Fully Empowered Radio September 28, 2011: Women in Leadership Inside The Glass Ceiling

 

Join Christine Agro and Marian Mangoubi, co-founder and CEO of Sassy CEO.  Christine and Marian will be talking about women in leadership roles. Although Marian's inspiration was women in teach, her mission is extending as she meets more and more unseen women in amazing leadership roles.

MARIAN MANGOUBI  Co-Founder, CEO & Executive Producer though prefers Dreamer/Women’s Champion/Digital Marketer/Mom

Marian’s worked in various male-dominated industries (finance, politics, media, tech) but never got over the lack of women leaders in these industries. After constantly reading about the lack of women in tech, Gandhi’s words “be the change you want to see in the world” got stuck in her head. Marian realized she needed to do something to change the situation, and Sassy CEO, LLC was born.

Sassy CEO is in response to a discussion that began in 2010 and still continues today….WHERE ARE ALL THE WOMEN IN TECH?

Guess what? No one is talking about them. Yet we know who they are, where they are and what they are doing!

Sassy CEO's mission is to shine a light on sassy, successful female founders in the online and digital space, who are making a difference, creating innovation and blazing trails in the tech world. Not only do we want to be their voice but give them one.

The end goal is to create and increase awareness in order to help more women launch and grow.

It’s as simple as that!

Welcome to My Über AHA moment'!

By Christine Agro
The Metaphysical Feminist

Throughout the years I have had many  'aha' moments - you know, an 'aha' moment is when you seemingly, suddenly have this awareness about something in your life or some life question suddenly has a clarity to it.

Well for me, some 'aha' moments are more poignant the others, somehow, more clear, more life changing. I call these 'Über Aha' moments

This morning I had one of those über moments of clarity.

For you to get the true signfigance of this moment, I need to rewind and give you the back story on this.

Almost 11 years ago exactly, I enrolled in a month long yoga teacher training program which would have me venture off to live at an ashram for the month of October and immerse myself in my passion for yoga.  I have an innate love of yoga.  I love seeing what my body can do, the way I feel when I practice yoga and the benefits it gives to my body.

After the training program I opened my own wellness center in Boulder, Colorado and I personally was teaching 11 classes a week and loving it.  I was in the best physical shape of my life.  I felt great and I looked great.

My center was open for just under a year when 9/11 happened and for the days and weeks after I began feeling a pull to move to NYC.  There was no question on an energetic level I was being asked to come to the city.  It made sense, the city required a lot of healing and healers were answering the call.  I too choose to answer the call so I closed my center and began my meandering move to NYC.  I put most of my belongings in a storage unit.  Then packed up my JEEP with two bags of clothes, two file boxes of client files, my desktop computer and my two dogs Pebbles and Miranda and left Colorado. This trek consisted of staying with friends, sleeping on couches - although I knew in my heart I was headed to NYC, I wasn't ready just yet.  I first landed in Montreal for a brief stay. Then made my way to Lake Placid where I set up shop for a short period.  I taught my Tools to Live By class, a Female Uniqueness class, and offered an intro to Yoga class.  Yoga was still very much a daily part of my life and I was still completely in love with what it offered my body.

Then one day I did a reading for a woman.  She had been a Yoga teacher and after an injury was unable to not only teach Yoga but she also was unable to do Yoga any more.  I remember seeing in the reading how much her EGO was wrapped up in her approach to Yoga.  Did I see my own matching picture...nope! Instead I thought to myself "I can't imagine not being able to teach or do Yoga."   A month later I had a cyst rupture on my ovary.  A 'normal' person would have gone to the hospital the pain was that bad as were the fever and chills.  But not me, I pulled out my natural healing tool box and nursed myself back to a functioning state.

Around the same time, my now husband who was living in NYC emailed me and invited me down to for a visit.  We had dated, briefly, years before when I was an undergraduate at SUNY Buffalo Art school and he was a graduate student. The May before the Towers fell, I had been in NYC and he and I reconnected and spent a lovely day walking around the city.  So when he emailed with his invitation for a visit I accepted.  When I arrived it was clear to him that I wasn't well and he spent the weekend taking care of me, which I have to say was nice.  Within a month my dogs and I were packed up and moving to NYC.  I was finally there, where I had been called to.  It took me eight months to get there, but I was there.  As I began to navigate the city, I could only go out for about 15 to 20 minutes at a time.  The city exhausted me.  If I got too close to Ground Zero I got a splitting headache and nauseous.  The city itself gave me an amazing opportunity to learn how to manage my energy on a whole new level.  A true gift as I came to say "If you can manage your energy here, you can manage your energy anywhere!"

As my body continued to heal, I tried to return to Yoga, but each and every time, something would happen that knocked me back.  More fatigue, more ovary issues.  Eventually I let it go and concentrated on the energetics of my Spiritual journey.  I began exploring mantras and mudras and the power of sacred geometry, all the while continuing my hourly meditation practice.  It was within my meditation space that I was given the information about allowing our Spirit to guide us and the benefits of aligning all the aspects of our being with our own Spirit.  When I got pregnant in 2003, Yoga returned as a way to support my gestating son.  I did daily yoga, breathing exercises and continued my hourly meditation practice.  But once my son was born in 2004, Yoga disappeared from my life again.

After another three-years of a yoga-less life, I found a way to go to an early morning yoga class.  One that allowed me to get up and out of the house and back before my son needed to get his own day going.  So I was once again immersed in Yoga and loving it.  My beloved shape and flexibility was returning to my body and I was excelling in advance Asanas.  I was looking and feeling great.

And then it happened, the ovary, again!  I couldn't believe it.  I was so angry, yet I knew this had something to do with my EGO body.  It had something to do with the way in which I was using Yoga, seeing Yoga, and engaging in Yoga.  So I gave myself time to heal and left Yoga behind one more time.

Skip ahead two more years, and right, almost, next-door to us in Brooklyn, a Pilates studio opened.   The timing of the classes were perfect.  The classes themselves were less than an hour long - perfect again.  So I signed up.  Within weeks I was a die-hard Pilates student.  I loved it.  My body was shaping up, I was losing weight and I felt great.  Until one day, I found that I couldn't use my wrist.  I was unable to type it was so painful.  When I went to class I explained to my teacher what was happening.  She watched me through my workout and there was nothing indicating it was from Pilates.  As I continued with classes my wrist got worse and worse and only got better when I didn't take class.  So, I begrudgingly stopped going to Pilates.

Again I found myself looking at this and knowing that in someway this was connected to my EGO Body.  But I aside from knowing that, I really wasn't seeing why I couldn't be excited about my body and excited to look good and feel good.  By this point I was fully into aligning with Spirit and living in alignment - wasn't I?

Skip ahead to today.  The journey I have been on is very much about living fully and completely as Spirit with a body and in living this way, creating a state of being where no aspect of myself (mental, emotional, ego) overrides or stands apart from living as a Spirit.  By living in this way, I fully embody the power of my Spirit and it is the mental, emotional and ego aspects of myself that manifest the intentions of Spirit in the physical world.  The mind's job is to know Spirit, the emotion's role is the feel Spirit and the ego's role is the manifest the intention of Spirit.  Aligning with our Spirit is not about doing away with these aspects, it is about understanding their roles and allowing our Spirit to guide and direct us.

So today, as I was driving home from dropping my now 7 year old son off at school, I finally get why I kept getting pushed out of activities that led me to 'love' the way my body looked and felt.  Although I thought I was in alignment, it is clear to me now that I was not and just as with any other time that an aspect of me steps out of alignment, I am alerted.  These physical manifestations were the way in which I was being alerted to this out of alignment in my EGO.  I knew this.  I knew this each and every time I got derailed that it had to do with my EGO. The difference today was that I experienced a whole being 'aha' awareness of how, why and in what way I step out of alignment when I focus on my body.  I could see it all so clearly.

The insight that came with the 'aha' was invaluable and it will change the way I approach so many seemingly inconsequential activities.  It gives me the opportunity to even more fully live in Spiritual alignment.  This is what I call the 'Über-Aha moment'!

I am constantly enthralled with this journey and with the ways in which we are given information and insight to help and support us.  Now, here's hoping I can get back to Yoga as a fully aligned being.  I do miss it so.

 

Christine Agro is The Metaphysical Feminist, offering a unique perspective on being a woman.  Christine has been working with women around the world helping them to live in the Feminine Principle and create fully empowered lives.  Christine is the host of Fully Empowered with Christine Agro on www.SQRadio.FM , posts FEMNEWS daily on her website FullyEmpowere.net, via twitter and facebook and she is a frequent guest on radio shows around the world.

Fully Empowered Radio: September 21st - Suppressed History of Women in Power

 



 



Join Christine with her special guest Max Dashú, teacher of global women's history and heritages through images. Christine and Max will be speaking about Max's DVD "Women's Power in Global Perspective" which details the lost history of women in power throughout the ages.This is sure to be a fascinating conversation!

Max Dashú teaches global women's history and heritages through images. She founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research female spheres of power, goddess

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veneration, shamanic arts, mother-right, patriarchy and the history of domination. Drawing on a collection of over 20,000 images, she has created over one hundred visual presentations, and presented them at universities around North America, and at community centers, conferences, festivals, prisons, libraries, and schools. (See http://www.suppressedhistories.net)

Dashú has spoken at many universities and at international conferences in Germany, Bulgaria, and Britain. Her articles have appeared in Goddesses in World Culture (Praeger, 2010) and various journals and anthologies. She teaches online courses and webinars, maintains a blog (http://www.sourcememory.net/veleda/ ) and has published several posters of female iconography in archaeology. Her acclaimed dvd Women's Power in Global Perspective was released in 2008, and a second movie, Woman Shaman: the Ancients, is now in production.

Fully Empowered Radio: September 14th - Creative Vision Mentor Day

 

Do you know when you are getting a message from Spirit or are you hitting blocks and resistance energy?  This month's Creative Vision Mentor Guest is asking just that question.

Join Christine and her Creative Vision Mentor guest Coleen.

Coleen is a healer and a massage therapist and she is on her own journey to discover more about herself.  Tune in to find out if Coleen is receiving messages from Spirit, or hitting resistance energy around what she thinks she should be doing.  It's something we all experience at one time or another - is it a message? or is it a block?

Redefining Preventative Care

By Christine Agro
The Metaphysical Feminist

In the United States 'preventative care' seems to focus on the tests and scans that can offer early detection of diseases.  It focuses on the medications that can slow these diseases when identified.   It focuses on counseling for tobacco, alcohol and drug addiction.  That's not preventative care in my mind.  To me, preventative care is education and a focus on supporting the body naturally through the foods we eat, the water we drink, the lives we live and the  natural remedies that support the body's ability to heal.

Why is it so impossible in a country with such a wealth of intellegence and means to understand that prevention is what we do BEFORE we get sick.   How can we live in a country with such tools, skills and access to information and NOT understanding that we would be healthier and happier if we focused on our wellness rather than on our illness.

Unfortunately, I do know the answer.  There is no money, no patents, no research grants, no big investors to buy into true wellness.  Money is made on our illness or our fear of illness.  The sicker we are, the more money is made.  Insurance companies make money because we need to be covered for the cost of tests, scans and medications.  Doctors make money because we turn to them to tell us if we are O.K.  Drug companies make money by creating drug after drug, the side-effects of which often times create the need for yet another drug.  And the list goes on.

It is time that we redefine the words 'preventative care'.  When we hear these words used in the mainstream media they are attached to mammograms, prostate exams, sonagrams and stress-tests, but this isn't preventative care this is 'Let's find out if you're already sick' care .

True preventative care requires that we each take responsibility for our own health and wellness.  That we educate ourselves, because no one else is going to - not the media, not the government, not the drug companies.  We need to educate ourselves about things like water quality, food quality, genetic modification of foods, the dangers in bath and body products and why they are dangerous to our health and wellness, the true connection between stress and health, and so many other things that either keep us well or make us sick.

And then we need to act.  Our spending power is greatly influential as is our voting power.  If everyone demanded that their water be truly safe to drink, if everyone demanded that Genetically Modified Foods be banned, if everyone insisted that their fruits and vegetables be organic, that's what we would have.  But we don't.  We go through our days and unless something directly affects us, we do nothing, say nothing, demand nothing.  This isn't the freedom that the United States offers, this is complacency, this is denial, this is laziness.

This country was built on a demand for freedom, unity, and a government of the people.  Today, those who speak up, who buck the trend, who call for change are often labeled as 'nut jobs', 'wackos' or 'hippies' or worse carted off to jail.

It is time that we stop trusting what we are told and instead take back our power and get informed.

Our bodies are amazing machines with capabilities that most of us have not even begun to realize.  Take your trust out of the hands of others, out of the hands of people who make money off of every ill-informed choice you make, and put the trust into your own body.  Support it, love it, nurture it and start on a journey of true preventative care.