Episode 145 - Jenna Ward: Redefining Strength & Success Through Feminine Embodiment
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Mary: So welcome, Jenna!
Jenna: Thank you so much for having me, mary and everyone on your delicious podcast. Who's joining us for this conversation? I'm a fan and I myself tune in. When I need a little dose of lusciousness, I am so glad to hear that.
Mary: Yeah Well, you are one of my biggest inspirations. Muses, I mean taking the feminine embodiment. Coaching certification just so drastically changed my career and my life. And I just so I remember doing my certification call with you like my intro call, and I am part of the enrollment team and I hear participants say this that it's like I don't know why I'm doing this, but I just feel it in my body, you know. So I just really want to affirm and acknowledge and give gratitude for your resonance that you hold in the world.
Jenna: Thank you, and I have experienced this myself. I think when we start speaking about concepts around the feminine and embodiment, it's not like that's on your list of goals, when it may be at this point in your life, but if I rewind, these are like words and concepts that are very hard to orientate to mentally and can be really challenging to know why we're intrigued or what that intangible pull is, because it's often so much a feeling rather than a very clear cognizant. This makes sense. So I'm always in rapture with hearing those experiences where there was a resonance and when there is a calling and where it has awoken in us to a degree that the curiosity is strong and it's something that we want to pursue. I think that feeling of curiosity and that feeling of resonance it's like follow that feeling, because it's more feeling that you want in your life. So using those feelings as a tool to navigate and as a tool to lean in and to explore is ultimately going to be the most useful tool, even though it seems like a really unusual tool to use to make decisions.
Mary: Yeah, you know, I love that expression, more feeling, is what you want in your life. You know, like
Jenna: it's pretty much what I'm trying to do, like it's pretty much what it comes down to make me more alive. Let me burst with aliveness, let me be ravished Right Like whether it's on the ravishment.
Mary: Totally Like, whether it's new stuff, new career, new pet, new child. It's all about feeling, and that was something that I just so profoundly noticed in my own life was when I started doing the practices of feminine embodiment as they're taught in the certification. It was like my capacity to feel skillfully and safely was so expanded and I think that that you know, I know for me that was a big concern of. Like Crikey, I feel so much already. How can I possibly feel more? I'm going to implode. And for people who are curious about embodiment, I'm curious if you might speak to that.
Jenna: I do appreciate that you share the sense of safety and stability, because I feel we generally belong to one of two camps where either in Camp Num, whereby we're going through life as kind of this layer of concrete that exists emotionally between us and the rest of the world and I feel like for a lot of women who maybe have busy domestic loads or who have been following a certain path in a really go go, go way we can become very dissociated from our hearts and our bodies and our feelings and our sensations. And so this first camp, which is where my embodiment journey started, is kind of camp. I don't feel a lot and I know there's meant to be more, but I don't know the way in. So for this camp, the skill that we have and the thing that we need to do is to turn up the volume on our internal felt sense and our internal ability to open and feel more of the world. But that's not the case for everyone. Others of us will live in the second camp, which is Camp. I'm already pretty sensitive and this world is a lot, and sensitivity is something that's not valued or seen by myself and by those around me, something that's useful. It's interesting, I was talking with a client recently and she said I was chatting about this idea of women being cyclic feeling beings that have different levels of energy and attention and capability depending on their menstruation cycle, if they have a menstruation cycle. I was chatting about this with a male colleague and he said well, how can we rely on a woman to be a CEO if she's not going to be available for a few days every month, because that's when her energy gets low? And the client said to me I didn't know how to respond, and so I laughed and I said well, I'm going to be a CEO, I'm going to respond. And so I laughed and changed the topic. So there's a lot to unpack in that short little statement, but what I want, the piece that I want to focus in on here, is we live in a culture that expects us to act like dissociated robots that can prioritize our productivity and operating mechanically, as opposed to the very real circles and cycles of the world that we're part of. And that's how we've got to the point of like climate collapse for all of us, because we've all just been pushing on, not honoring the cycles and the seasons. If we have perpetual growth in our bodies, it's called cancer. But yet we expect perpetual growth in our bank balances, in our corporations, in our gross domestic products. That's the sign of success of a country. And yet when that happens in our body, it's literally a malignancy. We live in times whereby for many people, particularly women in this second camp of I, am a sensitive feeling woman and many of us have internalized the narrative that that is not a superpower and that that is in fact a risk or a burden or something that's going to hinder us progressing and being successful in our chosen career or life, the only way that we can. And yet I feel like as humanity, we obviously need a new trajectory forward. The way that we're doing things is not working. We have never had more dire situations in our climate. There have never been more wars being fought on. I read an article the other day that there's like 180 active wars in different parts of the world at this moment in time. I just think how did we get here? And obviously the systems that we're living in, systems that say sensitivity makes you hysterical, it makes you irrational, it makes you hormonal, it makes you unreliable these are all really actually untrue narratives. If we instead flip up the idea that my sensitivity. Sure it doesn't come out of my head or my intellect. It comes out of my body, the 90% of me that lives below the level of my neck. But maybe there's actually good and valid data to navigate life with compassion, with care, with more humanity, in the way that I personally. I'm a CEO of a company that makes a lot of money and me being a cyclic woman has absolutely only positive benefit on the culture and the wellness and the bottom dollar that we create as a company. So I think it's really challenging for a lot of us who have internalized this idea that sensitivity isn't a superpower, because that's the soup that we all live in and that's the culture of our times. And it does take a lot of investigation, courage and finding safety within our own bodies for that sensitive superpower to be carefully titrated and embraced and deepened so that we can actually show up as much more of ourselves in the world. And I feel like that's a gift that the world needs much more of.
Mary: Amazing. Yeah, I want to go to that CEO and say do you have any idea how much your company would grow if you learned how to cycle sync? You know, yeah, yeah, and let's see. There was something else I was going to share about, about what you just said. Well, and that's something that you know, being on the teaching team at school has illuminated so much for me as a business owner, for example, the fact that our team meetings always start with a drop in, you know and a visualization of how we can best be of service to our community. It's such an embodied experience, and one of the people or listeners that I want to speak directly to is someone who is drawn to feminine embodiment, that doesn't fully understand what that means, and also someone who may be considering a career change or has always been interested in the coaching world, Like I was. You know, I was a movement teacher and a facilitator for about seven years before I took the training, and I'd always looked at one-on-one certifications, but they were so mind focused and goal focused, and so I love the way that you break down feminine embodiment coaching and I wondered if you might lay that spiel on us.
Jenna: Oh yeah, and I'm really similar to you, Mary, in the sense that I was very curious about feminine embodiment for a long time, without really exactly knowing what it means, and even now still, my definition is fluid and it changes on any given day because this is not an exact science, it's an art and a way of living. So when we think about feminine and embodiment and coaching those three concepts the first I want to define as coaching because it's actually the simplest to get our head around. There are so many problems in the coaching industry and when I first realized that I was innately a coach like that's just the code that exists within me I really rebelled against the name and the label because I didn't necessarily want to be a coach. I think there's a lot of icky things in the coaching industry, but if we strip all the assumptions back, a coach is somebody who uses powerful questions to create new awareness for their clients and with their clients, and that does describe me. I do not like being told the answer. I do not like somebody saying well, this is how I did it, this is how you should do it. I'm open to advice if I ask for advice, but on a whole, I want to actually discover what my truth and my answer is. And so, despite a lot of my surface level gripes with coaching, when we really get to the heart of what good coaching means, it's about being really skillful in asking questions that can open a new doorway and lead somebody into a room within themselves that they might not have explored, and that is such a gift. So I employ coaching in the way that I work with my clients, but I use it with myself and with my kid and with our team, and when my husband's got a problem, I use it in so many domains of our life because I feel like when we can master the art of asking really great questions, we have really great, meaningful conversations and we reveal new treasures. That, to me, is sexy. So that's the coaching piece. Now you can be a coach that asks tons of different types of questions, like mindset coaches ask questions about the mind and the 10% of our body that lives in our head. Accountability coaches might ask questions about your calendar and what your action steps are. A feminine embodiment coach is somebody who weaves the feminine and who weaves embodiment into the way they're asking questions. So if we break apart what those two concepts are. Embodiment really, simply put, is inhabiting yourself fully. So most of us are at times, throughout our day or our week, needing to put on a mask or wear a shape of who we need to be in order to get by, in order to be professional, in order to run a household, our body, the shape of our body, the words that come out of our mouth, the way we're spending time. Very often we're having to put ourselves into shape that might not be our most true, authentic self, and sometimes that's required to pay the bills because we live in a capitalistic world. So I do understand that sometimes we do have to show up and do the thing. And at the same time, when we think about very pure embodiment, it's about do I know who I am and what lights me up and how I can feel my full aliveness? Radiance and pleasure come alive from the tops of my head to the bottom of my toes. Like can I just inhabit me and just be me in the way that I show up and move and dress and express myself, in the decisions that I make, in the way that I spend my time. And it sounds very simple, but it's actually very far from the way most of us live our lives. So when somebody is an embodiment coach, they're inviting the client not only to consider what they think, because your head is part of your body, but also what do you feel, what do you sense, what is the deeper wisdom of how your body is moving through the world. That might contribute to creating new awareness. This might involve the client closing down their eyes and bringing their awareness into the feeling, sensing body or changing their posture or stretching their body open or letting out a sound or a sigh or a groan, or being alive through expressing what's arising by letting our body be dynamic. I think a lot of people, when we think of coaching, we think of like sitting there talking with somebody with our eyes open and just having a conversation, and if we're going to inhabit ourselves, we might need to like move and be a bit dynamic in the way that we actually allow ourselves to come into contact with you know what's really at the heart of that, and so this is the embodiment piece, the final piece. I'm sorry you go.
Mary: No, I just want to add something. Whenever I do a session with a client, I just want to echo what you said, which is that sitting there talking in a feminine embodiment coaching session, it is very much not that when I'm working with a client, we might be talking about something relating work or money. All of a sudden it's like they feel some twinge under their rib that we follow and a whole new world of beliefs and feelings and sensations gets opened up. It's something I just think is so. I mean, I had a client who used to say this is sorcery. I love that word because it pulls from a source and a reservoir that is just so much more abundant and ever flowing than the mind. I just wanted to add that.
Jenna: I love what you shared. I think our body is literally it's storing the past and how we got here. It's storing our ancestry and the conditions of how we have been shaped. If we have a particular goal or a particular desire that we're wanting to move towards, very often we have to unpack all of that old stuff. Now, I'm not saying that, and there's so much nuance in this. Some modalities and philosophies believe that you have to fix everything in your history in order for you to be radiant and alive and pleasurable. I don't believe that to be the case or to be true at all. I think that all of us, as humans, are a work in progress and we always have aspects of imperfection and edges to explore. We can be hot messes and be radiantly alive and full of pleasure and magnetism at the same time, because we're an ever eluding work in progress. When we speak about embodiment, we're speaking about bringing both the stored warehouse of tension that we might have accumulated in this lifetime, over generations, to the table. That stuff's going to need to get sorted out to create a different trajectory for your lineage going forward. We're also talking about the very radiant potential that exists within you because you are. You are this delicious divinity incarnate, and so, yeah, I just clarify that, because it's not all like in the trenches shoveling dirt. There's also a lot of the ability to expand, and I feel like a lot of conventional coaching misses the opportunity for us to ask questions and bring the body alive in ways that are full of ravishment. And this, perhaps this brings us to the third component of the modality the feminine. So the feminine is not a gender or an identity, for lack of a better word. It's an energy that exists in all of life and in all human beings, in all, really in everything. If we were to divide the two ends of the spectrum, the feminine and the masculine, which we can also name as the flowing energy and the going energy, the go energy is what a lot of us are really deeply indoctrinated into in our culture. It's like productivity, performance, linear, moving forward, getting it done. A lot of us have to develop quite masculine go energy skills, because that's what produces a lot of results in our culture, and this is what we see at the climate at this time. Everyone's concerned with, like how do I move forward with this perpetual and ever growing growth? The feminine, on the other hand of the spectrum is so beautifully represented by Mother Nature and she is the feeling, creative, alive force that is actually just life experiencing itself and it is fluid and it is felt, and it's a volcano erupting and a beautiful butterfly landing on a flower to drink at the same time. So when we speak about this idea of the dark and deep work in the trenches and the radiance and aliveness, it's like that's perfectly represented by Mother Nature. She can be muddy and a rainbow at the same time, and we have that within our own bodies because we too are part of this spectrum of aliveness of life. And so, in the way that we coach and in the way that I and our graduates who choose to work this way work with our clients, it's not about fixing the volcano or making the mud better. It's about embracing the full spectrum of our humanity so that everything from the gift of our vulnerability through to the radiance of our pleasure can be accessed and can be considered valuable and useful part of our human experience. And this requires us to break apart a few binaries, because in a lot of the personal development space there's a lot of very subtle, unconscious ideas that the darker ends of our spectrum need to be fixed, healed, so that we can just be all love and light all the time. And I would say, well, you can't live in half of the spectrum. You have to either be all of the colours or narrow yourself to just a few. So that's feminine embodiment, coaching in a nutshell.
Mary: Amazing, oh, I mean, there's so many layers there. And yes, and I agree, and that's been my experience too is that for clients that I work with going into the trenches, it's like it's like, you know, in a more traditional kind of life coaching, goal oriented session and I know this because I've practiced this in the past it's like getting these dark emotions out of the way so that we can get to the point which is that pinnacle of pleasure and empowerment. But that doesn't prepare us for the inevitable decline that is the very nature of life itself. And that's something I just so appreciate about this method is that, rather than teaching us how to go upward more frequently, it teaches us how to expand outward, to hold more and to hold all of what we are.
Jenna: That's a beautiful way to describe it and this is very simple, but it's also very complex in a way to get our head around, and I was actually having a chat about this with one of the participants in our program yesterday. She was sharing with me I'm working with this client. We got to the root of the dynamic that was playing out Now. They were coaching in the realm of kind of a particular goal the client wanted to move towards. The goal could be in any domain. It could be like I want to move my business forward, or I have this issue in intimacy, or I'm grieving, or I'm finding myself in procrastination all the time, like the actual context, the situation in life could be anything. And we have graduates who work in every domain, even some that are like wild and fabulous that I never would have dreamed of, like sex witches, like all kinds of things. So they're working together and the coach said we came to this, this root belief of I'm not enough as I am, and the client shared with me this is so uncomfortable, I don't want to go near this feeling, this state in my body. I want to get rid of it. And the coach shared with me. At that point I knew like the method is to invite somebody to take a moment and as much as feel safe and secure, to titrate them into allowing us to actually feel and enter into that state more fully so that we might love it and bring it back like into a part of us. She said, but in the moment it felt like a really stupid thing to ask someone Like can you love that feeling of not enoughness when it's so uncomfortable? And I can understand that. I remember one of the first times that I was figuring out this thing called embodiment and at that point I had pretty severe adult acne and I had so much hatred towards my skin and when I really let myself feel and enter into more of the felt sensations, the embodiment of feeling how much hatred I had in my body towards myself was effing, heartbreaking. To really go into the depths of what I was telling myself, what I was feeling, and it doesn't make a lot of like it makes sense to say let's get those bad, uncomfortable feelings out, let's evict them, let's make them go away. That seems like a very logical thing to do because it will save us the vulnerability and the heartache of encountering what we're actually holding in our body. But if I evict that from me, I'm taking all of the life force, all of the energy, all of the potential that's bound up in that very uncomfortable seed and I'm like cutting off a limb. The only way for me to reclaim that life force is just like I would not. I have a four year old. I would not say to her you are not enough, get outside. I never want to see you again. You know, as a mother to that child, even if she's having a horrible tantrum, and I would prefer to cut the limb off and just put it outside. It's like I'm going to invite you back into warmth and care and security and I love you, back into wholeness. And this is very subtle but a very different approach to. I feel like it's an approach that it requires that we invoke the body, because the body is where all this warehouse of, like, deep feeling is. But it's also a way for us to like reclaim that power and the life force that lives in there. Like, however, that story of not enough or, however, that story of not beautiful enough got in there for us to really reclaim and create a new narrative and thus a new trajectory for all of our collective future, we're going to have to reclaim the power that lives in that very, that seed of great discomfort, and that's not something we're going to like, push or force our clients to feel. We're going to just swim gently out into the, out into the depths, at a speed and at a pace that feels supportive and safe, and that's masterful. We don't want to retraumatize somebody in doing that, but ultimately we need to have power by entering into the discomfort. Then we will forever be beholden to it and our life force will forever be tied up and frozen in it, and that's power that I would prefer to be circulating in my body in the world.
Mary: I love how one of the fundamental concepts of feminine embodiment coaching is finding a flow state and this truth, that life force like that, those uncomfortable feelings and I love that you use that word uncomfortable, because some other words that often get tied to them are dark feelings or shadowy feelings and those are, you know, natural words to describe them but ultimately it's like they're neutral. They're just life force that is bumping up against something that's holding on. You know, I was just at a fire. I was aggressively decluttering this weekend it's the Gemini full moon and I don't know something came over me and I decluttered some major stuff and I came upon this notebook of resentments that I had written with a mentor's guidance and looking at my part, and I mean there were hundreds of pages of writing and I was like, and this was from years ago and I was like I'm ready, I'm ready to let this go. And I just went to a friend's house where she has a fire pit and I was like it's going to be this solemn releasing, you know, and her, she was there to friends, were there, her kids were there, and all my resentments are just blazing while her kids roast marshmallows over. So amazing. And it was like yes, like. This is what happens when we allow flow to happen.
Jenna: Yeah, and I feel that for many of us, that state of flow, of being like, of inhabiting ourselves, of life moving through us If we're in this camp of not feeling enough or we're in this camp of feeling too much and it's unsafe and it's unsteadying Either of these extreme ends of the spectrum can make it really just difficult to feel like you can show up to flow with the magic that is present in life and to capture it in little moments. I have a pretty domestic life, so I'm often capturing a lot of magic in the domestic. It's not like I'm going off into the I'm in Australia so it's not like I'm going off into the Australian bush for rituals by myself every morning, away from the family, in order to feel alive. But this needs to happen inside the constraints of just like regular living. And this is it's almost like an emotional education that I know I certainly didn't receive. And when we think about how much education we have for supporting the development of our mind and our intellect and our really our more linear, the more linear sides of our capacity as humans, these things are all great. I think let's not stop doing those, but let's also balance it with some skills to inhabit the emotional bandwidth and spectrum and depth of our body. Because these are skills that I never had and I was into my late 20s before I looked around and thought, is this really it and what am I missing? Because I just don't really feel like I know how to live and do life well.
Mary: Can you imagine I mean, I went to Catholic school my whole life. I can't even well I can imagine what it might have been like had there been breaks during nuns teaching me multiplication and religion to express how I felt through finger painting. You know like I mean. It would be a very different world. And that brings me to my next question, which is right now as, as we're recording this, something that's going on for the school is the future is embodied conference, where you have interviewed amazing influencers in the world of embodiment, and and not just embodiment in feeling more of your body personally, but the impact of embodiment on the collective, and I wondered if you might share a bit about just what you see as the impact of a more embodied future.
Jenna: The very good question. I have children, so I'm personally very invested in us having a well society that functions and thrives, and I don't. I think we have a lot of blessings in our society and I'm a white woman so I also hold a lot of privilege in our society, but we've got a long way to go. I don't think you would turn on the news Most people are, most parents wouldn't necessarily turn on the news and think, gee, I'm super optimistic about future generations, longevity on this planet. I feel like that's a factor that impacts a lot of people's ability or decision whether they want to even have children or not. I know my partner and I discussed that, and whether you're a mother or not is actually irrelevant, because when we're thinking of where we are now, how did we, as the culture, get so collectively disembodied and how can we create a new future? Because our bodies, as we've spoken about, our bodies, are the ones that are holding the past we're holding. We have been shaped by the toil, the burden, the privilege, the oppression that the ancestors that have gone before us and that might show up in our bank account in a presence or an absence of intergenerational wealth. It might show up in our education, in terms of the opportunities that we've had. But it also shows up in the in, like the deep imprints of what our body is holding. Just to give this as an example, I come from a lineage of sugar cane farmers. So my father, my mother, grandparents everyone is like in the dirt, toiling literally with their hands in the soil, and they've done very well for themselves through hard work, like prioritizing hard work above all, including sometimes above family, which to me is like a controversial value, prioritization. And so then, when it comes to my generation and I'm doing this whole feminine embodiment thing, it's like I'm not afraid of some hard work. Sure, happy to show up for some hard work, but is that the number one value in my life? Cognitively, the answer is no, but very often my body has another habit, it has another orientation and it's doing something else. When I'm like, hey, this isn't what I want, why does my body keep wanting to show up, expecting a problem when I open an email, or feeling like I've just never got enough done, even when I've produced plenty today? So, personally, one of the edges over however long I've been doing this has been this exploration of like my body holds this tendency towards working so hard, and that's not what I want. Now, that's a very micro example and I'm a pretty privileged person, like on the spectrum of things, but I feel like if we took, you know, 50 different women from 50 different continents and put them in the room well, let's say we took 100 women from different continents and put them in the room these would be the participants in our coaching certification program, like they each have a story of their own, shaped by their culture and their family and their location, and when we think about how we've gotten here, it just really makes me a bit worried for how we're going to continue to go forward, because I feel like we do really need a bit of a revolution in terms of more of the feeling feminine. We need to stop saying that these feeling sensitive bodies are a burden and that they have no place in the boardroom, and instead really see them as a gift. And so at the conference, we've been speaking a lot about what does it mean to be a bit of a suburban activist in an embodied way, and what role does feminism play in the way that we might market our businesses or do commerce in ways that are not extractive? So there's a wide range of conversations, because I feel that embodiment is a really the important piece of how we're going to navigate our way forward to make better decisions. It's not the solution to all of the world's problems. There's so many different solutions that we need, but on a really personal level, I think it's a skill of rehumanizing ourselves so that we can make better, more full spectrum decisions as humans.
Mary: I love ending on that note of just the connection between embodiment and our full humaneness, because, even though we specialize in feminine embodiment, like you said, the feminine is a universal energy that is an essential piece of restoring our full humanity.
Jenna: Yeah, and it sounds super new agey, which is good and great and fine. And also I can just imagine having a conversation with my cane farming mother and saying like we need a return of the feminine. And that's, in a lot of ways, while I feel like it's important, it is true that we need more of the feminine, but the feminine is actually just the spectrum of our humanity that has been persecuted and shamed and silenced and diminished for many, many generations. So whether you're in a woman's body or a man's body or whatever kind of body you're in, all of us holds the diminishing of that end of the spectrum. And as we diminish that end of our humanity, we diminish the capacity for our humanity and we become much more tolerant for things like genocide and war and the harming of animals and the harming of other humans. We become desensitized to these things when we narrow our spectrum of humanity, and so that to me doesn't seem new agey at all. It actually just seems like caring for each other on the planet.
Mary: Absolutely, and for people who are listening, who are feeling this spark of yes, opening wide more, please. You know, to take the feminine embodiment coaching certification. You can either be pursuing a career change or you can be just wanting to deepen your experience of embodiment, and I'm curious if there's anything that you might share with them, and particularly to those who may feel intimidated by the saturation of coaching and coaches on social media and you know, when I speak to clients and future participants, that's one of the biggest things that comes up is like how on earth would I do this? And everybody's already doing it, so I'm late to the party, so why even begin? You know? And, yeah, just wondered if you had anything that you might like to share on that.
Jenna: I think that is an interesting feeling of being late to the party. So a few things. About half the people that come to join us in the program are already a practitioner or a. They might be an existing coach or have an interest in yoga or, like you, marry movement background or group facilitation. So about half the people that come to join us already have toes or feet in this world and they know that there's something a lot deeper that they want to bring to their work. The other half are kind of like me, coming to this work saying, well, I used to be a clinical hospital pharmacist so I came to this work because I knew there was something there really personally for me, and it then expanded and flourished into a profession that centered my passions as well. So about half the people are kind of quite new to the field, maybe still deciding if they want to be a coach or pursue that professionally, but knowing this is a skill set that is going to make them like a fabulously well-rounded human. And I have seen during my not quite full decade but about that in the industry, that the concepts around the feminine, around embodiment and around coaching, like the demand for this, the interest in this continues to grow and continues to flourish, and when we're in this space, depending on who we're following, it can very much feel like a saturated market where everything's already been said. This often ties into our own fears around visibility and will I actually have anything unique to contribute, and so what I would say to this is I think those fears are really, really valid. We have seen the uptake and the growth of these industries, and yet when we're in this microcosm like we know these people and we're in these worlds it's actually really interesting to also look at who lives on the street with you, who lives in your suburb. I can go around my suburb telling everyone what I do, and no one has ever fricking heard of it. They're like what is that? Can you send me your website? Do you have a podcast? Like people are hungry for this, and so I feel like when we're in a microcosm, it can feel like everyone's talking about it, but the reality is that, collectively, we're so far from it that we're still very much in the early stages of this the growth, I think, of this industry, and even though there may be a lot of people speaking about or around these concepts, I'm a firm believer that these arts don't awaken in us because it's some master design in existential torment. I believe they awaken in us because we've been chosen to contribute something to the constellation of practitioners, and so that requires courage to really think. Could I have some lived, embodied experience, some unique perspective, philosophy or politics that could marry with this particular model or style or skill of working to create something that's actually really unique, that has something profound and distinct to say? That's a pretty big contemplation to come out, but yet, if I look at who's on our teaching team yourself, for example, you have this delicious like we're on a podcast called Come to your Senses what a ravishing name and there's such a distinct flavor and style in the way that you do your work. And that's totally different to Kate from the teaching team, who marries grief and pleasure and has a body of work that is the alchemy of around how to deeply grieve in ways that don't break you open and destabilize you. And that's totally different again from Sharon, who has a real passion for looking at women of color and how they can decolonize their pleasures to come back into their body. Such unique, totally different flavors that I could never do, but that is just perfect for your exact experience, locations, passions, politics, and so I think it can be a big jump to perhaps say, for example, listen to somebody's podcast, like you marry and think like she knows what she's doing, she's got it all sorted out, she knows what she's here to talk about. How am I ever going to get to that point? Because it can seem so far and intimidating in the future. But I have seen we've had like 600 women through this program now women, humans and souls of women identifying identities. And the fact of the matter is everybody has that spark. It just takes nurturing to discern it and to see it and to value it, and that's a journey of personal mastery.
Mary: Amen. You know, that's something I so appreciate about this method is, when you become a feminine embodiment coach, you don't necessarily have to go tell people to get more embodied or even work directly with embodiment. My guy was a nutritionist recently and I was really excited for the appointment because they are backed by an intuitive eating and health at every size philosophy and I was like God, I wish we could get some FEC up in this place Because everything they were saying was great and it was so up in the head and cerebral. And so it's like, like you said, like sex, which I mean if you work in engineering and you consult with people who want to grow in the engineering industry, you can bring embodiment and feminine embodiment to that practice and see incredible results. And so I just really appreciate the versatility and the invitation to that spark as an invitation rather than just a fantasy.
Jenna: Yeah, Without doubt there is some magic there, and the discovery of that magic I feel like that's part of inhabiting self, like figuring out who you are and what you're here to say and what you want to take a stand for. That's part of the mastery of inhabiting yourself, which is the literal definition of embodiment, whether you want to use that word or not.
Mary: Bringing form to the formless. Yeah, totally so, off the record, I'll edit this part out, but is there anything I haven't asked that maybe you would like me to ask or that you want to talk about?
Jenna: Okay, great, I'm really good. I've really enjoyed where we've been. I think it's been great.
Mary : Awesome. Well, thank you from the bottom of my heart. My pelvic bowl, my toes, Every part of my embodiment is grateful to your embodiment and if you're interested in joining the coaching certification or just learning more about Jenna and her body of work, you can go to Jenna Ward and just so grateful for you to be part of this podcast, part of my community and part of this world. Thank you.
Jenna: Thank you so much, Mary, it's been delicious.
It is with such great pleasure that I introduce you today to my coaching mentor, friend and feminine embodiment muse, Jenna Ward.
Jenna is the founder of The School of Embodied Arts & The Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification; a training that COMPLETELY changed my life, both personally and professionally.
Not a day goes by where I do not feel the impact that Feminine Embodiment Coaching has had on my life, and I am so excited to share this groundbreaking work with you.
In this beguiling conversation, you’ll discover:
The often misunderstood concept of sensitivity, and how to redefine it as a potent source of strength and leadership
How success is not a one-size-fits-all concept, and how to pull back from the pressure of constant productivity to create more satisfaction and sustainability in your life
My personal story as a CEO, and how embracing sensitivity has been a game-changer, not only for my well-being but for the culture and success of my entire company
How the contrast between the masculine drive for action and the feminine capacity for creativity can create flow and freedom in your life and work
This conversation is designed for anyone looking to bring more feminine aliveness, sustainable leadership, emotional range and rich satisfaction to their lives. (Also, if you are a coach or are considering a coaching career, it is not to be missed.)
LINKS FROM THE SHOW:
Jenna Ward
The Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification
The SOEA Podcast
SOEA + Jenna Instagram
