This week’s blog is an interview with the unforgettable Regena Thomashauer, founder of the School of Womanly Arts, that last year awarded me the honor of Pleasure Revolutionary of the Year, alongside Dr. Christian Northrup. Join Regena and I for an interview that may change your relationship with your beauty, and subsequently your life, forever.

Jena: Regena, the little known weight loss secret the dieting industry doesn’t want you to know is that an internal dialogue that sounds like, “I’m not good enough, I’m not cute enough, I’m not beautiful enough,” creates an inner stress state that metabolically prevents weight loss, creating a vicious cycle.

How do you teach women to start owning their beauty and put these stressful, self-deprecating thoughts to rest once and for all?

Regena: Well, the key to beauty is ownership. Every single woman is gorgeous if she makes the decision that she’s gorgeous. And every single woman is horrifyingly ugly if she makes the decision thats she’s horrifyingly ugly. 

It’s really a funny thing. It’s a buyer’s market, and whatever opinion we choose to buy at the beginning of the day can impact, not just the way we relate with ourselves and others throughout the day, but our whole life.

We have all seen incredible precedents of a woman who is not particularly beautiful, but who can captivate us with her extraordinary beauty, and soon we are completely under her spell. And vice versa, a woman with great attributes we barely notice. The big deciding factor is how she feels on the inside.

If she feels gorgeous then she is gorgeous, but it takes discipline to decide that you are beautiful. The act of loving yourself is radical self care. It’s a revolutionary decision to make, to look in that mirror, decide that you are hot and fabulous, amazing and fierce, and just unbelievably compelling.

It’s war out there. The culture will eat away at a woman’s confidence everyday.

Jena: For a woman who’s struggling to think of herself as hot, what’s the first step?

Regena: Every woman has experienced that you can’t open the cover of a Glamour or Elle or Vogue and not realize there’s a standard of beauty that’s different than the way most women appear. It’s an act of revolutionary power and discipline to decide to name and claim and own your beauty.

For example, picture this: You start your day. You shower, brush your teeth, get dressed, and as you look in the the mirror, you decide, “Oh, I am so seriously hot today! I am gorgeous. I am fabulous. I am delicious, look at me. I am having a beyond good hair day today.”

And then you walk down the street differently. You feel fantastic. And it’s because of nothing more than a little dialogue you had with your mirror.

We’ve also both had the following experience. Same girl, same morning, but you look in the mirror and you think, “ugh I look awful, it’s a bad hair day, I have bags under my eyes, I think I’m fat.” You make a series of decisions that completely takes the wind out of your beauty sails, and you so walk through your day, thinking you’re not so beautiful that day.

It all happened because you made the decision. 

What I do at my School of Womanly Arts is continually give women the technology, the instructions, and the excuses, to make the decision that they are fabulous, gorgeous, hot, sexy, irresistible.

For example, let’s say you wake up and it’s one of those bad hair days. You look in the mirror it’s not working out. That shouldn’t stop you because there are still things you can do next can change your day, your life, and your impact on the planet.

For me, I have 3 or 4 things that always make me feel hot. One is lip gloss. My preference is the kind with a little sparkle in it, ‘cause even if I have no other makeup, if I have little dewy dewdrop lips, I am ravishing–that’s all I need. Even in my old gym clothes, on my way to the gym, I always make a moment to put on my little glitter lip gloss, and then off I go. And when I’m waving hi to the construction workers on the way there, it’s a different me walking down the street with lip gloss, than with no lip gloss.

Every woman has her little thing. It could be a spray of her favorite fragrance–that could transform a woman, a small thing like that. It could be a decision about the way you dress. Even if it’s the wrong time of the month, if I put on a pair of high heels, I’m suddenly hot.

I practice “protective heel use”–a woman has to be crazy to wear high heels all day–it’s not right. But if you throw your heels in your bag and walk to the party in your flats, switch your heels before you get in, you get to make the entrance, you get to be fabulous, and then throw the flats on again for comfort on your way home.

Jena: I love that strategy.

Regena: It’s so helpful. I don’t know why these little teeny tiny things are so helpful, but its worthy of exploration. What are the ingredients of beauty? How can I organize three, four or five of them, and make sure I have them in place even if I have absolutely no time.

I mean how long does it take to throw a little lipgloss on and spray my favorite fragrance? That’s under a minute for those three things, and it can make or break my opinion of my own beauty that day.

Remember, time is not a factor in owning your beauty, your choice is. 

Our culture does not encourage a woman to think about her pleasure first, foremost and always. She’s encouraged to think about her obligations, to either her work, or her family, her boss, her girlfriends, her kids, and to leave out her obligation to herself, and to the ownership to her own beauty.

Jena, I know you know this, because you always look fantastic. When you prioritize your own pleasure enough to take that moment for that little 30 second to a minute organizing of how you are going to represent your beauty to yourself that day before you leave your house, your day is different.

The experiences you attract to yourself are different, the experiences you create with other people are different, because you are not hiding–you are shining your light. That’s key for a woman. A woman turned on is a woman in her highest power.

When we feel hot and delicious, and turned on and irresistible, we make magic not only for ourselves, but for everyone who encounters us. You know how it is. You can be hot, fabulous and turned on whether you weight 90 pounds or 190 pounds, it all comes back to your decision.

Another free and fast thing for a woman to turn herself on is if she looks in the mirror and gives herself a little wink and says, “you are so hot, who is hotter than you?” Just a little like that, and her day is changed. So its not time consuming or expensive to be beautiful. Plastic surgery has nothing to do with it, weight loss has nothing to do with it really. It’s a decision. It’s a decision I encourage woman to make as often as possible throughout their lives because when we’re feeling hot and fabulous everything in the world works better.

Jena: I definitely agree. It’s a fallacy that if we hate our bodies and we lose weight we’ll start loving them. We have to start loving our bodies now.

Regena: You got it. I find that the women at my school very often just by virtue of loving themselves more as you say, will start losing weight even without meaning to. It’s a consequence of everything getting better.

Another example, when you love yourself you start to make better decisions about who you date.  If you think you’re hot, you will make sure you date a guy who is not only respectful, just worshipful of how hot and fantastic you are. You won’t waste your time with guys that don’t think you’re the bomb, if you think you’re the bomb. The same thing with food, you want to make fantastic choices about how to nourish your body, when you decide your body is your temple and you are the goddess that inhabits the temple.

Every thing works so well when we think we’re delicious.  

You know back in the day when you and I were two or three or four years old we just thought we were the cutest things ever.  Little kids when they are two or three or four or five years old, they just think they are so adorable and cute and amazing. They love looking at themselves in the mirror, they will do so for hours, showing you that it is part of the DNA of what it means to be a woman. It’s back there and we can each kind of be inspired by the actual makeup of what it means to be a woman.

We don’t have to fall victim to the way our culture skews our relationships with ourself, and has us diminish ourselves rather than celebrate ourselves.  I keep using the word revolutionary.  You have to be a revolutionary spirit to decide that no matter what the culture says, I’m gorgeous, no matter what my age is, I’m gorgeous, no matter what my weight is, I’m irresistible, no matter if I haven’t had my boobs done, or my tummy tucked, or whatever those things are that women do, I am fantastic and irresistible right now because every woman is. Every single woman is.

Jena: It was when I really began to understand the point you’re making that I was able to come to peace with food and end years of compulsive eating and binging. 

Regena: I thank you for knowing the huge importance of that insight in your life and for having the courage to give other women a leg up.  I know you are saving so many women’s lives by sparing them that journey into those dark reaches of eating disorders, which so many women have succumbed to without having inspirational lights like you in the world.

I so appreciate the work you do teaching women how to take pleasure from food. 

It seems so silly, but it’s so critical. It’s the turning point. It’s the big difference.

Jena: How can we create more pleasures for ourselves?

Regena: It starts out really, simply, with a little internal discipline for new little habit. We all know we are supposed to exercise and we’re supposed to eat right and all those things we are supposed to to do.  But, what if even before we address any of those issues, we just took a minute every morning to pay attention to what would make me feel beautiful today? What would that be?  And then organize that.

Another way is to make what I call a new “womantra” everyday.

Maybe on Monday your “womantra” is “I am hot, I am fabulous.” I promise you if you walked around and said that ten times that day, it would be so much fun!  And you start creating that consequence in the world.  And then maybe Tuesdays, Tuesdays it would be “I am irresistible, everyone melts in my presence.”

Sounds like a silly, small thing, but its huge.  We don’t account for the fact that our culture gives us a lot of negative messaging, and if we decide to be that revolutionary and add positive messaging every single day, it has a huge impact on our enjoyment of our own beauty and our enjoyment of ourselves in the world.

Another thing you can do is organize your clothing so that everything you put on makes you feel fabulous, even if it’s your workout gear.  I watch women at the gym, and I’ve noticed the women who are in fun, bright, hot, workout gear have much more enjoyable workouts than the women who are in the old paddy ratty stuff. They just sparkle.  I don’t know why that is, but it is.

So you want to pay attention to the clothes that you wear. Even if you end up throwing out half of the stuff in your closet, you have just done yourself a huge favor because the stuff you kept are clothes that make you feel gorgeous, and make you presence the best of yourself,  rather than stuff you wear because you bought it on sale, or because it was there,  or it was practical, or something.  You have to be very cut-throat and make sure everything in your closet makes you feel gorgeous, or it has to go.

So find out, am I a fragrance girl?  Am I a lip gloss girl? Am I a high heels girls?  What are those little tricks that make me feel fantastic, and then make sure that you incorporate those in your daily practice with yourself.

Jena: Deep hair conditioning treatment is one of mine. I use a natural brand that’s thick and luscious. I definitely have a good hair day after that.

Regena: For me it’s a certain body lotion with a ginger fragrance.  When I smell this I feel like I am a Hawaiian princess.  Just that little fragrance makes me feel delicious.  Is it a small thing yes, but it makes me feel wonderful.

I also find that when I eat something, I feel prettier if I go slow.  If I eat off of  china and drink out of a glass instead of a bottle, it makes me feel luxurious and more beautiful.  I make sure those little choices, those little things that I’ve noticed augment my beauty, become part of my daily life.

It’s a fun research project for every women to look and see, ok, what are those 3 or 4 things I can do in the morning to make myself feel beautiful? Whats a “womantra” I can create to make myself feel beautiful? And what’s the most beautiful way that I could enjoy my meals today?  What makes me feel hot and worthy and fabulous?  And then take all those decisions and input them.  Make sure they happen, at least two or three a day.

Jena: My friend Annie calls it, “decorating the world,” meaning that by owning your beauty and putting your beauty out there in the world, it’s brings decoration, it brings contribution. We give more to the world by shining.  The world blossoms when we own our beauty–it’s not just a selfish act.

Regena: Exactly. It makes such a huge difference inside a woman. If I feel gorgeous, I’m so much more generous.  I have so much more space inside myself to be gracious  or patient with my little girl, my family or my guy.  When I make that decision inside myself that I am beautiful, I am the woman I was born to be.  And when I don’t feel beautiful, it’s trickier, I’m crankier.

It’s very easy to have a mediocre life or a miserable life.  Pretty much do nothing, and you’ll have a miserable or a mediocre life.  But a life filled with pleasure, a life filled with joy, a life filled with ecstasy, a life filled with beauty, that requires discipline.  And a real sister goddess, a real pleasure revolutionary, is a woman that prioritizes her joy above all other values, as you say, knowing that it will serve everyone in her presence, if she prioritizes her own pleasure and her own joy. And then she will have a life filled with passion, pleasure, beauty, ecstasy, intimacy, all those things.  It does take a lot of courage to live a pleasured life.

Jena: Regena, thank you so much.  I’m really energized by everything you have to share. 

Regena Thomashauer (Mama Gena) is an icon, teacher, author, mother and one of a handful of pioneers on the planet researching the nature of pleasure and dedicating her life to the discipline of pleasure and fun. The author of three books published by Simon & Schuster including Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts: Using the Power of Pleasure to Have Your Way with the World, find out more about her live and online school at http://mamagenas.com

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