Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 0:01
If you've ever felt undervalued as a woman, which, let's be honest, what woman hasn't, then this is the podcast for you today. This podcast is going to talk to you about all of the work that you do that largely goes unnoticed, the emotional work, the relational work, the regulatory work of your family systems your friends systems, your career systems, heck, your life systems that really nobody is paying attention to. Well, Sister, I'm paying attention, and I want to name it and help you get the value out of it, because your efforts are incredibly valuable. 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, powerful woman and how we can live a satisfied and sovereign life on our own terms. Visit the hub at the satisfied woman.com now if you haven't yet, make sure you head over to my website, thesatisfiedwoman.com I know nobody goes to websites anymore, but I'm really not on social media, that's a personal choice. You can imagine the 9 million reasons why, as a woman, I don't want to be on social media, so I interact with all my community members, primarily through things on my website, and especially through my rooted membership. That's where women who do this work with me, come to interact, come to be supported. Whether you found me through my book, The Way of the satisfied woman, through one of my online courses, through this podcast here, or even my YouTube channel, most of those women head over to the rooted membership to allow this work to really settle in and percolate and become their new normal, because the insights and information I drop here on the podcast is just that. It's just insights and information. And unless you really live with it, unless you practice it and embody it, it doesn't become permanent change. And often that practice and embodiment comes with a lot of shakeups and dysregulation and some nervousness and some anxiety, which is all totally normal, by the way, but without support, it's easy for this information to simply go by the wayside. We live and operate in a world that wasn't built for us, that wasn't designed to recognize feminine power, that wasn't designed to value an embodied woman in her. I don't know gloriousness and her greatest manifestation and her greatest potential. We as women have been taught for too long to hide, to play small, to play basically the backup singers to everyone else's life. Now, there is absolutely truth and value and amazingness in supporting and being behind other people. So if that's like a great role for you and you're more of that introverted type of person, that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is when women dismiss their own intuition, when they suppress their emotional depth, when they don't speak their needs, when they place their needs behind everyone else's, or never even talk about them or get them met. That is self abandonment. That is self betrayal. That's not just mild introversion or a personality trait, okay, this is women playing small, which is not ever something you're going to hear me validate. Never going to be okay with it. Women are, by nature, not small. If you think about some of the most beautiful and extraordinary qualities of femininity, and there are many just as there are incredible and extraordinary qualities of masculinity, right? For those of you that are new to my podcast, by the way, I mean, I've been doing this podcast for, I think it's over a year and a half. At this point, it could even be almost two years. I'll have to look but for those of you that are new, and I've got a lot of new subscribers recently. You know, I'm here to affirm all of the things that are good in human behavior, whether it be masculine or feminine. I'm not, you know, it's not one to the detriment of the other. I'm not vilifying anybody here. I am revealing problems and places where we can upgrade absolutely both masculinity and femininity have strengths and both have true distortions, things that we in this current modern culture are we're just not doing it well on both sides. All right, now I'm here to tend to the women. I'm here to tend to the feminine woman who is embodied. Good and to make sure that she in her life and this life right now, in this moment, this glorious, incredible moment in time where we have more power agency and choice than we've ever had before. We have more now, even than we had 10 years ago. 20 years ago, I have more power agency and choice than my mother did, and certainly than my grandmother did. And so that affords us not only incredible opportunities, but extraordinary responsibility. The challenge of it is that we don't have well worn pathways that have gone before us to know what a truly embodied, empowered, satisfied, sovereign woman looks like that's why I've done the research, that's why I quite literally wrote the book. That's why I am on this podcast, and that's why I developed my rooted membership, as well as my online courses and online coaching programs. Because I'm hell bent, very, very serious about making sure that this information gets out there and that women start to feel truly empowered as a feminine woman. Okay, so that's my little pep talk. Now all that said, what we're here to do today is to recognize all of the labor that you offer to the world that is probably gone unnoticed and certainly gone unvalued. Now this is invisible labor, labor that you actually don't even possibly know that you're doing, but that is likely costing you your energy, maybe even your sanity, maybe even some of your time, or your expertise or your health, women do a lot, and we're often not seen for it. And you know, I want to name that I had. I had an amazing call the other day with my coaching certification group. So I train other women to become feminine coaches in the same way that I do, so they can help women become more powerfully embodied as well. And if that sounds like a career path you'd like to pursue, I am taking applications for it, and the next round will begin at the end of February. So head over to the satisfied woman.com and you'll find it's right at the top in the nav. You'll find it easily where you can apply to become a certified coach with me. It was one of the last calls, and one of my students said something just absolutely extraordinary. She said, You know, she's an incredible lady. She's got her she's got her own business. She has a couple of kids, she has a husband. She used to have a really high powered corporate career. She's traded it for more holistic work. And she said, you know? And she kind of said it through tears in a really soulful way, I do all this work, I run this business, and no one really notices. My husband just thinks so, you know, it's She's over there, just doing her little thing. The kids don't even really ask her about it, you know, they just let her take her time, or they try to bother her while she's doing her stuff. And no one really notices. No one questions it. No one says, Wow, you're doing such an incredible job. And the truth is, her clients, her students, the people she works with, come to her in deep crisis because there's nowhere else to go. Who else do people go to when they're in deep crisis and need big transformation, or their hands held, or their hearts mended? Who do they go to but us? Women. They come to us women. This is not extra work. This is not optional work. This is essential. And look whether you're doing this as a paid endeavor, as something like a coach or a teacher or an instructor or a guide, or whether you're doing this in the most unpaid way, as a member of your family or in your community or in your family cohort, this is unbelievably energetically taxing. It create. It is, it is an enormous skill set. It's a gift that you're giving them. It's not obligatory. You don't have to do this. But something I've been saying for a long time is that women are the emotional calibrators of their spaces, and there's a couple of reasons for that. They're actually really powerful, psychological and biological reasons for that, but women, we will feel the tension or the discomfort or the unhappiness in our spaces. First, we may or may not understand the root of it or be able to articulate it, but we're going to feel it because women
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 9:50
are embodied. We one of our superpowers is our emotional depth. I think our two greatest superpowers are our emotional depth and our intuition. One of our greatest quality, one of our greatest abilities, is receptivity. So these allow us to feel into our spaces, not in a magical way. Right? Emotions are real. The way that it changes a human's behavior, their outlook, even like the level of sweat on their skin, is something that we can pick up. It's measurable, and we want to create stasis. We want to make things okay. That's where safety lies, or at least where we believe safety lies. If there's too much upset or unhappiness or discomfort or anger, we want to bring things back to stasis, because a lot of safety comes in that it's difficult to get protection and providership and trust and cherishing some of the things that are really important for women when those around us are unstable, emotionally compromised, in An angered state, challenged going through some sort of major stress, and so in order to bring safety for us and whatever community unit we're in, we do the labor of recalibration. Now, I mean, if you think about it, it then makes complete sense why so many women are therapists or healthcare providers, why so many women are teachers, why so many women are moving into the coaching space, and also why so many women are good at it? This is something that in our feminine psychology is almost like a natural gift. Now I'm not saying that it's not a gift that can be honed. There's a lot of tools and techniques and ways to do this where you make sure that you're not just giving yourself away and depleting yourself unnecessarily, because that's the cost. That's the cost of being the emotional calibrator in such a way that isn't properly valued, or that you don't have some sort of lever to pull to hit the eject button if you need to. And so that's what I wanted to name today in this podcast I wanted to really share with you, if you think about it, and I know, look, I hope that if you're let's say you're listening to this podcast, driving in your car, and you're zooming down the road, maybe heading home from work and you're having that aha moment that oh my gosh, that's me. I've been doing that my whole life. You know? I grew up in an emotionally unstable household, and in order to try and create greater safety, I was the people pleaser. I was the one who tried to make everyone else happy. I read the discomfort or the unhappiness on my mom or dad's face, maybe even before they knew it, and I rushed in to try to make them smile or laugh or giggle, or maybe said the thing at the dinner table so that things wouldn't fall apart, to try to keep everyone up. But what is, what that often is, is at our own expense. It's often at our own expense, and that's where it becomes problematic. That's where we call it invisible labor, or unpaid labor. Now I'm not saying that everybody should give you $1 for making them happy. I'm also talking about this in a very metaphorical way, right? Payment or reciprocity comes in a lot of ways, where we become depleted, where we become taken advantage of, where we become self abandoning, where we give too much of ourselves away, where we're not getting bolstered enough, that's where the problem lies, and that's what I heard when this student of mine the other day said, you know, Alanna, I do this amazing work, and really nobody notices. And it's not that I need a cheering section, but somehow we need the world to see this essential thing that we do as women, whether we do it naturally, whether we do it by default, whether we do it as part of our career. I think it's time for the world, our family, our communities, to understand that this isn't just a free gift. This is really highly valuable work. So let's talk a little bit about what that might look like. Because, like I said, I don't want you to suddenly cut off your kindness. That's not what we're here to do. We want to keep connecting. We want that good calibration, but in a way that doesn't deplete us. So I'm thinking about, you know, for Okay, let me back up even further. First of all, if you are the woman, and I'm going to bet that you are, especially if you listen. This podcast, and have gotten this far, you know, and you're a woman, that as a young girl, you did a lot of this type of emotional, relational, regulatory work in your family unit, that you might have been the kid that your siblings went to when things got tricky, that you were the one that they came to for advice, or that you were the one that tried to keep the family copacetic, maybe they didn't even realize that it wasn't copacetic because you did such a good job. So just be kind and patient with yourself, that this is a long ingrained nervous system and neural pattern for you that you have survived this long because you notice first and quickly and often when someone is starting to get emotionally out of whack, And you rush in to try and recalibrate and fix them, but without allowing yourself to be held or supported in return. One of the things that I do a lot with my one on one coaching clients, I have one on one coaching clients that come to me to help develop sovereign businesses so that they can really earn and attract, magnetize their own money and abundance through their gifts and their magic. And the other biggest kind of work that I do is with relationships, women who are either in challenging relationships and they're not sure whether they want to stay or just, you know, hopefully recalibrate them, or women who want to attract the kind of relationship that they've never had because they continuously have relationships that are dysregulated, challenging, let's say the Word toxic, those consistent patterns often and hear this lovingly come from us, not because we're doing anything wrong, but because we become so good at propping other people up that people who need propping seek us out. We need to hit the brakes on the propping a little bit because it's not allowing us to receive the level of care and support that we actually need. This work is draining when we are the emotional regulators of people who cannot regulate themselves. We never get the reciprocity. We never get our own time or space to be refueled. We collapse our own boundaries and an unboundaried woman is an unsafe woman is a depleted woman is a woman who is burnt out. So strong boundaries are going to be your biggest source, resource of repletion. If that's a word, I think that's where I just made it a word. As you move through being the emotional calibrator of your space. Okay, so a couple of things you want to ask yourself, are these spaces, places or relationships that you want to work in? Are they? You know, the answer could be yes. It could be no. There isn't a right answer. There may be people that you feel are absolutely worth the work, the energy you may as you listen to this, as this knowledge starts to settle into your body. Realize that there are some people in your life who are simply dysregulated. They cannot regulate themselves. This is not their fault. It doesn't make them bad people, but it doesn't lessen or diminish their impact or even potential harm on you. They may be people who, as children, were never taught to regulate. They as children, they never understood how to maintain or contain their own relational or emotional experiences, if they had households that were chaotic, if they had parents that were unpredictable, if they had any kind of abuse in the home, if they never resolved those things through their own therapy or their own deep work, they may now be adults that don't have any kind of boundaries around emotional regulation, and so they just dump it all on you.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 19:36
They just dump it all on you every time they feel a wobble or an emotional reaction, it's almost like emotional vomit, and it just goes in your direction, because that's all they've known. Okay, so we're not vilifying anyone. I just want to recognize, and if that's the case, then each of us as individuals. Rules really does, like as a part of cleaning up our own street, needs to understand our own regulation and our own emotional containment. Yes, sometimes other people can be helpful, but if it's the same person all the time and never back in the other direction, that's depletion, that's lack of boundaries that for you, my dear sister, is self abandonment. Okay? So just notice, if any of that exists in your world, and if it does, it is very likely that a level of greater support for you will be incredibly helpful. Listening to a podcast is great, right? That's why I do it. I want to give you lots of information. It's very difficult to turn this information into impact. It's very difficult to turn these concepts into something concrete without support and practice. So that's why I run the rooted membership as a place for you to come when you start to understand these ideas, notice these patterns when you start to practice them, they can actually feel this regulating for you, as well as whoever's around you. If you're used to being the emotional receptacle that they just trash into and suddenly you stop, it could actually cause a bigger shakeup than your nervous system currently can hold on your own, and I believe firmly that women cannot do this work alone. We're not we're just not built that way. We thrive in community connection and communion, and we particularly thrive with the support of other safe women. So I strongly recommend that you get support, if it's not with me at rooted membership or one on one coaching, find it and as you notice where you might be over giving in this essential work that women do, right? We are the emotional regulators of our space. We are the emotional calibrators of our space. Notice where there might be places that you actually do feel supported when you offer that work. Is there anyone who reflects it back to you? Is there anyone who holds you when you have your breakdowns and breakthroughs? Because you're not invincible? None of us is all of us needs a place, kind of a wall, to break against a little bit. Now, if you've read my book, you'll know this. But for the feminine woman, there are four keys to satisfaction, four things that every feminine woman really needs to establish and maintain as a foundation of satisfaction, satisfaction, which is a deeply felt feeling for us, cannot really arise without these four keys. Number one is safety. Number two is security. Number three is trust, both in ourselves and those around us. And number four is cherishing, and specifically cherishing by the masculine now our own internal masculine, yes, can cherish our own internal feminine, and that's a game that we work with, and I talk about that in the podcast too. But when I talk about this, this emotional labor we do for others, I'm going to talk about it in terms of others that there needs to be external masculine forces, partners, people, friends, relatives, family members who are in a healthy masculine enough to be your mooring in your storm. Because what's challenging for the woman who is doing all of this emotional calibration, this relational regulation for everyone else trying to hold the world together. Is it? What happens when she falls apart? Yeah, big pause there. Because if you have been the glue that holds everyone together, and they can't hold themselves, and you finally fall apart. The whole world collapses, right? This is good for nobody, and so that woman, you will likely hold yourself, glue yourself together far past your expiration date, to a point where self care doesn't work, that it's really self rescue, and you are absolutely frazzled, burnt out, depleted toast. We don't want it to get that far. I need to make sure that you recognize your boundaries and what you can actually hold and what you actually don't need to because, just because you've been the emotional regulator and recalibrator For everyone else, or just because you've been the emotional receptacle for everyone else's shit for so long, doesn't mean you have to keep doing it. It means you can stop. And that stop comes with your strong boundaries, your energetic clarity, understanding when you're depleted and when it's time to say no. Now there's a couple of ways. There's actually a lot of ways to do this. I'm going to give you two here on this podcast, and I hope you'll go back and listen to some of my podcast archive for more ways to become a truly boundaried woman. A truly boundaried woman is a healthy, satisfied, sovereign woman. And boundaries, first and foremost, for us as women, come from our powerfully embodied no you're going to feel it when you get into a compromising place where your emotional or relational labor is too much, or it's being taken advantage of, or it's being not being recognized, your body will start to contract. You'll start to feel maybe your throat tighten, or your chest get heavy, or your belly get fluttery, or even you'll feel a sense of darkness or heaviness the body is going to tell you, and that's your signal to pull back, to hold strong. You know what? I can't do any more of this. Or I need you to find another resource. Or let's pause for now. Or actually, can you go talk to x person about this? Whatever you need to do that needs to start being a hard gnome. If there's somebody who just is essentially an energy vampire that drains you all the time, I'm a huge fan of curating our life and firing people who are like that for us, who drain us or deplete us or take advantage of us. It's okay to fire people out of our life. There might be people that you find is really worthy to do this kind of work, this not optional, essential work that is so a part of who we are as women, but make sure that we're not overdoing it with those people. Either, like children under 10, almost get a free pass. We are teaching them about emotional regulation and calibration. We are modeling it for them. We're giving them good support so they know what that looks like, so that they can find it in their adult relationships. We also need to empower them to regulate themselves, so that they don't become the ones who find their own feminine, emotional receptacle when they're adults to dump into right? The cycle stops with us. So when you feel a sense of nope, I've hit my limit. I really can't that's your cue to pull back so that you create a strong boundary, so that this person knows this is how far emotional regulation is available with you, and then they need to establish it for themselves. Everyone truly is responsible for their own on many levels, it's not that we can't get help from others, but ultimately, we can't outsource emotional regulation, especially 100% of the time, into our beloved, cherished lady. So the other way to do this right, there's an internal factor and there's an external factor. One of the precious things that we get when we have these four keys established that I mentioned, safety, security, trust and cherishing is the emotional and masculine support on the outside to help us weather our storms, because when we go through our own emotional shake ups, and we Will we're women, it's biologically inbuilt. It's a part of our makeup. It's a part of who we are. It's a part of what makes us special. It's not instability, it's information. It's not unpredictability, it's recalibration. Our emotions are sacred, and they need to be honored as such and a healthy masculine counterpart will do that, whether it is a partner, whether it is a family member, whether it is a friend, the healthy masculine is like the mooring in our storm. So I used to be a sailor. I am a sailor, and when I sailed in Los Angeles, from Los Angeles over to Catalina Island. I would tell it, sail my sailboat, and then you'd find a mooring ball.
Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D. 29:28
And the mooring ball is anchored to the sea floor. It pops up right to the top of the water, and you pull up with your sailboat, and you grab the the lines and you hook them to your boat. So the boat is now lowered to the mooring ball, and the mooring ball is anchored to the sea floor. Now there were many nights on Catalina in my little sailboat. Their waves were huge, and there were even sometimes big winds, 25 to 30 knots. Now the boat is rocking, and I'm inside the belly of the ship, and I'm like, break. Sing myself against the walls, trying not to roll over too much. But I have this, knowing this, knowing right, I'm in the ship. That's the feminine, but the ship is moored that, no matter how much the sea rocks, no matter how much the wind blows, that there is an anchor right to the sea floor, almost to the heart of the earth that isn't going to let me go. That's healthy, masculine, safety, security, trust and cherishing. So again, whether that is an intimate partner, a family member, a community member, or somebody that can be that for you. That's when you get the reciprocity to all of the regulation you provide for everybody else. Because remember, when the world is falling apart, they come to you, but where do you go? There needs to be a place for you, dear sister. Now, if you don't have that in your world, or you're missing that, or you want more of that, I really hope that you'll come join me in the rooted membership over at the satisfied woman.com I know most people don't go to websites anymore. It's all about apps and social media, but I'm not really on social media, and I bet you can imagine all of the reasons for that. Social media can be a challenging place. So you'll find me on YouTube, and you'll find me inside my rooted membership over at the satisfiedwoman.com I would love to have you join me. Let's support each other together, and let's start getting the reciprocity and the value out of this unbelievably essential work that we provide as women. And until then, my dear sister, do all you can to stay satisfied.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
