Esther Perel Discussion Group | Good Girl Conditioning and Becoming Unbound
Watch the full interview on YouTube here.
Read the transcript:
Leah: Welcome guys. I'm here with Kasia Urbaniak. I know this is a much-awaited conversation.
“The whole book Unbound is about breaking out of the good girl conditioning in the body, in the mind, and the emotional field without waiting for the world to change.”
Kasia, I can't remember where I first came across your work. It was in November of this past year. Maybe it was a suggested YouTube video after I watched something else, but I learned about you and was just so drawn to your work and your message. You just this week came out with a new book.
Kasia: That's right.
Leah: Unbound. I bought a couple of copies for friends for their birthdays coming up. I’m an audiobook person so I got my version on audiobook, but I got hardcover copies for friends. I'm always curious, like with the book-writing process, I feel like it's a journey in itself. And I'm curious what came up for you in writing this book.
Kasia: I almost feel like it's a magical, paradoxical, karmic land situation where starting the school and writing the book were similar in the sense that everything I was trying to do I ended up being confronted by.
Leah: Oh of course.
Kasia: So the book writing process. You could say it took two years, you could say it took five years. You mentioned the thing about Esther (Perel’s) take on eroticism as being linked to vitality. One of the things that helped me was returning to that even in the vocal booth of recording the audiobook. Every step of the way; the work of The Academy on asking, on legitimacy, on not worrying about asking for the 35th correction, the arguments about the photographer and how it should look. All of it, I'd have to go back to the book I was writing and be like, “Oh, this is how I do it.”
Leah: Yeah, it's funny. I just bought my first home. And I feel like this home has been a really great teacher and mirror to me as well. Just all of the decisions that come up, negotiating credits with the sellers, and even the design process. The drain of making decisions and this balance between being okay with stuff and creating this beautiful space for yourself. I feel like my home has been one of my biggest teachers for myself this year.
Kasia: Right. I’m not surprised.
Leah: Amazing. Okay, so you talked a little bit about what came up for you in the book writing process. And I'm curious specifically, what good girl conditioning came up for you? And maybe for anyone who's unfamiliar with that term, since it's such a foundation and cornerstone of your book if you can explain it in your own words.
Kasia: Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to acknowledge that this is a discussion group around Esther Perel’s work. One of the things I love about her work is that you can feel, taste, touch, and see. That although she's incredibly intellectual, and incredibly smart, and there's a very strong mind component, you can feel, see, taste, touch, and understand that everything comes out of practice. Practice.
When The Academy got started, I had 1000 ideas about good girl conditioning, about what was going to work, about asking, about negotiation. And I had to throw them all out the window. What ended up winning out were the things that showed up in the room that worked.
Good girl conditioning is a concept that mentally is kind of easy to understand, in the sense that you take a look at the arc of human history and that women have had some kind of rights for maybe 50, maybe 100 years, maybe 20, depending on how you define it, right? And even if you are generous and say, 150 years, that's really an eyeblink. Most people, most women will have grandparents who were raised in a very different world when it comes to gender, if not parents, right?
Leah: Yeah.
Kasia: So if you have an entire cultural history that's bent on a woman being able to thrive and succeed survive in society based on basically one factor, how marriageable she is. How high up the social ladder she can marry, can she find a partner that will do all this stuff? That will make it tougher to express her dreams? What you have is the fabric of social behavior and social conditioning around a woman being marriageable.
What are the qualities in the patriarchy that would make a woman marriageable? Low maintenance, accommodating, harmonizing, putting other people first. Never, never, never, never looking better than everyone else, but also not falling behind. Being incredibly resourceful, not asking for anything, but making the best use of what she has. And suddenly you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that's a really antiquated idea.” But you see our current predicament and women's behavior – and not even women's behavior. Our own unconscious bodily tendencies still move in the space of either wanting to be all those things or an exact rejection of those things. I'm not going to ask for permission, I'm not going to ask for help. I'm not going to receive anything. I do it all myself. Screw that. I'm totally independent. And then being really exhausted, tired alone, isolated, doing the job of 20 people, getting 20% of the credit. Either way good girl conditioning can be addressed in the present moment in our present culture in a way that speaks to an individual woman's experience as related to history. Instead of talking just about, very important, but sexism, right? There's something we can do to break out of this thing that was passed on to us by our foremothers and forefathers. So that's kind of a long definition of good girl conditioning, but it lives in the body and we teach it to each other. The whole book Unbound is about breaking out of the good girl conditioning in the body, in the mind, and the emotional field without waiting for the world to change.
Leah: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know why I thought of this. Maybe kind of because of how you set the stage. But my grandparents on my mom's side were Holocaust survivors. And so I think my mom really received not just like the good girl conditioning, but the fear and the scarcity that came with that. Yes, women have good girl conditioning, but if you're in a family that has experienced trauma, or racism, or other challenges, then that's layered on top of the good girl conditioning as well.
Kasia: Yeah. You know that there have been these great studies recently about epigenetic trauma, trauma being passed down genetically. People who argue, “Oh, women are free now. There's no reason why we should have any kind of conditioning from the past,” don't understand. Actually Holocaust survivors were the sort of the core of this study, that they found that there was a genetic impact on children of Holocaust survivors that hadn't never had that trauma, but it was genetically affected. Certain gene sequences were turned on or off in accordance with the trauma pattern.
Leah: Yeah, I believe that I feel like the embodied trauma that you're probably not even conscious of. And then there was like, the conscious messages that you got because of the trauma as well.
Kasia: That's true, it becomes a vicious cycle. But here's the core of what's really important for me to say. I have this path. This is this unique conjunction between studying to be a dominatrix and training to be a Taoist nun made me really sensitive in the space of studying power dynamics. Really subtle and sensitive. What I saw was a huge missing piece in how we understand power connection, power dynamics, and this architecture of power, right? The thing that I want to say more than anything else is when it's going perfectly well, when we are in our natural state of sharing attention and sharing power and taking turns being on top and taking turns receiving and being the certain the surrendered submissive state, when it's working and singing and working particularly well, that's when we don't notice it. And when it starts falling apart, it's usually to the detriment, though not always, of whoever has a lower status in society, women's conditioning in particular. But when it fails, it fails both parties, and then we have 1000 explanations for why it's happening, and not the one that has to do with attention. Not the one that has to do with the architecture of how this works.
So another Esther Perel thing that I think is brilliant, is it doesn't matter what your partner says to you, if you're in a romantic relationship, it doesn't matter what your partner says to you. And I hope I hope I'm paraphrasing this correctly. If you don't think that your partner cares and is existing for your best interests and cares about your well-being, anything they say will be interpreted or can be interpreted as an attack. This noticing points to the conversation under the conversation, that's always the most important thing there is. How do you transmit the information, “I care about you, therefore, when I say one of us should take out the trash,” it's not an attack? How do I transmit that? By paying attention to you. Where's the weight of attention. By seamlessly shifting that attention back and forth, when I'm talking about myself, I'm talking about my experience, my attention’s on myself. My attention is on you, and what ends up happening is the energetic construction of victimhood. And vice versa. So anyway, I'm getting into the mechanics of it, but when it's working, it's the best fuck you've ever had. The back and forth, it's the best conversation you've ever had. That's when the power dynamic is fluid, the switching is happening. It's the brainstorming session that's generating phenomenal ideas, where you don't even remember whose ideas were whose anymore. You can't even log the IP rights because you're just so connected and moving in the dance. The point is that despite conditioning our natural state, you see how children shift roles. One minute you're a magician, one minute, you're the enemy, you're the then you go from the villain to the hero, it doesn't matter. All of a sudden I have an invisible shield that protects me from bullets. Reality doesn't get in the way of the energetic need of the dynamic. And it's beautiful to watch. It's just phenomenal. It's where the magic of human synergy comes in.
Leah: I thought of a great improv show or a great jazz improv trio. That magic that happens with that spontaneity.
I don't know why I thought of this when you just shared what you did. But I was a huge Governor Andrew Cuomo fan. I don't know if you're familiar with him at all. You're nodding a little bit. Okay. So during the pandemic, he was in the spotlight for kind of like really taking control in New York City. And I was really turned on by him, and I think a lot of people were. You couldn't listen to an interview, whether it was like Chelsea Handler or Jada Pinkett Smith, talking about like, don't bother me during Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing every day. He had every eligible woman interested in his status, etc. And then I think just this month, really bad allegations have come out around sexual harassment and there's a new one coming out every day. It just struck me. I was so disgusted when I heard this news, because he's someone with obviously a tremendous amount of power, and sex appeal. And yet he's, if the allegations are correct, choosing to prey on people who don't have power. I was just curious to get your perspective, what makes someone who's seen as very sexually attractive, and very “eligible bachelor”, what went wrong in the whole power dynamic that they chose to take advantage of these situations?
Kasia: There are two issues that come up for me immediately, and one of them is the way we pay attention to and how we talk about people who do great things, do terrible things, how we publicly decide and change our minds about what behavior is acceptable, what behavior can be talked about, what behavior can't be talked about. So like, let's leave that aside for a moment.
I can't speak to Cuomo at all right? There is a required level of nuance that we’re culturally not ready to get into. We're not we're very quick to conflate a person's horrible or potential criminally illegal behavior with who they are. You know how in a relationship, they'll say, punish the behavior, not the person? We're nowhere near that. And I understand why. So not Cuomo. But I know that there are many men who have had the experience of being told their entire lives to shut it down, don't have feelings, numb out so that you can sacrifice your lives and go to war. So you can fight for us, kill the bear. And then at the same time, are also being told, you're numb, you're dumb, you're not picking up the signals, you don't know that you violated someone, you can't see the signs. We have a situation where a lot of men are in a position where they have been conditioned not to notice. I'm not talking about the straight-up predators and aggressors. I'm not talking about those who've committed crimes or who have, I'm not even talking about the fact that like our shifting values are a good thing. That we care about these things now. There is something about educating men and not being so quick to murder them.
Now, in terms of power dynamics, the reason I mention this is you asked me about Cuomo is I can't speak to him, but the idea that because he's attractive and sexy, that he would have to use power dynamics in order to get a woman or get something. It has nothing to do with why that happens. It happens because of numbness and sheer stupidity, or it happens. because the pleasure is not in flirting with a woman or getting her it's in pitting her, violating her, making her feel less than, and stupid. One is incredibly nefarious and one is incredibly innocent. And we don't have the social skills to separate or to even talk about those things. So everyone's either exonerated, and it’s “boys will be boys” or everyone goes into the bonfire. We actually need to develop the skills at some point of being able to evaluate these things and think about them.
Leah: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I totally get that. It's a great point too.
I have so many questions for you. Well, this was a nice segue. You had done an interview on the podcast, The Unmistakable Creative, and you had shared men want to know how to feel more, and women want to know how to do more with what they feel. And I'm curious if you can explain that and share where each, meaning men and women, can start.
Kasia: Yeah, that interview was one of my first, it was quite a few years ago, and I would correct it and say men need to feel more. Not want to. Some of them. Some of them do, some of them don't. And women want to know what to do with what they feel has to do with our opposing conditioning. So it's not even so gender binary, it's more what's asked of us and what's expected of us, right? This is like a big picture statement, right? If we step back, we're looking at a civilization based on the Judeo-Christian flow of thought, which can really tend towards ignoring the body, disembodiment, rising above the body. That also means rising above emotions, rising above feelings, this whole trend of hyper-productivity and stoicism. Here are your hacks on how to turn your 8-hour day into a 40-hour day. Produce, produce, produce, produce. This is all to override embodiment. Now, where women sit and where men sit in terms of conditioning is, for better or for worse, we've kept more of our embodiment. We’ve kept more of our embodiment, right? Women are allowed to have feelings, even though they're diminished and made to feel crazy for having them. I don't know if it's biology or what it is, but time and time again there's more space – even if it knocks a woman down the totem pole – for her to have a more embodied experience. We are all moving in a disembodied direction. That override is not good for men or women. It's quite terrible for men and women. Women are sitting on these signals and gaslit into craziness about being able to feel out that it's time to change a schedule or commitment or change a deal or adjust to the seasons, adjust to the moment. All great sex, all great parties are all about being able to feel the rhythm, feel the moment, feel that. This is the movement of the lifeforce. We’re a civilization that's trying to dominate. Nature, women, body. All the life speaking to us, telling us, guiding us.
Now, when it comes to men and women in a heterosexual pairing, what we have is the thing that's hard to say, which is, we think men are idiots. They think we're angry bitches. We're sitting on all of this information. Right? Not understanding why they don't get it. And they're on the other side being like, what's the deal? What's all this about? What's all this chaos? What's all this feeling? What's all this about? Why is this such a big deal? Because we're standing on different levels through our conditioning of how embodied and how we engage with what comes up for us in any given moment. It’s one of the most important things to understand if we're going to survive as a human race and live in harmony with the life force. On the individual level, it's exactly how you get Unbound, feel more life, understand what to do with the signals. Use your empathy as a superpower, not as a curse. Understand where the heat is, where people are coming from, how to move with it, and live your life in accordance with that. There's nothing better, there's nothing better, there's nothing better. There's no amount of success that's joyful when it's bereft of life. There's no formula that leads you to a deader option that can satisfy. There's nothing better than living with the life force and living in accordance with it. My biggest dream and hope for humanity is that as women decondition from the disembodied programming, we become wilder, we lead the way, we lead men, we lead children, and we lead us all through a way of life that is spontaneous, that's alive, that's that in honor of what's alive. The decisions you made when you bought your house, it's the things you were confronted with when you say your house is your teacher. It's how you choose something when logical information doesn't really do the thing to guide you in one direction or another. It's being at the right place at the right time. Knowing what someone needs or what you need in a given moment. It's being in conversation with the universe in a really deep and profound way. I don't think there's anything better.
Leah: Kasia, I'm having the biggest chuckle, because for anyone who's read your book, there's a whole section on the noisy neighbor. And that was what led me to buy a house.
Kasia: That’s amazing!
Leah: I was having the most horrific experience with a noisy neighbor, and an unresponsive management company. And as I was reading your book, I was trying to think back about the energy that I approached my neighbor with. It's hard when you're sleep-deprived, you're pissed off, and you're cranky, to bring the finesse that you suggested to the moment. But the good news is, it was such a painful experience, I was pretty happy in my old place, and I never would have been in an uncomfortable enough position to move out of it. And this is just the most beautiful space and I could be here for 20 years and be happy as a clam. So maybe it's good that I completely fucked up the, “how to approach a noisy neighbor and get what you want.” Because I love the situation I'm in now. So that's a whole other kind of lesson.
Kasia: There's so much I want to say about that. First of all, it's clear that your house was the most alive next choice, it was more alive than winning with your neighbor. Also in that example, I say it's better to tell your neighbor to fuck off and turn that shit down than it is to try to be really nice. And that's where we get into trouble with trying to get it right. Congruence wins. When what you're feeling and how you're speaking and where your attention is are aligned, it always turns out better for everyone. But it's not a prescription for getting it right or wrong. It's like, you got your house.
Leah: 100%.
Kasia: That's the thing. Life moves in mysterious ways. We’re happier when we know how to follow it.
Leah: Agreed, 100%. I was just having such a chuckle with that example. I wanted to ask you, going back to that last quote about men want to feel deeper, and women want to act on how they feel. I'm curious if in your sessions as a dominatrix if there were any moments where men were allowed to feel really deeply through that container that you created. And then as a follow-up, I'm curious what stops women from acting on how they feel? I know, they're two different sides of the coin, but just kind of brought up curiosities about both.
Kasia: First question, every single session I've ever done. Every single session I've done has been about creating a safe space so that my clients can feel more deeply. Using language, story, and direct instructions to lead them into a place where they can feel even more. Literally, some of the basic location tools in the book in terms of how to track in a conversation, how to keep track of what's happening, and have influence, came from sessions. I was like, the stereotypical thing, “On your knees, head down,” right? And then suddenly I noticed there was his sadness there. So I'd say, “You did that quite slowly. You seem quite sad.” Sigh. “You sighed. Is there grief?” Tears. Right? Locating someone step by step. So every single session.
When I started training dominatrixes, it was really interesting because a lot of the women who were being trained were quite young, I was quite young, they were quite young. A lot of them were doing it for money. There was a percentage who were naturals, they loved this kind of thing. They were meant for it, destined for it. I wasn't, I wasn't a natural dominatrix at all. I had trouble ordering water in a restaurant. I didn't want to bother the waiter. When I was training them, I saw the same thing I saw over and over again, which is, there's a huge difference between a performance of power where the attention is all on the self, and a demonstration of power, where the attention’s on the other. And the difference is huge. Because if I go, “I am so powerful, I am mistress of the dark, you are a bad boy.” Versus if I look and just say simply, “You are here.” Much softer statement, totally neutral. “You are here, you heard that I saw you hear that you are here, your head is tilted downward.” That is so much more powerful. So what I saw is the hesitation and shifting the attention outward.
Men tend to feel more comfortable moving, maybe less so now out of fear, but men tend to feel more comfortable moving into a woman's space. Women tend to feel very uncomfortable with moving into a man's physical space. Giving him the wrong idea. It translates in attention. We'll even, not fully, put our attention out on a man. Here's the problem. In the animal kingdom, how you declare yourself as alpha is not by puffing out your chest. If you look at wolf packs, if you look at all of these organizations on the most basic level, the alpha is the one that has their attention out. All of the submissives are the ones that have their attention on themselves to see if they're following, if they're getting it right, getting the instructions.
Women on a basic attention level will tend towards incomplete outward attention. Just enough outward attention to see if they're in trouble, if they're wearing the right dress at the cocktail party, just enough to see if anybody needs anything, just enough to see what's happening, like a vigilance. But not enough to shift to a dominant state. Because in the dominant state, your attention is landed so fully on the other that they feel it. They shift into a self-aware surrendered state. In the dungeon, I saw this over and over and over again. Then when I became a teacher, I saw “women in a meeting” syndrome. A woman is not owning a room because she's been conditioned to not put her attention and wrap it all the way around everybody there. She says a great idea, and somehow nobody really hears it until a guy says it. Yeah, it's sexism, but it's also energetics. He's been taught his entire life to stick his energetic penis out. And she's been watching herself. “Okay, I'm here and I'm in charge,” right? But the attention is not fully out. Just on the primal animal body level, it makes all the difference. Do you trust that you are well held? Everybody knows how to do the dominant state of attention. Everybody knows how to do the surrendered state of attention. Not everybody knows what it is. Not everybody can do it on call. Forgive the stereotype, but watch a mom figure out what's going wrong with her kid. She's got that kid held. Right? Even just a minute. How many of us are driven crazy by moms who in the moment of mothering have their intention inward even though they're speaking about you. It's like a mom that isn't there. You don't feel well held by. Business, sex, friendship, partnership, creative pursuits, or making an ask, understanding attention dynamics makes all the difference. You move from something transactional to something synergetic where both people get more out than they've put in.
Leah: I had a total a-ha moment when you were talking about training young dominatrixes. So I’m a pole dancer; I dance almost every day. At the studio, there are a lot of the up-and-coming newbie instructors, and they're wearing zero clothing and they have these model bodies. And there's the owner of a studio, I think she started like a decade ago, we all call her Dede. Dede will show up, she has a very nondescript body, a body of someone you'd see on the street. She usually wears sweats and a hoodie. And I feel so held in her presence. It’s like she knows exactly why each person is there. This person is there are because they're a mom, and they're trying to reconnect with their sexuality. This person is in her 20s and she’s trying to get guys. This person is a former gymnast and is trying to connect with her sense of athleticism. Right? This person is just looking for a fun way to tune in to music and be playful and silly. She knows everyone's why. There are 15 moving bodies in a room and she has her eye on every single one. There's a new person in the back, and she's telling her how to do the basics. There's an advanced student in the front, and she's giving her advanced modifications. She's cracking jokes. It's really kind of hard to put into words, the feeling of being with her, but it's really like nothing else you've experienced. You can go into a class with a newbie instructor and they have the right music and they have the right moves, and I just find myself looking at the clock and just not being in it. And then I go to one of Dede’s classes and it's euphoric. So when you describe being held, I'm like, yep, that's it.
Kasia: That is a phenomenally perfect, accurate, and beautiful example. So high priestess, Dede, is an excellent dom and knows how to place her attention. We do this exercise at The Academy that takes about five minutes. All the women pair off, and they do this exercise where they practice putting their attention on the other, while the other person practices deeply receiving attention. It's done with very neutral language. What happens is after a few minutes, a flow begins where even the most concrete-minded woman starts becoming so deeply intuitive that this woman that she's never met, who she is describing, she starts to get images and feel psychic about. This is a few minutes, and then they switch. After the exercise, both women feel like they just had a spa day, but also feel like in that five minutes so much deep information was transmitted not through language. If I say you have brown hair, it's such a basic neutral language experience. They practice without Dede’s skill, without Dede’s magical experience, being like Dede and being held by Dede, because we all have that natural capacity. Good girl conditioning is what teaches us how not to use it. Because those newbie instructors are probably doing what so many of us have been conditioned to do. To be self-aware, to be confident. “Being confident.” Not using our attention confidently, not regarding others with confidence. It's a huge difference. I love that example. Such a good one.
Leah: Thanks. Is there anyone in your life where you feel super held with them?
“You don’t have to be incredibly well-loved in order to feel incredibly well-held. But to feel incredibly well-held is an essential ingredient in being well-loved.”
Kasia: Everyone. I am around great people but also I need to be well held every day, many times a day. I put my attention out so much that receiving attention is very important. And it's not because it's spontaneous, it's because I ask. I ask for it. So there are three people watching this right now and they already know, like my friends, my people, they already know that the moment this is over their job is to spend 10 minutes telling me only what was great. Only what they liked. I'll ask my partner, “I need 10 minutes where you hear me vent, and then afterward, tell me how cute I looked,” or, “tell me you want to be with me,” or, “I need 10 minutes to tell you about this idea that I think is genius, I want you to spend five minutes afterward shooting my idea full of holes.” And the timing aspect is super important. “We're stepping out of the real world, and we're creating a magical container where I need you to shoot my idea full of holes, this idea is going to go up against a firing squad, I need you to be the bully, the attacker, I need you to play with me for five minutes after I tell you for 10 minutes.” This is something I do every day, and if I didn't those emotional needs and those relational needs wouldn’t be met. I would bounce around in my head between my thoughts and feelings. You don't have to be incredibly well-loved in order to feel incredibly well-held. But to feel incredibly well-held is an essential ingredient in being well-loved. These are practices and skills that anyone can do.
Leah: I just had a realization. I don't have people who, the way you've designed your life, what you just described, I don't have that. But maybe consciously, maybe unconsciously, I've created daily routines where for example, I mentioned the pole example. I have a fitness community that I'm a part of. I noticed that I tend to be drawn to instructors, where they just excel at words of affirmation. “You're amazing. You're doing awesome.” They're super challenging, but also so acknowledging. So like, at noon, I know for an hour I'm going to have Austin cheering me on. I'll have 30 other people who are in this virtual fitness community. He has team challenges where he'll have us go off-camera and cheer one person on as they're doing push-ups. I’ve designed my life where I get these bursts of words of affirmation, or energetically being held.
Kasia: I get passionately angry and fiery in such a delicious way anytime I hear anything in this area of like, “You're not supposed to care what people think.” I get the idea. Give zero fucks. I get the idea. It's just not real. It's not how human beings are designed. And this push towards sociopathy. We worship sociopaths. These incredibly wealthy or powerful people devoid of feelings who don't need compliments. Guess what, it's an illness. It's not healthy. To want affirmation, to want compliments, to want praise. I understand that not depending on what people think and going your own way is super important to fulfilling your destiny and not following the herd and all of that, but every human being needs – because of the nature of the landscape we live in, women especially – need to be seen, praised, adored, worshiped, complimented, affirmed, all of it. And the thing is, it doesn't have to happen by accident. Like you, you can put yourself in environments where it's part of the structure. Or you can literally ask for it. Call it what it is: a word bath of love. You can hear my rage. It's just not fair. We have that temporary hit. We hear, “Give zero fucks. Don't care what people think.” I don't care what people think…lasts about 90 seconds to 90 minutes. And then we're like, “Oh, there's something wrong with me because I care. I care if I hurt people's feelings, I care.” What we need is to move past that and start talking about how to care for ourselves. What place to put all those things in. Otherwise just lying, rewarding people for we're cursing empaths, worshipping sociopaths. We don't need any more disembodiment in this world.
Leah: I'm laughing because I'm kind of sleep deprived this week. I'm the type of person where if I feel deeply during the day, it will keep me up at night. And I watched the Meghan and Harry Oprah interview. I guess it was on Sunday night or Monday. And I felt really saddened by the racism that I experienced through it. I know people perceived it very differently, so I'm owning that what I observed was a lot of racism. I mentioned my family's history, Holocaust survivors, and so I'm very sensitive to that. So I slept horribly that night, and then I put a post in the group about it the following day, and it led people of color in the group to feel unsafe, which made me feel again to feel upset and sad. It can be challenging to feel really deeply. Even if you'd like to be asleep, the emotions that get stirred up prevent you being able to kind relax and rest. Do you experience that?
Kasia: I can say so much about that, and the interview that you're referring to. When we feel deeply and it keeps us up at night, when we feel deeply affected by the news, deeply affected by something that happened. When we feel deeply, that's our being, not only receiving information and processing it but generating energy in order to act in accordance. We are designed to have an experience, and not just think about it and feel it. Up until very recently, every thought led to an activity. You think about human beings all the way back. Human beings didn't just have feelings and think about things. You had them, so you did stuff. You feel deeply and energy is raised for an activity, right? Our bodies were not designed with the internet in mind. Our bodies were not designed with the news media in mind. Where you see things and feel things but feel like you can't do anything in response.
Now you think about that kind of behavior. You feel deeply, you see these people, you relate to your own personal history. Why are you awake at night? Why are you feeling deeply? Because something in you is speaking to do something about it. And you got to post about it, but we are designed to match the intensity with the action. So an action that matches that intensity would have satisfied you and given you a good night's sleep. Now let's put that to one side.
Then there's the activity we do that we call “work.” That's not motivated by deep feeling, but that we have to whip ourselves into shape and generate the motivation to do. The production-oriented machine kind of way of being in the world that we're all expected, to greater or lesser degrees, to do doing something when you don't feel like it. And then not being able to do something when you deeply feel it. Which motivational source is better?
So if you ask me, does that happen to you when you feel deeply and you can't sleep at night? Isn't it hard to feel deeply? No. Yes, but no. Because feeling deeply, and of course, I've had the luxury of spending the last 20 years of my life designing my life this way so that what I do and what I feel deeply match and match intensity. Okay, but that's not entirely true. Sometimes I'm absolutely overwhelmed with feeling and need to take some time to figure out how to take this energy and make art out of pain. Make a message out of the passion, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
“We pay attention to how women are and to what men do.”
The other thing that I think is interesting about the interview that you're referring to, what stood out to me the most, is this whole thing that I keep saying about how when it comes to women, we pay attention to how they are and we pay attention to what men do, not how they are. Right now Prince Harry is trying to protect his partner. But what is Meghan? Is she a liar? Is she a fraud? That's huge. And we're missing that the main story here is about him. His being, his feelings. We’re ignoring his feelings. He lost his mother to the intensity of the press, to criticism. The entire narrative, in essence, is that he lost his mother and now he doesn't want the same thing to happen to his partner. But the focus is on her not on him. Why men aren't allowed to have a deep feeling and we're criticizing her for who she is, when she's tangential to the story when it's about him. That's where the meat is. That's where the life is. And we're just like, “Who’s she?”
Leah: I just got full-body tingles when you said that. But 100%. Yeah.
Kasia: Can you imagine what that would be like? You’re a kid and your mom dies in a tunnel because the paparazzi’s chasing her. Then you're with a woman and you see the same thing starts happening. That's big.
Leah: Can I just take a breath? Okay, so I'm looking at the clock. Do you have a hard stop right at the hour?
Kasia: No.
Leah: You had a line in your book and it goes, well, it wasn't phrased this way, but the idea that men don’t like dominant women. I feel like it's shared throughout culture and it’s seen as true. I'm curious to hear your perspective on that. Do men dislike dominant women?
Kasia: That sentence can be taken apart and dismantled on at least three different levels.
I'm loving this Facebook comment: “A boy loses his mother, but we talk about her mental health.” That's exactly right. I just had to mention it. This comment says it better than I did.
Men don't like dominant women. Okay. First, define dominant woman. Because if you're in a compressed state, good girl conditioning is manifesting in your being and your attention. You're trying really hard not to be too much, and not too little. Not too quiet, not too loud. Not too sexy, not too uptight. You can see this caginess in the body when you get compressed. So, if a woman tries to be authoritative, dominant, but she's in this state, it's going to feel bad to her and to everyone. Oftentimes, she's pushed into this state, so it's not not her fault, but she's in the state. She sounds bossy, not like the boss, right? It's like the thing we talked about. It's not her fault. If you're describing that as dominant behavior, then men don't like dominant women, but neither do babies, butterflies, cats, dogs, or women. We like ourselves in that state. So that's the first dismantling of that sense. Men don't like dominant women. If it's true dominance, it's different than if it's compressed dominance. If it's compressed dominant through the good girl filter. If it's compressed, surrender and submission. “Yeah, I'm totally fine.” It also feels like shit to us and everyone else, including birds, bees, any creature with a nervous system that can pick up a signal.
Next thing, everybody loves a good Dom. Everybody loves a good Dom. Dede, your example of a good Dom. Everybody loves a good Dom. Men, women, children, birds, bees, everyone.
Now, aside from that, there's an entire category of men who like only dominant women. And they don't all go to dungeons, a lot of them just marry strong women.
So it's bullshit. The main thing is that all human beings, or anything with a nervous system, struggle with incongruence. We are much more vibe-oriented than we know. And it's not that mysterious. It’s a little more complicated over zoom, attention dynamics. I'm looking at you as we're doing this interview, and it definitely gets more complicated in a virtual space. But it's not that complicated, because we all know how to do it. We all know when when it feels good and when it feels right.
Leah: How would you define a good Dom? Meaning, one who's whose energetics are aligned? How would you put that into words?
Kasia: A really simple way of putting it into words is if I'm talking to you about you and what you are to do. Giving you instructions, suggestions, making a request of you, but in a dominant form, my attention is on you. So I'm looking at you now. “Oh, did you understand that?” I'm watching and I'm seeing if the words landed. I'm catching to see if maybe you misunderstood something or something rubbed you the wrong way. That's a good Dom. That's like a Dede being like, “not only do I see that you're here, I see the way in which you are here. I know what you're asking for, I know what your body's asking for.” And with just some clean, fully out attention practice, we all start being better body readers without knowing why, without knowing how, without a book, it’s just organic. I don't know about men, because I don't teach them, but women are phenomenally fast at picking this up.
Leah: Yeah.
“A really easy way to avoid your own energetic sovereignty and authority is to be vague. ”
Kasia: And a good Dom also makes really specific asks, or gives really specific instructions. It's not like “love me more, respect to me more, or work harder.” It's like, “You're gonna call me every Thursday morning for 10 minutes, and ask me how my day was.” It's specific. It's like, “We're going to have dinners on Fridays, it's going to be date night, you're going to surprise me with a new restaurant each time, I'm going to surprise you with an erotic fantasy, each time written on a piece of paper.” Fucking specific. So that you know if it happened or not. A really easy way to avoid your own energetic sovereignty and authority is to be vague. So that you don't see it when people fail you, you don't see it when people renege. It's not obvious, you don't know if they did it or not, it's a way of hiding.
So a good Dom gives really specific instructions, a good Dom pays attention and puts her attention out. But you can also get everything you want by being a phenomenal Sub. By being phenomenally surrendered. Absolutely unconcerned with how people are going to meet your desires and be so in love with what you want, that you just magnetically make everybody want to fulfill every request you haven't even spoken.
Sometimes, especially for women who are growing up in these tumultuous feminist times, can even be more powerful. It’s debatable whether one is more powerful than the other, but living in the absolute beauty and enthusiasm of the things that you want and carrying that signal. I use this example because it's so simple. You could really want a hug because you're stressed out. You could want a big, grounding bear hug because you're stressed. And if you're sitting with the stress of how much you want that hug and how shitty you feel, anybody who could be a hugging candidate is gonna have to climb over all of those signals in order to give you that hug you need. But if you take a moment to be like, “Whoa, it would be so awesome to receive a hug.” All of the sudden, the chances of somebody not even knowing why, they decided to come up to you and give you a big bear hug, increase exponentially, you all of a sudden become huggable. And that energetic language, that language of just attention, I'm paying attention to myself in the thing that I want. It changes my signal. It changes the approach pattern of people. You're fun to make happy, you're fun to please, you're fun to worship, you're fun to adore if you're a really good Sub. If you're really good at being ready to receive all that you want.
Leah: It’s funny because as you're sharing that I was thinking about some of the men that I've been most drawn to. I'm definitely not drawn to stereotypical macho men. But they share a couple of things in common. When we have a conversation, they'll remember everything, and then they'll use little bits to make jokes about in the future. That's kind of like being held in a sense.
Kasia: Absolutely. Not in a sense, in the sense. They're paying attention.
Leah: I'm not drawn to someone unless they have a great sense of humor. One of the things that struck me about your book is you talked about the manifestation of the mastery of power is playfulness. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that?
Kasia: Oh, yeah. On a really basic level, when I see students in The Academy, start to roleplay really high stakes, difficult conversations with playfulness, they're ready to graduate. When you understand attention dynamics enough you can afford to have fun. Every interaction isn't make or break, you like getting into trouble because you know you can get yourself out, you're not afraid to take risks because you know how to get yourself out should anything go wrong. There isn't so much weight on a single interaction or a single ask. Nothing is that devastating, everything is negotiable. There's movement, you’re process-oriented versus final result-oriented. Which doesn't mean that it's all about the journey and not about the results, because I want all women to get what the fuck they want. I want them to actually get those things. It's not just like, “have fun doing it.” But when you're having fun doing it, it means that you're willing to experiment. There's no way to have a meaningful collaboration, relationship, negotiation with anyone if you're not experimenting. If you're trying 19 times to get something to land the 20th time, to make it through those 19 times, if you already know it's going to take 20 tries, and you're having fun experimenting, you're an unshakeable, influential human being.
“Women are trained to be absolutely terrified of ‘no.’ There’s this intense thing that happens where energetically when we receive the word no, it’s to our being, not to our request.
So we won’t even ask or venture into territory where we could because it’s not a rejection of the thing we want, it’s a rejection of us.
That has everything to do with attention dynamics. Women’s being is always front and center.
”
Once you get the game, once you get that ‘no’ is not an insult, once you get how erotic conflict can be and what comes after, how not breakable relationships are, then a sense of humor and playfulness is native to that. It just comes with it. We’re trying shit, you know? We're gonna get somewhere phenomenal. Women are trained to be absolutely terrified of no. There's this intense thing that happens where energetically when we receive the word no, it's to our being, not to our request. So we won't even ask or venture into territory where we could because it's not a rejection of the thing we want, it's a rejection of us. That has everything to do with attention dynamics. Women’s being is always front and center.
Leah: When you are describing that playfulness, I immediately thought of Esther. She has she embodies that sense of playfulness. I also thought of – have you ever seen the movie The Thomas Crown Affair?
Kasia: I don't remember that was a while ago, I might have.
Leah: You have to see this.
Kasia: Was that with Catherine Zeta Jones or is that a different one?
Leah: She's been in those types of movies. But there was an original, and then the sequel was with Pierce Brosnan. He loves art, specifically Magritte. He's an art collector, and there was a famous piece that was stolen and he's involved in catching the thief but also possibly being nefarious in other ways without giving away too much. And there's this amazing erotic tension between, oh who was the female lead? Someone throw it in the comments. I'm blanking on her name.
Kasia: Was it like Rene Russo? I'm just like shouting out.
Leah: It was! Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan. There were incredibly high stakes for one of the biggest paintings in the world. And the two of them together are just so playful, loving the chase. Loving messing with each other. And it reminded me so much of that as well.
Kasia: Yeah, really makes me want to see that scene.
Leah: Amazing soundtrack to that movie as well. Good call on Rene Russo. She's devastating in that.
Okay. We have to touch on this. You've made it very clear that you can't talk about power without touching on sex. And it reminded me of this quote, it's attributed to Oscar Wilde, but some people say it wasn't actually him. “Everything is about sex. Except sex. Sex is about power.” So curious to hear your thoughts, why can't you talk about power without also talking about sex? You had shared in the four-week masterclass you did, about how you learned so much about eroticism from the celibate nuns that you studied in the monastery. I'm curious if you could then share what did the celibate nuns teach you about eroticism?
Kasia: First and foremost, we start by defining power, because right now, this is changing, but in most universities, when you talk like in behavioral economics or macroeconomics, you talk about power as the person who has the most toys. Those are accessories to power, those can be taken away. The kind of power that can move mountains, the kind of power that does not depend on resources. Martin Luther King Jr. power, fucking Gandhi power. The kind of power we're talking about lives in the body. It's animal bodies communicating with one another. It's the difference of whether you're invisible or not. When you decide to be visible, you're visible. You get heard, you get seen, you get followed. We're talking about that kind of power.
Animal bodies communicating with one another. What is one of your greatest energy sources in terms of presence? Your sexual fire. When I went to China and studied with celibate nuns practicing Taoism for decades, one of the things that were astounding about them was almost impossible to put into words. The human female body I was looking at felt like it was the top 10% of an iceberg that went deep into the earth, like 90% of their bodies were in the earth.
There's a famous story about the abbot who ran that convent, when the military came to tear down the monastery complex, she just stood on the edge of this plateau, looked at them, spooked them, and they all turned around and went on their way. That anecdote, I believe, because I was in her presence. Like, whoa, the magnitude of this human energy field is just unthinkably large. Then I realized, not only through the fact that we were doing a lot of alchemical meditations that had to do with the female hormone system, ovaries, reproductive system, I noticed that they breathed really low. What I mean by that is quite literally, like from the womb. This high chest breathing is so common for us. Moves our center of gravity up, makes us easy to tip over in a martial art sense. It also means that the energy we project is not that powerful. What happens to women start practicing some of these lower belly breath practices like I did? The first thing that comes up is all the sexual trauma. Those of us who didn't have, concrete rapes or stories like that. Repeated sexual compromises. All of us had it. Unwanted sex. This is training from celibate nuns. That's why I say you can't separate sex from power when we're talking about this kind of power. Because it's like having one of your fundamental biological batteries cut off by 80%. So when you walk into a room, the sound of your voice, all of the things that people pick up about you, feel you, end up being faint, the pulse is weak. If sex is suppressed, cut off, diminished. They go together.
It's different for men. What is a man using his sexuality? Is he wearing a business suit standing like an erect penis with an arrow pointing to his crotch? Maybe. So integrated in our perception that we don't even think about it?
For women, it's entirely different. She can act sexy. But that means that first there's a disconnect, and then there's a mimicking of what was taken away.
Leah: If you had to try to capture what it was that made the nuns that you just described so magnetic? Besides the groundedness, the deep belly breathing, that unshakable quality, are you able to point to anything?
Kasia: You know how you see in a nature documentary, a panther walking? Or even if you have a house cat, actually, you can see it. There's no part of their body that's deadened or asleep. Their arms and legs are not separate. They're one integrated individual; their whole system is fluid.
You study pole dancing so I'm sure that Dede probably notices moments where somebody's arm isn't in the game.
Leah: It's every single part of the body. She'll give us cues around how to accentuate it. I joke because even the feet – you think pole dancing is swinging around a pole – half of the class is her teaching us how to point and flex our feet at specific moments to draw attention to them.
Kasia: So that integrated body, in their case, felt like an integrated way of being with their environment. The whole world, the impeccable sense of timing of what to say when and at what volume. So clearly not pre-thought. It's like being a great jazz musician but with your entire being. It's an incredible feeling.
“There’s so much information available right now. You can learn so many things. But the things that are of the most value have to do with recollecting and remembering the things we always thought we knew. Unlearning. Unknowing. Getting back to the aliveness.
”
And again, we're coming kind of back to this idea of embodiment, because you and I are in a situation where because of when we were raised and where we're growing up, and how, as women, we're studying how to point and flex our feet with Dede in order to put the attention on the right place, because we forgot what we always knew. There's so much information available right now. You can learn so many things. But the things that are of the most value have to do with recollecting and remembering the things we always thought we knew. Unlearning. Unknowing. Getting back to the aliveness.
Leah: This is unrelated, but someone was making a joke about how Oprah has an avocado farm in her home. I think it was like James Corden, the comedian, he's like, “You know you've really made it when you've gone back to becoming a farmer.” Back to the basics.
Okay, before we close I have a couple of really interesting group member questions that I wanted to share with you. We have a women's group that runs every Saturday. We've been talking about good girl conditioning in anticipation of this conversation. One woman shared, she lives in San Francisco, it was a beautiful sunny day, 75 degrees outside. She was wearing a sun dress and didn't feel like wearing a bra. She was walking down the street and this guy calls out. He says, “Well, someone knew what to wear today. Nice bouncy tits.” A lot of what you do at The Academy is helping women in moments when they would normally freeze, shut down, or stay quiet to have a voice. You have a whole system for this. I'm curious if you can quickly share this system? And then what you might have done in that situation?
Kasia: Absolutely. So the public comments, the walking down the street and having somebody catcall or notice you. How many of the women listening have noticed that sometimes it's really intimate like, “Nice bouncy tits.” Sometimes it's like, “Hey,” or sometimes it's like, “Nice hair,” something that shouldn't actually generate the degree of freakout, feeling of violation, feeling of attack.
“One of the things that tend to make us feel violated is knowing in advance that we can’t protect ourselves from it and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s a lie. That’s our conditioning.”
One of the things that tend to make us feel violated is knowing in advance that we can’t protect ourselves from it and there's nothing we can do about it. And that's a lie. That's our conditioning. When somebody puts their attention on us, we will tend to keep it stuck there. That reaffirms a power dynamic of the catcaller being the dom and us being the sub.
Leah: Yeah, 100%.
Kasia: The thing that will feel better is when it's safe, right? I know there are some situations where catcallers are not catcallers, and it's not a safe situation. It's a dark alley. You don't want to try this then. But if you try to flip the power dynamic by putting attention on them for a minute, you do it a few times, you start feeling in control of those interactions. When you start feeling in control of those interactions, they don't phase you as much. Sometimes they can be an opportunity for having fun. The best thing to do is to ask them a question. Why? You could put attention on them by saying, “Yeah, nice shoes, nice comment, nice mouth. Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?” It's the question that you ask them that's going to move their attention on themselves, even for a split second, that's gonna flip the power dynamic. “Are you a fashion critic? Are you a boob expert? Do you enjoy making women feel uncomfortable?” Any one of those. Ask them a question and keep walking. It's gonna feel like you're more in control. Because it's the being pinned, feeling of speechlessness, it's that freeze, that ends up hurting us more than anything else. We mostly don't care what people say, so why is it so disempowering? It's because we get stuck, and then we feel like we can't trust ourselves to defend ourselves. Then we're mad that people like that even exist.
Leah: Yeah. What are your thoughts on that counterargument? “I'd rather not give them any attention? Not give them the time of day? I don't want to like acknowledge their comments.”
Kasia: That's a legitimate argument. Except for, how often does that work? This dynamic is kind of fucked, because very often, not always, sometimes it's an innocent compliment, right? Sometimes it's a nice smile, but if it's nefarious they're going to have liked silenced you and getting your goat. They might repeat. They might try even harder. So yeah, sure. You get to decide, but if you're in a place that's safe to experiment, on a public street, turn it around and ask them a question. See how it feels. You might feel very sassy, very proud of yourself. You might get a laugh. Laugh at yourself.
Leah: Right. Yeah. And again, it goes back to that idea of once I’m able to be in a state of playfulness, I can handle whatever comes at me, right? I'm not taking it so seriously.
Kasia: Yeah. Oftentimes there's a lot of cluelessness on the other side. Sometimes it's difficult for the catcaller to know that they're doing something bad, something wrong. And they're put on the spot and questioned. “Is this a pickup line that works for you?” They have a moment where they're publicly having to question themselves. Maybe that didn't work so well.
Leah: Right. Even just that retort sends a message to yourself that you don't have to take that seriously, which is half the battle.
Kasia: Yes, very well said. Absolutely. Because it's the conversation we have with ourselves that’s actually the most brutal.
Leah: There was another example. This was inside of a dance club, and there was a guy wearing sunglasses who sits down next to where one of our group members was dancing. She was enjoying time with her friends, and he was just staring at her. And she found out later he'd asked if he could take a picture of her. What would be a good thing to say in that situation where you have someone who's looking at you in a way where you're not really able to enjoy yourself because of it.
“I want women to trust their instincts more and more and speak their truth more and more. But saying so isn’t going to make it happen. ”
