Shadowing Practice: Why Religious Tools Don't Work For Women - Learn English Speaking with Video

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One time when my four kids were little, I was at my parents' house for Christmas,

and my mom had us do an activity where we wrote down a gift

that we would like to give to Jesus in the form of an act of service for someone else

or a sacrifice that we would make in his name.

This is a very common activity for Christian families, and it's supposed to be a tender, peaceful experience.

So I was surprised that I found myself inexplicably filled with rage.

I stared at the paper where I was supposed to be writing down my special self -sacrifice and I started bawling.

I had given and given and given and given and I had nothing left to give and I felt terrible about it.

Interestingly, I've heard from women in other religious traditions share similar feelings.

Let's talk about why.

Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity are three of the largest and most influential religious traditions in the world.

What did their founders teach?

Confucius was born in 6th century BCE China during a time of chaos.

Local warlords were constantly battling for power.

Confucius offered a path back to harmony.

Know your place, serve your community.

Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, was born into wealth and privilege in India in the 6th or 5th century BCE.

He was devastated when he learned about the suffering in the world.

He taught that suffering comes from attachment to the ego.

His message was, you are not your title, your wealth, or your ego.

Let it go.

Jesus of Nazareth lived in a time where rigid religious rules had overtaken compassion.

His was a world of power plays, political violence, and deep division.

Christ's call was for more radical love.

Lose your life in order to find it.

Give everything away.

Turn the other cheek.

Love your enemies.

These were all powerful, transformative ideas.

But do these teachings benefit everyone equally?

Confucius, Buddha, and Christ all taught humility, sacrifice, and selflessness.

And those teachings were exactly what the founders and subsequent leaders of those religions needed.

But those founders and subsequent leaders were all men.

Their teachings were made by men and for men.

In Confucianism, women were expected to obey their fathers, then their husbands, then their sons.

Confucius never imagined a woman as a moral agent in her own right.

His vision of harmony depended on women's subordination.

The Buddha's path to enlightenment meant leaving his family, something spiritual men were praised for.

But what would happen if a mother left her children to pursue enlightenment?

That would rarely ever be possible, and if it were, she would be called selfish and unnatural.

And women were excluded from Buddhist monastic life for centuries.

Christianity teaches that

Eve sinned by seeking knowledge that women should submit to their husbands and that women should not be leaders.

For thousands of years, women all across the world have been conditioned to disappear,

to defer, to serve, and to be small.

So when women are handed the spiritual tools of further selflessness, sacrifice, and humility, those tools don't liberate us.

They erase us.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert recently gave a talk about this at the

Archangel Summit about the different spiritual needs of typical men and typical women.

She said that humanity's goal is to move from the profane to the divine.

But those who are socialized to be masculine

and those who are socialized to be feminine require different roads to get

there the profane masculine is putting the wants

and needs of the self above the good of the whole

it's conquering hoarding wealth being power hungry i am the king greedy selfish

and violent it's i'm going to take whatever i want to just

because i can i'm going to take over this country

or have sex with this woman or level this forest

because i want to the divine masculine is putting other people's needs above our own it's kindness forgiveness selflessness

and compassion it's i could hoard resources

but i choose to share i could have power

but i refuse it i look out for the whole instead of just myself the profane feminine over gives,

over serves, is overly selfless, is used and abused.

It's I exist to give and serve.

In the face of bad behavior, I will stay silent and I will continue to please.

I will not ruffle any feathers or make anyone upset.

I look out for the whole at the expense of myself.

Everyone else's needs are prioritized above my own.

It's accommodating others' desires even when resentment is silently oozing out of my eyeballs.

This was me at the Christmas party

and I'll bet it's a lot of women watching right now and maybe a lot of our mothers.

The divine feminine is the protector.

It's standing up in the face of injustice.

It's I will not allow oppression and abuse.

It's holy power, taking up space, speaking up, protecting against wrongdoing, ensuring equity not only for others,

but also for the self.

It's honoring and protecting our own desires rest, and goals.

So the divine feminine starts with putting itself in the center

and then it expands to a circle of protection for everything

that is good and holy and sacred and must not be violated by the profane masculine getting out of hand, right?

Not to allow it, not to enable it, not to be nicer, not to be sweeter, not to be understanding, not to be like,

well he never had a dad himself so he doesn't know.

None of that.

To just be like, oh no, oh no. No, no, no, no, no. That's gone too far.

In sum, in order for the masculine to move from the degraded to the divine, it must give up the self.

In order for the feminine to move from the degraded to the divine, it must build the self.

Unfortunately for women, nearly all major religious traditions were created for the needs of men, taught by men to men using the words of men.

Historically, since religions were speaking exclusively to men, only using masculine tools made sense.

But for the past few centuries, religions have considered themselves universal, covering the needs of both masculine and feminine.

But there's been no change in doctrines or practices to accommodate or speak to women.

Women have been exclusively given the tools of the divine masculine as if they were the only spiritual tools.

Women have evolved with empathy tools hardwired into our bodies.

Women tuning in to the cries of their newborn babies is an evolutionary necessity for the survival of our species.

It's built in.

So when tuning in to the needs of others is further and further and further pushed on us, we just dissolve.

We give ourselves so completely that we can disappear.

It's not the toolkit we need.

And it's why religious tools as they exist now don't work for women.

They were never meant for us.

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Many women are burnt out from a lifetime of service.

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And then they can go looking for new age spiritual teachings that tell them that what they need is ego death.

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But women have spent their whole lives losing their ego.

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They need to build their ego.

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Men are conditioned to grow their ego and they need tools to lose it.

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Britt Hartley from No Nonsense Spirituality has some really important insights on this.

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Let's hear from her.

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Women, stop going to male spiritual leaders and gurus to dissolve your ego.

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These men who have been able to build a strong sense of ego, that they are a person and they take that process for granted,

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now go into these spiritual spaces to help others experience ego dissolution

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or ego death in order to give other men the flexibility to not be so ego -driven, which actually really can be progress.

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But with most women who were raised in patriarchy, you've already had to kind of repress and negotiate your own needs in order to accommodate others.

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These tools are for people, mostly men, who have already developed and overdeveloped their own ego.

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So for most of the female clients that I work with who have been raised in patriarchy,

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the most spiritual thing that you can do is to build your ego, take up space, build your voice, do a project.

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You're in a place of ego overdevelopment and you are in a place of ego underdevelopment.

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And so the tools and the path of spirituality will look different.

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And Oceana Lane also has some really interesting thoughts on this subject.

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Let's hear what she has to say.

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I wish I had known this in my late teens,

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early 20s, which was when I started obsessively going to male gurus to help dissolve my ego and it felt natural.

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Do you know why?

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Because my ego was already very fragile because I'm a female and I grew up in a dysfunctional family.

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So having a male try to break me down just felt really familiar.

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It took me a long, long time to learn this lesson.

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Zen Buddhist meditation centers, boyfriends who acted like gurus and they all speak with such authority, it's hard not to believe.

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Long, grueling meditation retreats where I had to be silent and listen to a man talk while I dissolved into the ether, becoming nothing.

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My ego was the enemy, and these guys had it all figured out.

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And I was really good at it.

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Really, really good at just disappearing, becoming selfless.

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Almost like I just had like a natural knack for it, you know?

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These spiritual tools not only don't help women, they barricade her from spiritual progress.

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Religious tools outlaw the exact things the feminine needs in order to find balance, building and prioritizing the self.

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In order to even start moving towards balance, women must first hurdle over all of the spiritual tools that we've been given.

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And this concept applies to more than just religious teachings.

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The message of most marriage books is similarly to lose the self.

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According to Goodreads, the most popular marriage books are The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller,

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Love and Respect by Emerson Egerichs, Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas, and The Seven Principles to Make Marriage Work by John Gottman.

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These books primarily teach the tools of compassion, forgiveness, empathy, compromise, and kindness.

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These are great tools.

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These are essential tools and I promote them wholeheartedly.

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But I will say that for me personally, those were tools that I already had and that I overused in my marriage.

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The skills that I needed to develop were to set boundaries and speak up for myself.

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My friend

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and co -writer Celeste Davis taught the Seven Principles to Make Marriage Work course for the Gottman Institute for several years.

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She said that with every passing class, she wished more and more that she could divide the class up

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and teach the wives separately from the husbands instead of teaching all the marriage tools as if they applied universally.

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When she taught that compromise and compassion were the foundations of a good marriage, she could see that those were exactly the tools

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that the husbands needed because they hadn't been taught those skills as they were growing up as boys.

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She saw how during role plays and in discussions, the men struggled to stop problem solving and start really listening,

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to compromise, to be compassionate when they were upset, to give up some autonomy for the good of the partnership.

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But the women didn't need those tools.

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They had been doing too much compromise, too little prioritizing their own needs, and they were drowning in resentment,

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they needed to be taught to start paying attention to that resentment, to ask themselves what they really wanted,

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not just what would keep the peace for everybody else.

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They needed permission to make room for their desires, even when it meant disappointing their spouse.

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They needed to be given the tools to be okay in the midst of upsetting someone.

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In religion and in relationships, women have already been sacrificing.

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We've already been surrendering.

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We've already been told our whole lives to think of others first and to put ourselves last.

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What women need is the opposite message.

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Your life matters.

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Your voice matters.

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Your body, your boundaries, your dreams, they matter.

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The spiritual work of women is not to dissolve the self it's to recover it to rebuild what has been taken

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thanks for watching please share this video with the women in your life share it with your mom, your sisters, your girlfriends and

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if you're like me share these ideas with the younger version of yourself who needed this framework

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but hadn't learned it yet and of course like and subscribe if you haven't already thank you so much

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We'll be right back.

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I'll see you next time.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Religious Tools Don't Work For Women”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: tools, ego, spiritual, marriage. This video has 169 sentences and 2175 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:55. The speaker talks at a steady 146 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
spiritual adjective	/ˈspɪɹɪt͡ʃuəl/	Of or pertaining to the spirit or the soul.
masculine adjective	/ˈmæskjələn/	Of or pertaining to the male gender.
divine adjective	/dɪˈvaɪn/	Of or pertaining to a god.
feminine adjective	/ˈfɛmɪnɪn/	Of or pertaining to the female gender.
sacrifice noun	/ˈsæk.ɹɪ.faɪs/	Originally, the killing (and often burning) of a human being or an animal as an offering to a deity; later, also the offering of an object to a deity.
compromise noun	/ˈkɑmpɹəˌmaɪz/	The settlement of differences by arbitration or by consent reached by mutual concessions.
compassion noun	/kəmˈpæʃ.ən/	Deep awareness of the suffering of others that people have to the point of them being motivated to relieve such states.
founder noun	/ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/	One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.).
disappear verb	/dɪsəˈpɪɹ/	To vanish.
accommodate verb	/əˈkɑməˌdeɪt/	To render fit, suitable, or correspondent; to adapt.
guru noun	/ˈɡʊɹ(ˌ)u/	In Indian traditions: a spiritual teacher who transmits knowledge to a shishya.
resentment noun	/ɹɪˈzɛnt.mənt/	Anger or displeasure stemming from belief that one or one's group has been wronged or betrayed by others; indignation.
silent adjective	/ˈsaɪ̯lənt/	Free from sound or noise; absolutely still; perfectly quiet.
suffer verb	/ˈsʌfɚ/	To undergo hardship.
subsequent adjective	/ˈsʌbsɪkwənt/	Following in time; coming or being after something else at any time, indefinitely.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
give up verb		To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
take up verb		To pick up.
write down verb		To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something.
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
get out of verb		To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of.
grow up verb		To mature and become an adult.
speak up verb	/ˌspik ˈʌp/	To talk more loudly or clearly.
take over verb		To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

It's I exist to give and serve.
Everyone else's needs are prioritized above my own.
It's I will not allow oppression and abuse.
It's not the toolkit we need.
Let's hear what she has to say.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	have already been sacrificing · We've already been surrendering
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've heard · have been conditioned · have considered
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was born · were made · were expected
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	those who are · men who have · women who were

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 21 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, feather /ˈfɛðə/, ether /ˈi.θɚ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: compassion /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/, partnership /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/, influential /ɪnflʊˈɛnʃəl/
Long words — get the stress right: accommodate /əˈkɑməˌdeɪt/, exclusively /ɪkˈskluːsɪvli/, enlightenment /ɪnˈlaɪtənmənt/, humility /hjuːˈmɪlɪti/, spirituality /ˌspɪɹ.ə.t͡ʃuˈæl.ə.tɪ/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like spiritual, masculine, divine.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Why Religious Tools Don't Work For Women - Learn English Speaking with Video

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