Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is LiYana Silver. LiYana Silver is a coach, teacher, and speaker who helps women find the full expression of their feminine strength in work, love, and life. Her offerings include her mentorship program, Woman: The Embodiment Experience, and her online course, Ignite Your Feminine Genius. With Sounds True, LiYana has written a new book called Feminine Genius: The Provocative Path to Waking Up and Turning On the Wisdom of Being a Woman. Partly an irreverently reverent feminist treatise and partly a nondenominational devotional hymnal to the Sacred Feminine, Feminine Genius has been written to change forever what women know about their body, sexuality, intuition, and power.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, LiYana and I spoke about journeying into the dark as a necessary part of developing Feminine Genius, and what LiYana learned from her “Year of Hell,” and how pain can be a life raft. We also talked about tuning to one’s own intuition, and specifically listening to the guidance of what LiYana calls “The Inner Oracle.” LiYana also led us on a guided meditation to summon our inner Oracle. We also talked about the importance of pleasure as an aspect of developing our Feminine Genius, and the value of asking the question, “How can I make this moment more pleasurable and enjoyable for myself?” And finally, we talked about how women can relate to each other from a place of Feminine Genius—not as competitors, but as people who burn more brightly in each other’s warm light. Here’s my conversation with LiYana Silver:
LiYana, the subtitle of your new book, Feminine Genius, is The Provocative Path to Waking Up and Turning On the Wisdom of Being a Woman. We’re going to get to what I think are some provocative statements and provocative practices that you offer in the book, but just to begin, how do you define “feminine genius”?
LiYana Silver: Oh, that’s a great question. So, I define “feminine genius” in a couple ways: as sort of a divine mix of our intuitive, feeling, emotional, sensual, collaborative qualities and strengths. Kind of in contrast to what fuels the world, which is more of our linear, goal-oriented, rational, analytical, competitive, hierarchical strengths. I really see Feminine Genius as a lifeforce energy that is intelligent and is very felt. It is palpable and felt by the senses of the body.
TS: One of the claims you make in the book that I found really interesting is that for women, it can be important for us to claim and define a Heroine’s Journey for our life that might be distinct from the classic Hero’s Journey that many people are familiar with—an archetypal journey that Joseph Campbell is renowned for having categorized and documented for people. What is unique in your view about a Heroine’s Journey?
LS: There’s a couple of unique ones, and of course we have to bow to the concept and the resource of the Hero’s Journey that Joseph Campbell offered us—wow. I see one of the main differences is that it’s a shift in perspective. I draw it a little bit from Jungian dream analysis, where in one telling of a dream or one examination of a dream—the kind you would have at night—you sort of look at all the characters and players in the dream as aspects or parts of yourself so that the drama or the obstacles that are being overcome, or the issues of that dream, are actually aspects of yourself that are working something out, and there’s a potential reconciliation of parts of yourself.
So, whereas archetypally a hero can go and surmount obstacles, in this context the heroine invites the obstacles in to become parts of herself and have a reconciliation. Whereas the hero can kind of go and win and vanquish, and win a battle, when we’re reconciling certain parts of ourselves, we can’t cut out one part of ourselves; we can’t vanquish or battle against one part of ourselves without damaging the whole or killing off our soul. So, [this is] part of the Heroine’s Journey that it’s all internal; it’s all me, it’s all aspects of me; and that real piece—a real fondness of looking the enemy in the eye and realizing, “That is an aspect of me. Why would I want to do damage to that part?”
TS: I’m curious: if you were to look at your own life through the lens of a Heroine’s Journey and even the publication of this book as a type of Grail presentation of what you learned, how would you describe some of the Heroine’s Journey of your own life? And really emphasize, if you will, some distinctions from the classic Hero’s Journey.
LS: Well, I would say I developed over my life—my first real career and focus in life was as a dancer, a professional dancer. So while I got a really great acuity and subtlety and sense of being in a body and how to use that as my instrument, I also at the same time was very ashamed to be in a female body. The standard in dance is very thin, very muscular, kind of like an adolescent boy body. And it’s really inconvenient to have a female body in that world. And mine was definitely not playing along; I got curves and I wasn’t that skinny.
So, I developed a sense that my body was against me. I developed a sense that things that had to do with femininity, feminine energy, my female body, my female cycles, really were antithetical to my dreams. So, I thought, “Well, if I could just get rid of or change or cut out certain aspects of myself and my body, I could have my dreams maybe more work out.” I think this is very ubiquitous with a lot of women, even if they don’t come through the lens of dance or fashion or athletics or something like that. So, I spent a lifetime at war with myself, and this is definitely not unusual. I—wow.
So, to get to your question, one of the main places that I’ve noticed that this could be a Heroine’s Journey is: if I am at war with myself and I manage to win—which I’ve always been hell-bent on doing—which part loses? Who loses? I lose. I can’t war against any part of myself, and there’s no winning possible.
So, it really feels like to be a heroine is to be a champion for every single aspect of myself, even the parts that I considered antithetical to my dreams, or ugly, or unseeable, or shameful. This—I don’t know, I think that’s self-love. I think that’s inner peace; it’s a version of it.
TS: Interestingly, there’s a very powerful section of your book on Feminine Genius where you write, “All great journeys begin in the dark.” You talk about your own—what you call— “Year of Hell,” and it seemed like this was a year that was incredibly initiatory and transformative for you. So, I’m curious if you can tell us a little bit about your Year of Hell and how it changed you.
LS: So, funny enough, Tami, when I first wrote the proposal for this book, a friend of mine who’s a proposal doctor at Reddit said, “It’s good, go ahead and submit it; [but] the section where you talk about the dark—it feels immature; it feels a little surface.” And this is someone himself who has dealt with bipolar issues in his life and a lot of depression. He was like, “I don’t know. It feels surface level.” So I said, “Yes, yes, whatever.”
Then what happened to me was a sort of confluence of physically and metaphysically dealing with the ramifications of warring with myself for 35 years. Just to give you a sense, I would wake up in the morning and have this foreboding sense that the day was not going to go well, and my emotions were out of control. I would have shaking attacks, panic attacks; I couldn’t sleep; I’d wake up at 4am in the morning, dreaming of dying. And none of—kind of health professionals couldn’t really figure it out; [I was] on this kind of yearlong journey to figure out what was going on with me.
I remember having tea one day with a friend of a friend who I’d just met that day—an elder woman, an artist. I told her what I was going through—I didn’t know what was going on with my body. Nothing was working in terms of what food I would eat or what practices I would do. Nothing was working, and I just was in a lot of emotional and physical pain. And she looked at me, and she smiled. And she was like, “I’m so excited for you. The dark is a delicious place. Up and down, down and up—you’re reconnecting dots, reconnecting wires. You have to feel your way through.” And it was the first time anybody had given me that perspective.
So, I just really went for it, and I—it is initiation. It’s an invitation because I think what happens is everything that used to be a road to wellness or to your connection to the Divine or a sense of yourself gets stripped away so that you get to know afresh—so that an aspect of your knowing or inner authority is born, but it’s born from a place that is completely nascent. It’s the fertile void.
And I don’t think that—it doesn’t ever feel like that. I don’t think anybody who’s going through a dark time feels like, “Yay! This is an initiation!” I think it’s just really hard in the moment. But to have that frame around it—to know that this is not a punishment or a mistake, but is actually an invitation to a deeper sense of ourselves or deep clarity in our life, or a deeper understanding of ourselves—is beautiful.
TS: How would you say that that year of your life and surviving it and then emerging in a new way—how were you different at the end, as a person?
LS: I feel there were some subtle ways, or maybe not so subtle ways, where I felt a bit superior to or disconnected from humanity—to my fellow human beings. “Oh you know, I’ve got this technique figured out, and you probably don’t. Oh well.” Or, “You know, things are going well in my life, they’re not going well in yours. I’m sorry for you, but I guess maybe you just should do the program I just did,” or something. It removed every sense of separation from me and other people. It feels incredibly humbling, and I feel like I have looked in the mirror, looked inside myself, and seen every face of humanity, and all the ugly parts, and found a way to really see them and love them. So that is—it is not an issue for me to do that with other people. So, humbling and connecting, and just beautifying. I mean, what a gift.
TS: One of the observations you make in this section of the book has to do with women’s connection, in particular, to the cycles of nature and the connection between our menstrual cycles and the moon cycle, for example. I wonder if you can talk more about how you learned about the cycles of nature and our connection to nature through your own descent—period of descent.
LS: I’ve had several really great colleagues point out that our menstrual cycle maps over onto the natural cycles of winter, spring, summer, and fall, et cetera; to the cycles of the moon; and I’ve studied that my life long.
Here’s the one thing that repositioned this year—it really was a descent into the underworld of hell for me, for sure. One thing that reposition did was to know nature seems to do this once a year—if you live in a year where there’s four distinct cycles, but every part of the world goes through some version of winter, spring, summer, fall, even if they’re more subtle. So we can look around and go, “It’s wintertime.” Nature didn’t make a mistake; it’s just wintertime. We might have a preference for one season or the other, but there’s a reason for this season.
So that really, really helped me to say, “Maybe this isn’t a problem or a mistake. Maybe this is by design. Maybe this is supposed to happen; maybe I’m not being punished for some personal deficiency by being here in the dark. Maybe this is part of the creative cycle—that doubt or despair is actually part of the creative cycle of our psyche, just as challenge and triumph and pleasure.”
TS: I just want to comment—you said that a friend of yours really encouraged you to go deeper in the book into your own understanding of journeys beginning in in the dark. This was my favorite section of the book, which may tell you something about me. But it also gave me confidence in you as an authority, if you will, on Feminine Genius and coaching people in this way. It gave me a certain confidence in you that I don’t think I would have had if this section of the book hadn’t been written with such depth and vulnerability.
LS: I really wanted to swat him away for that, because I’d been working on things for about two years at that point, and I had to get this baby out of here and ship it. And what a blessing—what a portending event that was, and I really appreciate him. It was hard—I thought I was dying a lot of that time, but I feel so grateful. And I agree with you that there is a gravitas and connection with readers—with my clients—that absolutely was not possible before then.
TS: I’m curious if you could speak to the person who might be right now navigating a difficult period in their life, and just talk directly to them. I think there’s even some sections in your book—I don’t know if you want to read a few paragraphs or just speak to that person who perhaps is, as you say “navigating storms” right now?
LS: Well, I’d love to read a section. That would be beautiful. Tami, I also feel really affectionate toward this section of the book, for the underdog in all of us. I remember writing it and writing just the truest, hottest-off-the-press thing I could, and feeling that really the thing that made the difference when I was in that time was not advice; it wasn’t a plan to fix it, although eventually that was useful. It was the kind of heart-to-heart, body-to-body, animal-to-animal listening of just, “I’m with you.” So, I hoped to put some of that in these pages. So, here, let me read them, and we’ll see what we’ve got.
“If you are in a Dark Night of the Soul right now: So, if you, my friend, are mid-spiral right now, on your way down or all the way down, know that the dark place you are in where it seems God Herself has forsaken you, I have been there. I may be there again. And I am listening.
“Even if I never get to meet you, I will meet you here, because the dark is a place where I made my home and I found my home. I can go there with you now anytime. I can sit with you, and you will feel the metronome of my heart beating with yours. We can burn together. I know how to burn with you, yet not go down in flames. I am educated in the ways of the dark. I made it out alive, and you will too. And not just alive, but alive. Rebirthed. The parts of you dying in there, you don’t need them anymore. Not where you’re going.
“If you’re there right now, I know you can barely hear me. I know the sound is muffled, and anything that tastes remotely of platitude you will spit out at once. But hear this: where you are is not a mistake. You are in the forge. The goddess of holy blacksmithery knows what the hell she is doing.
“I myself have no map or script or blueprint to give to you, but you will still make your way through. But don’t worry about that now. It might sound like bullshit. Just put one foot in front of the other. Breathe in, and breathe out, again and again. Don’t even try to imagine the sacred yet. I will not try to convince you that there’s any sacred left in your life. Just give me your hand and take one more step with me, and then one more. I know that where we are going is worth all of it. But you have to believe me. All you have to do is trust me. Even if to trust me, just stay with me. Stay with me here.
“I know you want to go. I know you want it to end. I know that the things that would ordinarily horrify you are starting to sound good right about now if they would just make the burning stop. I know you wonder if you’re crazy, if this is what it feels like when a mind turns itself inside-out, shakes itself of its contents, and returns to the wild. But stay with me here. Let me show you what can help. Let me show you where the cracks are in the fortress without cracks. Let me show you the rungs on the ladder out of this cesspool you are submerged in. Let me straighten the crown on your head as you dodge arrows flying at you from your own mouth.
“Stay with me here. Keep reading. Keep feeling. There will be at least one good, true, useful thing you’ll find here that will work for you. Let me show you how to use pain as a life raft. Let me show you the wisdom of what feels insanely hard. Let me show you how to let your isolation drag you into the arms of the Beloved. Stay with me here. Let me show you how to grab another and another pearl out of the underworld and return to this world alive. You’re in a holy place, even though it feels like hell. This is where an aspect of your Genius is birthed.”
TS: How would you say, LiYana, an aspect of your own Feminine Genius was birthed through this experience?
LS: Part of the aspect of my Genius is a deep reverence, respect, for the cycles that we as humans, but certainly as women, go through. I don’t see a dark time in any one of my family or friends or anyone that I’m working with as a problem. I might have that same reaction that my friend having tea with me had: “Oh, good.” I don’t wish pain or suffering on anybody certainly, but I know that the way through the burning is the way; that they’re going to find an aspect of their own authority, a sense of what is next or a sense of their own innate wholeness that can’t happen any other way. I trust the intelligence—what a strange process. What a strange stripping away, and going through something that nearly kills you! But I have a deep reverence for it.
TS: You had an interesting phrase: “I’ll show you how to use pain as a life raft.” How do we use pain as a life raft? How is that possible?
LS: I feel very grateful for a line from a book of Pema Chödrön’s, [who] I feel is probably a living saint! She said—I was reading a book, The Places that Scare You, because I was in a place that scared me, and she said, “Just let what you’re going through pierce you to the bone.” Or, “Let it pierce your heart.” So, I just really thought about that, and I thought—well, I didn’t think about it, I did it.
So, I noticed that if I put a microscope on feelings, on emotions, on the sensations that were going on in my body—this is like shaking and panic attacks and anxiety and crying, et cetera—and I thought, “OK, well, what if I don’t tense up a little bit? What if I don’t armor against what I’m feeling? What if I don’t try to make sense of it and get into the story of it? What if I let it in? What if I let it take me? What if I, instead of leaning away from it, lean into it? What if I just let it overtake me and really just get into every part of my bones and my marrow, climb on it like a raft, and just let it take me?”
And I really had to talk myself into this, because I thought—we all fear what we feel, because we fear we’re going to die from it because it feels so intense. So, I just said, “OK, maybe I’ll just be willing to die.” So not a small thing, but, “OK, I’ll just see. I might die. I’m willing to die. But I’m going to see what happens.” And the emotions—they ran their course. I didn’t die. I mean, I might have sweat and [shaken] and cried and convulsed and sat there on the floor, you know—but I didn’t die.
And then there was something—that’s like a storm, right? When the storm had abated, then I was able to strike up a dialogue with what I was feeling. And that—I was able to say, “OK, you’re not here to kill me, you might be here to tell me something, let me know something.” So then I started dialoging with my feelings or my sensations, and it was the most remarkable conversation.
It really felt like at first, sort of a somatic riding down the rapids on my emotions, in my emotions, and somehow going into the pain gives us a way out of the pain that running off to smoke or to drink or to get busy with work or whatever it is we do to kind of deal with emotions doesn’t—it doesn’t actually let the pain be done with us.
TS: In the book, Feminine Genius, the arc begins, if you will, in this darkness, but we then move into what you call “embodying your genius”—learning to listen to one’s own deep, intuitive voice. You introduce us to something that you believe all women have, which is what you call an “inner Oracle.” I think we get now into some of the more provocative parts, if you will, of Feminine Genius: this idea that we each have an Oracle. Why don’t you tell us more about the Oracle and where it’s located?
LS: Right. So an Oracle, for millennia, was considered to be a person or maybe a place like a shrine or a spring or a temple that really had the ear of God—by whatever name you called God. It was a mouthpiece to God. So, if you had a question, you’d go to the Oracle and you respect the answer that you get. Most of us can really hang with the idea, OK, that isn’t necessarily out there in another person or in another authority or in another lineage, or in a magazine; it’s within us. I agree, and I locate your Oracle between your thighs, which is definitely—we’re getting into one of the provocative parts.
I think it’s pretty—here’s the surprising thing: most women who hear this or most people who hear this nod and go, “Yes, I get that. I might not be the most comfortable hearing that, but instinctually or intuitively, I get that.” But I’ll explain a little bit, because usually we don’t think of something of our sexuality, of our erotic energy, and our intuitive energy or our spiritual energy, sharing the same zip code. In fact, most traditions separate them quite a bit.
I think there’s something really important about—when I talk about your Oracle, I’m having you imagine that we’re talking about this location of your body that’s below your belly button and above your tailbone. It’s sort of the region of your body that holds most of your reproductive organs—not all, but most—and is in your pelvic bowl. This is the region we’re talking about. This is a region that most of us like to ignore or just don’t consider a part of our spiritual path or our soul journey, particularly.
Here’s what happens: so here we are in our sexual center, but we’re also in the creative center of the body. I also think that this is the center of the body that is connected to our innate wholeness, to our personal power, and to our inner knowing. Now, I definitely do not think there is one way to access your creativity, wholeness, intuition, or knowing, or power; this is—each person feels this and senses it wherever and however they do, and more power to you. But, partly because most of us are so confused and oppressed around erotic and sensual energy, this is an area of our body and hence and area of our being that we kind of excise and we numb to, or we exploit. And I think there is something profound about understanding the wellspring that’s here, and being able to integrate it into who we are—into our intuitive intelligence.
TS: OK. I’m going to get a little technical with you for a moment about the zip code of our Oracle, because at first when you said “between your thighs,” I was imagining, “Oh, we’re talking about the vagina. I’m talking about my vagina.” And then as you described, no, it’s all the way from the belly button down to the pelvic floor—this whole region of the body. That’s actually a very different sense. It’s a whole, large geographic zone, if you will. So I just want to make sure I understand the geography you’re pointing to for this Oracle.
LS: Yes, great. So, we are talking about—this is where it gets specific for each person, for each woman. A lot of times when I’ll do exercises to help women ask their Oracle and listen for the answers [from their Oracle], oftentimes women will sense it in their labia—so that’s kind of the more between your thighs area. That’s the inner and outer lips of your vulva, right? Often, they will actually sense it in the vaginal canal—that’s the area that goes from the vulva up to your uterus, if you have one. Oftentimes, women will actually sense it in the uterus, or certain things in the ovaries. It gets very unique and very personal. So it’s a larger geographical area than just between your thighs, but “between your thighs” is very provocative. It gets your attention, certainly.
TS: It does. OK, now you offer in your book an Oracle meditation designed to wake up a slumbering Oracle. I wonder if you’d be able, believe it or not, to take us through it and help listeners who maybe aren’t sure which part of this geographic zone is in fact their intelligent, divining, go-to source—their Oracle. Can you help us get in touch with our Oracle and maybe even start having a conversation? Can we do that?
LS: Definitely! Let’s do it!
TS: Let’s do it.
LS: So this is—it’s actually pretty—it’s provocative, but it’s simple, and probably will piggyback on most people’s understanding of breathing practices or simple meditation practices. So, let’s do it.
You can do this by keeping your eyes open or eyes closed—whatever feels like a relaxed position for your body and your eyes. We’ll begin by simply breathing, but a little bit deeper and more deliberate than you ordinarily would do. And on your next in-breath, imagine that your breath is actually entering your body not necessarily through your nostrils or your mouth as it would ordinarily, but that you’re breathing into the base of your tailbone. As you breathe up, you’re breathing your breath up the length of your tailbone and spine and neck. And that at your out-breath, you imagine shooting the breath out the crown of your head and that it cascades in front of you like a waterfall. Then you can kind of scoop it up again, breathe into the base of your tailbone, up your spine, and shooting out the top of your head like a waterfall. We just start to imagine the breath as an enlivening—or that as you breathe it in through the base of your tailbone, it can wake up or enliven or caress or warm or soothe the inside of your body.
So, if you speak chakras, then you’re essentially breathing your breath up each of the chakras that are energy centers along the points of your spine. And then you begin to just narrow your attention and your focus a little bit more so that your breath is really warming up and waking up this area—that’s sort of your first and second chakra if you speak chakras, and it’s this area right above your tailbone, right below your belly button. So, this whole area is being awakened and enlivened and gently caressed. This is mostly to bring awareness—mostly to say, “Hello! This is not an area we usually meditate on, or include in our meditation, so hello.” And I would just say at this moment whatever you might be feeling or sensing or experiencing is great. It could be nothing, it could be numbness, it could be a lot of emotion, and it’s all really welcome.
Now, this, in and of itself, is a really beautiful way to move energy, to direct your attention and awareness. But Tami, since you asked, let’s do the second part of it, which is essentially—here we go. We’re going to imagine that this is the spot of our Oracle. This is the mouthpiece of God. This is the area that has the ear of God. And this is a place you can direct your questions. And I think a really nice question is something along the lines of, “Hello. What’s important for me to know?”
So, you just direct your question, and then you’re sort of just listening sort of inside [with]—I call them “soul ears”—you’re sensing and listening for any response you might hear. And [the] response could absolutely be in clear, straight sentences, or words. It could be in sensation, like warmth or cool or expansive or contraction. It could be images that need a little—like dreams that need a little of your interpretation. It could be sort of impulses. That’s all welcome. It also may be that it doesn’t come right now in this dialogue; it might come a little bit later in the day, and that’s also really welcome.
TS: LiYana, I’m curious: since this is such an unusual way to think about connecting to one’s intuitive guidance, how did you come to see that the Oracle lives in this part of our body?
LS: Well, one of my mentors was big on this—really great friend of mine and mentor Regena Thomashauer, who runs the School for Womanly Arts. We share some similar training, and she just was saying, “Hey, take a listen, take a look.” And I’ve just really taken it on over my lifetime to see, to check it out. I mean, I think it is a really interesting question, right? Because intuition is defined—I mean, undefinable—but it’s defined as spiritual insight, or knowing, or recognition that bypasses or happens before reasoning. So, this is instant knowing; this is—maybe it can later be corroborated by mind and mental processes, but this is a feeling/sensing thing.
I’d love to share one thing, too, which is: in the book Vagina by Naomi Wolf, she cites some really fascinating medical research. One is that there’s a medical device called a vaginal photometer that measures light fluctuations in the vagina. It’s is not very sexy, but what it does is it recognizes and measures a distinct pulse in this Oracle part of your body, and it’s separate from the pulse of your heart or your circulatory system. It pulses measurably when you’re moved emotionally, when you’re inspired, when you’re passionate, when you have a very clear yes or no. So, there’s a pulse in the body that is connected to your knowing that is certainly in concert with your mind and your rational processes, but happens on a totally different channel. And here it is in this Oracle part of our body.
Now, that feels like a corroboration of something I’ve noticed and worked with women with over the years, and often I’ll say, “Well, let’s take a listen. Take a look.” And 90 percent of the time, a woman’s like, “Oh yes! Right! I just never paid attention to that before, but it’s there.”
TS: I thought one of the provocative ideas in the book, and I think this was a provocative sentence, I wrote it down, is—ready for this?—”Guidance is best heard while turned on.” And I thought, “Oh—”
LS: That’s a good one.
TS: It is a really good one. I mean, I think often, if somebody’s taught meditation or stillness and go into silence, you don’t think, “It’s going to be best for me to listen to my guidance if I’m turned on.” So, explain that.
LS: So, I mean “turn on” not necessarily as high, high states of sexual excitement, but I mean like your inner light is turned on and there is a sense of being your five senses heightened; your sixth sense—which we call our intuition—heightened. That there is more vibrancy and life in our bodies. Maybe even more experience of pleasure in our bodies.
Now, here’s this really interesting thing: it’s a tiny snippet of how our bodies work. When we—you can sense pleasure all over your body, but there is a particular way where pleasure and enjoyment is sensed kind of in the vagina as we just talked about, and also if there is pleasure experienced in the body—it can be sort of relayed from the pelvic area through the pelvic nerve, which connects to your spine, goes on up to your brain, and releases many neurotransmitters—but at least one, which is dopamine. So, there’s this pleasure experience in your body, it releases dopamine, and dopamine is kind of your confidence, clarity neurotransmitter. So, pleasure in the body, especially in the body of a woman—so, a turn-on—equals clarity and confidence.
Now, just so you understand what dopamine is—if you take a lot of cocaine, that’s kind of a dopamine thing. I mean, I don’t suggest taking a lot of cocaine, but just so you understand what it does—it kind of makes you be like, “I’m awesome! Do you want to hear about me? Let me talk a lot about how awesome I am to you.” But in our natural processes we feel whole, we feel confident, we feel connected to who we are, we feel a natural sense of motivation and inspiration. And we don’t often link feeling pleasure and our own light and fire in our bodies with being connected to that kind of guidance. And I think this is remarkable—especially for women who, like myself, were addicted to overwork and overachievement, or maybe still contemplative, meditative practices to sort of still everything as a way to hear guidance. So, it’s pretty radical.
TS: I just want to kind of state something that I think should be stated here at this point, which is, we go into this part of our body, what’s important for me to know—and someone could certainly hear, “What’s important for me to know?” It could be very sexual, whatever the response is, because we’re in this part of our body that could be saying, “You know what’s important? What’s important is X-Y-Z sexual activity that you really want to have like now, or in an hour at most.” So, help me understand a little bit how you work with the Oracle and the fact that you could be asking a question about who knows what and it’s giving you information about sexual pleasure that is on your radar [as], “That’s what I want.”
LS: Right. This is a good question, because we’re more than a sum total of just our sexual desires or energy, of course. There’s a lot of hesitance on the part of most of us to even ask—like, “Why do I want to check in with this part of my body? I’m just going to hear about wanting to be more sexual, or I’m not sexual enough. There’s more to me than just this.”
So, I answer this in a couple ways. I think generally—not everybody, but a lot of people could probably do to be able to work with their sexual energy in a more embodied and useful way. So, in a way, the guidance is sound. You probably want to do this X-Y-Z sexual thing right now because it’d be great for you to move your sexual energy a little bit more. But I think there’s also a way to look at the deeper—kind of dialogue with it and understand that a desire—certainly any kind of desire, whether it’s sexual or not—can be layered, and that what first presents is maybe not our highest guidance or deepest guidance. There’s a way to separate wheat from chaff, or to separate the urge of the desire that might actually be in conflict with your morality or your values. To separate that top layer—I call it surface layer of desire—and kind of excavate down to understand what’s the deeper desire.
So, for example, if I have the urge to do X-Y-Z sexual thing right now in the next hour, I might just begin the dialogue a little bit more. What’s important to me about that? What will having that do for me? What will that let me know about me? And that in that dialogue, something like a deep gem emerges; for example, it could be spontaneity, or, “I want to feel more alive,” or, “Oh my gosh, I want to leave my partner,” or, “I just want to lighten up a little bit.”
Often, buried underneath the surface of a very controversial desire can be something that’s really workable with that will teach you something about who you are or what you want next for your life.
TS: You also write, LiYana, that it can be helpful to actually personalize your Oracle and give it a name. Why is that helpful?
LS: At the surface [that] can seem a little bit silly; I’m going to [name] my body part and have it be this affectionate pet name. It is fun, it is silly, but here’s the thing: intuition, I find, is often symbolic. It often uses a language that is not literal, that relies on symbolism and interpretation. So what I’ve done in the past with women is [say], “Let’s see. I’m calling this area ‘Oracle.’ What does yours want to be called?” So we’ll do the meditation as we just did it, and they’ll ask—instead of “What’s important for me to know?”—they’ll ask, “What do you want to be called?” And all kinds of really interesting names will happen, we’ll hear. And then I’ll say, “Go look it up. Go do an internet search, go check it out, open the dictionary and see.” And something kind of random-sounding, like Angela or Rose or Sophia—they’ll be like, “OK, whatever,” and go look it up, and 100 percent of the time, it is incredibly right on for that woman, and it usually means something.
For example, Rose is the Western equivalent of the lotus. It is sort of a symbol for enlightenment. It is also the unofficial flower for the Divine Feminine. Sophia, it means—it’s like a Divine Feminine, Divine Mother. Angela—a course participant once got Angela, and she heard it with the accent of a Jersey girl, and she was like, “Really?” So Angela—she looked it up and Angela means “little angel,” and it was just particularly significant for each of these women—that what seemed random or banal on the surface had incredible depth and symbology for that woman. So, I think it’s important on that level, and kind of euphoric, to go, “Wow, my system is really tapped in to some interesting knowing here.”
But I also think it’s nice to have a name, because wow—when I was doing research for this book, I came across this statistic that said there’s 220 words for a sexually promiscuous woman, but only 20 for a sexually promiscuous man. We have all kinds of very derogatory terms for all of our sexual body parts or just for Oracle parts. So when you’ve got a name for something that isn’t particularly accurate—medically accurate—or particularly sacred, there’s a lot of embedded shame, or you just want to ignore that part of your body. So, you can rename it, and it turns out to be incredibly personally symbolic. I think this does a lot—it does a lot for healing and integrating this part back into our bodies and psyches.
TS: I’m not going to ask you for the name of your Oracle, unless you want to share it.
LS: I’ll be happy to! So, one time, I did this with a group of mine and I was like, “Well, I guess I might as well do it with you all.” So yes, I listened, and I got this name: Alma. It’s a funny question, but I’m happy to answer it.
So, I got this name Alma, and I did the same thing that other women have done, went and looked on an online search, and Alma means “soul” in Spanish. It’s got some incredible definitions in other language, but it means “soul”—”alma mater,” we use it in English to mean higher education, but it also means “sacred mother.” I was also likewise blown away. I don’t know; I just asked, heard this random name, and then it has this incredible symbolic resonance for me.
TS: Well thank you, LiYana, for sharing that. I think this is a moment for me in my Insights at the Edge hosting history, the first time I’ve ever asked such a question. So thank you.
LS: You really are at the edge!
TS: Thank you. I want to talk more about Feminine Genius, because we’ve ventured into the darkness and the capacity to work with our own pain as an aspect of Feminine Genius. Then this other aspect we’ve discussed about—being able to tune to our bodies and particularly this Oracle that all women have, and to dialogue with this Oracle. What else do you think is really essential, if you will, in cultivating Feminine Genius?
LS: Well, I’ve definitely been accused of being a little dark and noir and furious, so it’s good to notice that we can move out of navigating the dark as we started, and into—I think it’s really important to know how to cultivate our light. I do believe we are—that the body is condensed soul; there is no difference between the Divine and being human. We’re just the same stuff. We’re light. We’re embodied light. So, we need to cultivate that.
So, I think that it is so beautiful for a woman to understand that she’s actually—it’s almost as though we have been groping around in a dark room, feeling really lost, feeling really disconnected from ourselves, feeling disconnected from our sense of wholeness and our power. Feeling around for the light switch—where is the light switch to turn the lights on in this room? And the ironic thing is that actually we’ve been holding the source of the light the whole time. It’s not out there in the room; it’s actually within us.
So, there’s a number of really useful practices that I do and women have told me have felt just really great—to return the sense that they’re holding the light switch themselves rather than groping for it out there in the world somewhere. Should I maybe say one of them?
TS: Sure.
LS: Yes. So there’s a simple question I like to ask, and by now, at this point in my life, it is pretty default. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction; I’ve spent a lot of time asking it on manual, and now it’s automatic. So, the question is seemingly simple—it’s got some layers to it—but the question you ask yourself at least once a day or as many times as you can, is, “How can I make this moment more pleasurable or more enjoyable for myself?”
Partly, this takes the idea that as soon as I get this gold star, have the baby, get him to propose to me, get the promotion, make tenure, lose the ten pounds, then I can enjoy myself. It really turns that idea on its head and says, “It’s available right now, and you have to dial on it.” There is no prescription; it’s only what is true for you. What would make this moment more enjoyable for you, Tami, is probably very different than it would for me, as it should be.
Now, there is also another piece of that question, which I think is beautiful, which is “for myself.” How can I make this moment more pleasurable or enjoyable for myself? Because not all women, but a vast majority, have a natural inclination or it’s been groomed to take care of others or sense others’ needs before our own—or to pretend we don’t have needs, or to do for other before we do [for] ourselves. There’s a place for it, certainly, but it’s got a bit out of hand. So this idea—like putting on your own oxygen mask first before you help other people—is simple and hard—hard for a lot of us. So in a way, it’s a simple question, but it kind of takes some mettle to do.
Then what happens is ordinary moments or dull, everyday moments can turn into satisfying ones, ones that you enjoy. Standing on a grocery line, talking to the person at the coffee shop, hustling to get your kids out the door—that there’s something in the question that unlocks the ability to be connected to your joy and your pleasure and your turn-ons now. Not when, but now.
TS: So let’s say someone’s asking this question right now as they’re listening: “How can I make this moment more pleasurable for myself?” What do you think are the kinds of answers somebody might be getting?
LS: They might open the window so that they could feel the fresh air. They might go get themselves a cup of tea so they can sip the tea while they’re listening. They might get this inspiration jotted down and go, “I have to write that thing to my mother and thank her.” They might—usually the question is sensory-based, so there might be something to smell or to taste or to touch or to feel, because we’re already doing the hearing part. Let me see if there’s another example that comes to mind. Sometimes it’s just an internal stance—I make this moment more pleasurable [by], it could be a stance of relaxation in the body or openness in the body. That would make this moment even more enjoyable.
TS: What I like about all your suggestions is they’re very simple. Really simple things. I mean, there could be something more complicated, but you’re saying, “How can I make this moment more pleasurable for myself?” might be something as simple as breathing deeper. Very simple.
LS: Very simple.
TS: Beautiful. Now, I wanted to read another quote from the book that I thought was important, and it has to do with this idea of being embodied light, being turned on. And you say, “Our light can easily flicker if we overuse our masculine genius.” I thought that was an important thing to touch on here, if you could just comment on that.
LS: Well, I know personally—and this is echoed with the women that I talk to and get to work with—that we really feel like we’re living in a man’s world. This is not to fly in the face of any of the equalities that are present; for most of us, especially in the Western world, life is good. We are a culture and a world that bows to and is fueled by—these are great strengths; I call them “masculine genius.” We need this to function in the world. But you know, our thinking abilities—rational, linear, goal-oriented, productive, analytical, judgmental, competitive even.
It’s just that that’s become the gold standard, and we have a lot of fear and we have a lot of confusion about other kinds of qualities, and we kind of lump them into this thing called “feminine energy” or “feminine strengths.” So, we feel the way to get loved or be taken seriously or to feel valuable is to achieve or to present my ideas in a very logical, linear fashion, or to make sure I’m on all the time and I’m not having some days where I’m more focused and some days where I’m not.
So, there’s a way of being in the world that favors our masculine essence or our masculine strengths, and at the same time really denigrates or fears some of the feminine strengths, if we were to make that delineation. For all of us—I think men and women alike, whatever you self-identify as—our culture, our planet, is impacted by this; it’s way imbalanced. So, it’s my sense that if we could understand and focus a little more heavily for a while on what this Feminine Genius is, it would be very rebalancing.
It’s not particularly superior. Neither is. I think they’re obviously both useful and important. We want a balance within us. But we’re way out of balance in ourselves, in our communities, in our families, in our world.
TS: There’s just one last thing I want to talk with you about, LiYana, because I thought this was a very important note that you included towards the end of the book—which is how women relate to each other, and that it’s possible that we could actually increase each other’s light, if you will—this quality of embodied light—instead of being competitive with each other or feeling less than when you’re around a woman who seems really lit up on the inside. I wonder if you can talk about that. How do we take an attitude that we’re going to be further lit up by each other, instead of needing to tear each other down in any way?
LS: Oh, this is such a big one. And it’s understandable; it’s only been in the last hundred, maybe two hundred years—not a lot of time—where women can hold a credit card in their own name, have a bank account in their own name, decide whether to have children or not, decide who to marry, if to marry. But before that, for a long period of time, your fate and your life—your quality of life as a woman—was dependent on a man and being in the favor of a man. So if another woman was in the favor of a man and you weren’t, you’re out of luck, sister.
So, there’s kind of a built-in to our emotional DNA, if you will, an inherent competition and fear of other women. It’s not present in the last couple of hundred years, but we’re still teaching our psyches that this doesn’t have to be. There’s kind of a gross culture of competition among women, or—I don’t know; I don’t watch a lot of reality TV at all, but yes, kind of cat-fighting to get what the other woman has. It’s all understandable. And I think this perspective of understanding that we need all flavors of the feminine in the world; we need all versions of light through whatever woman’s body and being that you’re in.
So the main thing that I practice—because goodness knows we all need to practice this—is to look at another woman who seems lit up from the inside and say, “How can I get lit from her flame or from her light?” So, not asking her to dim down, so she doesn’t steal my light, and I’m not worried that if I burn brighter, I’m going to stick her in the shade. How can I catch fire from her? “How can I get lit off another woman’s brilliance?” is the question. This is a fiery practice, because envy and jealousy or feeling shame around someone else—those are fiery ones.
I notice that it catches on really quickly, actually, with women—this idea of, “I am going to acknowledge what I find so incredibly beautiful or compelling about you, and I’m going to use that to rise myself.” And that we then get lit off of each other. This feels good. This feels good. Women go for this pretty quickly.
TS: I’m feeling lit, being in this conversation with you.
LS: [Laughs] Excellent.
TS: I am!
LS: Yes, me too. Someone I was having a conversation with the other day—I thought it was so beautiful—she said, “Don’t worry about being too big. Just get on my shoulders and we’ll all get big together. We’ll all get bigger together.”
TS: Just to end, LiYana, as I think you know, this program is called Insights at the Edge. One of the things I’m always curious about is what someone’s growing edge is, if you will, and particularly in terms of bringing all of your Feminine Genius into the world. What would you say is your edge here, with the publication of the book, to bringing your own Feminine Genius fully forward?
LS: I’m so excited for this. I would say the edge is to write a book, to get it into the world, is kind of a masculine process for me. So, the edge is to keep actually burning in the fire of the medicine of the book, which is to listen anyways—that it’s not a given that I can hear my own intuitive voice, or my Oracle. It is—of course, it’s always there, it’s always there for any woman, and the reality is, life is noisy. Other people’s opinions and expectations or suggestions are noisy and louder than my own internal knowing. So, the edge is to continue to listen, and then the listening practice that worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. So, there’s always a refinement of really listening and balancing that out with being in the world.
TS: Very beautiful and very truthful, and straightforward. Thank you so much.
LS: Oh, thank you.
TS: I’ve been speaking with LiYana Silver. She’s the author of the new book, Feminine Genius: The Provocative Path to Waking Up and Turning On the Wisdom of Being a Woman. LiYana, thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself, and really bringing so much helpful wisdom to other people. Thank you.
LS: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for being with us.
