Sarah Jenks
speaker
135 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Sarah Jenks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And there were people emerging on the planet that wanted to have power over instead of power for all. And one of the places when I was going through history to try to understand where did the The place that I focused a lot of my attention that seemed to really jump out at me glaringly was during the Crusades in the Dark Ages, you know, started around the year 1300, where the Catholic Church came.
decided to take over all of Europe and also spread into Asia and then enslaved people in Africa. And that was actually the same movement that colonized Turtle Island, which we now know as North America and the United States.
So the thing that I realized was when the Crusaders came into a village, the first thing they did was burn the sacred feminine temple and kill the leaders, the spiritual leaders of the community that were mostly women. And this also led to the burning times, which we know is the witch hunts and the witch burnings.
And what they did was they used Christianity and Jesus's supposed word, which most of us now know was not what he meant. to take over large groups of people, to get the masses really fearful for their lives, for their well-being. And anytime we're scared, we look to the person in power.
And I just thought it was so interesting that the tool they used was to erase sacred feminine spirituality in order to take the power away from the people. And so when I learned that, I really asked myself, well, what would happen if we put it back? How could we actually really change the way women saw themselves and saw their own power?
If we just put in this practice because they must have been onto something on some level, if that was the primary thing that they were after.
So I love that you use the word brainwashing because I use that phrase and that context a lot to explain to women like what's happening in us. Yeah. And if you take away the metaphor of powerful, sovereign women in religious stories, in talking about folklore around the fire, and you replace it with only a virgin, pious mother and a whore, then
Then we grow up, if we live in a, you know, a predominantly Christian society, even if we aren't grown up Christian, these archetypes, these metaphors are really baked in to our culture. Then we only have two archetypes to see ourselves in. And what can happen is that naturally, I believe as women grow, we have the magic in us.
You know, we were all super wild when we were little girls, but we've been taught to be afraid of that wildness of being ourselves, of that authenticity, because we've been living in a culture. And I do believe that it's changing where we were going to be made fun of for being different and
where we would maybe be shamed for being different, where we wouldn't be able to fit into the culture, to fit into school, to fit into a traditional job. And that's the best case scenario. And that comes with a lot of privilege. And a lot of people in different societies around the world and also in this country, if they are different, their lives are at stake and their thriving is at stake.
And so there's really a range of internalized conditioning, externalized conditioning, and And, but I really see it all going back to this brainwashing and this culturalization about what it means to be a woman and what's considered appropriate.
Well, when I go back and I look at history before this happened, it's been really fun for me to study what they believe was happening inside of priestess temples, inside of matriarchal societies, where women were leaders. I'm like, tell me all the things.
Where they were leaders, where they were the healers, where they were who were coming together in council and making really massive decisions for huge areas of land, both large and small communities. And When we go and look at that in history, we can remember, oh, I'm capable of that.
Because since so much of that history has been deliberately erased from what we know and mostly rewritten to be in the narrative that men have been in charge the whole time, we don't know what's possible for us. So that's why I think it's so important for women to learn about and understand about matriarchal communities and
you know, what it meant to be a magical woman and what it meant to be sovereign, what it meant to be in our wildness. And back on a time when everything was, when we were celebrated for being authentic. And of course it wasn't never, it's never been perfect, you know? And I believe that we can borrow from a lot of these, um,
stories in order to think about, you know, how to give ourselves permission to rock the boat, to color outside the lines, to forge our own path and not just default to what our belief systems are telling us we can do.
Yeah. So one story I love talking about is back when we were hunter gatherers, we know this from archaeologists looking at cave drawings where the female shamans of the community would go into deep meditation and the goddess would tell them where the animals were. And they would talk to the animals. They would attune to the animals.
They do a ceremony for the animals and they would send out the hunters and the hunters would know exactly where the herds were. And then of course they would only take what they needed. They would, you know, kill the animals in ceremony. And I just love this team of like divine direction with embodied action and out in the world in order to create thriving for communities.
Totally. And the other thing that I really love talking about is, you know, when priestesses would run a temple. So in some societies, mostly in Europe, like if you look at the Temple of Avalon, which is current day Glastonbury, England, a lot of what is said and remembered about this time is that there was a circle of priestesses that held the temple and they sat in a circle as equals.
And they would come into deep meditation, deep relationship with the goddess to really understand what was best for the community. And so we actually orient our team this way in my company because the way it used to be was like I was, you know, normal team is like a triangle. Hierarchical. A hierarchical where the CEO is at the top and everybody else supports the CEO. Right.
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