On today’s show is HeatherAsh Amara, the author of the best-seller Warrior Goddess Training, The Warrior Goddess Way, and The Toltec Path of Transformation: Embracing the Four Elements of Change. She is dedicated to inspiring depth, creativity, and joy by sharing the most potent tools from a variety of world traditions. In our conversation today, we dive heavily into feminine leadership, into women and trauma and history, into judgment, judgment of others, and self-judgment, and into what’s starting to happen in the realm of collective leadership. Stay tuned for HeatherAsh Amara!

I rap with HeatherAsh Amara about the history of women:

• The disconnect between the freedoms women legally have in our society and the way we feel and are treated because of our history
• Why we, as women, think other people’s desires are more important than ours
• Why we compare ourselves to other women

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Why we sometimes get caught in spiritual judgment, and how to step out of it
• How to truly befriend your body, mind, and spirit
• When to shed fears of exposure and step into leadership

Links:

• The Warrior Goddess Way on Amazon
• Warrior Goddess Training on Amazon
• The Toltec Path of Transformation: Embracing the Four Elements of Change on Amazon
• Daily Sparks, a tiny inspirational morning email to ignite your day
• HeatherAsh Amara’s website

Related podcasts:

• Deep Health = Kind Voices in your Head with Deborah Zucker
• Woman, The Emotional Wisdom of Women in Business with Katie Krimitsos
• Feeling Your Eroticism, Love + Self-Love with Katie Silcox
• Barbara Stanny: Women’s Path to Power through Money
• Superheroine Dharma Workshop for Pro Healer, Yoga Teachers, & Wellness Pros
• Busting Glass Ceilings on the Dharmic Path with Grace Edison

Show Highlights:

• 2:55 – In order to slow down and tap into your desires, you must have a practice that gives you tools to start coming back into yourself, and shift away from trying to be something else.
• 10:00 – From an early age, we are taught to compare ourselves to other women, and to be judgmental of them. By recognizing when we are doing this, and redirecting our thoughts with compassion for ourselves and for the other woman, we can take steps to heal ourselves and our future generations of this pattern.
• 14:00 – There are three things you can do to get in touch with the Self and live a more easeful, happy life:

1. Desire: Do more of the things you love!
2. Cleanse: With compassion, ask yourself what you are believing that isn’t true. Then clean up the old behavior, change it, and start living in a new, more conscious way.
3. Silence: Consciously bring more stillness into your life.

• 16:55 – Don’t apologize unless you’re actually sorry! Too many of us say ‘sorry’ more than we should, and this word undermines our confidence and self-worth.
• 23:20 – HeatherAsh shares two main psychological reasons women don’t want to step into leadership roles:

1. The dominant paradigm of leadership is that the leader has power over someone else and oppresses the other person. But leadership doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact, the most effective leaders are co-collaborators!
2. Stepping into leadership makes a person, and especially a woman, much more vulnerable. Our ancestral patterns tell us it isn’t safe to be so exposed.

But women are absolutely needed in leadership roles, and we should step into them past the fear of being exposed, in a collaborative and co-creative way.

• 35:00 -Instead of separating ourselves from other people and other groups, we should respect our diversity and celebrate our interconnectedness.

Favorite Quotes:

• “Desire is super intelligent! You want to pay attention to that stuff!” – Cate Stillman
• “The world is so busy, there’s so much going on, that if you’re not paying attention, you can look up and ten years has passed.” – HeatherAsh Amara
• “Who am I now, and who do I want to be next?” – Cate Stillman
• “While we have tremendous external freedoms, we don’t have the same internal freedom.” – HeatherAsh Amara
• “We all need more stillness in our lives.” – HeatherAsh Amara
• “More of us need to be willing to step into leadership. We’re needed! Our voice, our experience, our perspective, is so, so needed.” – HeatherAsh
• “We don’t serve anyone around us when we stay small and safe.” – HeatherAsh Amara

BIO:

HeatherAsh Amara is the author of the bestselling Warrior Goddess Training, The Warrior Goddess Way, and The Toltec Path of Transformation. She is dedicated to inspiring depth, creativity, and joy by sharing the most potent tools from a variety of world traditions. HeatherAsh studied and taught extensively with don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, and continues to teach with the Ruiz family. Raised in Southeast Asia, HeatherAsh has traveled the world from childhood and is continually inspired by the diversity and beauty of human expression and experience. She brings this open-hearted, inclusive worldview to her writings and teachings, which are a rich blend of Toltec wisdom, European shamanism, Buddhism, and Native American ceremony.