S1E9: Making Visibility Pleasurable with Mama Gena
Welcome to Women Rocking Business, where we are here to help you rock yourself, rock your life, and rock the world as a woman entrepreneur. Because the world needs you and the time is now. I’m Sage Lavine, CEO, trainer, unretired camp counselor, and best-selling author of the Hay House Book, Women Rocking Business. We’ve had the honor of serving over a hundred thousand women entrepreneurs around the globe, just like you, who are here to do more, be more, and have more by giving your gifts to the planet. Let’s do this.
Sage Lavine
00:00:38
I am so excited for this topic to support you to make your business and your process of getting visible more pleasurable. Not just enjoyable, but even dare I say, orgasmic.
Sage Lavine
00:00:45
I’m about ready to bring on one of my favorite humans and colleagues and mentors in the entire world, the one and the only Mama Gena pleasure expert, one of her esteemed students who is highly successful in her own right, Monick Halm, who’s a real estate mentor, and one of my guest faculty, an incredible member of the Women Rocking Business team, Clare Cui. These three women have been studying their entire lifetimes how to bring pleasure practices into their day-to-day work life, personal life.
Sage Lavine
00:01:26
Our commitment is to give you the backstory of how we arrived at the place where we’re more committed to ever making business and visibility pleasurable and get you some practices.
If you’ve ever felt like being visible and getting out there kind of stretches you thin in a way that leaves it not feeling fun and yummy, this interview could be the most transformational moment for you. So let’s claim that every single one of you here has your own transformation in this moment that changes the way that you approach work forever. And with no further ado, let me bring on my guests.
Sage Lavine
00:02:06
We’re getting on Mama Gena, hello! We’re getting on the incredible Monick Halm. Oh my gosh, the incredible Clare queen. We’re so excited to have all three of you. What an absolute honor. Let’s dive into this incredible, my favorite topic and the whole world, and what a gift to be here with three incredible rock stars. For those of you that don’t know Mama Gena, her name is Regena Thomas Hauer. She’s the teacher, best-selling author, mother and media personality, founder and CEO of the school of Women of Womanly Arts. I love this. Mama Gena believes that Women are the greatest untapped natural resource on the planet.
Sage Lavine
00:02:48
And that as people of all genders reclaim the magnificence of the feminine, the patriarchy will fail, liberating us all. The interview could just be done just with that one sentence, right? Mama Gena began her movement in her living room in 1998 and it has now grown into a global movement of women. Her approach stems from decades of research in the social cultural and economic history of women. She’s also the New York Times bestselling author of Pussy: A Reclamation and Mama Gena is my dear, dear, dear colleague and friend. I’m a student of hers, a lifelong student of the power of pussy.
Sage Lavine
00:03:29
Monick. I’m so excited to have you here. Monick Halm is the founder of real estate investor goddess. She’s an educator and an advocate for female real estate investors. Monick has a vision of an emission to help a million women achieve financial freedom through real estate and get this… She, with her investors, owns 1,300 real estate rental units across six States. What a turn on. She’s also the best-selling author, podcast host, wife and mother to three amazing kids. So excited to have you here, Monick. Clare Cui, fFor those of you though, don’t know Clare, she’s a seven figure sales rockstar.
Sage Lavine
00:04:11
Clare is also an incredible yogini and I am blessed enough to work with clare on a daily and weekly basis. She’s the sales manager for Women Rocking Business. She’s one of our high-level business coaches for our clients and Clare believes in sales as a pleasure path and a spiritual path. She instills rockstar sales skills into our clients every week. What an awesome honor to be with every single one of you.
Mama Gena
00:04:37
Thank you. We are so happy to be here. Meet each other, support you. It’s wonderful.
Sage Lavine
00:04:44
It is so wonderful that women from all over the world are stepping up, speaking out, and ready to continue to change the course of this planet. Right? As you guys know, a thousand plus women entrepreneurs are here live today. Thousands more are accessing the recording, and the women who are here, every single one of you watching this, every single one of you is taking courageous steps to grow your business, get visible online, step up in your leadership. You’re starting a business that’s an extension of your heart. It’s a personal passion. You’re not peddling a factory full of widgets. We all know that being in leadership, well, “life is in session” is no joke.
Sage Lavine
00:05:27
I’d love to hear from each one of you, a quick story of a time when life was happening, right? The challenges were real. You were starting a business amidst motherhood and you know, personal transformation. How did you navigate the hard times when the responsibility was on you as an entrepreneur to get out there? How did you bring yourself back to that yummy turned-on place we’ve been talking about.
Mama Gena
00:05:53
I can kick. I have a tale of rupture and reclamation. So I started my school when my daughter was born because I felt such a deep commitment to the girls of today, the women of tomorrow. And what was I doing as a woman, as a mom to make the world a place where women were loved, honored, and valued. So I thought, well, “I’ve got to start with women first.” So I began to write the material that became the course, Mama Gena’s school of Womanly Arts. Now, like many of you who are on this call, some things come very easily to you in business.
Mama Gena
00:06:34
For me, the easy part was creating books, creating course content. All of the creative visioning was super simple, even though it required a lot of time and effort. That was more easeful than the aspect of actually creating a business plan, understanding what a budget is.
So mine is a cautionary tale. So what I chose to do at that time was to say to my husband, I said, “Listen, I need your help. You run the company, you do all the business stuff. Then I will do the, you know, TV appearances, writing the book,writing the courses, like all that stuff. I’ll take care of that.” Now, meanwhile, I never fact checked or even asked him if he was skilled enough. I just figured he’s a guy and he’ll do it. While he was so willing to do his best, he was not very good at that either.
Mama Gena
00:07:31
Fast forward to about five years into running the company, the IRS came knocking at our door and said that there was a lien on our stuff, our bank accounts, et cetera, because the taxes hadn’t been paid. And so I was just like, “Oh shit.” That was like the wake-up call of all time. So anyway, through a series of decisions that I made very, very quickly, I ended up divorcing him and I made a declaration to myself and I said, you know what? I don’t know how, but I am going to find a way to put this business on its feet and to create a beautiful, successful life, both for myself and for my daughter.
Mama Gena
00:08:23
So I want to point that out because there’s so much power in your intention. When a woman makes a declaration about where she’s heading and what she’s standing for, I heard it in Monick’s, when you were describing Monick’s work, she chose to stand for a million women becoming financially successful in real estate. I have no doubt she will do that because when you can imagine it, you can create it. When you stand for it, there is nothing that can stand in your way. There was no force on earth, more powerful than a single mom. If there’s one available, hire her, she will give it your all.
So what happened was I then, and sometimes these moments when we fall on our ass, we have to in my case, there were a couple of girlfriends that loaned me money.
Mama Gena
00:09:16
My mom actually mortgaged her apartment because she believed in me so profoundly. So I just want to say, take the shame away from failure. There’s always a way to humbly accept help. Then once again, I was determined to pay each one of these debts back ahead of time. I didn’t know how to do it.
So I began one of the greatest learning curves of my life, which actually was the secret to my success because originally I was teaching classes in my small living room, but because my dream became larger, I needed to fill rooms of first hundreds of women and then thousands of Women and soon the Javits Center in New York City, because I was determined to become a great success selling something that isn’t simple sale is when you’re trying to sell pussy to women who are most frightened of their own sexual power, it’s not a simple problem.
Mama Gena
00:10:16
I always love complicated problems, things that are truly difficult to unpack. They’re my favorite. I want to really support all of you who are listening, who love complex problems too, and are deeply attracted to them. So let’s say beginning with that commitment to myself and with all of those obstacles, that was the secret actually to my success, I would never have created a multimillion dollar company had I not had that degree of a hole to climb out of. So a deep appreciation, if any of you find yourself in a deep hole right now, please hear my words.
Mama Gena
00:10:57
You are powerful. You are filled with creativity, grace, your life force is huge. With your commitment and your staying inside pleasurable practices, you will take yourself higher than you could have ever imagined or ever dream. That is your pathway.
Sage Lavine
00:11:15
That is your pathway. Amen, a-women. What about you, Monick?
Monick Halm
Yeah, so there are many times, but I’ll talk with the most recent due to this COVID time. So I have been building up this business and the number one, the main revenue driver for my business, were live events and you probably can relate Sage. So I had this live event model that would feed into my program and I was getting ready to have my April big three-day event. This is actually, there are two things I had planned for this year.
Monick Halm
00:11:56
One was traveling around the world with my husband and my daughter, beginning of the year in Australia. Then you’re going to double down on live events and they say, “How do you make God laugh? Show her your plans? And she’s laughing.”
I come back and we come back from Australia in the beginning of March, right before and everything shuts down. I was actually going to go to a Tony Robbins event and they’re thinking about him, maybe shutting it down and I’m going, “Oh, well, he hasn’t done that in 42 years. And then he shuts it down.” I look at my husband and I go, “You don’t think we’re going to have to cancel our event? It’s a small event and we’re going to have 300 people.” Then within that week, we’re on the phone with the hotel and we know what happened.
Monick Halm
00:12:41
So I was in a complete like, “Oh shit” moment. Right? I was like, what do I do? Because this is, this was everything. You know, my whole business plan was based off of these live events. I was terrified and I didn’t know what to do. I think, you know, Mama Gena said it so well, you make a declaration. So after like freaking out and feeling into that fear…I asked myself a different question. I said, “Well, what if this could be the best thing that ever happened to me? What if I could touch even more people?”
Monick Halm
00:13:24
Because our hotel room only fit 300. So what if I can touch even more people, have an even bigger impact and make even more money? What if that could happen now? And so I sat with that.
Then the idea for this summit came, the virtual summit where it could show and talk about ways in which you could take advantage of the opportunity during these recessionary times. That’s when there are more opportunities than ever, especially in real estate, like things go on sale for real estate. Not everything is a good thing, but there are certain asset classes that are amazing. It’s like, what if we could do something, create something that could help people be even more successful in this time and highlight more women.
Monick Halm
00:14:05
So I brought together 12 women for the summit instead of the 300 I was hoping to have in the live event. We had over 1300 that joined our virtual summit. It made more money than I would have for a lot less. You know, so it was just, it was this ripple effect. I just sort of played with it and partied with that. Like, what if this could be better?
Sage Lavine
00:14:31
What if this could be better? I love that because I want to underline that you asked yourself a question you didn’t stay stuck in a conclusion that because your event was getting canceled, everything was going to go to hell. You know, you ask yourself a question and questions, open up the energy and what came in was something even better.
Sage Lavine
00:14:52
Wow, this is so cool. I love this discussion. I want to just take a pause and share something I know you guys might want to know about and that’s that we just launched a rock, your business bonus training package for anyone who buys my book, Women Rocking Business. The book hit number one when it was recently published with Hay House and the book is a 12-step system for any woman to go from having just an idea to building a six- or seven-figure business with a simple and elegant business plan that’s based in women’s values. You know, women are starting businesses one and a half times faster than men right now, but we’re also failing faster than men. But what I’ve seen is that when we learn to build businesses that align with our innate values of collaboration, rather than competition empowerment, rather than power over.
When we build businesses based in generosity, rather than using scarcity and manipulative selling tactics, I see women thrive as successful CEOs, and in our community, we see 80% of businesses succeed rather than 80% of women’s businesses failing. So that’s why we have this special promo happening right now. When you buy the book, you’ll get immediate access to our fall training course. That’s four video modules on how to make money with your message. You’ll get our entire system to really get going. You’ll get my freedom formula training on how to grow a business and make great money and a huge impact in just 12 days a month or less. So go grab the book over at www.womenrockingbusiness.com/book and get all those bonuses so that we can get you going because your clients are waiting. Once again, that URL to buy the book www.womenrockingbusiness.com/book.
Sage Lavine
00:16:27
So freaking powerful. What about you, Clare? What’s been a time that you’ve been walking through the muck and you found your way through with pleasure practices?
Clare Cui
Oh yes, absolutely. Talk about the Muck and for sure the muck for me and the fear, the major contraction was absolutely around the sales process. Sales, initially for me, when I first started as an entrepreneur was really uncomfortable. I had a lot of fear. I was so in my head, I was so worried about the right thing to say how to navigate so they didn’t just hang up on me and I could just go in my closet and cry.
Clare Cui
00:17:07
It was really a lot of contraction around just sales in general. So, so scared. When I got the structure down, when I was able to understand the energetic exchange in the sales process, when most importantly, I was able to drop into my body and feel into myself, my vision, and most importantly, my client’s vision, it felt good. It felt completely aligned. The sale was truly a beautiful and heartfelt, aligned connection. So for me, being able to drop into my body even now, when I have big conversations, I kinda wiggle my body around and drop into that conversation of my heart and my body. For sure.
Sage Lavine
00:17:58
I’ve watched you do that many times. I’ve watched you lead us through that process on team meetings, and I could not agree more. Some of you guys have already heard about my divorce to my husband many years ago when it felt like somebody had like ripped my umbilical cord out of my solar plexus. I felt like I was kind of like walking around with no skin, like, umbilical cord, like flopping in the wind, like my best friend of 10 years not really by my side anymore. Meanwhile, my business had just launched and I just found myself as an emotional wreck. I remember continuing every day to say, “I wouldn’t have been led away from this person, if that was my destiny.”
Sage lavine
00:18:43
That journey led me to doing a fundraiser in Bali for the first time. I’ll never forget looking into this Balinese woman’s eyes and hearing that women all over the world struggle with this stuff. You know, I wasn’t the only one $35,000 in debt dependent on a man for my financial wellbeing. I remember looking in some of these Balinese women’s eyes and it’s legal to hit your wife in Indonesia, you know, and my Bali retreat turned into a fundraising opportunity where we raised over $10,000 to help 35 women in Indonesia start businesses.
I remember looking in this woman’s eyes being like, “I don’t have time to be stuck and feeling sorry for myself.” That there’s things to do on the planet, but it didn’t come without my journey of then returning home hosting my first live event, creating my first seven figure revenue launch, hiring my first six or seven team members.
Sage Lavine
00:19:42
It’s like, none of that came without feeling it. You know, I remember being on my belly, like blood, sweat, and tears coming out of me. I just remember my cheek at one point was like caked with snot, just from grieving like that which had come before. And it was years later that I learned from you, Mama Gena, that it’s a perfectly appropriate thing to go into the emotion as the way of them coming out of it. Rather than spending months in grief. Like what if you dive straight into grief rather than spending months and frustration? What if you dive straight into frustration as a way out?
Sage Lavine
00:20:22
Can each of you share a tip and validate the experience of women here who might be saying to themselves, “Well, I feel weak sometimes. I fall apart sometimes. I’m an emotional wreck sometimes. What gives me the right to be a leader, right? Can each of you share your own tip for validating that experience and moving through it?
Mama Gena
00:20:45
Yeah, absolutely. I think such an important point, Sage, it’s my conviction that Women are like a piano. We have 88 keys of our emotional range. We have like the most delicate, beautiful, quiet joy. We have the most huge, raging outrage. We have rivers of grief that run inside. We have frustration, we have jealousy, ecstasy, we have everything and then some. Normally speaking, a woman is given like middle seat play, you know, “How are you?” “Fine”
“How are you doing?” “Ok.” We don’t honor the whole spectacular range, but I think if you look back over life, that if you haven’t found yourself lying on the bathroom floor with snot and blood and mud of wherever you were, then you really haven’t lived well. So I think that for women to begin to celebrate their emotional brilliance and that there, the degree to which you can own your darkness is the degree to which you can own your light. It’s just both those different side of the same coin.
Mama Gena
00:22:13
So I officially grant all of us permission to falls her and use a hundred times a day if we need to, certainly these days and these times, and with this climate in this world, it’s not easy for me to get through a day without grieving or with feeling angry or frustrated or ecstatic the next minute. So I think that the more loving we can be with ourselves throughout the range of everything, then the more doorways we hold open, not only for ourselves, but for other women and love.
Sage Lavine
00:22:51
I love this. I love it. It’s like that access to emotional range is actually a part of that same makeup that constitutes the women visionary ,that constitutes the women dreamer, that constitutes your ability for every single one of you to use your intuition, to go out there and make a way for yourself entrepreneurially. Right? Rather than making that part of yourself wrong, like make it right, because it’s like that access is the access to your power. Who’s next? Who’s got another piece of this.
Monick Halm
00:23:27
All right. I’ll, I’ll share. I mean, there’s so many times where I’ve been able to, not even tap into it. A couple of years ago, two and a half years ago. Now my brother who was my best friend passed away of cancer.
Monick Halm
00:23:47
My heart just ripped in two. One of the things I really, even in this like tremendous grief that I had on his passing, I realized that I felt so lucky and blessed to be able to hurt so much because that was a function of how much I loved him. If I hadn’t loved that deeply, I wouldn’t have hurt so much. And it was because of that love that we were able to have for each other, that I was able to feel that pain. So I was so grateful to even have that level of grief because it was just a demonstrative of how much, you know, we’d been able to connect.
Monick Halm
00:24:32
When he had gotten sick, my whole family, we were always a close family, but it created this intimacy that we, that we’d never had before, this deepening, this love. So you know, on the other side of whatever negative emotion is, there is this beautiful, positive, and it, and it’s almost in being able, you can’t. I think that is something Mama Gena has said that, you know, the depth to which you can own your light is a function of depth to what you can feel your darkness, right? These, the shadows, the emotions. So there’s a beauty if you allow it to just be able to feel all of it.
Sage Lavine
00:25:22
Thank you for your vulnerability around your brother. What about you, Clare?
Clare Cui
I just love this thread that we’re on and just so resonating about the darkness that Mama Gena was talking about. For me, that darkness was just when I was offering my first program for $3,000. The darkness for me was the realization that I had never charged anything close to that amount of money in my life. When you’re making $18,000 a year to just say a price for a certain amount of work was $3,000 was just such a major contraction.
Clare Cui
00:26:02
It truly felt like life or death. It was a combination of culturally not believing that I was able to stand in my value, that somebody actually wanted to pay me for that amount of money. That fear, when I looked at that fear and I realized that my vision, my vision for my life and not just my vision, but what I was feeling into in my body, it was my birthright. I deserved to get paid for my heart, my vision, my soul, and when I actually was able to listen to my body and lean into that inner confidence that I actually knew and felt that it was my birthright.
Clare Cui
00:26:51
I just laid out that price and with some solid sales skills, ninja skills, I was able to close. It was this little ball, this little snowball that just started growing and growing, and Sage with me growing. I’ve been able to not just change my entire life, but help other teams reach multiple seven figures. It’s been so incredible to lean into that trust, even though that fear initially was so just death-defyingly scary. When we can actually listen and lean in and get quiet and understand that our value and our birthright is there if we’re willing to claim it, then nothing is in our way except for ourselves.
Sage Lavine
00:27:46
Mm. I love that. Well said. Clare, I’ve watched you creates so much abundance for yourself and step into so much receiving. This is the path, right? Like to feel the fear and do it anyway, to be on your own shero’s journey, to use the challenges and the transformations that you’ve gone through in your life to continue to orient toward the declaration, like Mama Gena said. So we just have a couple more minutes left. I’d love to hear from each of you, just a couple sentences of your best tip. Like, do you have a dance break, putting your hand on your pussy… what is one of your most creative out-o- the-box tips to shift yourself, right, when life is in session?
Mama Gena
00:28:35
I think that it’s really important for a woman to develop a pleasure practice, to maybe choose three or four things a day that she knows are hers, that allow her to connect with her body and connect with herself. I have a friend and we go on Zoom a few mornings a week, and we do a practice that I teach at the school, which you mentioned called swamping, or we’ll do a central embodied dancing as a way of just finding ourselves and connecting with each other. Then we’ll do a practice called a holy trinity, where we each give each other a brag, a gratitude and a desire.
That kind of resets a woman, so that instead of thinking about the problems of what we’re going to cook for dinner for our families, we’re thinking about celebrating ourselves, giving gratitude, and then what we long for. So that is something that’s super useful, super easy, always on the ready. There’s always a moment to dance. There’s always a moment to connect with a girlfriend, take her higher, take yourself higher, and any other little pleasures that you can find to insert in your day, do it, do it, do it because you’re worth it!
Sage Lavine
00:29:49
You are so worth that. Thank you. Because as a woman leader, that is actually your primary responsibility to stay clear, to keep your channel clear, so that you don’t have what we like to call like a hitch in your giddy up of your business, right? So that you can be an unlimited funnel of love and, and, and commitment and enjoy in your business. What about you Monick?
Monick Halm
00:30:18
I love the tools that Mama Gena talks about, which I do as well, which I learned from her, but I, one of the things that I love is using the power of orgasm. So orgasm is such an attractive place, like the law of attraction, right there in the most attractive spot. So with my husband, you can also do it as self pleasure, like at the point where I’m at an orgasm, we’ll just like, he’ll scream out for me or else like what we’re craving. So I’ll be like $10 million. So we never wasteand orgasm.
Sage Lavine
00:31:00
I love it! 100 new clients, 200 new clients. I think that’s homework for later today, ladies. Self play, get with one you love, get in that orgasmic state that is a very high state of consciousness and claim it, Monick, you are a bold freaking warrior for bringing the truth into the orgasmic strategies here. This is what we needed today. We needed this today. What about you Clare?
Clare Cui
00:31:30
Ah, this is so good. I’m loving this and having so much fun. My little practice that I do is money mantras, but also not just, I mean, there’s so much power in the words of saying, “I deserve wealth and abundance. Abundance is my birthright.” I actually feel on my body, like I just kind of see and feel like, what is it going to feel like to have that wealth and abundance on my body? Sometimes it feels like a warm Hawaiian beach, or sometimes it feels like ooey, gooey, caramel all over my body. So as I say, my money mantra is I actually really tap into the feeling so that I can activate and summon that money or that well for abundance towards me.
I’ve also noticed too, when, for example, Sage, with women that are struggling with visibility, I mean, having the money mantra and having support and that it’s just like having your body supported with a feeling that is so important to get visible, to make more money and get the clients that you deserve.
Sage Lavine
00:32:36
I love it. I love it. Rub yourself down with a hundred dollar bills, have an orgasm, and claim that which you want and have these pleasure practices that Mama Gena is speaking to. What a juicy interview! I’ve been looking forward to this all week. So, so, so honored to be here with such pleasure oriented, incredible rockstar women. Thank you, Mama Gena. Thank you, Monick. Thank you so much, Clare. Last parting words you want to leave this incredible audience of women, entrepreneurs with?
Mama Gena
You are amazing. You’re gorgeous. You’re powerful. You deserve it. We love and support you. Go for it.
Monick Halm
The world needs you to share your gifts.So this is part of your being. You’re having this desire cause you’re being called forth and we need what you’ve got. So just continue and continue on, gorgeous.
Clare Cui
I’ll piggyback off of that. The world definitely needs you. If you want to be visible, if you are ready to receive the clients, the money, the business, that’s really been waiting for you…I am just so honored to be with Sage, and if you have an opportunity to get visible, then there’s no other leader – I say this with complete confidence – that Sage is amazing.
1
00:33:57
Thank you, Sage. Thank you, Mama Gena. Thank you, Monick. That was a transformation. When you claim, when I claim publicly, “Here’s my new practice.” I’m going to be using my orgasms, thanks to Monick, I’m going to be using my orgasms a lot more productively moving forward. So what is your takeaway? Claiming it publicly, visibly, makes a difference in your ability to really embody that moving forward. Right? When we practice getting visible here, it’s easier to get visible everywhere because we lose the intensity around any one of our sort of visibility moments.
So what’s your biggest takeaway? Thank you for standing for your own pleasure. Thank you for that, because just like Mama gena, I believe that a juiced up, turned on woman is the largest source of transformation and energy on the planet ,because we’re all in this journey of changing the world as women leaders together. We love you. Thank you so much for being the very best part of the Women Rocking Business community.
You’ve been listening to Women Rocking Business. I’m Sage Lavine. The next step is to join our private Facebook group. The Women Rocking Business Sisterhood and introduce yourself over there for the real and vulnerable conversation of what it really takes to launch and scale a business you love in that Sisterhood group. We have each other’s backs, each other’s sides and each other’s fronts. This is true collaboration. So go grab a seat in the Sisterhood because we can go so much further when we go together, you’ll find a link to the private Sisterhood group and do our upcoming events in the show notes.
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