Magnetism During Pandemic: How to Navigate your Magnetic Gifts & Guilts during Messy Times

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I get to self-isolate in my own home, with the beach 2mins away. Most of the world’s population isn’t this lucky – and it can leave me feeling guilty when the whisperings of my heart tell me…

💛 More.
💛 I desire More.

MORE?! When I already have so much?
MORE?! When we are all headed for a depression?

On the podcast this week we’re examining the guilt & gift of magnetism during messy times (like pandemics).

This podcast was inspired by an email I received asking “How does the principle of magnetism apply amidst a global crisis?”

On the podcast I’m posing 3 key questions to ask yourself:

Q1. Can I acknowledge any guilt or shame I feel around wanting more?
And how might it do good, by paying it forward & back?

Q2. What is this global crisis personally revealing to you?
For me, this crisis is showing me that only humans & human systems are affected. Mother Nature keeps shining her abundance down upon us.

Q3. Do you want to vote (with your actions) for a world that denies the importance of our heart’s desires?
If we desire a world with less hyper-masculine & more feminine-first-feeling, then we need to let our decisions, actions & time reflect these values.

PS. On the podcast, I mention the Feminine Magnetism Map – a guide & workbook to move through one of your desires. You can download it (for free) here: www.jennaward.co/magnetismpdf

PPS. Our September 2020 Class of the Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification is now open for enrolment with an extended 10month payment play – you can learn more here

Transcript

Recently, I received a fabulous email from Rachel, and that’s what kick-started this conversation today around magnetism. Rachel wrote, “Hi, Jenna. I’ve listened to all of your podcasts numerous times over. I have a question about magnetism in the pandemic.”

“How does the principle of magnetism apply amidst a global crisis? I’ve been discontent in my job for quite some time now, and I’ve done a lot of embodiment practice, which has led me to the realization that what I really want is to quit my current position in 2021 so that I can travel, and then go back to school in the fall. However, is it realistic that my plans will fall into place when we are headed into a depression? Should I be more pragmatic and stay in my position that has job security, instead of following what feels right?” There’s so many layers to Rachel’s question that I could relate to and that I know so many of friends, and clients, and acquaintances can relate to whether we’re wanting to call in a lover and a partner, a specific opportunity for ourselves, maybe for our family, if we’re wanting to call in new clients if we’re in business already, or if we’re wanting to call in new opportunities depending on what our career path is.

Maybe we’re needing to call in a home to live in, or maybe we’re needing to call in money in the bank. Whatever the desire, I think it’s a very interesting question about, “How does magnetism work, and what is the relevancy of it during really challenging and unusual situations like the current global pandemic?” In today’s podcast, as always, as a coach, I don’t have the answer for Rachel, who I promised to record this podcast episode for. I don’t have the answer for anyone else, because I don’t live in anybody else’s body. I live in my body, and my body knows through the deep, instinctual wisdom that lives in every single one of my cells what is best for me, but what I can offer …

I can’t offer answers and I can’t offer solutions. What I can offer is some different perspectives, some questions, and some invitations into the realm of the deeper feminine that lives inside of our body, that is feminine embodiment, as a way for you to feel into what your truth and what your opinion on the situation at hand for you is. As always, with these podcasts, take the part that lands and that is relevant for you, and leave the rest because you are the most important decision-maker in your life. Okay. The first kind of thread or tangle that I want to unravel around the relevancy of magnetism, and this comes up always, every single time I teach or speak about the concept of magnetism in our personal women’s programs, in our coaching certification programs, even in calls with my private clients, when we speak about magnetism, this big problem comes up, and it also comes up when we speak about pleasure and sensuality as well.

It usually goes something, the big problem, the big challenge usually goes something loosely along these lines, “How can I feel good and have more when there are so many in the world who don’t have as much as I do, who don’t have the access to resources or possibilities that I have? How can I be so greedy as to want and desire, to feel good in drawing in more when there are so many that have less?” This question, this worry is very often laced with a strong sense of guilt, and sometimes also a sense of ashamedness for the privilege and the opportunity and the desires of the heart that women, maybe like Rachel, maybe like me, maybe like you feel at times. I can really relate to this so, so, so much personally. My personal life is incredibly privileged, incredibly privileged, and my heart also wants more, more freedom for my family, more abundance for my life, and yet, I see in the news.

Admittedly, it’s not the regular channel, whatever news on TV. You’ve got to go digging for this kind of news. I see the situations in other countries and populations, and particularly around this Coronavirus situation, and I think, “Gosh, isn’t that greedy of me to want more?” It can very quickly become a sense of contraction and guilt, ashamedness for being in the privilege of financial wealth, class wealth, owning a home wealth, intergenerational wealth that I’ve been privileged to. One of the things that can impact our capacity to harness magnetism is the guilt and the shame that we might feel about our own desires and our own capacity to pursue those desires.

I think this is very important to acknowledge because any emotion that is swept under the rug, any sensation or feeling that is not bought out into the light and embodied and embraced and expressed, like we’re expressing on this podcast today, is simply another secret shame that we need to squirrel away, not admit to ourselves, not admit to the world, and in doing so, taking that desire and that life force energy associated with it, and binding it up, putting it away in our body as a unit of tension that is frozen. The life force energy associated with that desire and with that pleasurable and magnetic potential is denied, until we get to the point whereby we feel so dry and so dull, that it becomes a long, slow unraveling to recover those intrinsic resources, and so I think these discussions are really important for us to have, particularly, if like me, you are in a position of privilege. I think that one of the most important aspects of privilege is to acknowledge in times like a pandemic crisis, is that if we rewind, let’s say to the start of this pandemic before, anything began to happen when it was kind of life and business as usual, it’s possible that these questions around the guilt of privilege and of those being, of those people in the world who are less fortunate than you, it’s possible that that might have come onto your radar as something for you to consider before you begin drawing in your desires, but even at those times, there are epidemics, and wars, and genocides, and oppressions, and injustices constantly going on in the world. Do these people, these people who are experiencing epidemics, and wars, and genocides, and oppressions, and injustices … That might be you.

You may be experiencing oppressions and injustices in micro or macro ways in your own life. As a woman or as an individual who holds an identity around all that is subject to oppressions and injustices, I’m curious, do you wait until this injustice, this oppression is over before you start harnessing all of the, I want to say god-given resources, but it’s almost also like goddess-given resources that are at your disposal? Do you wait until everyone has a quality before you’re allowed to harness that, which you intrinsically are? Again, I don’t have an answer here, but I can pose the question. Some of the most activating and influencing essays that I have been subject to in my long period of embodiment research, which continues, have been the writings of both classical tantra and some of the beautiful poetry of their sutras, but equally, women from the past 50, 60 years, some of them say, for example, black feminists who absolutely hold the identity of an oppressed group, and their writings invoke pleasure.

They invoke the senses. They invoke qualities like magnetism, and so I feel like, “Is magnetism the exclusive right of somebody who holds a privileged position in society, or rather, is it actually something that every single person is able to draw on and to use in whatever situation they have incarnated here in this lifetime as?” These are interesting questions. I feel that for me personally, as I’ve expressed already, my family is in a very wonderful position of privilege, my business is in a very wonderful position of privilege, and I’ll share some of the ideas around doing business in these uncertain times in a little while on the podcast, I know that when the guilt around pleasure or magnetism sometimes comes up for me, what that asks me to really look at is, “Well, as a result of this desire that I’m drawing in, what is my equivalent responsibility to pay it forward, to give back, and to ensure that I’m being a genuinely good and responsible human being?” That question has led to many different and diverse answers, so for example, my business, in the realm of my business, when I consider, “What is my responsibility?”

“How do I give back? How do I allow this, what seemingly is personal magnetism to overflow and to fuel everyone, not just me?” As a result of that, there’s a few things off the top of my head that I can think of. Say, for example, in the last six months, my business has developed an environmental policy, and we’ve totally changed how all of our client gifts are packaged and are sent. We’re playing a total premium for the ability to have biodegradable everything from the stickers to the packaging, to offset all of the miles that our gifts travel. We have clients from almost every continent across the world, so we have gifts that are flying from our headquarters in Australia across to just recently, we’ve been sending gifts to Sweden, and Italy, and within Australia, and across to Asia, and all around the place.

That’s one of the ways whereby yes, I am receiving, but it’s my responsibility to give back to the earth. Then, another example is, so in my work, a percentage of every launch that we do is donated to one of our charity partners. One of our big charity partners in 2019 was a beautiful organization called Birth for Humankind. In 2019, I birthed my own daughter, and I have the great privilege of drawing in, magnetizing in the most amazing midwife team, who I had the financial resources to be able to employ and engage. We had such a beautiful, beautiful birth at home.

P.S., I hear that home birth rates have increased 500% in the wake of Coronavirus because nobody, or people are increasingly concerned about birthing in hospitals. What a beautiful, beautiful change this pandemic has brought about, again for those in a position of privilege to actually seek out those resources to birth at home in really safe ways, but I divulge. Anyway, so Birth for Humankind was a charity partner that we contributed a percentage of each of our launches to in 2019. This was harnessing the personal magnetism, so the money that fuels me, my family and my work, but also allowing a big chunk of that to head over. Birth for Humankind, they pay for doulas and birth support for women who are in disadvantaged situations, so women who are homeless, women who identify as refugees, and a number of other different groups of women who are not resourced to have the safest births.

That’s an amazing charity partner that I was so behind in 2019, and I was so happy to share the fruits of my magnetism with them. This is not about buying back our guilt or paying off our guilt, but this is really coming back to the question of … This guilt is showing you that maybe there is a way that you can say yes to what your heart desires and fuel the magnetic possibilities of paying that forward, paying that abundance, paying that beauty forward, and it might mean paying it forward financially or emotionally. I would suggest that all currencies are equally valuable. We live in a world that says the only valuable way for you to pay things forward is in our highest value, which is money.

That’s not my highest value. I feel that we can pay things forward with the feminine currency, that is emotional connection, vulnerability, intimacy, depth, and also as women, anchoring a new way and norm of operating, which is much more expansive in the feminine values, which is exactly what the principle of magnetism is about. That brings me kind of to the second question that I would like to ponder for those of you who might also be considering, “Well, what is the role of magnetism in this pandemic?” The second question that I have is, “What has this crisis personally revealed to you?” What has this crisis personally revealed to you? We can look at this pandemic from a global perspective, and it is a really immense situation economically, healthwise, for different groups, for different economies.

There’s a big narrative that’s going on collectively around what this pandemic actually means and what it reveals to us, but you have to consider it for yourself on the micro level as well. I was reading an article by a woman yesterday, and she was speaking about what the pandemic had revealed for her personally. Long story short, her insight was that she’s got some school-aged children who are doing all of the extracurricular activities, that all of a sudden got stopped, and so the children were at home with her. Naturally, that presented a huge amount of increase in her domestic duties, and her responsibilities as a mother who was also working, but it really actually enabled her to learn more about her children’s learning style. It enabled her to parent her children, rather than being the chauffeur to a zillion different drop-offs.

In my family, there’s been some similar ideas, but the question here for you is, “What has this pandemic revealed to you personally in your own life?” What this pandemic has revealed to me personally is that this is a human crisis. It is a crisis that the only thing on the planet that has been affected is the humans. Mother Nature, she’s continued to go on cycling through her sunshine, and her storms, and her days, and her nights. She hasn’t blinked an eyelid, because Mother Nature is actually not part of this crisis that has been created by and through humans, and so this to me, in terms of what this has revealed to me personally, it’s really revealed to me the way that we live and the decisions that we make as a human species can either continue and compel us to go through these same and similar cycles, or as a human species, it feels to me like we have the opportunity to create something new and something different here.

I’ve been spending a lot more time with my family. We have the privilege of living in and by the beach. Beach is about two minutes from my house here at the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Yesterday, which was Mother’s Day here in Australia, we were down at the beach, and life was actually, for those few hours, really regular. Life was really usual. There was the sound of the ocean, a loud roar of the waves.

There were the birds flying around. My daughter, who’s now nine months old was just saturating herself in the textures of sand, and pebbles, and rocks, and, “What can I grab next?” It brought me back to the simplicity of these kinds of pleasures, the simplicity of the pleasure of nature. Now, let’s face it, here in Australia, all the cafes and restaurants are still closed. We probably would have gone out to brunch and had a very different experience.

Maybe not spent the entire day at the beach if it was kind of life as usual, and so what this pandemic has been revealing to me is that actually, success and rich-living can occur so much more simply. I’ve been having discussions with my husband around, “How can we have less? How can we consume less?” I think we’re already a pretty, let’s use the word conscious consumpters, but, “How can we be even more? How can we do even better?”

“How can we simplify even further?” That’s one of the conversations that this crisis has been revealing to me personally, and that means that the type of things that I’m wanting to draw and magnetize in are in many ways not necessarily stuff that I want out in the world, rather, feeling and states of emotion that I want to occupy within my body. This is very possible as well, and so for Rachel who’s asking the question, “Should I be more pragmatic and stay in my position?”, I guess from my lens of what this pandemic has revealed to me, one of the further like sub-questions here is, “Well, that change in career that you’ve identified that you want, how do you expect that is going to make you feel?” Identify that state, and then, “How can you work with that state?” Maybe you want to feel more freedom.

Maybe you want to feel more creative. Maybe you want to feel more independent. Whatever that state is for you, how can you begin to work with that energy now? In a lot of way, this collapses but also expands timelines, because very often, when we get an idea in our head like, “Okay, in 2021, this is going to happen, and once this happens, then I’m going to feel this way,” we can begin to attribute the success of our magnetism to looking like a particular three-dimensional something out in the world, but success in magnetism actually happens when we are within our own bodies, experiencing the way that we want to feel more consistently right here and now, and so in a lot of ways, that experiencing how you want to feel is both the how and the outcome of magnetism. Let’s take for example one of the clients that I’m working with at the moment has her own business and she’s working on drawing in a lot more clients to her signature body of work.

Now, there’s a whole heap of structure and masculine steps that she’s been putting in place, but there’s also the feminine side of things, the magnetism, the confidence, and the drawing in of her desires. Just in this last week or two, she’s had record numbers of women signing up to work with her. You might think, “Well, who’s got money to buy coaching in times like these? Who wants to invest in things like that in times like these?” Look, the woman that I’m speaking with say that it’s business is going really well at the moment, because when we are faced with these big questions, “What is there to invest in beyond how we want to feel in our lives?”, and so this client has been seeing really great results, drawing in lots and lots and lots of clients, which is so wonderful and absolutely a testament to how attuned and calibrated she is, and her body as a antenna to her desires. The point here is that, yes, those clients are flowing in, success is coming to her, and success is that form of abundance, like that abundance of overflowing of clients.

That’s what she wanted to draw in, and how she gets to that success is by tuning into finding the evidence of abundance, overflowing abundance that is here and now, because magnetism really works in that when we are able to access a possibility, a code, a frequency, a state of feeling in our body now, our body becomes an antenna, and it attunes to more, and more, and more of that which you desire, that which you are already experiencing in your body, drawing towards you. One of the other big things that this crisis has personally revealed to me, as I mentioned before, it’s like this is a human crisis and we’ve been speaking about abundance. Mother Nature has been really reminding me that abundance is everywhere. Even though there has seen like so much economic downturn and lack and scarcity during this pandemic, you only have to look to a little pocket of nature to see that it is bountiful. Recently, we have this blooming of butterflies just outside my office and in the area that I live.

The weather or the climate must have been just exactly perfect, and there were thousands upon thousands of butterflies emerging from their cocoons, and expanding into the sky, and floating on the wind. They just literally covered the sky from horizon to horizon. This to me was the perfect personification of the reminder that Mother Nature shows us, that there is endless abundance here, and so whether the timeline changes, maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but the way that you want to feel, you don’t have to wait for the conditions to be perfect to go after that feeling. You can begin to calibrate your body now towards that state of feeling. There’s no need to delay.

The final question that I want to pose before we dive into a few practical tips around how to calibrate yourself with magnetism in these times is I really … This is a short and a sweet one. I really want to ask, ” What is your truth in this?” Rachel wrote, “Should I be more pragmatic and stay in my position that has job security instead of following what actually feels right?” There are those words, what actually feels right.

We have all been conditioned and raised in civilizations that encourage us to externalize our security and our success according to what the formula tells it should look like. Then, there is this unique beating heart that is showing you through sensations and feelings in your body what your truth is. I would suggest that at times like these, it is more important than ever to say yes to that which feels right and feels true in your body, because if we don’t allow more of us to lead with, “What do I feel about this?”, instead of, “What do I think about this?”, if we don’t be the ones to step up and say, “I’m going to lead with what my body wants me to do,” rather than what would be the typically conceived of successful and safeful route, then how are we ever going to evolve our cultures and our economies into more heart-led, feminine-centered ways? Now, with that said, it is important that there is a healthy masculine that accompanies this feminine-first feeling. What I mean by that is if I had zero dollars in the bank, I probably wouldn’t be quitting my job right now, because you got to eat, you need warmth, you need shelter.

When these basic needs are not met, it’s very, very, very difficult for your spiritual heart to lead when the needs of your body are not taken care of, so there is absolutely sanity in ensuring that you have all of the basic needs to be met. If that means that you need to stay in your job, well then, maybe that’s what it means, but that does not mean that you can’t start with and calibrate your body to the magnetism now. I had the great privilege of leaving my pharmacy career with a little bit of a buffer of some cash that enabled me to launch into my entrepreneurial pursuits, hone my skills, which took training and practice and time, and to have a little bit of a runway so that when I was first figuring things out in my business, there was some space, but everybody is different. We have women who move through our six-month coaching certification program, and by the end of that six months, they’re ready to receive paying clients. Within two or three paying clients, they’ve made that money back and they’re beginning to make money for themselves.

I feel like timelines around this are different for every single individual, but if you deny what your heart feels and what, in Rachel’s own words, what actually feels right, if you deny that, then what kind of world are we creating, and do we even want to live in that world? That’s certainly not what I want for me. That’s not what I want for my daughter. That’s not what I want for any woman or for any human. This brings us to our fourth point for the podcast today and the final point, which is, “Okay, so now how do I practically do this magnetism piece?” There’s a few things that I can speak to around this.

One of them is actually a free resource that I have, which you can download if you’re interested in going a bit deeper with magnetism. The link for that is … You can download this Magnetism Map at jennaward.co/magnetismpdf. It’s a guide and a worksheet, which is a beautiful way to receive more of the theory around this magnetism, but actually also workshop one of your own desires. When we think about really what magnetism is, whether we’re in a pandemic or not, magnetism is existing.

The moon keeps moving through the sky, drawing the oceans towards her with her magnetic pull, and this same pull, this same polarity is going on inside all of our bodies constantly. If we choose to, our body can act as an antenna to draw towards us what we want, and this requires us to move through a few really practical steps. The first step is to really, well, it is to identify what we want, but also to identify, “Why are you after that thing? What is the emotional frequency, the feeling and the sensation that that desire creates within you?” Recently, my partner and I have been speaking about where we want to live, if we want to shift where we’re living, and part of the conversation around that has really been, “Well, what’s important to us, and how do we want to feel?”

Similarly, in business, we’ve currently got enrollment open for our September round of the coaching certification, and I’ve been doing some magnetism practices about welcoming the perfect women into that experience, and having many wonderful conversations. There’s this sense of abundance and of overflow that I spoke about earlier, which is one of the feeling states that I want to create for myself, also for my work, also for the women who are coming to join us. The question for you is, “What do you want, and how do you expect that to make you feel, or how is it that you want to feel?” Once we’ve got that kind of orientation and that desire in mind, we have the framework to begin to figure out how we’re moving towards that desire. In the Feminine Embodiment Coaching model, we use a depth first, direction second approach.

Let me explain what this means. Once you have your goal, your desire, the thing that you want to draw in, in mind, in heart and body, instead of taking action steps towards it, instead of writing a to-do list, instead of thinking, “Okay, how am I going to get this?”, and I’m curious right now when you think of the desire that you’re working with, is that what you’re doing? Are you instantly moving into that masculine action, that practical direction? Not a bad thing, but when we jump into that moving forward first, we miss the depth part of things. In the model of Feminine Embodiment Coaching, we say, “Okay. Well, let’s unravel and gather all of the resources, knowing and wisdom of our body so that when we are ready to move forward, we do it with our full potency and our full feminine fuel backing us.”

To do this really practically, one of the steps, one of the first steps with this is to not write the to-do list, to not get into the practical how, “How am I going to create that desire?”, and instead, to drop it and to become sensitive in your body, and to begin to explore, “Well, before I think about how I can move forward towards that, let me consider how does my body feel in relationship to that desire?” Take a moment maybe, and if you’ve got a desire in mind, you can even begin to consider, “How do I feel within my body in relationship to that desire? Do I feel open and excited? Do I feel closed? Do I feel guilty?”

“Is there a sense of contraction? Is there a sense of expansion? Is my desire close? Is it fire away? Is it inside me? Is it behind me? Is it big?”

“Is it small?” This somatic orientating is something that’s really essential and something that we do in our body by feeling our body, and this is really important because we can move forward in the practical doing and the to-do lists with respect to our desire while secretly holding an orientation of repulsion and contraction, and that’s never going to happen for me, orientation in the body. When we do that, all of our actions become futile. We’re working hard, and at our core, absolutely not believing that it can be for us and that we will receive it, and this is not magnetic. Your antenna is not switched on.

In fact, you’re almost like a magnet that is repelling and sending away the desire if your body is holding this orientation, and it doesn’t make you wrong, it doesn’t mean you broken, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get there. It just means that some time and attention is required to change your body’s polarity to a state of receptivity and attraction, but the step here, the key step is to notice how your body is orientated. If you want to dive into this more and expand this concept of magnetism more fully, then just head to Jennaward.co/magnetismpdf, and you’ll be able to grab the download. All the links are in the social media profiles and things as well, as well as the show notes for this podcast. I’d love to leave you today with a reminder, a reminder that every human is magnetic.

The world does not become a better or more equitable place by you denying that which you are, and yes, you got to take care of your own security. You got to take care of your own safety. You need to make sure this beautiful body of yours is provided for, but you also have to listen to your heart, and your body knows the best path forward for you, because, my love, you are the expert on you. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s podcast. If there’s a particular topic you’d love me to help you untangle, you can always shoot us an email and let me know. Very, very grateful, and sending you forth with so much belief in your inherent magnetic abilities as an embodied woman.