Dear Friends,
Today my guest for our DailyOM course interview series is Jumana Sophia, author of Break the Grip of Past Lovers. Over 65,000 readers have taken this course already! Jumana's course flows like a graceful ribbon, with beauty and ease. I think you will enjoy reading what she has to say.
Madisyn Taylor: This course is written with women in mind and is deeply rooted in feminine principals. It's almost as if an ancient goddess is teaching. How did you come to a place of teaching this work?
Jumana Sophia: Like most women, I navigated to where I am now largely by intuition and feeling. My experience is that it is part of deep feminine nature to "know" much more than we think we do and in deeper ways than we can imagine. It wasn't until about three years ago that the many choices and experiences of my first two adult decades finally resolved into a whole picture. That picture made it clear that I have been circling around the mysteries of the deep feminine for my entire life, long before I knew that was what I was doing. I grew up in East Coast suburbia, a shy, straight-A student and ballerina. I went to college at 17, and around 19 I started to have awakenings that I couldn't explain and that had absolutely no context in the world around me. By 21 I had packed up my van and headed West, following a calling to understand what I was experiencing.
In hindsight what fascinates me is that the awakenings I was experiencing were very much embodied and not mental. I was not studying spirituality or attempting to achieve certain states, yet these states were often opened and magnified through sexual connection. Now I know that this is the way the deep feminine awakens. It is mysterious and often comes by grace, not by effort. It very often runs counter to what conventional culture values and acknowledges (including traditional spiritual traditions), and it is generally an embodied and often sexually charged awakening.
My experience of the deep feminine is that it has emerged in me as a knowing, a deep instinct, and a destiny. In terms of how I have come to teach and work, it's notable that my awakenings were very much simultaneous with my pain, fears, and hardships. It's been messy, quite lonely at times, and often extremely confusing. The deep feminine way is a way of making medicine from our hardships, not attempting to gloss them over or transcend them. We honor and make beauty from our pain, and in that we come to understand the full capacity of the female being. I think that some of the gravity and ancient voice that comes through my work is a result of that depth, which can only be carved out by hardship, even as it is illuminated by ecstasy, power, and love.
MT: How does an imbalance from giving up our power show up in our lives? What does it look like?
JS: I have heard it said that you never really lose your power; it is always ours, and the loss of it is an illusion. I would say though that my experience is very much a paradox that embraces both the reality and the illusion of power loss. It is true that deep feminine power is indwelling, that it exists in and beyond us, and that "being in our power" has everything to do with simply sitting down and resting into it, rather than trying to achieve it. In that way, we are never far from our own potency, our own truth, even when we feel light years away from it. However, the dynamics of power loss, and particularly power struggle, are very real.
There are so many iterations of power imbalance, but I would say some of the most common signs that show up in women's lives are anxiety, rigidity, bitterness, depletion, and isolation from what feels like our true nature, our deepest needs and often subtle desires. This can turn to despair and depression.
Power loss is often a result of impressions and dynamics created by relationships, most notably sexual/emotional relationships. There is a deep exchange between lovers that leaves impressions that can touch power and raw vulnerability simultaneously. In bonded relationships, especially those that occur through sexuality, dynamics like neglect, betrayal, criticism, and manipulation can rupture our sense and perception of ourselves--our beliefs about who and what we are. This is power loss: the loss of deep feminine radiance, trust in our own knowing, the literal loss of energy and vitality. It often leads to grasping, compromising on the nonnegotiables, and creating a life that is shaped by our fears and self-betrayal rather than our sacred needs and well-being. It takes courage to look clearly and see the places where we have lost power. The return to power can happen in a moment because it is always with us, but in order to fully return to it, we have to be willing to let that return to power change our lives and inform the choices we make.
MT: Why is it important for women to clear the residual grip of past lovers?
JS: Lovers enter the most intimate and private terrain of a woman's being, not just physically. Despite how recklessly careless or overly moralized and repressed sexuality has become, it remains an experience that touches the physical, emotional, psychic, and spiritual aspects of ourselves. This is even true of brief "casual" encounters.
I consider the clearing of past lovers to be a part of a lost, deep feminine skill--the skill of basic emotional hygiene. So many women spend years burdened by the residual impacts of neglect, regret, betrayal, and abuse. Sexual experiences leave an energetic impact on the body and psyche of women that cannot be fully addressed by talk therapy and mental understanding. The impact of past lovers must be met and transformed in the place where it lives--the energetic, spiritual, and emotional terrain of a woman's innermost being. Impacts must be cleared, and the wisdom of the relationship harvested to become empowerment rather than a tragedy, an abandonment, or even just a strange encounter. This is what enables us to restore trust in life, the ability to share intimacy with a trusted new lover, to stay balanced sexually rather than shutting down over time or entering careless and damaging promiscuity.
MT: Your course is divided into three parts. The first is focused on strengthening, nourishing, and clarifying. In the second part you start working with some of the more challenging energies--past lovers, betrayal, power loss, and regret. The third part is about reestablishing boundaries and filling your cup. Talk to me about this.
JS: What we're working with in the course is clearing, but clearing is only possible when there is strength, clarity, and enough nourishment present to actually do the work and to know what that work actually is. Residual impacts from past lovers are often draining, confusing, and weakening to personal focus, power, and intimacy. So we start with nourishing and clarifying, strengthening through deep feminine practices that support the internal energetic terrain that has been most impacted by previous intimacies.
From there we start to work with the heavier things: betrayal, neglect, etc. We establish a baseline of nourishment, self-care, and empowerment from which to address these challenges. This makes the process clearer and far more effective. One of the biggest power losses associated with past lovers is simply the preoccupation with them and the ongoing presence of them in our lives and minds long after they have ceased to bring any true nourishment or positivity to our worlds. Even as we work through the issues associated with past lovers, we keep the focus turned toward ourselves, our own power, and a return to home within. Ultimately, clearing past lovers has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us. That's where the power to change everything is, regardless of past circumstances.
We then finish by reestablishing boundaries and getting absolutely saturated with nourishment and power. This course is a complete process, and this is the integration of it. After starting with self-care, reckoning with the cost and truth of past intimacies and clearing them, it is crucial to anchor this work as a new foundation for the future. Boundaries become clearer and stronger, and different from when we were still wrestling with power-loss dynamics. It becomes possible to fall so deeply in love with ourselves, find wholeness again, and saturate in our own essence--and to make choices from this place.
MT: Why do women keep repeating the same patterns?
JS: I think at the most fundamental level this has to do with energetic impressions that linger and shape the way we move, think, regard ourselves, and make choices. There is great insight and healing to be found in psychotherapy, counseling, and talking with wise women friends, but it's not all we need. We are deeply energetic, responsive, and subtle beings, and we need to address past hurts on that level in order to transform in a way that truly does change how we are and what we will choose in the future.
The way I teach about past lovers is to understand that an experience of a past lover, with all of its beauty and promise and devastation, is actually an initiation. It has the transformative power of sexuality inside of it, and it touches us in ways that nothing else will. We repeat patterns largely because we haven't yet completed the initiation into personal power and wisdom that is the harvest of these kinds of relationships. In the course, I keep women close to the initiatory power of these things, rather than the assumed tragedy or pain of them. In order to stop repeating the same patterns, we need to fully claim wisdom, self-knowing, and personal power on the energetic level, where we can feel it and not just talk about it.
Too many of us view our repeated patterns or past sexual relationships as evidence that we are somehow flawed, broken, or unable to make good choices. This is unnecessary and inaccurate shaming. There is only one way to learn personal power and to deeply understand ourselves, and it largely comes through experience. Sexual relationships are so thorough, so impactful. We will cycle through the same patterns and choices until we have taken the time and gotten the support we need to fully initiate into the greater expression of ourselves that is calling us.
MT: What will shift for women after the 21 days of journeying through your course?
JS: In addition to the freedom of actually clearing past lovers and walking forward into life with a capacity to foster mutually respectful sexual relationships in the future, I would say the deepest shift is a return, or a recovery, of true and unapologetic feminine power. A shift from feeling like it is in any way a burden or a difficulty or a weakness to be a woman in this world; a shift into the knowledge that to be a woman is to have capacities that we can only begin to imagine. Women enroll in this course because they feel trapped, confused, unresolved, and disempowered. They enroll because they have a past relationship that impacts them still, and they want freedom from it. The feedback I receive from many of them is that they finish the course with that freedom, and in some ways this becomes secondary to their experience of rediscovering so much of themselves that they had lost or dimmed or forgotten or betrayed.
When a woman starts to honor the unmet sacred needs and deep feminine longings inside of her, she fosters an alliance with her own well-being that will ultimately change everything. So much of what supports a woman to thrive as a sexual and relational being is not acknowledged or is discredited in our current culture. The gift of past lovers is that they can show a woman where it is inside of herself that she hasn't yet come to trust and honor what it is to be a woman, and where it is that she can grow into the power, grace, love, and charisma that she has always longed for.
When we as women open our bodies to another, we open not only to power and love, but to incredible vulnerability and to whatever else is moving either inside of our partners, or between us in the relationship. Regardless of your past choices, how much healing you've done, and whether or not you're in a relationship now, you almost certainly find yourself navigating a host of issues because you STILL CARRY the residual impact of perhaps many past lovers. By the end of this course, you will have gratefully and gracefully put past lovers where they belong--clearly out of you and on their own path--so that you can travel freely forward on yours. We will begin by strengthening, nourishing and clarifying, then we will start working with some of the more challenging energies--past lovers, betrayal, power loss, regret, and so forth. After strengthening and clearing, we will complete our journey together by re-establishing boundaries, and filling your cup, so that you complete these 21 days as a stronger, clearer, and more fully radiant you than you are right now. If you gift yourself the time to commit to yourself through this journey, you will complete this course with more feminine magnetism, sensual receptivity, personal power, and emotional balance than ever before.
Starting today, you will receive a new lesson every day for 3 weeks (total of 21 lessons). Each lesson is yours to keep and you'll be able to refer back to it whenever you want. And if you miss a lesson or are too busy to get to it that day, each lesson will conveniently remain in your account so you won't have to search for it when you're ready to get back to it.
We are offering this course with the option of selecting how much you want to pay. No matter how much you pay, you'll be getting the same course as everybody else. We simply trust that people are honest and will support the author of the course with whatever they can afford. And if you are not 100% satisfied, we will refund your money.
Thank you, Jumana. It is always lovely to have your warm presence on DailyOM and feel the comfort of your words. If you feel you have residual impact from a past lover, you may want to consider enrolling in this course. Until next time.
Be well,
Madisyn Taylor
Cofounder, Editor-in-Chief
DailyOM
