This episode’s guest is the powerhouse Claire Zammit.  Claire is the co-creator of the Feminine Power training courses for women and co-leads a thriving learning community of hundreds of thousands of women throughout the world.

In this episode, Claire Zammit and I speak about:

• “Feminine Power”
• Living our truth through relationship and our greater connection to the whole
• The best way to empower other women
• How spirituality will change with the rise of feminine power
• The feminine as the “Great Integrator”
• Her latest honor through Inc. Magazine and her company Evolving Wisdom

 

Claire Zammit was a featured presenter at the 2013 Emerging Women Live Conference, October 10th-13th in Boulder, CO.

Tune in to listen to my conversation “The Keys to Feminine Power” with Claire Zammit.

Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.

 

Transcript

Chantal Pierrat: Welcome, Claire!

Claire Zammit: Hi, Chantal. Great to be with you.

CP: I’m excited to be talking to you because I know that every time we get on the phone together, we end up talking about my favorite topic, which is feminine power.

CZ: Yes, absolutely.

CP: Well, maybe we should just jump in, and I know that’s the title of your upcoming book, and it’s the title of your work. I know you have a telecast and a workshop that does—I don’t know, how many thousands of people have listened to that workshop now?

CZ: We’ve been teaching a seven-week course on feminine power for the last four years, and we’ve had about seven thousand women participate in that, [and] hundreds of thousands more with our free events. It’s something that I’m really seeing as speaking to women’s experience at a very deep level. I think that’s what we connect with when we have our conversations. So I’m excited to be able to dive into it today, together.

CP: Well, why don’t we start by—it’s just interesting, “feminine” and “power.” They’re two very different energies, but together they totally make sense. And I’m just curious to see if you can start with defining what you mean by “feminine power.”

CZ: Well, I might just start, if I can, with a bit of a story that creates a little context for it. I think this exploration and discovery [really] came out of our own experience. My teaching partner Katherine Woodward Thomas and the women that we were serving in the community we had started in Los Angeles—we had a center for transformation, and we were coaching women and working with women.

And both of us were accomplished, successful women, as were the women we were serving. And we really noticed, in spite of having so much “power” in our lives, we both felt this very painful and confusing gap between the deeper potentials that we sensed for who we were as women, for the creative contribution, for the intimacy and connection of our relationships, and just for our overall experience of life. We couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was, and we found that women everywhere were having the same experience as us.

At the same time, we noticed that there was a yearning towards the feminine that was happening. We [said,] “This is really interesting. So why don’t we do a class so we can begin to explore what the feminine is?” And the first night of class, it was [really] interesting: We listed these feminine qualities up on the board, and these masculine qualities up on the board—just common assumptions about [the] feminine: flowing, intuitive, receptive, surrendered, nurturing. And typical masculine qualities like logical, linear, hard, angular, penetrating.

And we looked at these different energies and these different qualities, and what was noticed was that we were hungry, as a group, as women, to experience these more feminine qualities. We were very drawn, but there was a collective fear that if we allowed ourselves to be scented in these qualities, that there would be a loss of power. So there was [this idea that] we were drawn to power, we’re drawn to this feminine, but it occurs like somehow there’s not power available to us.

We got really interested in this, and we looked up the word “power” in the dictionary, and it said, “To do, to act, to accomplish, political force, might.” And it was like, “Gee, this sounds very much like the masculine qualities that we have up on the board.” And we realized—it was kind of a big awakening—wow, we as women, in the power system that we’ve been mastering over the last 50 years, [have] been [in] more of a masculine version of power.

And so we just go, “Wow, I wonder what a feminine version of power would look like,” so that we could begin to create and source our lives from these feminine qualities. And it’s really interesting. That began, I think, what has become in many ways our life’s work in terms of we made it our mission to find out how to access the more feminine version of power. And the interesting thing we found was that it speaks to a shift that’s happening, I think, for women where we have accomplished a lot—and certainly there’s a long way to go globally and in the United States. But there have been huge strides made over the last 50 years through feminism that the opportunity, the access to power and to freedom is so enormous.

And it’s a different kind of yearning that’s waking up inside of us where we don’t necessarily want to just achieve success, or we don’t want to necessarily just achieve accomplishment or have power for power’s sake. What we see—and this was my experience, it was Katherine’s experience, it was the experience of the women in our community—is that what we’re yearning for is to actually create our lives as an expression of who we truly are and an expression of our deepest gifts. We [want to] realize our higher spiritual potentials, our potentials for our relationships, for our larger creative contribution.

And what we recognized and realized was that because that has to do with the flourishing of these higher potentials, you actually can’t create that kind of success in your life just with the masculine system of power. For that, we need to awaken this new system of power, which is more of the feminine system, and that’s really what we’ve been going into in all of our work.

So the masculine system of power [or] anything that’s predictable or controllable that you can create with a step-by-step plan—like building a house. You have a plan, you have a certain number of bricks, you have an infrastructure, you know how many people you need, and you can just execute on the plan and be able to make it happen. So the masculine system is a wonderful system to use for anything that you can create in that way. If you want to get a rocket ship to the moon, the masculine system has been amazing. The miracles of science, the marvels of industry [are] incredible gifts of the masculine. It’s not that it’s wrong and bad, it’s just insufficient to create the things that we’re now most yearning for.

So feminine power is really the power to create those things that can’t be controlled: true love, intimacy, higher creativity, the realization of your spiritual potential, your creative gifts, being able to impact others. All of these things we need to be able to access with more of a feminine system of power that we’ve found is based upon the feminine principle of relatedness. So I would say there is a difference—I could go into this all day, but I hope that’s a helpful starting point in terms of the context around the two.

CP: Yes! There were a couple of things that just came to mind. One was that it was very interesting when you said—and again, this is the Emerging Women tagline, so I totally get it—that really coming in and creating a life—women want this, and I think men want it too—but creating a life where we’re really living our truth, and that the outer is a reflection of an inner alignment.

And then you went on to say how it becomes expressed through relationship and our greater contribution. And I thought that was very interesting because after you realize the truth of who you are, you can go in a million different directions. You can ride your true purpose. But you really made a point to bring those two things, which I think are hugely feminine. When people with a strong feminine lead realize the truth of who they are, they then want to express it in terms of relationship, and what this [means] with the greater contribution to the world and how we [can] make the world a better place through this.

CZ: Yes. And this is where it really is a paradigm shift in terms of, I think, at this moment where [many of us] are looking at what we’ve been lined up with. Many of us have been lined up with goals of success—going to college and getting a good job. I know I certainly grew up where these were the markers of success. And I experienced them. I was a high achiever early on in life, and I was able to accomplish a lot of goals.

By the time I was in my late twenties, I was the head of an organization, I had a team of 50 women. Everything looked great on the outside. I had accomplished all of the things that I was supposed to do, and yet I was painfully depressed. I would go to sleep with a kind of agony. I would wake up with [it]. And it was really the beginning of a dark night of the soul. And it was very confusing because I felt like there was a deeper purpose, a deeper reason why I was here. I could feel this contribution inside of me; I could sense it, but I couldn’t see it.

And I think this is the challenge that we have, where we need to create with a different system of power. Because the yearning that’s awakening in us, it’s not just to achieve these external markers of success, as wonderful as they are. There’s nothing wrong with that. Again, it’s just this deeper yearning that’s awakening to discover who we are and why we’re here, and really participate in the life process in a way that’s bigger than ourselves. And that has to do with becoming the fullness of who we are in service to the evolution and flourishing of life.

That’s really the deeper context each one of us—you, me, all of us—in our clearest moments sense that we have gifts and talents inside of us that the world has never seen and may never see again after we’re gone. Perhaps even in our most courageous moments [we] sense that we have a role to play in shaping the future of our world. And the thing I’ve really discovered is we’re right, but we can’t necessarily see what that looks like or how to get there. And the power that we’ve been cultivating to do, to accomplish, to make things happen is not necessarily the power that’s going to give us access to unleashing the fullness of who we are in this larger context.

CP: Right. I think that’s what excites me the most about the rising feminine. And as we can teach our society, both men and women, to accept that energy, both as a lead and also as something to be integrated with the masculine, that it will bring that component of, “Yes, we want to realize who we are, but that’s not the end of the story. That’s not the end of the game right there. That’s just a stepping stone so we can be more effective in connecting with the rest of the world in a real way.”

CZ: Right! Absolutely. And really, not just achieve power as it is, but access the power to transform and evolve the world, and through becoming ourselves, actually transforming and evolving our world in the process.

CP: Right. So juicy. And I love your work also because you are teaching women—in some way, there’s [a] skills part about how to actually realize a business, but primarily it’s mindset and framework and perspective. And again, the feminine is more subtle, there are subtler energies rather than, “OK, step one, step two, step three.” And there’s a lot of skills-based trainings out there for women who want to build businesses, who want to lead, but this vision piece, this perspective, the deep inner transformation that’s required—I really feel like that’s where the real work is.

CZ: Yes. Right. Absolutely. How do we begin to source power from relatedness? What’s the process of creating something from the inside out? In our work, we teach that [there are] three primary sources of feminine power, and [the first is] our relationship with ourselves, getting into an empowered relationship with our feelings and emotions so that we can transform and embody the deeper truth of who we are. I love that in your tagline, I think that’s the foundation. We need to actually step in and become the women that we came here to be.

Secondly, to be able to step into this rich co-creative relationship with the energy and intelligence of life and access our own inner guidance and the intelligence and creativity of the life process. And finally, in our relationships with each other. I think we’re so deeply entrenched in a paradigm of competition and autonomy. We feel like there’s something insufficient in us if we need help or partnership or support. But we’ve really found that the truth is we can’t become ourselves by ourselves, and we actually need to learn how to open up and receive and generate support at an unprecedented level to be able to create in this way.

These ways of knowing and being and creating are a critical piece of development that we need to take on to be able to be successful at all of these other things—exactly what you’re pointing to. We don’t want to just have the tools to be able to make things happen. We want to be able to self-express, self-evolve, co-create, and for that there is this process of development that we absolutely need to engage.

I found it was critical in me—if I can share something from my own experience—to try to make that more tangible, more concrete. So the first thing, “becoming who you are,” I think we all sense this deeper possibility of who we are, and for many of us, we don’t have an experience of being mirrored by others in our lives, personally or professionally, in ways that reflect who we truly are.

That was my experience. I had this chronic experience of invisibility. I would go to different events, different places, and I would feel like I wouldn’t ever get any opportunities. And it would be very confusing because I knew I had wisdom to contribute, but I felt like there was a way, both personally in my relationships, [where] I felt very unseen and invisible, and professionally, [where it] was constantly my experience where other people not extending support or offering me opportunities or inviting me to participate in things. And I was very, very confused.

And I realized that I had a chronic way of being where I was constantly disappearing myself without even realizing it. So I was actually disconnected from my own feelings and emotions, and this is very common of women’s development in our culture. To access power in the masculine, we’ve had to become very hyper-rational, hyper-in-our-heads, to make it happen. That’s the kind of system. We don’t necessarily know how to relate to what we’re feeling. We kind of disappear our own inner selves.

And so I was so disconnected from myself that it was generating this experience of other people not being able to feel connected to me either. I was kind of waiting to be discovered [laughs]. I was confused because I had such an ability to see into other people and their experience—that’s often one of the gifts of this pattern of invisibility.

But through the principles we teach in Feminine Power—this is where we start, our first power base—I was able to get connected to myself, and I was able to get connected to what I was feeling, what I was seeing, what I was sensing. And I developed an ability to make that visible, make myself visible. So it was a shift from waiting to be discovered to actually taking responsibility to present myself into the world.

This is what it looks like when we say, “Become the woman, become your true self.” There’s a gap in terms of who we are and who we’re being and how we’re showing up and how we’re relating. And when I began to show up and I was presenting myself, I can’t begin to tell you how radically things began to change for me in a very short period of time.

CP: Meaning, you would get more offers, people were inviting you—

CZ: Yes! It was just incredible, what happened. I was interviewing people and the response was radically different. It was like finally I felt seen and I felt mirrored and I felt supported and things just began to open up.

We found that there’s usually one or maybe two core patterns that we have as women in spite of our spiritual and psychology work. We haven’t been able to actually step in and embody that deeper truth of who we are and presence ourselves into the world in that way. So you can use the manifestation techniques inside that pattern of invisibility—I can manifest all the opportunities in the world, [but] none of them would have stuck because there’s a way in my own being. I wasn’t yet fully aligning who I was being. [It] wasn’t matched up with that deeper self.

CP: Well, let me ask you this: So I do think that that is something that is rampant among women, and one of two things can happen. Either they become invisible or they become super over-masculinized. This is what happened to me, where you’re loud and you’re trying to get the attention that way.

But either way, I’m just curious to see, since you’ve had this experience of—let’s take the invisibility experience. When you’re in a room with other women and see that maybe another woman is having that or she’s not speaking up. Do you reach forward and try and draw her out? What’s the right thing? Because your experience is so powerful and we want that for every woman, and yet I feel sometimes when I’m recognizing somebody who’s not in their power, I’m the rescuer. I’m always trying to draw them out. What’s the right balance there?

CZ: Well, that’s a great question. In our course, we have a whole new set of shared agreements that we teach about creating a culture of empowerment between women. And the point in which you can really partner to stand with someone and for someone is when they step forward in self-responsibility.

So where we go into rescuing and that kind of thing is that woman hasn’t yet said, “I’m committed to realizing the greatest possibility of who I am. And I’m standing to be responsible, to see myself as a source of my experience up until that point. And I am open to receiving support.” I think a woman has to step into that for the support to become really conscious and powerful and potent. Does that make sense?

CP: Yes.

CZ: I think generally speaking, as a general statement, we want to be finding ways to extend that invitation to women to actually step forth into that level of commitment, to standing for themselves in their lives. So I think rather than [saying,] “Oh, I see you,” we want to mirror. I think it’s, in many ways, so true. We want to mirror the possibilities. We want to reflect opportunities everywhere we go. We want to see and relate to the most powerful version of others.

And I think more than anything I would want to encourage women to take that stand for themselves as a foundation for them being able to join other women in partnership, to be able to feed each other power. I think you can create a culture of empowerment between women [when] everyone’s stepping forward in self-responsibility as the price of admission for that.

CP: Right. Exactly. There’s another thing that you mentioned. We were touching a little bit on spirituality, and I’m curious to see how this plays out in spiritual disciplines. Because once again, you were doing your three-part, three elements of feminine power, and at the end you said that really it’s through relationships where we get the ultimate feedback and the ultimate transformation as we’re getting the mirroring—I call it the reverb—from the world and our loved ones, the people that are closest to us. And that is very interesting because when you look at the history of spirituality, both Eastern and Western, there’s an element of seclusion that may indicate a more monastic life that is not about relationship, but really just about that solo journey of unfoldment. And I’m curious to see if you feel that somehow even spirituality is going to change with the rise of feminine power.

CZ: Yes, well, I think feminine power in many ways is aligned with a new paradigm of evolutionary spirituality that is emerging. It’s very consistent with that. The great spiritual traditions emerged in a very different time, when human beings were at a very different stage of development. And the goal of most of the traditions was transcendence, so heaven was somewhere other than here. So there really wasn’t so much a value on the transformation of the world or the transformation of the individual as much as the realization of the divine at the source of everything that is in service to transcending the world, [and] heaven being somewhere other than here.

And I think this is where the goal and the path of the future of spirituality is in a process of radical transformation or evolution. The goal of the spiritual path has to do with both the realization of the oneness of the divinity of everything that is, but also the awakening to the power to transform and create a manifest world that reflects the inherent unity and perfection at the source of everything that is.

And so it becomes a process where the path of spirituality becomes the path of higher human development. We have very rich, complex, post-modern individualized selves that we didn’t have 2,000 years ago. So you have a self that’s different and you have a goal of the path that’s different. And so the process, then, of becoming both of self and society and culture and transforming the world becomes a path where the collective nature of that journey becomes really integral to it. That higher development really can’t happen—higher creativity, higher flourishing, higher consciousness is not something that we can access anymore by ourselves.

CP: Right. So let’s dig into that a little bit more. When you say that we can’t access it by ourselves, how then do we access it? Are we sitting in a group? Or maybe the right way to ask this question is, what are the actual practices? Will the actual practices change now that we’re moving to a different paradigm?

CZ: Sure, yes. I think there’s a whole new way of knowing that enables collective intelligence and collective creativity and collective consciousness. And in many ways the implications about power in this are very, very deep. It’s like particularly in the ’80s, particularly in women’s empowerment, there was this whole idea about personal power. So this really shakes that, and I can speak to it from my experience that there’s a way of knowing and a source of wisdom that I can tap into in partnership with others that I couldn’t necessarily access on my own.

You and I are having this conversation this morning, and it’s like what we’re talking about, there’s a source of energy and wisdom in how we’re coming together that even transcends both of us in what’s coming forward. There’s a way where we can actually come into—because you asked about the practices—the procedure of engagement with others from a whole set of new assumptions. So my own knowing is incomplete, my own perspective is incomplete, [but] together we can actually access something that’s deeper than one individual, that there is some deeper potential that’s wanting to emerge that we can be receptive to.

There are all these different ways of orienting, and different ways of coming forward that are very different [than] notions that we’ve had of power and what power looks like: to come already knowing the answers, being independent and autonomous. A lot of those old ways of accessing power and showing up don’t enable us to tap into this deeper source of creativity that’s available through these more relational ways of knowing and being and sensing together.

CP: I use this example a lot: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Stranger in a Strange Land.

CZ: No, I haven’t.

CP: It’s a sci-fi book, and it actually has a lot of commentary on the human evolutionary consciousness. One of the terms that they use—they’re future beings, and they use this term to understand one another or to understand an idea or a concept—[is] the term grok. When you grok something, it’s almost a physical experience because you fully understand it from all different sensory locations in the body, but also your mind gets it. It’s almost like a mind meld with either the person or the thing.

And I feel like as we learn to develop these feminine principles more and more, we’re going to actually be connecting on such a deep level that it will surpass language or cognitive relationships and actually move into the grok, which is a step toward actual telepathy.

CZ: Yes. What you’re describing sounds totally true of my experiences of higher creativity. I don’t know if it’s going to transcend language. I think there’s a function to language. [But] I’m with the spirit of what you’re saying in terms of there’s a way that it’s not just thinking, it’s not just feeling. It’s a higher order of intelligence that gets unleashed when we bring all of these systems in together that enables a much richer way of knowing.

The distinction I would make about the kind of feminine that makes this possible [is that] in many ways, the feminine of the ancient past has been the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of feelings, the wisdom of the earth. And the masculine has been the genius of the mind. And so I think when we’re talking about the kind of feminine that’s going to constellate these higher orders of intelligence, creativity, and spirituality, it’s this larger feminine principle of relatedness and connection that weaves together the wisdom of the earth, the wisdom of the body, the genius of the mind, the connection to higher orders of intelligence. It’s this feminine principle of relatedness that actually connects all of these different systems into a larger whole and thus then constellates this higher order of intelligence and creativity and presence that we’ve never seen before in our recorded history.

I think that’s what’s possible. That kind of feminine principle becomes the great integrator of these different systems that I think is really what I’m talking about [and] what you’re talking about. We’re talking about feminine power and the power of relatedness, to bring it all together. We’re not talking about letting go of one system and just going back to the wisdom of feelings in a kind of pre-rational feminine.

CP: Exactly! It’s funny because talking about the emotions and the wisdom from the emotions is a very recent subject of study, and yet it already feels—when we start talking in these realms when I’m here with you in this interview—even that feels like it’s in the past and that there’s this new way of communicating and sharing and connecting.

CZ: It’s been transcended and rejected, right? The wisdom of the body? It needs to be re-embraced, but then connected with and evolved further to something new.

CP: Right. I think it’s so interesting that energy medicine is something where people—even conventional people that aren’t even exposed to this—are feeling more into the energy of certain situations or spaces. And I think energy is a perfect example of how we’re actually connecting to things on a much subtler level that implies a little bit of a deeper connection. And that’s just one step towards that.

CZ: Definitely.

CP: I love that concept that the feminine is the great integrator. I think that is just so beautiful. I love that.

CZ: Yes, I think that’s really important in a conversation that’s about the feminine and re-embracing the feminine, and it’s not to the exclusion of these other systems. [There is still] great reverence for the genius of the rational mind and what that’s brought to human development and what happens when you bring that into relationship with all of these other things, in relationship to these other intelligences, and what it can catalyze.

CP: And then when you were saying that the feminine is historically in the body—I’m seeing this myself, that just in terms of the world of spirituality or mindfulness, that it’s trending more towards body-centric practices.

CZ: Yes, and that’s great at a stage of development where you are re-embracing what had been rejected. And so developmentally, that’s a really important thing to do. So often focusing on that, again, is going to develop it. And I think what’s really exciting in terms of where the higher orders of creativity, power, spirituality, all of those things, it’s going to happen when there is that larger integration process.

CP: I think we’re at the end of our time, so I want to ask—and you can take your time with this: As we emerge—so we’ve realized the truth of who we are and we start to come out—once that happens and you start to see yourself and you’ve gotten feedback and you’re connecting and you’re in alignment, something happens. It’s sort of like a volcano. You stop compromising, and this has been my experience. I’ve seen it over and over. You start to want to move outward. And that emerging energy has a fire and fierceness to it because it’s so new.

And I’m curious to see if you have some wisdom that you could give women right now, right when there’s on the precipice or at the early stages of really taking that alignment and manifesting outward. There’s fear that comes with that, there [are] specific challenges during that phase, and I’m curious to see if you have something specific that could help women during this period.

CZ: Sure. Thank you, that’s a really powerful and deep question. I just want to appreciate how clearly and powerfully you named that, Chantal, in terms of what happens. I just wanted to underscore that. What happens is we get connected to and we step into who we truly are, and then there’s this energy of emergence where it’s like these things that are in potential start to get unleashed inside of us.

So you put yourself, you create the conditions through making a commitment, through saying “yes” to your calling, even though the how of it or what it’s going to look like. You create the conditions where you suddenly birth forth. So that which is inside of us is like a seed that gets sprouted. If you imagine putting a rose seed and there’s fertile soil and sunshine and rain, suddenly you create the conditions in your unconsciousness and you just begin to surge.

I think the big challenge that happens is we don’t know what that mature expression of that self is going to look like or how we’re going to get there right in that moment. So that’s the biggest shift in creating with this co-creating feminine system versus a masculine system. At that moment, what can happen as we put the brakes on that process—because can’t really see how it could possibly come to be that we could fully express this or where the money’s going to come from or where the support’s going to come from or where the resources are going to come from or what it’s going to look like—our mind goes into this freak-out contraction. It can happen. We can get paralyzed by self-doubt or fear. “I don’t know enough, I don’t have enough.”

I think the thing I would want to say in that moment is when you’ve said “yes” to yourself and to the value of your life and your contribution, and you begin to activate this alchemical process of becoming inside of you, I think that you can just absolutely trust that all of creation is organized around bringing everything into potential, into its fullness. And so when you make the decision to line up with and surrender to—in many ways it’s a surrender—that deeper truth of who you are, there’s an energy and intelligence of life that you are partnered with.

And so in saying “yes” to becoming yourself, you’re not longer alone on that journey. All of life is actually there to support you in ways you can’t even begin to foresee or anticipate. And so we have to actually trust. We don’t need to know where we’re going to be able to get there. That’s the biggest shift with a feminine system. You don’t need to have become a perfect person to be worthy to be on the journey.

The process of becoming yourself and fulfilling your destiny, it’s one where you’re always just on the edge of being able to manage and navigate what’s in front of you. Each of us knows what our next step is. I would just say to believe in yourself and who you are in your clearest moments and what you sense, even though you might not necessarily know what you look like, what you can sense and what you can feel, that is what’s wanting to come through you. And in aligning with that, you can just not worry about how it’s going to turn out, but really focus on taking the next step and showing up for the next opportunity that’s right in front of you in a way where you’re bringing and you’re giving it your all.

So if your next step is running a workshop with six people, as it was for me—for about four years I would get up every morning and I would be speaking to six women—you want to show up with your full heart, with your full soul, with your full passion, and really use the journey to actually develop yourself and prepare for the future that’s coming. So you can bloom where planted. But wherever you are in your relationship with yourself, with the energy and intelligence of life, with others around you, you have everything you need right now to realize the greatest possibility in saying yes. So trust that, trust yourself, trust life, open up and trust others, other women, generate and receive support, and just keep taking your next step. The fulfillment of your life and your higher destiny becomes inevitable when you’re orienting to life and lining up in that way.

CP: Fabulous. And now, you just received quite an honor by Inc. Magazine. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

CZ: We’re very excited. We just found out that my company, Evolving Wisdom, that is the company that hosts Feminine Power programs and my husband’s program, Greg Hamilton, on evolutionary spirituality, and Jean Houston and Neale Donald Walsch and different teachers, we have been ranked number 83 on Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing privately held companies in America. Which is just incredibly exciting because the whole way that I created Evolving Wisdom was exactly as I was just describing, with these feminine power principles.

And it was totally that! We were there with six women, we needed to create a platform to be able to serve the other women who asking [about it.] Feminine Power began to expand organically and different women in different parts of the country were asking for us to share these principles, so we needed to create an online platform to do that.

Through the process of breaking up my invisibility, I had a very different experience of others and different relationships forged. And out of that the whole thing became very organic, and now, three and a half years later, we’ve had over a million people in all of our programs, about 60,000 students in courses, and we have a magnificent team of 50 of the most extraordinary people I know who work with us in our company. So I feel like I have to pinch myself because my dream, my deepest feeling like I had this gift inside me—it had to do with learning communities, where people could learn and develop in ways that were going to matter most.

So my own work with feminine power in this larger platform with Evolving Wisdom is such a full expression of that, and to have been able to create something that’s been so successful that’s so deeply in alignment with that deeper calling and mission and purpose, I couldn’t have imagined that. I couldn’t have put that on a vision board to know that’s what I wanted to manifest.

CP: I totally get it! I love it! It’s just such a relief not to have to [think,] “What’s my vision?”

CZ: That’s the biggest thing. You don’t need to know where you’re going to be able to get there. You really don’t. To actually just take that next step that’s right there and really trust yourself and trust life.

CP: Well, thank you so much, Claire. This has been a pleasure. And we will see you very soon at Emerging Women live in October.

CZ: Chantal, I just want to thank and appreciate you for creating this forum for women. This, I think, is the most important conversation—these conversations and dialogues that you’re having and how you’re bringing women together, I think you’re creating a space for us to get to this deeper conversation that’s absolutely critical for all of us to be able to step forth into our own power. I just really honor and appreciate your courage and your stand and your commitment and what you’re generating and inspiriting and bringing into the world. I can’t wait to be with everybody and meet everyone at the event.

CP: Yes, it’s a lot of trust. There’s a lot of trust here.

CZ: Yes, right?

CP: Yes! [Laughs]

CZ: Totally. That experience, that’s totally how I created Evolving Wisdom. That was totally my experience every step of the way. I don’t know what the next thing to do is. I don’t know how it’s going to go. I’m just going to keep showing up for what I feel really called and compelled to create next. So in that, it takes tremendous courage. It’s so exciting as well. You’re saying “yes” to life, and in that, you’re taking a stand for the flourishing for all of us. I appreciate it so much. I can’t wait to be with you and everyone.

CP: Thank you, Claire.

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