A Radical Awakening For Women With Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Ready to level up your badassery? Join Jennifer Cassetta as she chats with the remarkable Dr. Shefali Tsabary. Dr. Shefali, a clinical psychologist from Columbia University, is renowned for blending Western psychology and Eastern philosophy to transform lives. Known for her expertise in family dynamics and personal development, she’s authored seven books, including the groundbreaking “A Radical Awakening.”

In this episode, Dr. Shefali dives deep into the themes of her transformative book. She shares her profound insights on overcoming toxic patriarchy, soul erosion, and the cultural conditioning that keeps women feeling small. Dr. Shefali guides listeners on a journey to reclaim their power, embrace their authentic selves, and awaken to their true potential. This powerful conversation is filled with wisdom, personal stories, and practical tools for self-reflection and empowerment.

Whether you’re on a journey of self-discovery, seeking deeper truths, or ready to break free from societal constraints, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in now and unleash your inner badass!

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A Radical Awakening For Women With Dr. Shefali Tsabary

I have such an exciting guest for you. I’ve been looking forward to this. Dr. Shefali, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

In case any of you haven’t heard of Dr. Shefali yet, she received her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University, specializing in the Integration of Western Psychology and Eastern Philosophy. She brings together the best of both worlds for her clients. She’s an expert in family dynamics and personal development, my favorite, teaching courses around the globe.

She’s written 7 books, which blows my mind, 3 of which are New York Times bestsellers, including her 2 landmark books, The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. I must also shout out The Radical Awakening, which is my personal favorite. You all may know her as Oprah’s favorite child expert. How fabulous is that? Dr. Shefali, I heard you actually have another project in the works. Can you tell us about that, please?

It’s my new podcast called Parenting and You with Dr. Shefali. I only do real-life coaching in real-time with parents. It’s like being a fly on the wall, listening to me doing coaching with people, which I think is the best way to learn. By watching someone else get coached, you get coached. It’s really for every person who’s been a child or is raising one. You have no excuse. You have to go visit. I think it’s got life wisdom for every situation and people are just loving it. It’s doing well.

It’s already at the top of the charts.

I’m pretty blown away and we didn’t spend any money on advertising, nothing. It’s organic because I think the format of doing real-life coaching in real-time is what parents need. Everybody is spreading so much data and information, statistics, studies and research, but all of that doesn’t help a parent in the home. That’s what this podcast is about. It is giving real-life tools to parents and they’re going to watch me do the coaching. It’s not me telling you what to do. It’s me showing you what to do in real-time.

One of my favorite podcasts to date is Esther Perel’s Where Do We Begin? It’s a similar format where she coaches couples. I can’t wait to tune in and listen. Dr. Shefali, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom in so many formats.

Radical Awakening

Thank you. I do love The Radical Awakening. It is one of my favorite books that I’ve written. It is my favorite book, too. I love it so much. I know the author shouldn’t talk like that, but it’s because I think it really touches so many deep truths that we, as women, need to hear.

You should talk like that. I love my book too. I get that so much. My first question was literally going to be, where have you been all my life? When I read this book, I felt like you were speaking to my soul. I kept thinking like, “If I just had this information in my teens and my early 20s, my late 20s and even my 30s and keep going even now. There’s just so much wisdom in there. Can you give us a quick journey of how Dr. Shefali came to The Radical Awakening, starting from when you were a young Shefali in India? What’s the journey?

Real quick. I was raised in India. I do have beautiful parents who were connected and available to me, which is, I think, why I do the work I do because I so understand the jewels of that relationship that I want to help other people receive those jewels. I grew up in a very stifling culture with a lot of toxic patriarchy. I suffocated in that and I needed to find myself. I came to the West. I came to America at the age of 21 and kept unearthing my own co-creation in my own oppression.

I think we women don’t realize how we co-create our own oppression. We are not the cause of our oppression. There is a cause and that is the toxic masculinity and the toxic patriarchy. The toxic part of it, not the natural beautiful part of masculinity, but women co-create it. How do we co-create it? We co-create it by how we treat ourselves. We become the internalized oppressors of ourselves. We internalize that voice within ourselves.

We mistreat each other as women. We compete with each other. We are selfish. We are competitive. We are bitchy. Every woman knows what I’m talking about. We then pass on this insecurity and unworthiness to our children. We co-create the toxic elements of the oppressive culture without awakening. I wrote this book so that we can begin to awaken so we can at least entangle ourselves from our own co-creation.

Culture may still be oppressive, still be dangerous for us women, and still be toxic, but can we not participate? On a very basic level, if we look at a woman who has a sixteen-inch waist on social media and then we go and take out our ribs, yes, social media was toxic, but we co-created our reality right there because we paid attention, we took it in, we told ourselves we are not good enough. We then followed a mandate that said, “You should look like that.”

We go and take out our ribs and get a sixteen-inch waist and then we’re upset with culture, but we don’t realize how we have participated. If we go outside and wear these super high heels, I always say no one is forcing us, chopping our ankles, putting it in the shoe, buying the shoe, telling us where the uncomfortable shoe is. We do that for ourselves. We can’t blame culture. Although culture is so toxic, we have to own our part in that oppression.

Although culture is so toxic, we have to own our part in that oppression.

Soul Erosion

Music to my ears, Dr. Shefali. The whole book is like this, you guys. You have to dig into this. Every woman, again, not just parents. It is for truly every single woman out there. Can you start a little bit with the soul erosion in chapter one? I found that so fascinating, and just share what that’s about a little bit.

I discovered my own soul erosion had been occurring since I was a child. What is soul erosion? It really, in essence, means that in all the million moments in our childhood that we could have followed our inner voice and discovered our inner truth, we were stopped as little girls and we were primed and curated and prepped, to become an image of our parents’ fantasy.

All those million moments led to us leaving behind our authentic voice and claiming a false voice. Eventually, the soul gets so eroded that at the end of your 21 years, 25, 30 years, you look in the mirror and you ask yourself, “Who the hell is this?” It’s because you have no connection to your truth anymore. You are an automaton to other people’s fancies, expectations, and fantasies.

There’s this huge abyss, this crevice between your present self, which is completely now false, and who you once were. That’s why we enter dysfunctional relationships. We have surrogacy through drugs, alcohol, prescription meds, and cosmetic treatments because of this gap. Soul erosion refers to this process where we leave behind our authentic self and begin to occupy a completely false, fake, artificial, superficial sense of who we are.

What are some of the ways that you in your life or that you’ve helped others close that gap?

The first step is to have this sobering encounter with your false self. First, you have to be willing to say, “I’m full of shit. This is fake. I did an experiment with myself for a few weeks. I challenged myself.” 1) Don’t say anything until you check in with yourself. 2) When you check in with yourself, if the answer you’re about to give or the response you’re about to give comes from fear and a sense of scarcity or insecurity, then don’t talk. Don’t say it. I just gave myself that challenge to do an audit into how much of my response set was coming from fear and protection versus truth and power and authenticity.

I can tell you, it was almost 99% of my answers. I was not talking much. I’m like, “This is fake. I’m only saying yes because I’m scared of this person. I’m only saying no because I’m scared of this person. I’m only saying yes because I’m afraid they’ll leave me. I’m only saying no because I’m afraid they will not love me.” All my responses were based on and tailored to the other person’s reaction. I didn’t even know what I was feeling. That’s when I began to wake up. The first step is to recognize the discrepancy, the abyss, the false self.

You have to dare yourself to begin really tuning in and asking, “What do I feel?” If you don’t know what you feel, then don’t just give a proxy answer. Say, “I need time,” and then go discover what you feel. Even if it’s whether I want a Sprite or a Coke, even for something as basic, you need to know where the answer is coming from. Am I ordering the salad because that’s what my body wants right now, or am I ordering the salad because it’ll look great and everyone around me is trying to lose weight? Which one is it?

Am I saying, “Yes, I’ll give you the $5,” because I authentically want to share the money with you? Or am I saying I’ll give you the $5 because I’m scared you won’t love me if I say no? Am I saying, yes, I’ll have sex with my husband because I authentically wanted or because I’m scared of him? In all these ways, from the micro to the macro and from the minutiae to those profound, we need to start checking in with ourselves.

The third step, of course, is to dare to speak the truth, even if it’s as simple as saying, “I’m struggling. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t want to say yes,” or authentically and vulnerably, “I’m scared. This doesn’t feel good to me that I have to speak up.” As we begin to practice and cultivate that inner voice, then we fall into alignment with our truth and then we can show up so much more free. It is a process and nobody should expect themselves to just get to a place of wild freedom right away. It’s these little micro steps you take along the way.

I love that advice, and it’s bringing me back to this journey, doing what I do and what we all do. We get on social media, and we want to share. We truly have this stuff that we want to share with others and there are intentions behind it. At the same time, sometimes I feel like am I doing this stuff to fill a void? Am I doing this because I’m supposed to be doing it? I’ve noticed lately that I only want to get on social media when I’m like going for a walk and relaxed. I don’t want to make these fancy reels anymore. I feel like that’s part of me closing that gap in my own little way.

You’re backing up your feelings. We have feelings as children, but because they’re not backed up by parental permission and validation, we drop that feeling. The feeling is now just suppressed. You are not backing yourself up. You’re like, “Actually, if you ask me, I don’t like to do the social media thing,” or whatever. “I don’t like to cook big meals on Thanksgiving,” or, “I don’t like grandma,” whatever it is. You go, “Now how can I validate myself and let out my own truth.”

It feels risky because all of culture is saying go this way and you’re now saying, “No, I don’t want to go that way.” It’s a risk and people are not going to like you along the way. People are going to pressure you. “Why aren’t you on social media or how dare you not cook for Thanksgiving? You’ve done it every year. How dare you not go meet Grandma? She’s so nice.” You have to risk that. Ask yourself, “Do I want to follow my own truth and get my validation and love myself or do I want to be fake and get other people’s validation and their love? Which one do I want to be?”

Inner Reflection

I feel like tools to help you do that would be journaling. I journal every single morning and just sitting in meditation, thoughts will arise and I’ll have feelings, like a tugging either towards or a tugging away from things that are happening in my life. I always encourage everyone reading to find a practice that works for you, a mindfulness practice, whatever that is. Whether it be the writing, the sitting, the breathing, or the visualizations. All of what you’re talking about now can be guided through those practices.

What those practices have in common is inner reflection because I think we are not aware that the greatest relationship, the most important relationship, the most significant relationship we need to have is with ourselves. We’re not aware of that, so we don’t sit with ourselves and we don’t reflect on ourselves. We would rather reflect on our partners, what they are doing, what they should do differently, and what our children should do differently.

We’re not doing this to ourselves, but this is the most important relationship. In order to have a relationship with ourselves, we have to do it through inner reflection. When you have a relationship with your child, you play with your child, you walk with your child, and you sing with your child. When we’re having a relationship with ourselves, we have to do those things with ourselves, but that requires going within because ourselves is the inner self. Ourself is the inner self. We have to have a relationship with our inner self, and we don’t cultivate that relationship.

I’ve coached mothers for the last two decades in multiple things, from physical fitness to martial arts training, to health coaching, and now high-performance coaching. The biggest pattern I see is that moms don’t want to take that time for themselves. They don’t want to carve out that 5 minutes, 10 minutes in the morning or in the evening or whenever it is to fill their own cup before they start pouring into others.

They now believe that who they are is that self-deprecating person, meaning they put themselves down and put others first. That is a lie. They are actually not that person who has no time, but that is the image they have of themselves, that they are martyrs, that they’re selfless, and that they are so busy. When they are told to spend time with themselves, they look at that as selfish because they are so bought into this image of themselves as selfless. They deprecate themselves, and they put others first because that is their agenda, their persona.

That’s a lie because nobody should put themselves second. All of us should put ourselves first, then the others. All are living this lie, especially women and mothers, because we think, no, children should be first and the husband should be first. No, we should be first and then we decide who’s next. That feels very appalling to women who have been groomed to put themselves last. We’ve been groomed to put ourselves last. We equate good girlness, good womanhood, and good motherhood with putting ourselves last because that’s how we were groomed.

All of us should put ourselves first, then the others. We’re all living this lie, especially women and mothers.

A quick little story. This one woman I was coaching said, “I always really wanted to have a meditation practice.” I said, “Great. Well, tell me what your morning is like currently.” “I wake up and the first thing I have to do is make lunch for my kids.” I’m like, “Interesting. Okay. How old are your kids?” She said, “13 and 15.” I was like, “Okay, what would that be like if they made their own lunch?” Take that time back for yourself. I understand if that’s something you want to do, but maybe you get there, you enlist their help or get up five minutes earlier for yourself. There are ways to make it work when you put yourself as the first priority. I think that’s what you’re trying to say.

That is so hard for us women who’ve been trained to be good girls because we learned that good girls come last, don’t speak up, and don’t sit at the table. It feels very crippling to us to now step out of that image that we have of ourselves. That’s why I said the first thing to uncover is if I am being true or false right now. That is a very hard question because it’s a fish in water who doesn’t even know they’re in false self until they burn out, until they get exhausted, until they get fired or they get divorced. They’re like, “Is something going on inside me?”

Predators And Prey

That’s when they seek you out. Dr. Shefali, this is the part of the show where I always want to share with everyone why I’ve asked you to come on this show. First of all, I’m so honored you said yes, but it’s because I believe you’re a black belt in badassery. To me, that means someone that has gone through their own life challenges. Now, through that inner strength and grit and grace that they built, they share with others and help others rise. I noticed in The Radical Awakening, there were at least three things that you shared about your personal story.

This is the connection that I appreciate and acknowledge so much. It’s when people talk about vulnerability but actually are vulnerable. There are a lot of folks that just want to talk about it, but don’t share their story. You shared that early in your childhood, you had abuse. There was sexual abuse and molestation, you said, in your childhood. As someone who teaches all ages of women and girls self-defense, this stuck out in my mind, especially when we have statistics like 1 in 3 women globally are the victims of sexual violence in this world.

I honor you for sharing that because it is something that feels so taboo, but we should be talking about it. You talk specifically about how we should educate girls and young women around this concept of predator and prey. When you said those words, I stopped in my tracks. I was walking on my and listening to Audible. I stopped in my tracks. Can you share a little bit about that and then how we can do this delicate dance of sharing with young girls, educating them, and yet not scaring them? That’s the struggle I have, this delicate dance.

I appreciate your words and your question. In my own daughter’s life, I had to dance that dance of educating her but not scaring her. Let me just back up. Young children are the prey of adults, of anyone older really who has more power over them. Children, animals, and the Earth are always prey. Now out of the children subset, girls tend to be more at prey, but boys too have been sexually abused and physically abused. Girls are more prey to sexual violence and abuse because of unchecked male sexual energy and predatorial sexual energy.

Girls are more prey to sexual violence and abuse because of unchecked male, predatory sexual energy.

People don’t like when I will say this and they’ll be like, you’re anti-male or you’re pro-female. It’s not that. It’s just a reality. That male sexual energy, when it’s unharnessed, unchecked, it’s wild, it’s damaged. It’s also wounded in its own way. It looks for an outlet. Typically, the outlets are young, innocent girls. We see this across the board. As parents, we owe it to our young girls, especially and young boys to prepare them that they could be preyed on. You can do this quite simply from a young age about good touch, bad touch, private, this is yours, nobody gets to touch it, not even grandpa, not even grandma.

You designate safety and you teach them to fight back and to speak up. That’s what we need to do with our young girls. If you don’t allow your child to feel free with you, they will not come to you. You need to show them that you’re very aware of this thing. “It is probably going to happen. Please come to me, even if it’s Dad, even if it’s my brother, even if it’s my grandmother. It can come in any shape or form, so don’t feel bad. Anyone who touches you here, you have to come tell mom because it’s not okay and you have to get angry with them.”

You give the child the permission to speak up and say, “My boundaries are being violated.” What is anger? A boundary violation, so you have a right to be angry. We teach our girls especially to be so good and meek and docile that they then think, “I’m not being nice. While I’m being raped, I should be nice.” We teach children, girls especially, to be nice, not angry. I taught my daughter, and she can get very angry, I taught her to kick, to scream, to bite, to punch. I taught her all these seemingly violent things.

I said, “Anybody touches you, you have a right to fight and defend yourself and call me immediately.” I said, “Even if it’s dad, even if it’s grandpa.” As a protector, I did not leave her with my dad or my father-in-law, my brother or uncles. I really didn’t. I was keeping a watchful eye because when I was young, my mother did not know this. I don’t blame her. She didn’t know this. She did not keep a watchful eye. She actually put me in the predator’s way without realizing it because it was somebody who we knew.

It often is, by the way.

It is mostly, yes, because they have to groom the child. How do they groom the child? They have to show up, give gifts, and play games. We women need to educate ourselves for our children. This could happen to your sons as well. It is often right under your nose. We women, because we’re trying to be so good, we forget to be authentic and alive in the present moment.

It’s never too late to have that conversation. If your kids are young, if they’re teenagers, if they’re in their twenties, I don’t care. Just have the conversations. If you’re not a parent like me, you could be an auntie or a community member, these are such important conversations that we need. I loved in the book how you said, at one point, you kneed somebody in the groin because finally, you were like, “Enough. I’m not having this anymore.” Kudos to you. Kudos for teaching your daughter. I keep thinking in the book, how powerful your daughter probably is already and is going to be in this world. Thank you. Everyone out there, do a self-defense class and do it with your kids.

It’s so great to do a self-defense class. I have a course on the book The Radical Awakening. They can take my course or read the book. It is our favorite book. I’m sure your book is going to be another favorite of mine. These kinds of books are good because they remind us not to be afraid. They remind us to claim our power. They remind us to step into our worth. We owe it to our sisters. We owe it to our daughters. When one woman wakes up, she paves the way for other women to wake up.

Rapid Fire Questions

That’s a perfect thing to almost close on because I want everyone to understand where they can get all of your stuff and listen to your new podcast, Parenting and You. I have four rapid-fire questions. Are you up for them right now?

Yes.

One, what was your favorite food as a child?

My favorite food was sushi.

Two, if you could have a drink with anyone dead or alive, who is it and what’s the drink?

I don’t drink much. Just wine and always will be Oprah.

Third is what’s your favorite self-help personal growth book?

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Last but not least, your favorite hype song.

What’s that song by Alicia Keys? Girl on Fire?

Yes. Amazing. Dr. Shefali, please tell everyone again where we can find you, follow you, and get all the things.

They can follow me on Instagram at @DoctorShefali or to my website, DrShefali.com. My podcast is called Parenting and You, where I do real-life coaching. It’s really taken off and people love it. Thank you for having me and for all the beautiful work you do and to your beautiful audience. Thank you for reading.

Thank you so much, Dr. Shefali. Everyone, make sure you subscribe and let us know what you think. Get on social media, @JennCasetta or @DoctorShefali on Instagram, and let us know what you think. If you have any questions, we would love to help. Thank you so much for reading and share this episode with all the women in your life. Love you all.

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About Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Dr. Shefali is a clinical psychologist and three-time New York Times bestselling author, renowned for her work in conscious parenting. She has transformed countless lives through her wisdom and teachings, blending Eastern mindfulness with Western psychology.