Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 0:00
PH, Happy New Year, dear sisters, it is incredible that we have made it to 2026 and for some of us, that might be a bigger feat than others, but regardless, I hope that your new year has started off absolutely superbly, and I want to make sure it's as exquisite and, of course, as satisfied as possible. So with this podcast, I'm going to be issuing you a new year's challenge, not even a resolution, a challenge, a way to shift your entire mode of being for the rest of the year and hopefully the rest of your life. That's going to make a big impact. I can't wait to tell you what it is. Welcome to the satisfied woman podcast. I'm your host. Alanna Kaivalya. This podcast is dedicated to helping women lean into their femininity and rediscover the power of their feminine gifts. We take a look at what it means to be a modern woman and how we can live a satisfied life on our own terms. So if you can believe it, it is January of 2026, but I promise that no matter when you happen to be listening to this podcast, it's going to be relevant for you, because the challenge I'll issue today is going to break through something that I'm 99 point 9,000,000% sure most of us as women are guilty of, and it's something that's causing us stress or distress. It's draining our energy. It's leading to burnout. It's contributing to our feeling of overwhelm, and it is not allowing us to live a satisfied life. Now, if you're new to the podcast, and I've had a bunch of new subscribers recently, so welcome. My name is Alanna Kaivalya. I am the author of the way of the satisfied woman, reclaiming feminine power. So if you don't have the book yet, make sure you grab it. And if you haven't come to visit me over at the satisfied woman.com make sure you do that. I've got a ton of resources there for you, including my rooted membership, which is where all of the women who participate in this work in my world come to support each other and to hold themselves accountable to some of the changes and transformations and ideas and concepts that I present to you here on this podcast, because telling you about something is one thing. Giving you an idea is one thing. Giving you a concept is one thing, but it doesn't make it concrete until we actually embody it. And what's true for most all of us as women, is that we have been trained and ingrained into behaviors and thought patterns that actually don't serve us, that are meant to keep us small, meant to keep us burnt out, meant to keep us questioning our own intuition, our own sense of knowing, and when you've lived an entire lifetime where you're second guessing yourself or giving yourself away or over giving your entire nervous system actually calibrates around that, and that's what we we, all of us, start to believe or accept as normal. Now I can tell you it's not normal, and you know that too somewhere in the core of your being, you know that sense of discomfort isn't supposed to be there. You know that sense of wanting to say no, but being pressured to say yes is not okay. You know that staying quiet or playing small is not giving the world the best of who you are, and that level of discomfort that lives inside of you is like a seed. And you know, as well as I do, seeds grow. So when that seed starts to grow and you start to feel more discomfort, more you know of that rub inside of you with what's going on in life, in the world in general, then I'm glad you're here. That's when usually women start to wake up and they find work like this with me. So I'm thrilled that you're here. Thank you for being here, and I want to affirm and acknowledge that you're overwhelmed, your discomfort, your burnout, is not meant for you. It's not it's a symptom of living in a world that wasn't built and wasn't designed with us in mind. Now, no slight to the world. I'm not blaming anyone. This is just our culture. This is where we've grown up. This is the world we live in. And there have been many, many generations and 1000s of years of training and affirmation and patterning that have led us here. Right? There's no one person to blame or at fault, and most people really they don't question it, which is why. Why most people continue to affirm some of the things that lead us to feel small or uncomfortable or taken advantage of, or whatever it is that we're feeling right. I like to call it improper training. It's all just improper training. So thank goodness you're here to get some information, hopefully some upgrades to your operating system and some new ways of thinking, some perspective shifts that help you make sense of that discomfort and start to regulate through that dysregulation. Because what happens when you've lived for all of these years with this discomfort, these assumptions that you're meant to play small, that the needs of others come first, that you're meant to over give until you break. Is that when you change it, it's going to feel uncomfortable, it's going to feel like a shake up, and furthermore, the people around you, when they start to witness you changing or you behaving differently, it's going to shake them up too. And women are very sensitive. I always say that we are the emotional calibrators of our space, and when we feel the discomfort or even the disappointment of others, it often makes us shrink back into old patterns. So this is why I run a membership, and why I do one on one coaching and group coaching. It's because when we want to shrink back, when we want to go back to our old operating system, parts of us or the things that we used to do that kept us uncomfortable,

Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 6:40
it doesn't allow us to move forward, and we need support in that upgrade. We need support in holding our new way of being, our more deeply embodied feminine nature, until it feels like who we are. It is who we are. Trust me, you're going to feel more free. You're going to feel more at ease that burnout will burn itself out. You're going to release the things that were no longer meant for you anyway. You're going to be able to let go of what's not yours. But if you've been holding it for so long, there is that pattern or that moment, and it can be a long moment of shake up and recalibration until you truly own your feminine power. This is not an overnight process. I wish it was, trust me, I wish I could just do this podcast. And I've been doing this podcast now for over a year, I think about a year and a half at this point, I wish I could just do this podcast, give me the concepts. Have you integrate them, and poof, you are the satisfied woman. But it takes practice. And the other thing that I know for sure is that women can't do this alone, and that's not that's not to our detriment. That's actually one of our great personal strengths, and it's one of our fundamental qualities as a feminine woman, that we have power in communion, that we are strong when we communicate with one another, that when we are connected, that we actually are empowered by it, women in isolation, women who are completely alone, struggle, we struggle, we flail. I talk to women all of the time, even women who are at home raising children, if they're at home alone all day, even Yes, the kids are there, but kids aren't peers. They feel very lonely. And that's another way that our society, our culture, has been designed to keep women small and uncomfortable and unquestioning and second guessing ourselves, because you know as well as I do, what actually happens when women come together, when you have groups of women who come together, that is what changes the world. Okay, so now I know that I've kept you on the edge of your seat for my new year's challenge, right? I wanted to give you all a little bit of background. Like I said, I've had a bunch of new subscribers recently. Thank you. Thank you for being here. It's a real validating signal for me how needed this work is, and I know that it's needed, but the fact that women are finding it, that they're subscribing, that they're tuning in, that they're joining the rooted membership, that they're reaching out, they're reading the book, they're being transformed by this work. It's I'm deeply grateful. I'm deeply, deeply grateful, and I'm so glad you're here. So this challenge for this year, it's radical. You ready? I like to do radical things, and frankly, a woman, a fully empowered feminine woman, is radical. And I want to affirm that femininity and womanhood is not quiet, it's not meek, it's not even soft, it's not mild. I. It's wild, it's untamed, it's emotional, but with emotional depth, it's intuitive, it's truth seeking. It's powerful, but it's powerful in its own way, right? Masculine power and feminine power look different. They are both powerful. They are both equally powerful, but they look different. And for the feminine, woman who has agency, has satisfaction, has sovereignty, is empowered. That is a radical statement. I had an incredible call yesterday. It was actually my one of my last calls on my coaching certification program, which I'm going to be launching, the next coaching certification program course. It's a six month course at the end of February. If you're interested, make sure you apply. But I had my second to last call yesterday, and we were talking about how, you know, really, we are at the forefront of women owning their power. If you think about your mother, your grandmother, any woman who has come before you, even women 10 to 15 to 20 years ago, they had less power, choice and agency than you do now, than we do now. Now, I know that we're not 100% there yet either. But we have opportunities at this moment, at this time, on the planet that we never had before. And so it's not like we have a well trod path before us. You know, men have been successful for millennia. If a man wants to be successful, he just follows the successful man that went before him. For us women, we don't have a lot of that. And look, I wish that were not true. And yes, of course there are women who have been successful, but they are not as plentiful as men. There isn't that well worn path. And frankly, and I was actually speaking about this yesterday with my coaching clients, my coaching certification clients, many of the women that we named as successful did it on a man's terms. They did it in a man's way. Very few women have been able to make their mark and achieve success, satisfaction, sovereignty in this life on their own terms. So the pressure is on, because the time is now. Now we can do it now. We have at least a little bit of examples. We have the tools we need. We have the choices and agency that we've always required for that. And we now have the framework we understand now these days, finally, what femininity is, not just because, you know, of the book, but because women are finally stepping into this work and owning their power. Okay, so that is to say, this is radical. Most everything we do to become a satisfied woman will be radical. And this challenge I'm issuing for you this year is deeply radical. And you're right. I came up with this in the last couple of days as I was working with some of my one on one on one, coaching clients and hearing some of the things that I say over and over to them. And the challenge for 2026 My dear sister, is ready just stop. That's my challenge to you. Just stop. Women have been trained to overdo, to over give, to push themselves to the brink, to give themselves away and and also trained to feel and believe that if they don't do that, that their whole world will fall apart if we don't do the laundry, no one will if we don't put the dishes away, no one will if we don't work Late at night and on the weekends, that project won't get done if we don't make sure that our partner is picked up from the airport, they will apparently, I guess, remain stranded there. We take on things that aren't ours all of the time we pick up the slack for others, we do things that they don't even ask us to do, and what that does is it leaves us drained, burnt out and resentful of doing them. And those qualities being drained bring being burnt out and being resentful. They foster disconnection. Now I have a pH, D in mythology and psychology, and so I understand a lot about humans relationships, how the human mind works, our belief systems, what connects us, and of all of the things that I've studied. One thing that I've come to know across both masculinity and femininity, this is a simple human function, is that disconnection will always lead to our downfall. Connection will lead to greatness. It will lead to great. They will lead to gratitude. It will lead to feeling good. It will lead to happiness, it will lead to thriving and success. Disconnection is going to lead to all of the things that are bad, loneliness, apathy, depression, anxiety, second guessing ourselves, worthlessness, okay, big lists on both sides. So the short public service announcement there is avoid disconnection at all costs.

Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 15:46
But when we as women over give and overdo, when we take on things that are not ours, either because we feel obligated to, because we've overtly been asked to, or because there's an implicit expectation for us to it leads to us being burnt out, depleted, drained and resentful, and that's going to contribute to disconnection, whether that's a feeling of being disconnected from our partner, our family, our career, our sense of joy, our place in the world, and That disconnection is isolation, and I've already let you know that isolation for the feminine woman is a soul killer. We lose ourselves in isolation. We are the connectors. We are the connectors of our spaces. We are the emotional calibrators of our spaces. So we need to preserve connection, and we can only do that when we feel a sense of energetic clarity. And energetic clarity for the feminine woman comes when we give of our energy and of ourselves, when it when we have a full bodied Yes, when our whole body says, Yes, feminine women are embodied. We are embodied. We feel everything. Now. If that sounds foreign to you, I get it. It makes sense. Men, many, many women. And I could even go as far as saying most women are disembodied because of this world, environment, culture that we grew up in. We're taught to put on a lot of masculine armor, second guess ourselves, try to override our feminine intuition with logical thinking. We're diminished at every turn. We're dismissed. We're devalued when we have an emotional reaction to anything. We've learned to play small and take up less space so that we'll belong. So if you don't feel embodied, it's not because anything's wrong with you. It's simply because you have been improperly trained, just by this world that was not built for us. Okay, you can get it back. It's always been there, is the truth. It's always been there. You've always felt it. It's more likely that you've just suppressed it or ignored it. Now I have a couple of podcasts, so if you haven't, if you are new, I want you to go back, especially listen to podcast number 25 okay, that's kind of the clincher podcast. That's the one that I send everybody to first. So make sure you go and listen to podcast number 25 that's where you're gonna learn the sacred No. Okay, now I know again, a lot of the stuff I'm saying, I think sometimes is radical, but the phrase of the feminine is no. The phrase of the masculine is yes, okay, that doesn't mean that men are always supposed to say yes and women are always supposed to say no. That means that the psychic energy of femininity holds her boundaries and space with that sacred No, and the psychic energy of masculinity expands and holds his space with that sacred energy of yes, okay, all of us has masculine and feminine within us at all times. For those of us who embody more of the feminine polarity, we actually want to lead with no, and I know that that can feel scary and destabilizing when the world has trained you to say yes, even when you want to say no, because if you say no, you risk rejection, and rejection can be scary, our minds, our bodies, our biology as a woman is really encoded with not just a desire for belonging, but a necessity for belonging. We often gained protection in our tribal systems through belonging and protection. Is important for the feminine woman, you know, particularly if we have small children or if we're pregnant, we need extra protection. And look, you know, women are strong. Yes, women are very, very strong. We are resilient. We are flexible. But physically, our physical bodies are less strong than a man's physical body, and so historically in our tribes, having the protection of the tribe and the men around us was very important. So if you extrapolate that forward into our society today, into our bodies today, our bodies haven't evolved from that. Our bodies, we still live with this same encoded biological DNA and nervous systems of our tribal ancestors. We still live with that. Now, obviously we live in different times and circumstances, but we still have that biological that psychological need for belonging. And so the idea of saying saying no and suddenly not belonging to our community, our family, our friends group, whoever, our tribe, our our job inside is encoded as near certain death. So if it feels scary, I understand you're going to be okay. This is a moment that we have to start recalibrating our nervous system, then safety can come through refinement, that safety can come through clear choice. Because what's true is that saying yes, when your body means no, is a self betrayal. It's a self betrayal. It doesn't actually foster connection. And those around you can feel that self betrayal, and they actually can feel that disconnection too, so it really serves nobody, okay? So remember the challenge this year is, just stop. Just stop. When you feel the No, when you want to say no, you know you look at you look at your teenager's room. They haven't made their bed again. You've asked them a million times. It's not going to get done unless you do it. I don't want to do it. You just stop. Bed's not gonna get made. Just stop when the boss asks you to stay late because he can count on you and he knows you're gonna stay late and get the job done while he goes home early for his cocktail hour, and your whole body says, I don't want to do that. You know, I'm exhausted today. This is your this is your resolution. This is your new year's challenge. You just stop. No, not gonna stay late. No explanation is necessary. You don't have to justify your No, you're gonna lay down this year the things that are not yours or that you do not genuinely want to carry Now, I understand there's things that we're responsible for, and sometimes we have to eat our peas when we have small children. You know, there might be elements of that that feel challenging, and some days we want to lay those down. I know parents don't like to talk about that, but we're all human. I understand that. You know, work needs to happen in order for the bills to be paid, and sometimes we have to get out of bed even when we don't want to. Okay, this isn't, this isn't about those things. This isn't about opting out of your life and existence. This is about reconnecting and realigning with your own desires. Needs, energetic clarity. Stop betraying yourself. Just stop. So when you don't want to make the extra airport pickup for your spouse for the third time this month, you just stop. Guess what? They'll get home when you don't want to make the bed, just stop. You know what the bed might be unmade when you're not willing to make dinner every night of the week. You know what somebody else can you just stop? And maybe Domino's gets called more than normal for a little while. Now, what I want to reassure you, because when you do, just stop, when you start to because I'm giving you permission to do it, right? This is a permission giving Podcast. I'm giving you a permission to just stop. Just stop the thing that is not yours that you don't genuinely want to offer. Your energy, your effort, your expertise, your resources to there will be things that you do, but when you don't want to offer it, you just stop. There is going to be discomfort, and I want to normalize that. That is your nervous system, that is your

Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 24:56
your habits and your patterns in your mind, your. Ah, your neural networks retraining themselves. Now, if you've been doing something, even though you haven't wanted to for a really long time, retraining your nervous system your neural networks isn't instant. It's going to require a little muscle at first, and likely some support. As I mentioned, it's very difficult. I think it's impossible for women, really, to do this alone, because there's too many factors outside of us pressuring us into continuing to overdoing like we always have. That's the norm. Those are the expectations. If we don't meet those expectations, it leads to disappointments. That's where we run into what I call feminine guilt, that precursor guilty feeling that someone may be disappointed. So we're just going to overdo it anyway. So if you feel that collapse, if you feel that shake up, if you see the disappointment coming, then that's what I want you to make sure that you have support, and we have it inside the rooted membership. So come join me at the satisfied woman.com and make sure that as you go through this year, as you affirm this challenge, and you just stop what's not yours, what you no longer want to do, that you have support around holding that line. Because the worst thing that could happen, the worst thing that could happen is that you just stop for a little bit and you realize how much that restores your energy, how much more balanced you feel, how many fucks you actually don't give or never gave about that thing. And now you've got the energy to give to what you truly are called to. And then the panic happens and the collapse happens and you go back to doing it the old way. I don't want 2026 to look for you like 2025 did, right? I don't know what it was about 2025 maybe it was just me. I don't think it was but there was some real heaviness for women in 2025 there was some real big asks that, frankly, I think the universe over asked, you know, a little bit of us, you know, they say that life never gives you anything you Can't handle, I don't know that that's true. Sometimes life over gave in 2025 to a lot of us. And so I think that as a reaction, as a recalibration, as a pendulum swinging back to what can hopefully be a truly new, calibrated center, that you need to overdo the just stop for a minute. So that is my 2026 challenge for all of you, just stop, even if it's one thing, even if you pick one thing to just stop doing. You know what you never actually liked, emptying the dishwasher. You're gonna let somebody else do it, unless you live alone. Then you know what? You're gonna have to probably empty the probably empty the dishwasher. You know what? You never liked mowing your lawn. Guess what? There are people who can do that. You know what? Actually that class that you've been going to every week. You haven't liked going to that class for the last year, but you kept going because people expected you to show up. Just stop. You don't need to explain it. You just need to feel it. And if letting that go, if putting that down, feels right inside of your body, if it gives you more energy to do the things that you want to do that do feel right to you, then just stop and come. Please make sure and tell me how that is going for you. I want to hear what you've stopped. I want to hear what the reactions were. I want to hear if there was any shake up or collapse, and I want to support you all the way through to the finish line, to your greatest satisfaction. So I look forward to seeing you over on my website, in some [email protected], or hopefully inside my rooted membership, and until then, my dear sister, do everything you can to stay satisfied. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai