Unknowing Podcast: Unbound with Kasia Urbaniak
“Ultimately, this is the goal. That vital feeling to be fully awake. This is why we have to shed our good girl bondage and the compression that comes with it. This goes past congruence and the ability to communicate in a clean way. In a contracted state, it is not only difficult to fully access our power, but it’s hard to feel fully alive.”
Cover art by Marfa Madee
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Introduction (Brie): It's interesting to me that we're not trained on power and power dynamics. We spend a lot of time talking about power and power dynamics. We certainly experience the effects of power and the consequences of power when not held well. We're not taught the subtleties of power in our own bodies, or how to wield it, how to utilize it toward creative ends, and co-create in power so that we can have power with as opposed to just power over, which is the dominant paradigm. As a woman growing up in a religious paradigm, I can attest to the fact that I, at least in my experience, was trained how to submit to power, how to defer, deflect, be nice, be good, be sweet, be kind, but definitely don't stand in your own power. Don't shake things up. Don't ask questions. Don't live the questions. Certainly don't get curious about what works, what doesn't. And to follow that inner curiosity, instinct, and intuition into a more wild and expansive life force affirming reality.
Most of us women who broke out of those containers had to do it the hard way and the old way, but there is somebody out there who is actively training women on how to break free and become unbound, how to unknow all the very unhelpful training that many of us women received. Her name is Kasia Urbaniak, founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. I met Kasia through a mutual friend, who within a month of meeting me said, “Oh my god, you remind me so much of my friend Kasia, you have to meet each other. It's just weird.”
After meeting each other on Zoom, and having a couple of conversations, Kasia generously invited me to sit in on a couple of her classes at The Academy and I was blown away. Kasia is an incredibly unique and masterful teacher. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she worked as a professional dominatrix, practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, and obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines which include medical Qi gong, and systemic constellations. Since founding the Academy in 2013, Kasia has taught over 4000 women the practical tools and embodied knowledge on how to break free from the stories, lies, narratives, and tiny boxes that most of us were trained to be sweetly in. Kasia has also written a book called Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power. We will be discussing some of the topics in her book in this conversation.
When I'm interviewing an artist, I like to remind all of you that just because you don't consider yourself an artist doesn't mean you don't have a lot to learn about the path of creative possibility by listening to a particular artist. I'm going to say the same thing now about Kasia. If you don't identify as a woman, this is not a podcast episode just for women. There’s a lot for us to learn on the path of creative possibility about unknowing, about power, about the unhelpful categories that many of us were trained in, to label things as good and bad, and then miss out on the opportunity to alchemize that energy toward creative ends.
So grab your notebook, you're gonna want to write down some things because there's a lot of embodied wisdom coming your way. With that, let's dive right in to Episode 12 with Kasia Urbaniak.
Brie: Kasia, thank you so much for being on Unknowing today. I usually like to begin by asking my guests about the first map that they were given when growing up to make sense of their reality. This has a way of setting us off in a particular direction and course. So to begin, would you share what map you were given? What lens were you handed to interpret your world?
Kasia: Two things come to mind, but can you tell me a little bit more about what kind of map you're looking for? What do you mean by map?
Brie: I kind of like to leave it open. For some people, it'll be like, “This was my spiritual upbringing.” For some people, it's like, “I had a scientist for a dad and a teacher for a mom and that impacted me in this way.” So whatever first popped into your mind.
Kasia: What comes up for me is a radical violation of a map I had that I didn't know I had. When I was born, my parents who were musicians were touring quite heavily. So even though I was born in New York, my little sister and I were on tour with my parents until about the age of six. This is the map, right? The map that I didn't know was a map. This is what I thought all reality looked like. My mom, my dad, me, my sister, the band, the roadies, the other musicians. Every day, two days, three days, a different European city, trains, hotel rooms, bars, clubs, vans. The main thing was all of us in this small tribe had a common purpose. It was to get to the next gig and make a show. My sister had a place, I had a place, even if I was carrying the tambourine or looking after luggage, or figuring out where the french fries were in this German train station. And it was kind of amazing. Even though you would think that was a chaotic time, it wasn't. Everything made perfect sense. Everyone had a place, we were together all the time, we were doing a thing.
Then all of a sudden, I'm in New York in a Catholic elementary school and I'm sitting in a damn chair all day long. There are these people in the front of the room telling me things. I don't understand why I have to do anything. At that point, my English isn’t that great, but even if my English was flawless, I still wouldn't understand why I have to sit. I was a terrible student, and I was miserable. The fluorescent lights, the sitting. I’d already had a different map for what humans were supposed to do with each other. I didn't understand why I wasn't in the same room as my little sister. I didn't understand where my parents were.
That upset fundamentally shaped me. I think it invigorated this very rebellious stance. Why are we here? What's the point of this? Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Answers like ‘just because you're supposed to’ weren’t enough to satisfy my previous experience in what it was like to do something together.
That map transition, or map violation, was one that defined essentially the rest of my life.
Brie: So wild, because I find that for so many of us it's the ruptures that become the birthplace of something that becomes a core search. It's like that initial rupture of ‘why am I being forced into a system of education or a version of reality that's suddenly very square, very rule-oriented?’ So with that search that began inside of you, walk us through how you wound up deciding to study Taoism at the same time as you became an incredibly successful dominatrix. How did you get from starting to ask ‘why’ to those deep core experiences in your life.
Kasia: I think what you say about rupture is right on. The holy unhappiness I felt through all of my school years, the crushing unhappiness and misery. I watched my parents go through something similar, but I didn't know that at the time. The energy that was required to be touring musicians and Polish immigrants. Their belief in the American Dream was in some ways purer and stronger than most, but there was an almost toxic, ambitious drive towards success in the music industry. The point of why we were doing anything at all was something that I was looking for without even knowing it.
I read a lot as a kid, and was drawn to books even when I was 10. On any alternative spiritual path, especially since I was going to Catholic school. I was sneaking home books on pagan stuff and witchcraft. It’s almost a cliche and a bad joke that it was time to pay for college and I was like, “Why do I have to go to a cheap school?” Making money as a dominatrix was something that was just about as anti-everything I was around that I could think of.
Initially, Taoism drew me because it was so magical. It had a promise of things that were very supernatural and metaphysical. Later on, it matured into a different kind of practice understanding. The miraculous healings, the exorcisms, the witchy-wizardy parts of Taoism were the things that drew me in first.
I don't know if that answered your question.
Brie: It completely did. It makes perfect sense in so many ways. Maybe this beginning, baptismal, experiential first map that you had, in which wildness, creativity, and alternative possibilities were welcome was the true north that you were then trying to find in your explorations. To say, “I don't believe that this is the only way. I don't believe this is the only system. I will not play by these rules. I will be the bad girl and break these rules. And I make a lot of money doing it.” Something in you – that deep, rebellious urge seems to be tied to a deep knowing. I'm fascinated by this. When I first told you about the concept of this show, you were like, “Oh my god, that's so Taoist. I can't believe that the Unknowing is so Taoist.”
Could you connect the dots for those who may not be as familiar? How is that connection there? Why was that something you said to me?
Kasia: Oh, yeah. This also makes me want to add something to the previous question, this is a good link. Even though the rebellious paths that I chose look wild and sometimes strange, the drive behind understanding why actually made me a practically driven person. What works despite what people say? What actually works? Certain roles in society promise something, does it work? If it does works, what does it work to achieve? Do I want that? What's practical? To me, the way to be the most compassionate person involves a hell of a lot of practicality. What actually works? I think one of the fundamental truths is that we want to know, cognitively and mentally, a lot more than we actually need to. At the expense of the wisdom and information that arises for us at the moment, that blossoms for the next few steps. That is a really beautiful way to navigate the world.
So when you're talking about Unknowing, you're talking about, at least for me, breaking the conditioning. Breaking the pointless rules that lead you to places you don't even want to go. This won't make you happy. In just a basic sense, Taoism is practical. It's the foundation of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and a huge percentage of martial arts. How to heal your body, how to heal other bodies, how to defend yourself.
Working as a dominatrix was an absolutely fascinating interface with human beings and power, and it was also a really practical way to make money. It was a practical way to start exploring all the things I didn't like about the way I was being put into a box as a woman, and test them out. There's this almost social, scientific, experimental part of all of these things that I think have to do. We are human beings on this planet and we don't even really know what that means. We don't really know what it means to be Kasia or Brie, or a person. We don't really know where we are. What do we know? How much do we need to know in order to make the next move and to see the results of that?
The magic of being alive on this planet is that you don't know. But you can, in a unique, isolated moment, see and find out. It's not knowledge to be captured. It's a conversation with the universe where you say something, you do something, and the universe responds. You don't get to know where the rest of the conversation’s going. You just know that you heard back from the world, ‘oh this is the thing.’ The insecurity and fear make us want to turn that response into a fundamental truth. How cool is this, the Tao Te Ching begins with the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. It's the fundamental disclaimer of integrity. Like it's saying, the moment we start talking about this, it's never always going to be true.
Brie: It’s such a koan. Your brain just kind of self-combusts. Short circuits.
Kasia: I had personal curiosities and personal interests. I wanted to be an incredibly powerful woman. I wanted to understand the things that were in my way. I wanted to break through the things that were in my way. I felt incredibly trapped and wanted to understand everything. I wanted to know everything, I wanted to study everything, I wanted to strategize over everyone. In that maybe misguided, but really honest desire to be the most powerful woman in the world. I had to be humbled and schooled by the world by facing the results of everything that I tried. Seeing that I didn't need to preemptively understand everything, I only needed to have a basic way of operating. A basic positive regarding curiosity about how to look at the responses that the world hides.
Brie: It's so powerful to me listening to you talk about this shift from this colonial need to subjugate reality with a form of oppressive knowledge that can then create and determine a sense of certainty, versus the kind of radical simplicity, an internal posture of humility that says, “I don't need to know. I just need to be really, really freaking awake and aware so that I can track where this life force is moving and be in conversation with the universe moment by moment.” That's such a different posture. That's a completely, radically other way of talking about knowledge than how society is set up. Which is like, academically, you're considered to be an intelligent, knowledgeable person, if you know all of this information up in your head.
Kasia: Yeah, and here's my favorite part. The idea that colonial subjugation is bad and the radical simplicity of humility on the inside is good isn't even necessary because it's a question of what works. We just know. Anyone with eyes who's curious and really interested in the subject of power and being able to make things happen in the world. If you look at that mindset, of utter control, and if you look at tyranny in an amoral way, it becomes really evident that it doesn't work. The amount of force required when you break people's free will, when you take what is inherently wanting to be birthed inside of them, their energy sources, when you try to crush and oppress people, it takes a tremendous amount of energy and wastes the energy that's inherent in them. So even in this kind of cold-hearted, neutral way, looking at what works and what doesn't work, it's actually the synergy between human beings that creates all of the stuff we want. The way of looking even at how we use our resources and the ways we go to war. We have these metrics that make it look like those things spell success, but those metrics are false. The GDP, how wealthy a person is when they have lots of money. It doesn't take that much to see that it just doesn't work. It’s easy to see the person who has their head full of facts doesn't necessarily make the best decisions.
Brie: I love the practicality of how you're describing this path, this way of life because it just doesn't work. If your head is full of information and it's clouding your ability to be in the moment and connect with life force and yourself, let alone how to influence and dance with others to create beautiful possibilities. It's like, oh yeah, that doesn't work. That doesn't work.
I want to ask you about how you're training people to learn the things that work, especially your work with women. This is really how we met as me witnessing you in your full glory on your throne and teaching and bringing it to your class at The Academy, which is the school that you founded. The first time I witnessed your teaching, it was on Zoom, and I'm sitting there and you're getting going, and you're talking about the importance of connecting with rage. I'm like, yeah, yeah, we should all connect with our anger. Sure, yeah. And you single out a student, you asked her to connect with her rage. She got amped up, but it was still like a polite 5. She was still somewhat apologetic, even in her body posture. She was shrugging her shoulders and giggling a little bit and kind of on the spot, but there was something in her and you felt it. You knew was there from all of your experience, you could feel that life force in her and you were like, “Nah, I'm not gonna let you get off the hook.” So you kept prodding her until she finally got there. I will never forget what I witnessed because when she touched into her rage, she was able to be so clear in her language, but also her whole body posture changed, her shoulders rolled back, her chin lifted up, and suddenly she recovered her sovereignty. It made me weep because it reminded me of that movie, Hook. Where Peter Pan comes back as a full adult and one of the lost boys comes up to him and grabs his face and starts manipulating all the extra skin until he can kind of see his old friend. And he goes, “Oh, there you are, Peter, there you are.” At that moment with that student, it was like, “Ah, there she is, there she is.”
So talk about this process of aligning with that life force and your work with your students and helping them find that themselves.
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Kasia: Yeah. In founding The Academy and in working with women, to break a lot of the specifically gendered social conditioning, the good girl behavior, all of that, I've gotten to witness such extraordinary beauty and miracles. But what I treasure the most is something that feels repeatedly verifiable to me.
Human beings don't have to be good because we already are good. What works is fundamental goodness. All we have to do is be true. Now, those words can be misconstrued 100,000 different ways. My anti-morality stance is a challenge to the idea that we're inherently sinful beings who need corrective behavior. Let me draw back to that example and then move back to that spot.
Rage can be incredibly destructive, so we don't want it. We have a cultural practice of perversely, almost in a pornographic way, allowing for particular expressions of rage and violence, but strongly regulating where it's allowed. You can make a movie where 10,000 people's heads are chopped off, but watch your goddamn tone if you're in a meeting, right? We have a highly regulated relationship to rage and very little understanding of it. The idea is social control; to hijack the power that rage provides to use it for military purposes. But everywhere else where it occurs naturally, tamp it down. This implies that human beings have evil in them.
This is what happens on a practical level I see happen with the women in my class and rage. I have yet to meet a woman who isn't on some level furious. The most tamped-down rage looks like a lack of life purpose and a lack of energy. Maybe this is a coincidence, but also a high incidence of autoimmune diseases. A lack of clarity, sex drive, purpose, sleepiness, resignation. Now, because I have 1000 tests of encountering a woman in this stage, and testing what happens is their rage underneath. We'll call this phase one rage. When phase one rage becomes phase two rage, it's the kind of rage that we're most afraid of socially. It's a little bit like the way a foot falls asleep, you don't know it's asleep when it's asleep – this is phase one. The moment you start shaking it though, you shake it up a little and it hurts. It feels uncomfortable, you can't use it, and you don't have control over it. So phase two rage socially is that thing that we're freaked out about, especially with women who are holding millennia of rage. In phase two, you hurt people, you don't have control, you're destructive. There's a lot of energy, but it's going all over the place. So tamp it down, back to phase one. Most people are oscillating, moving back and forth between phase one and phase two. It becomes like a pendulum. It becomes cyclical. It's like, “Oh, I shouldn't be mad. Oh, but I am mad.” It’s good to pass through phase two in a safe space, in community, or in private, not with the object of your rage. There's something that happens where all of a sudden the things that you're fighting against, the things that your anger wants to stop, start transitioning into, “I want to break through this because I see a vision for something better.” The amount of energy that's unavailable to a human being because they're in phase one rage, that they start feeling as uncontrollable and cumbersome in phase two becomes passionate, direction, clarity. It's that thing you witnessed when she got to the other side. All of a sudden, she went from wanting to yell to a grounded, embodied voice speaking in an unshakable, undeniable way.
We have this funny habit when it comes to emotions, right? The ones that are perceived as negative, it's like you put a biohazard sign on them. Some of them are too tumultuous to just observe, observe, observe, observe, right? Even that idea is far more evolved and more Eastern. Suppress the bad ones, control them, hold them away from people. Definitely don't get to the other side of them. Don't rage and scream until you find your passion point. Then the positive ones, take them for granted. Something good happens? Oh, I'm fine. I'm good. Let's move on. Let's move on to the next problem. The incredible energy available when a positive emotion surfaces, it's not like, “Hey, I feel fantastic about myself today, I got this beautiful gift, or I did this phenomenal thing.” So the energy that's there is also not directed, amplified, cared for. If we go into the premise that human beings are fundamentally sinful, born with original sin, that the body is bad, that's the things that come through us are bad or good.
“If we are distrustful of what arises within us, we are more likely to be disconnected, disembodied, and also not shepherding and managing the negative and positive emotions properly. ”
Brie: Looking at you Augustine.
Kasia: The need to be regulated, the need to be highly controlled. If we are distrustful of what arises within us, we are more likely to be disconnected, disembodied, and also not shepherding and managing the negative and positive emotions properly. The amount of beauty that's possible if you wield the beauty of your positive emotions and alchemize your negative emotions. That distinction is only necessary because we made it. You don't treat everything exactly the same. You don't treat a child the same way you treat a pet or the same way you treat a friend. Those raw emotions that are negative only have become the monsters they are because they get locked into a closet. They get worse and worse and worse and worse the longer they stay. If you don't believe me, listen to how a woman talks to her partner after 10 years of resentment. It might be quiet, but those poison arrows, those vicious comments can cut an artery. The longer it stays hidden the gnarlier it is. The more it requires the process of moving from phase one, phase two, phase three.
When I say human beings don't need to be good because we are good so all we have to do is be true, is a huge oversimplification of the processes that happened when we come to know ourselves again as good therefore trustworthy.
Kind of a side note, but since the theme of religion is coming up if you look at the seven deadly sins, they are only problems if you're disembodied. Greed, for example. Greed only works if you're not embodied enough to feel what you've received and hit a point of satiety. So the problem with greed isn't greed. The problem with greed is disembodiment. If you were there in your seat to receive what your greed got you, you get full. It’s a natural, metabolic function. It's a spiritual metabolism. You go out, you get praise, you fully receive it, you celebrate, you say, “Yes, I did that fantastically. I am great.” Suddenly, vanity, pride becomes less of a problem. The same thing with gluttony, self-regulating. We're self-regulating beings. When we are in our bodies, we are in harmony with the universe, we participate in nature's self-regulating processes. Rage, which we already talked about. Wrath, a sin. It's only a problem if you're not embodied enough to feel the passion and where it directs and leads. Name any of them. It's the same thing over and over again. If you're there to receive what is already yours, the self-regulating mechanisms of satiety and appropriate hunger kick in, and suddenly even Buddhist ideas of craving and aversion are going out the window because we're self-regulating.
This is the beauty, with all of the dramatic problems in the world, to be able to work with a woman and uncover her fundamental innocence which leads to a tremendous amount of power and influence. Who would have thought that inherent goodness and innocence lead to her being able to get outrageously legendary things in the world? To have a feeling of influence. It's a wonderful thing to be watching over and over and over again, those guilty pleasures, secretly delicious but maybe a little wicked desires that we have. Pursuing them is not only not wicked but requires us to be exactly as we are. It leads to goodness for everyone.
Brie: It's stunningly beautiful to listen to this worldview shift that you've given your life to. Full stop at: can we just accept our inherent worth and goodness? Can we please correct this terrible anthropology that religion and certain platonic philosophies have yielded? I'm stunned by this insight that you've just offered here. You've got the 7 deadly sins, and you're like, “Well, if you’re just in your body, if you trusted this vehicle of incarnation as capable of manifesting something sacred, then those issues are no longer issues.” That alone, I could just stop right there. That's a podcast, let’s just hover on that.
But this idea of following the life force and trusting that goodness. It seems so simple, and yet again and again we default to this smaller, lesser, disembodied life. We stick to familiar patterns. We herd into social constructs. I pulled this from your book, Unbound, which I enjoyed living in for the last week preparing for this podcast. You’re giving examples of successes and breakthroughs your students had, you say, “none of these solutions came out of the grind.” So it wasn't a forced, top-down, here's what we're gonna do. “It came from inspiration, byproducts of the imagination, creativity, experimentation, and ingenuity. They came from following life force. Ultimately, this is the goal,” you say, “that vital feeling to be fully awake. This is why we have to shed our good girl bondage and the compression that comes with it. This goes past congruence and the ability to communicate in a clean way. In a contracted state, it is not only difficult to fully access our power, but it's hard to feel fully alive.”
This reminds me of some of the koans you were saying earlier, because on the surface, you're like, that sounds really obvious. But then to live it, to actually have the courage to break those patterns, is a whole other thing.
I just want to reflect back that I'm in one of those places of profound unknowing, where the following of life force has taken me into doing something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I might be dead broke in a few months, but I have never felt clearer, happier, or more in my body and more here on this planet. Harmonizing with the harmonies of the world. It's like that kind of like bliss, right? I don't say that in a disembodied way. I'm just really having a lot of fun. The funny thing is, for a long time, and you know this because we've been friends for a while now, I've wanted to break through, break out, and do my own thing and start doing my own creative projects and honor these creative expressions in my life. But I just kept shrinking back or holding back because we're taught that a courageous, creative life is not practical. It's not how things are done. The universe came along and kicked my ass and set me on this course.
Sometimes the universe intervenes, right? Sometimes the universe is like, “okay, gonna help you break through this limiting belief that you have about yourself,” but what practice would you offer listeners to help us get in touch with desire? And maybe reconfigure our relationship with desire that has gotten warped through our unhelpful societal training?
Kasia: Yeah. So the first thing is changing how we regard desire, to begin with. We make new year's resolutions, we set goals, even as kids some of us are asked to make Christmas lists, right? There's this kind of illusion that we make our desires. We try and articulate our desires, yeah. But we don't make them. You don't sit down and commit to wanting vanilla gelato. You can't make yourself be attracted to men if you're attracted to women. You can’t make desire.
Brie: We can't manufacture it.
Kasia: No, but we regard it like we do. If we have a ‘bad’ one, or if we have a ‘good’ one, we have certain feelings about ourselves. So the first thing to do is to change our regard about how desire works. I am not making these desires, they're coming through me. I have no say in what I want, it happens to me. Now, I do have plenty of say in what I allow myself to see. Next level. How I articulate the guesses I make about what will satisfy that. When you have an urge for vanilla ice cream, for example, you're referencing something in the past. It may not necessarily be something that's existed before, the actual desire may be calling for something that's not on the menu, not ever been seen on this planet, right? Desire comes up, we have say in whether we acknowledge it, we have say in our skill level and making educated guesses and experiments about what will satisfy it, we have say in whether we do anything about it at all, but we don't have any say in what comes up. Judging ourselves on the basis of our desires is utter nonsense. It makes no sense.
If you have what seems like a very wicked desire, like revenge or destruction, this is a moment where all of the Eastern practices in detachment and observation are so helpful, right? “Oh, I have a wicked desire. This has nothing to do with whether I'm a good person or not. What is this telling me? How do I engage with it?”
This is going to sound nuts, but I do a lot of work with revenge in my classes. The desire for justice, to punish, and to destroy people. When we go into that impulse, oftentimes, when we start alchemizing it, the actual essence of the revenge is so generous. So many women will go, “I want my toxic father to go to therapy. First, I want him to pay, and then I want him to fix, and then I want him to grow.” There is a generosity that can develop there.
Desire. The ones that seem kind of wicked are the quickest ones to be shut down, and they’re also the ones that are most useful to look at. If you don't look at them without judging yourself, that often ends up playing out anyway in less than conscious ways. We end up hurting people, and then it's messy. It's not skillful. The result isn't exactly what we want.
The guilty pleasures, those are all clues. I have a student who was asking me about self-discipline. She runs a business, and she wants to spend less time watching TV shows. I asked her if there's a particular show, and she watches RuPaul’s Drag Race. She wanted to stop the hours of watching RuPaul’s Drag Race a day. We looked into it, and this seems like a small thing but it's a really good direction. She has a business where she guides women through the wedding process of being brides in a holistic and beautiful way. When we leaned into what she likes about it, we had to look into what her desire was saying. She would’ve never looked at binge-watching a TV show as something positive. So we looked into it. She realized that the archetype of the drag queen is so relevant to the woman who's transforming herself as a bride, creating a performance in community, living out loud, and having the kind of celebration wedding experience that absolutely showcases every single woman's unique fabulousness in a theatrical way. All of the sudden, she saw that she was doing research. Being able to accept that had her radically reinvent how she approaches her work, her business, and her success in her business. This is another one of those things where even the small petty things that we beat ourselves up for being wrong about are very likely intelligent signposts. Meet those signposts consciously, in a loving way, and ask ourselves what purpose they’re serving instead of categorizing things – trying to get rid of one category and holding another as good. Utilizing everything. How can you rage? How can you use your laziness? What is it telling you?
Writing down your desire is super important. We have a fun exercise that we call The Bad Girl Protocol where you write down, “If I were a bad girl I would ______.” And ‘bad girl’ – I know it's infantilizing, but it's on purpose. “You're such a good girl. You're such a bad girl.” The way that that evokes those very fundamental, early punishments and rewards. The idea is you let loose your writing this on paper. You can destroy the paper, nobody has to look at it. If vile and really twisted things come up, you never have to look at them again. You can look at them and start getting curious. What is wanted here? What's the desire here? Oftentimes things will pop up that are absolutely totally good and loving. “If I were a bad girl, I’d get nine hours of sleep.” “If I were a bad girl, I would tell my sister to break up with her partner.” You name it.
“One of our favorite sayings in The Academy is imagination over effort. When you’re stuck and doubling down on a technique that hasn’t worked for you in the past, you think, ‘This didn’t work. It’s probably me, I have to try harder.’ Stop, take a step back, and think, ‘is imagination going to be better here than effort?’”