Shadowing Practice: Consciously Reclaiming the Feminine & Masculine Within Each of Us | Sarah Poet, M.Ed | TEDxAsheville - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Reviewer Gopal Six years ago, I was a school principal, and I identified as a hard-working professional.
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Reviewer Gopal Six years ago, I was a school principal, and I identified as a hard-working professional.
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I was not using the words sacred feminine in my vocabulary, and I thought that they might be words reserved for women who danced naked around fire circles at the full moon.
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You know?
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At this time, I had two master's degrees.
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I was generally very driven.
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I was not doing a lot of dancing.
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If I wanted to go after something and accomplish it, usually I did.
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I helped run a school by day, and I was bossy at home by night.
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I knew how to maintain order.
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My son's father and my therapist encouraged me to relax, to rest, but I didn't actually know how.
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And I was getting sick at this point from how hard I had been pushing myself for so long.
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I was secretly laying on the floor in my office, with my feet elevated on a chair three times a day to help regulate my adrenals.
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I was 32 years old.
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I had a toddler son.
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I was just getting started.
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I had a coveted position at work, and I was utterly depleted.
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Around this time, I remember being in a leadership team meeting, and we were making an important decision about a student with special needs.
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I offered up what I thought, and one of my colleagues dismissed what I said and said, Sarah, you take intuitive leaps.
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We didn't yet have the data to back up what I was saying, and data was the driver of the decision.
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So I walked away, and I was thinking, intuitive leaps?
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Well, if I'm a woman, isn't intuition a part of me?
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And what is the role of this feminine quality in leadership?
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And if I'm repressing this aspect of me, then what else about the feminine am I repressing?
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The discord was increasingly rising in me.
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The pressure to perform and succeed was just less and less fulfilling all the time.
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And my career, though it was heart-centered, really seemed to demand that I repress part of me, what I innately knew.
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And I sensed that something had long ago been forgotten, something to do with the sacred feminine.
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And so I went on a quest, first to reclaim the sacred feminine within me, and then to reclaim the sacred masculine in me as well, because what I discovered is both are needed for wholeness.
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Today I want to challenge assumptions of what we think we know about the sacred feminine and masculine in the modern world.
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And I'm going to share some of my story, and I want to invite you on a journey of self-exploration as to how you incorporate these two archetypes in your life, work and relationships.
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relationships.
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So first of all, what do I mean by masculine and feminine?
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I see these two as the foundational archetypes in our entire collective.
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Psychologist Carl Jung said that the archetypes are the patterns in the collective subconscious.
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He called them inherited potentials that we actualize when we bring them into consciousness.
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Masculine and feminine are not gendered.
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Masculine does not equal male and feminine does not equal female.
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Rather, they're archetypes, potentials, energies.
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And I have to tell you, some people say to me, Sarah, please do not use these words, for fear that there will be more divisiveness if we do.
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But I actually think that the opposite is true, and that we can really bring connection if we understand the beauty in the polarities of these archetypes, and that they all exist within us.
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I also want to take a moment to say that I'm going to use the words man and woman a lot in this talk today and there are a lot of our friends who do not identify on that binary and I want to say that every beautiful human is welcome here in this conversation.
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We're all in this together.
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So the archetypes, the masculine and feminine, they're complements.
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They're energies and potentials and they all exist within us.
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So if you look at this slide, you can see that you have all of these within you and that you might call on them at different times.
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So masculine logic balances feminine intuition.
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Feminine emotion balances masculine cognition.
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They really want to work together and so we can balance them or we can polarize them and we can dance in between within one human.
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These two would, one would never dominate the other in nature.
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But about 10,000 years ago, at the inception of the patriarchy, which is a social system that defaults power and authority to men, the sacred feminine, the archetype, was systematically suppressed.
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It wasn't valued, and it was even seen as a threat.
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And what happened is, you and I have all been defaulting to the masculine first ever since.
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I'm sure that you can think of a time in your life where you chose cognition over emotion, or logic over intuition, right?
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So in my life, I've been looking at this for about eight years, really looking at how and why my own feminine became so repressed.
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And the significant turning point for me was a significant trauma at the age of 18.
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You see, I got pregnant my very first semester of college.
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It was accidental, and it was out of the expected order of operations.
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I intuitively knew that this child was meant to be in the world.
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I also knew that to my family, school remained a priority.
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And so I spent that first trimester of pregnancy with a plain bagel in one hand and a Nalgene full of orange juice in the other to settle my stomach while I kept going to classes.
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And I finished the semester with high grades, of course, and I packed up and drove the 10 hours back home to my disappointed Christian conservative parents in small town, and we were going to decide how to proceed.
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And it was decided that because I was doing things in the wrong order, my child would be adopted at birth.
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So I put my head down.
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I did what needed to be done.
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I went to classes during the day.
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I waited tables at night.
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And then as if I was carrying this little stowaway, I would sneak away in all of the quiet moments that I had with her and just cherish the time that I had.
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And in that time and space, I found books written by midwives with wisdom about the body that my mother and grandmother had not taught me.
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I don't think that they knew it.
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It was as if something ancient was calling to me, and I was seeking it out.
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I birthed my daughter, all nine pounds, three ounces of her, naturally, as if wanting this primal process of the body.
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I named her based on a sacred vision that I had, and I chose her parents based on a gut knowing.
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And all of this was evidence of the sacred feminine, and I see that looking back.
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I wasn't aware of that then, but there was a wisdom there, and I was touching it.
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And immediately after her birth, I shut it all down.
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There was one formula for success before me.
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go make something of yourself.
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So I went back to school within three weeks.
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And the shame sounded in my head like, you are not enough.
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You are not old enough, wise enough, wealthy enough, educated enough, married enough to be worthy of your own beautiful baby.
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And so go prove your worth.
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Shame and vulnerability expert Brene Brown says that when we live with shame, we are more likely to attempt to control the variables and to prove our worth outside of ourself.
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After the loss of my daughter, I no longer knew if I had ever known my internal sense of wholeness, and I certainly hustled for my self-worth for a good long time.
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If we don't operate with a conscious awareness of masculine and feminine, then we operate in the subconscious, as my story shows.
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I remained in that driven, masculine orientation of achievement, drive, cognition, go back to school, make something of yourself,
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for over 10 years, until I find myself physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally exhausted, laying on my office floor a decade later.
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I had played by the rules of the patriarchy, and I wasn't winning.
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So when we repress the feminine, the masculine automatically goes into a subconscious orientation.
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You can't have one existing healthily without another.
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By the way, this is what we call toxic masculinity these days, the repression of the feminine, and the masculine goes into more of a domination, control, and separation orientation.
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And we're all experiencing this as a collective.
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We're all experiencing what I call a collective trauma of separation, domination, and control.
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Because you simply can't repress half of the energy that comprises the entire universe for so many thousands of years without massive consequence.
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And we're feeling it inside of ourselves, individually, and then we're also feeling it within our collective.
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Think about problems of domination and separation.
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Racism, sexism, environmental destruction.
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At the core, this chasm between the feminine and masculine that want to be united is the cause.
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so later on my journey of reclaiming the sacred feminine this by this time recognizing some
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of what had been sort of suppressed i began to identify as a resilient feminine badass and i began claiming my story and using my voice and i made a man box
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And I put into that man box my understanding of masculinity, as well as every man who had hurt me, as well as every man that I knew.
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And then I began asking them to prove to me that they didn't deserve to be in my man box.
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I was essentially asking for men to hustle and prove their self-worth, which is not exactly the sacred feminine in action.
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The Me Too movement was so powerful because what we see is women together raising up their voices in spite of fear.
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And I want to be clear that what's happening is actually a rising up of the sacred feminine under these women's movements, right?
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It's exciting, it won't be stopped, and it's a little uncomfortable right now because we're in this pivot of such a long history.
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When I see one woman at a time reclaim her voice and her right to her own body, I know within my entire being that this courageous choice of hers ripples change into the world.
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I get to support women doing this in my business.
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It's amazing.
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We saw with Me Too just how much trauma against women and violence has been silenced.
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And as a woman, I can say Me Too.
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I have, and I believe in the movement.
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And I later realized that as a human, I can't stop at Me Too.
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Because every man who's ever hurt me by taking advantage of my body or attempting to silence me or repressing my equality in the workplace has really done so because of his own repression of the feminine.
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It's this collective wound of separation.
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And I can't continue to point my own fingers in anger when I recognize that I, too, have participated in this unconscious programming, suppressing my feminine over time as well.
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So if I can't point my fingers, I have to do other things, like give TEDx talks and devote my life to it.
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Last year, the American Psychological Association published guidelines for working with men and boys.
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And a paper that was published at the same time said that what they called traditional masculinity was marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, and is, on the whole, harmful.
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And then they give recommendations for treating masculinity.
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And I think that this is really dangerous, because if we put all of masculinity into this subconscious or toxic box, then we don't have another map.
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We don't need to treat masculinity, we need to reclaim the sacred masculine.
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In this country, approximately 7 out of 10 suicides are committed by white middle-aged men.
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the same group of people that we call the most privileged.
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In the last three years consecutively, the lifespan of men in this country has decreased because the suicide rates have gone up so high.
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So with these statistics, I think it's clear that men aren't actually winning in the patriarchy either.
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I've worked with hundreds of male students.
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I now work with adult men in my practice.
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I'm the mother of a beautiful son, and I love the masculine within me.
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And I can say that the true nature of masculinity is not harmful or toxic.
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It's beautiful, it's powerful in just the right ways, and it's necessary at this time.
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The sacred feminine rising doesn't want a world without men.
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So men, at the root of these statistics is really a lot of shame.
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And what we need you to do is stop trying to control the variables and do the courageous and vulnerable thing of reclaiming the sacred masculine and then the sacred feminine within you.
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So eventually, I got out of all of those classrooms, and I started the practice of Heart and Soul Embodied Breath.
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And in this practice, I help individuals, couples, and organizations to consciously relate to themselves and to one another.
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There's just so much gender-related trauma playing out in our primary partnerships.
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But what if our primary partnerships were actually the place where we could actually heal some of this separation that I'm talking about?
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They can be.
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Because when we come together in primary unions, of course that's going to be the place that our wounds show the most, right?
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So it also goes to show that that is the place of the most potential in healing.
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And I'm seeing it in the couples that I'm working with now, each claiming their wholeness, each understanding these archetypes and rebalancing and coming into greater intimacy and connection.
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And what if we reincorporated feminine differently in our workplaces?
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I think that we would see far less of those crunchy human resource problems involving gender if we incorporated things like collaboration and intuition and creativity more consciously.
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The patriarchy historically gave positions of power to men.
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and women have thankfully been fighting for equality in the workplace for a really long time but I personally found that
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when I did climb that ladder and I achieved those positions I didn't want what we called equality in the workplace if it meant that I had to force down what I innately knew which it ultimately did.
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It's wonderful to have women in leadership.
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What we need is the feminine in leadership, which requires some conscious reprogramming and restructuring.
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As you've heard, I'm no longer afraid, as I was in those days of being a school principal, to use the words sacred feminine or patriarchy.
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And maybe, just maybe, I too have now danced naked around that sacred fire, which you may or may not decide to do on your path.
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This path is mysterious and beautiful.
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It's lifelong and it's sometimes difficult.
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Earlier I asked you to consider how you use or how you have the archetypes both within you.
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And now I'll ask you, how do you consciously integrate them?
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And how will you?
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There's one more thing that I noticed on my path.
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When these two danced within me, in union, wholeness was restored, and love was the result.
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Living from the heart was the result.
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And from there, I believe that there's nothing that we cannot do or be, heal or create as a conscious collective of people.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, learners will focus on speaking practice through the insights shared by Sarah Poet in her TEDx talk about the balance of feminine and masculine energies. By engaging with the concepts of the sacred feminine and masculine, students will enhance their English language skills while discussing themes of intuition, leadership, and self-exploration. This practice will not only refine speaking skills but also deepen understanding of nuanced concepts that affect personal and professional relationships.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Sacred feminine - a concept referring to embracing intuition and emotional intelligence, often associated with femininity.
- Intuitive leaps - sudden insights or understandings that come without extensive data or rational thinking.
- Archetypes - universal symbols or themes that reside in the collective subconscious, as defined by psychologist Carl Jung.
- Masculine energy - often associated with logic and decision-making capabilities.
- Feminine energy - commonly aligned with emotional depth and intuitive understanding.
- Patriarchy - a societal structure that historically favored male authority, impacting the balance of energies.
- Wholeness - the state of being complete and balanced in one's approach to life, encompassing both energies.
- Self-exploration - the process of examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and motivations to gain deeper self-knowledge.
Practice Tips
To effectively incorporate the content from Sarah Poet's talk into your English speaking practice, consider these tips:
- Use a shadowing app to listen closely to the rhythm, tone, and pacing of the speaker. This will help you mimic the natural flow of conversation.
- Engage in shadow speech by repeating significant phrases aloud, focusing particularly on emotional delivery and clarity.
- Practice discussing the concepts presented in the video with peers or language partners, utilizing the key vocabulary to reinforce understanding.
- Set a comfortable pace for your practice; begin by summarizing the talk in your own words and gradually work up to longer discussions.
- Record yourself articulating the central themes and play back the recordings to assess clarity and confidence, adjusting your speaking style as needed.
As you engage with this material, remember that recognizing the balance of energies within us can enrich not only your vocabulary but also your expressive capabilities in English. By practicing shadowspeaks, you will become more attuned to the nuances of communication, enhancing both personal insight and language proficiency.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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