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May 28 - June 16, 2025
Society hasn’t evolved much. Our culture still insists that women’s ambitions should be at least partially crowned by children, that not wanting a family suggests something is wrong with you.
Carl Jung said that nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent,
the Buddha taught people how to walk the line between self-expression and attachment—how to know who you are and what you want without clinging to a certain outcome. You are responsible for your part, your blooming lotus from the mud beneath, as it were—but how the world relates to you is beyond your control or provenance. In the interim, you must do your best to express your gifts—you must put yourself out there.
Owning our desire, this bid for wholeness, also requires taking responsibility for our reactions, particularly in those moments when we find the behavior of others threatening. We need to study how our irritation might be reflecting our own, unrequited desire.
We have these limitations in part, she explained to me, because we’ve been conditioned to think that satisfaction, abundance, safety, and security aren’t possible. If you’ve never seen it, you can’t believe it. In Lacy’s view, to make the impossible possible, to make all our wanting plausible, we must journey deep into our own minds to remove blocks—and then replace those blocks with concrete examples of people who represent our biggest dreams for ourselves. These people serve as our “expanders,” shedding light on a realizable path.
In Lacy’s world, it’s She has it, and so I can have it too.
Per Lacy, there are expanders and fragment expanders. Here’s Lacy’s checklist for an expander, all conditions required: 1. They’ve been in the exact place you’re in now, whether it’s struggling, or lack, or limit, or not having what they want. 2. They’ve gone on to become successful in, own, or embody what you’re calling in. 3. Their success track feels believable and obtainable to you. 4. They give you an aha moment that sounds egotistical, but it’s not. You know you’ve been expanded on a subconscious level when you have an aha moment where you go, “Oh…oh my gosh, if they accomplished that,
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Lacy also speaks of “reality expanders,” who can help minimize pining or impatience by showing us the harder side of a dream (e.g., you think you really want to own a restaurant, find an expander living that life, and realize by studying her that being a chef is very difficult—you might not lo...
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expansion in lieu of envy, a reclamation and re-languaging around this essential need, and then a way of using each other to get bigger and bigger. This support and abundance is the model of a sisterhood.
As Malkin explains, “Young children only feel like they matter—only feel like they exist—when their parents make them feel special. Parents who pay attention to their children’s inner lives—their hopes and dreams, their sadness and fears, and most of all their need for admiration—provide the ‘mirroring’ necessary for the child to develop a healthy sense of self.”
you can get a lot from your parents and still not get everything you need.
as a child you need validation. You will look wherever you can to find assurances you’re OK, and you’ll figure out what you need to do to get love, to feel secure attachment.
As children, we know: We know when our painting of an apple looks like a sad turd; we know when we’re sad, or scared, or lonely—and to be told that’s not true is at best confusing. At worst, it means you lose faith in yourself to know yourself.
We crave accuracy of assessment—we want our perception of ourselves in the world to be in lockstep with how we’re perceived by the world.
For many of the women I know, it feels safer and more secure to be underestimated, overlooked, and not valorized in any way. I don’t think we minimize ourselves because we’re naturally afraid of pressure; I think it’s because we’ve been coached to lead ...
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We find safety and security in not believing in ourselves—not only because there’s a world that tells us we shouldn’t but also because there’s less to lose this way. So we remain tight and confined, even slapping down other women who attempt to rise. How dare she, we think, when I am down here, in a defensive crouch?
By embracing our true selves, we can better support other women as they celebrate themselves too.
How nice it would be to exist in a system where we value people not by how well they fit in but by what they uniquely contribute, how accurately they achieve the work of being who they are meant to be.
“The less you need to be to the world, the more you can be to yourself.”
What if instead of “Am I worthy?” we learned, “I give, and in turn, I receive”? It would be remarkable if we could behold and celebrate our specialness without the accompanying wash of shame that seems to follow any gestures of self-love.
The mechanism behind the cycle of reciprocity is to recognize and employ our individual talents to serve the collective whole.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson talks about the science of wolf packs and our misunderstanding of what keeps the dogs together: She discovered that while the alpha gets the attention and acclaim, it’s the omega who functions as the group’s heartbeat, the most essential canine, the most mourned when lost.
the best leaders are able to modulate their confidence: They dial it down when they need to take in information and consider other perspectives, and then, when they move into making and executing a decision, they dial it back up.
As Boorstin writes, “Exaggerated self-confidence often stood in the way of rational decisions,” continuing, “Male CEOs scored higher on typical measures of CEO confidence, whereas female leaders were found to be more accurate in assessing their own abilities and were much more sensitive to different types of feedback. There’s also evidence that when faced with negative news and in anticipation of negative outcomes, women respond more decisively than men.”
Whom would we miss the most: the person who collects the garbage from the curb, the person who harvests the summer crops, or the CEO down the street? It’s no mystery who has a greater impact on our collective health and well-being.
Oprah said: “Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility.”
“The word humility derives from the Latin word humilitas, which means ‘of the earth.’ To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become—to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.”
Humility doesn’t mean hiding in the side curtains, it just means you should keep your feet planted while you reach for the sky. Your gifts, after all, belong to the earth: humility, humus, the soil beneath our feet.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Marion Woodman, in her Jungian framework, believed that anorexics want to be light, to be untethered to matter, to feel empty and clean, as though they’ve been scrubbed inside with a bottle brush. On the other side, those who eat compulsively want to be buried alive, to concretize themselves in mass. Both are avenues to numbing, to dissociation—and at the same time a battle for control.
we are all on the spectrum of restricting and permitting. While “Permitters” use food to bail on their bodies, eating to unconsciousness, “Restrictors” believe in control.
Being in a body is hard. It’s the prism through which we work out our relationship to the world. It is the home for our feelings and our soul, from which we are often so disconnected, choosing to live up high, in our minds, instead.
Spiritually and energetically, we don’t know where we end and others begin. We struggle to understand exactly how much space we deserve to take up.
The body is the way that we contact the world and each other. Food is simply a medium through which many of us express ourselves, almost as an antidote to the poisonous expectations that are projected onto us about what we should look like and how we should be.
When we eat beyond our hunger or override our hunger instinct entirely, we seem to be saying: I cannot metabolize my feelings and emotions, I deserve no pleasure, I want to disappear, I want to die.
Eating in any way that is punishing is unkind, certainly, and it’s also an abnegation of who we are and who we’re trying to be. It is a profound rejection of self. We treat ourselves like prisoners who must be punished with solitary confinement, who must be wrestled into their cells. We don’t trust ourselves enough to let ourselves be.
my body was its own entity, not fully under my dominion. It would do what it would do. It had its own language. Yet I had never tried to talk to it, or to listen. I had ignored its attempts to communicate for years, leaving it stuffed with shame and other bad feelings.
Once you start with the idea of more, it’s hard to know when you have enough.
The basic thesis is that we make ourselves miserable because we underdevelop our intellect (not to be confused with intelligence) and let our propulsive minds drive our lives forward.
Our minds are the seat of emotions—our likes and dislikes. Our minds exhaust us and make us crazy. We cannot manage them.
shopping sated a momentary yet persistent appetite in me but did nothing to solve an underlying hunger or need. I was buying just to own, to collect.
Women have been programmed to believe money is like a pond, finite and boundaried, whereas men perceive it as a roaring and endless river.
Our thinking is problematic for many reasons: Not only are women often stuck in the shallow end, worried about accruing enough money in a culture that defines power by its access to wealth, but we perceive it as a dwindling supply.
“If you think about water when it’s moving, when it’s flowing, it purifies. It makes things grow, it cleanses. But when it’s hoarded or held or stuck, it becomes stagnant and toxic to those who are holding onto it.”
Part of evolution is allowing our humanity to emerge without rushing to stuff it down. We need to resist letting stories about who we’re supposed to be—good, pliant, obliging—define us. We must do the work of defining ourselves first.
anger can be a guiding light, a means of showing us what and where our boundaries are.
anger serves as an internal alarm, indicating that something is wrong. We must learn to he...
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when people direct their anger and pain toward us, we must learn how to respond appro...
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she could be right, or she could be free.
