Awakening Power: My Year with Women

by Rachel Regan

I’ve been working inside the women’s movement now for over a year and also all my life it feels. Because yes, my name is Rachel, and I am a woman. This might sound funny, but I have only very recently acknowledged that. There is so much in our culture that contorts what it is to be a woman. I chose a career path for a long time that was utterly dominated by men. I looked at that like it was a great challenge that I wanted to conquer. Women who were successful had to contort themselves so much into a shape that could pass, usually one where we had to work three times as hard to be more like the successful men around us, laugh and smile at things that weren’t funny, and compete with other women. Now do not get me wrong, I absolutely loved it for a while. I took all my power and I drove it toward winning that game and that was great until it wasn’t. I’ll go out on a limb and say this is likely the experience of many women in some context or other.

I think the reason why we meet that point of, “This is just not doing it for me anymore” is common, and I’ll wager there are common aspects to it. Likely there is not a lot of connection with other women who acknowledge their power fully, a general learned habit of thinking we need something beyond ourselves to live the life we want to live, and limited aspirations of the potential impact on the world we can, want, and do have. Little did I know that the funneling of all my power and resources into a career arena where my biggest aspiration was to beat and conquer an environment dominated by men was the exact thing that took me away from the deeper aspect of women’s power inherent in me, and my own deep desire to be of benefit to the world in a significant way.

This realization is what drew me to the women’s movement. Over the past year we have been cultivating spaces and gatherings where women come to speak openly about things we keep to ourselves, about the ways we contort instead of emanate, withhold instead of offer, and the ways in which we want to have the real aspects of women’s power arise, making the need for contortion obsolete.

Women Over Dinner has a goal to reach 1 million women globally. We do this through a grassroots movement, one dinner at a time, that lights up one or six or twenty other women who then have their own dinners lighting up those women and so on and so on. That’s how this thing will grow through active and intentional engagement, lighting up a global power grid of women. So far we have had 79 dinners reaching 1,400 women. We have established some core monthly dinners on each coast, one in Harlem, New York, and one in Petaluma, California, as well as many satellite dinners held by turned on women across the country and even as far as Europe and Africa. We want to really ignite women globally, and this is all done through women getting involved, holding their own dinners, and all our collective fundraising efforts.

This week we introduced the 12 Women’s Steps to Unleashing Power on our weekly Women Are Power call to some incredible reception. I watched every single one of the 40+ women on the call flash and light up as we read them together. The call crackled with rolling electricity and emanating joy, some things that I have come to know as markers of actual power!

Several of the women spoke to feeling like they had finally found a space to speak and practice these truths they have always known and felt would not be heard or understood, as well as how they are healing or building a new relationship to their sexuality and a general desire to be more fully expressed as a woman in the world.

The biggest shift for me has been going from directing all my power in the pursuit of a personal goal to conquer, to remembering that all power is shared power, that I want to use that power to be of the most benefit to the most people, and that the way to do that is in connection with (not competition with) other women – or men!

Rachel Regan is a single mother and former Fortune 500 tech executive who passionately and fiercely supports women owning their personal power and true erotic selves. She’s dedicated to helping others live with confidence and joy, both personally and professionally.