144. Why Isn't Everyone Using Pleasure to Reclaim Their Power? with Regena Tomashauer

What if the darkest season of your life isn't a punishment, but an initiation?

In this episode, Emily Fletcher sits down with her friend and former roommate Regena Thomashauer, known around the world as Mama Gena, for a conversation about her new book, On Our Knees. Regena is the New York Times bestselling author of Pussy: A Reclamation and the founder of the School of Womanly Arts, and this book was written by hand, one card and one page at a time, over years of 5am mornings.

Regena walks through the myth of Inanna's descent into the underworld, why she believes hell is a patriarchal invention built to keep women small while the underworld exists to make them whole, and what it costs a woman to keep playing “fine” instead of the full range of who she is. She also shares her own story: a goddess who visited her bedside at five years old, an acting class that told her she had no sensuality, and the years at what she calls “the Vatican of orgasm” that taught her pleasure is a biological miracle, not a luxury. The conversation closes with Regena reading live from the book's chapter on Kali, the goddess who arrives precisely when a life has grown too small to hold who you're becoming.

Get the book: On Our Knees by Regena Thomashauer, available now →

https://mamagenas.com/onourknees/

In this episode, Regena explores:

Why hell is a patriarchal invention, and why the underworld belongs to the feminine instead

The myth of Inanna, and why a throne can get a woman adored but never whole

Her own childhood visits from an unnamed goddess, and years spent searching for her

The acting class that sent her looking for orgasm instead of a callback

Life inside what she calls “the Vatican of orgasm,” and the neurochemistry that let her heal

Why pleasure regulates the nervous system in ways therapy and to-do lists cannot