to go here. And this piece wants to go here. And this piece wants to go here.” This was like 20 years ago. And this sentence rang through, which was everything's an open book test. Everything reveals the answers you need to know in front of you, you just need to look at it. From assembling furniture, I can see the person in front of me, the task in front of me, the formula, the rulebook, the instruction manual, the tips, the hacks, the guides, they're really not necessary if I'm looking at the moment as the Braille, the language. It contains within it all of the answers. And it actually really informed the way that we went about creating the curriculum for The Academy. We looked at women, listened to what they wanted, what they were suffering from, watched them, tried things. “Oh, this is how this wants to work. This is how this comes together.” That was my moment of radiance.
Heidi: It's brilliant. And it really is how you have grown the school. This perfect, very practical moment. But I love that. Okay, that's perfect.
Do you want to tell our listeners about where to find you or invite us into anything that's happening because you're teaching a lot right now?
Kasia: Our website is my name, but my name can be hard to spell. So you can also get there by going to weteachpower.com.
We're offering eight classes this semester:
Empathy
Power with Men
Power with the Erotic
Unshakeable Power of Desire
Unshakeable Confidence – Breaking the Spell of Self-Doubt
The Obligation Detox
Power Dynamics
