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Book Excerpt...
A Feminine Manifesta
Preface
We met on the first day of school in the fall of 1978, two nervous freshmen at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California: Lily with her giant brown eyes and a mouth chock-full of silver braces, and Karen with her fiery red hair and Catholic uniform skirt hemmed just beneath the knees. We’ve been the very best of friends ever since.
For over thirty years, we’ve seen each other through thick and thin. New love, dramatic breakups, and marriage. Career success and financial duress. Health kicks and compulsive eating disorders. Births of children and heart-wrenching deaths of friends and parents. Fortunately, there have been more bouts of outrageous joy, adventure, and fun than hardship. Karen has been married to her college sweetheart for twenty-two years and is the mother of a teenage daughter and a pre-teen son. Lily is single and living life at its fullest in excited anticipation of meeting her true love. Although neither of us would say her life is perfect (whose is?), we can both say that as we enter our forty-fifth year, we are the happiest we have ever been and our lives continue to unfold in ways that surprise and delight us.
We’re passionate about the work we do in supporting women to develop better relationships with themselves, and we’re having more fun than ever since becoming five-days-a-week business partners. Of course it doesn’t hurt to be soulmate friends—think Lucy and Ethel—who’ve been making each other laugh till we snort on a daily basis since we were thirteen. We’re loving almost everything about growing older (yeah, the loss of skin elasticity we could do without). We’re in the best shape of our lives and have never been healthier, stronger or more at peace. And most importantly, our relationships with our loved ones are flourishing.
This book was born out of the happiness we’re experiencing that we want to share with other women. The original idea was hatched as we walked along Crissy Field by the Golden Gate Bridge about seven years ago. We were talking about how our own happiness seemed directly related to our ability to be kind and respectful to... ourselves. Women could be much less stressed-out, we agreed, if we weren’t constantly picking at our own perceived flaws and inadequacies. It’s like we’ve got an aggressive inner jockey—always riding ourselves with the whip instead of offering ourselves a carrot. We recognized the irony in this behavior, given that it’s exactly our self-critical ways—and the accompanying crankiness, insecurity and frustration—that drive us all to act in ways we’re not proud of.
It occurred to us that day that we women have unknowingly disempowered ourselves as a gender in large part because of our lack of self-appreciation. We were speaking from personal experience, each carrying her own torrid history of being self-critical. It had taken both of us many years of therapy, voracious reading, countless seminars, endless chick-chats and some darn good coaching before we finally saw the idiocy of our old self-demeaning ways and made a pact to lighten up on ourselves.
Slaying—or at least badly maiming—the dragon of self-denigration, we discovered, brought out our more patient and loving sides, which made us like ourselves more and ultimately allowed us to create more connected relationships. When it finally sank in, the lesson seemed so simple and obvious: being loving to ourselves was a much smarter choice than the alternative, not only for our own good, but for the good of our families, friends, and any random stranger that crossed our paths.
Warming to our topic, we walked and talked for hours on the trail along the San Francisco Bay. “We should write a book and share this holy grail o’ wisdom with as many women as possible!” we declared. Every woman, we vowed, should know the truth—when a woman is kinder to herself, not only does she feel happier, but it also brings out the best of who she is. Our enthusiasm crescendoed as we envisioned the message of empowerment we wanted to share with our sisters all over the world. Naïve as first graders, we figured we could crank a book out in no time. Really, how hard could it be?
Well, as anyone who’s ever written a book knows, it’s really hard and takes endless hours of hardcore focus. We became impatient with the process but simultaneously so excited about all the information we accumulated that we simply couldn’t wait any longer to share what we knew.
So instead of finishing the book, we decided to offer seminars for women. How hard could it be? Well, the seminars were fantastically inspiring and empowering—if we do say so ourselves—and the ladies who attended left high as kites, armed with all sorts of stress reduction techniques and self-appreciation tools, to say nothing of a much stronger sense of their own inherent value. But getting women to take time out of their busy schedules and commit to a weekend of self-reflection was like pulling teeth with extra long roots. Additionally, many of the seminar attendees reported that once they returned to their daily routines, they’d fall back into old habits of self-criticism.
So then we thought, “Let’s make it easy for them: let’s bring the mountain to Mohammed and do a weekly radio show. That way we can connect with even more women continuously in their homes and cars. How hard could it be?” The Goddess to Goddess Empower Hour—Inspirational Information for Women and the Divine Dudes Who Love Them was birthed from this place. We loved doing the radio show; it was a complete blast and it got rave reviews in our tiny Monterey Bay community, but it turns out breaking into the national radio market would require years of knocking on doors traditionally closed to female empowerment programming. Once again, we simply didn’t want to wait to get our message out to the masses.
So here we are, having come full circle and back to the book you now hold in your hands. Whoa, what a wild ride!
When we first started writing again, we were bursting with even more great information and we wanted to share all of it, every juicy morsel of wisdom we’d gleaned from our own experience and the “life experts” we’d interviewed each week on The Goddess to Goddess Empower Hour. The first version of the book—twenty eight verbose chapters, each dedicated to a specific practice—elicited the following admonition from a friend: “Honey, women like me are gonna be devouring this thing between diaper changes at home and filing briefs at the office. Think pamphlet, not epic saga.”
She was right, of course. After more months, revisions, and cups of coffee than we care to admit, we whittled A Feminine Manifesta down to three simple steps, the three most powerful practices we know of for creating a phenomenal life based on a healthier relationship with yourself. Each of the practices is related to your feminine side—and each is connected to self-love, which we believe to be the most important facet of happiness. Take what you like from what we offer, and leave the rest behind, but be sure to give each one a try.
Writing A Feminine Manifesta has been one of the most profound and challenging experiences of our lives. We wrote it to support other women in living in more joy—but, because we’ve immersed ourselves in the practices in this book for all these years, we’ve ended up taking our own lives to much higher levels. Are we the authors practicing everything we preach? Absolutely. Are we doing it perfectly? Of course not! Are we much stronger, kinder, wiser, joyous and peaceful than ever before? Without a doubt. This is why we can recommend these practices to you with complete and utter confidence.
Thank you for investing in this book, and in yourself. We feel privileged to be a part of your journey.
- Lily Hills and Karen Hudson
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