Capacity, the first key to the New Feminine Principle, comes from a root word that means “able to hold much” or “spacious.” It refers to an ability to contain large amounts with plenty of room to operate. We all know people like that. They operate in a style that enables people around them to relax, be themselves, and feel that everything is under control. Reverend Sofreeyah, a television personality in New York, is just like that. Everywhere she goes, she touches people in ways that give them more room to operate. At lunch one day our waiter was surly and abrupt. I wanted to ask for another waiter, but Reverend Sofreeyah put her hand on my arm and said, “Bill, give me a moment with him.” The next time the waiter came to the table, she smiled at him and said, “Tough day, huh?” She was genuinely interested and her interest disarmed him. He took a few moments to say why he was having a bad day and even laughed. She thanked him for his service, which improved dramatically for the rest of our meal.

At the heart of the New Feminine Principle is the ability to expand your capacity to include more in your own life and the lives of people around you. For millennia, women have been forced into roles that are second class. They have also been coerced into silence or submission by the masculine dominator culture. Fortunately, the freedom to be great and to operate openly is growing rapidly. To have that freedom is one thing; to be able to use it fully is another. Most people know that a person who has been bedridden for many months has to rebuild the capacity to walk. People who have not exercised for a long time must build a capacity for exercise gradually. It is useful to consider that what is seen as a “normal” capacity for leadership may not have anything to do with what you are really capable of. Building a brand-new capacity for enjoyment, for saying what is on your mind, for ending compromises in which you live, for using power brilliantly, and for being a person who commands respect for who you really are is the key to living a first-class life.

Building a capacity to hold more and more of the “voltage” that comes with being a sovereign woman—that is, a woman at the center of her own life, in full power—makes all the difference between being electrified or electrocuted. In the 1950s when I was growing up, most houses had wiring that held 60 amps of electrical capacity. As people bought more electrical devices, they soon discovered that using the hair dryer and toaster at the same time often blew a fuse. Within a decade or two, most homeowners had their houses rewired with 100-200 amps.

This chapter enables you to understand capacity as a function of physical, mental, and emotional nourishment, including areas of your life where you might not be getting enough of what you need to be great. The next two chapters give you specific, step-by-step ways to restore and increase capacity for your dreams, appetites and desires, and your mental capacity to “digest” the past and live in the present. Taken together, these three chapters give you the capacity to lead in your own life in ways that you may never have previously imagined. Take your time with this material; savor and digest it. It is quite a meal!

Nourishment: A Short Course

Having provided continuous nourishment for the child in her uterus, a mother gives the first and most primary form of nourishment to her child once she is born—her own milk. For this very reason, perhaps no issue is closer to women’s hearts than the nourishment of children—not just their own, but everyone’s. The chilling fact is that of the seven million people who die of hunger-related causes each year, the vast majority are children under five years of age, who die, not from starvation, but from chronic nutritional deficiencies that usually begin with their mothers who themselves are malnourished.

Startlingly, when you look into the condition of physical hunger, you also get a brilliant insight into the condition that women face spiritually and must overcome if they are to regain their place of power and effectiveness in human affairs.

When I use the word spiritual I do not mean religious. What I mean is that the spirit of women has been so malnourished by the dominator overlay that the very first requirement for women’s leadership is to feed the spirit of what it is to be a woman, and to restore yourself to your full capacity. For that reason, it is useful to start with an overview of nourishment.

Every living thing needs sustenance. Humans are preprogrammed to crave nourishment. We need it to stay alive, grow, and perform all the functions of life. Food is not enough. Human beings need the nourishment of perceptual stimulation, physical and emotional contact, intellectual engagement, and a sense of the spirit of our humanity.

You can get large amounts of nourishment in one area and still be starved in another. A teacher I worked with had full permission to express her talents in her classroom, but no intimacy with her husband. Taking in more nourishment in one area to make up for what you are not getting in another area leads to a whole new set of problems. For example, buying new clothes does not make up for the deficiency you feel when you lack dreams and visions that are big enough for you to really stretch out and fly.

Even if you have nourishment available, if you do not have sufficient ability to absorb it, you will also have problems. An entrepreneur I know was overwhelmed in her business because she believed that the people who offered to help could not do what she needed as well as she could—an ancient trap. People who go it alone become chronically malnourished because they lose their capacity to absorb nourishment from others, an essential factor for human beings; we are clearly social animals.

Experts who study nutrition make four basic distinctions about nourishment. These distinctions are especially useful to people who are tackling the problem of physical hunger worldwide, but they also can be used to conceptualize nourishment in every area of our lives. Think of the distinctions as locations in the plus or minus universes. They are:

• Thriving or robustness (plus)
• Sufficiency (plus)
• Chronic malnutrition (minus)
• Starvation (minus)

The plus and minus universes are both states of being and states of mind. To bring this into focus, imagine that last month you reconciled your bank statement and discovered that your ending balance was–$1,000. You still had a few bills to pay. Life was tough at that moment. You wondered what mistake you made. You felt stupid. You may have even thought of yourself as “bad with money.” This month you reconciled your statement and discovered that your balance was +$1,000. Life was good. You’d paid your bills and now you had something left over that you could use. You felt smart, maybe even more safe or secure.

What most people overlook in this story is that the amount, $1,000, was the same on each statement. In actual fact, it was not the amount but the “+” or “–” in front of the amount that made all the difference in your perception. What changed from one month to the next was the “universe” in which the $1,000 resided.

As in the “half-full, half-empty glass” analogy, not only does the universe in which your state of nourishment occurs give you different options, it also alters your personal perception and assessment of yourself as a human being.

The Plus Universe

Life in the plus universe of nourishment is good—really good. Life in the plus universe of nourishment is the land of appetite and desire. When most of us say, “I’m starved. I haven’t eaten since early morning,” it is only a colorful way of expressing our desire and appetite for food. If we had to, we could live off of the stored nutrients in our bodies for many days. Real hunger and starvation are an entirely different matter.

As with every universe, the plus universe of nourishment is not a single point or location. It covers a spectrum that begins at getting enough of what you need (sufficiency) and moves up to living abundantly (thriving). While no one in the plus universe suffers, the difference in how you feel if you are thriving versus living in sufficiency is dramatic, not only physically but mentally and emotionally as well. To live at full capacity is to thrive in all areas of life. To recognize your current location and to locate yourself consciously in the plus universe of nourishment, in every area of your life, is one of the most important ways you can empower yourself to get to the Promised Land of leadership and fulfillment.

In the plus universe, there is no driving force. There is only what you are “hankering for” and desires you want to fulfill. Rather than running after what you think you need, you begin to magnetize what you really want. True appetite has no desperation in it, so you are free to choose what you desire for the fun of it and to play with the people and circumstances that show up without any hidden agenda. People who live in the plus universe issue invitations, not orders. When you have enough of what you need, you can relax and enjoy the process of getting wherever you want to go. You can change your mind when you discover something you want more than what you desire now. Most importantly, you can add what other people desire to your own list. There is plenty for everyone in the plus universe, so you can help yourself to whatever looks good to you. The plus universe is where gratitude lives.

You might say that thriving is a state of mastery in the plus universe. It requires you to use fully what you have been given and stretch out in the game of desire, rather than playing it safe. To thrive is to acknowledge that there is no danger of living in the minus universe, so the worst thing that can happen if you take a chance and lose is that you will still be in a state of sufficiency.

About ten years ago, when I was still developing my thinking about fulfillment and leadership, I lived for a year with a couple who were friends of mine. One night the husband and I were sitting up in the hot tub and I told him I felt like a loser, because I wasn’t doing as well as I thought I should. Kevin looked completely surprised and said, “Bill, you go for your dreams and take chances that I know I’m too afraid to take. That’s what makes you a winner, not how much money you have or whether you’re winning or losing at any given moment.”

Many people, even wealthy people, are afraid that somehow they will lose everything and be living on the streets. It is a common fear in our culture and prevents playing for our full greatness. Several years ago, I had the startling revelation that no matter what happens financially, I have enough people who love me that I will never live on the streets and I will always have the basic necessities. As a matter of fact, when I went through a deep slump financially, a close friend invited me to live with her in her magnificent home. I was there for more than a year. When I realized that I could stop my internal dramas about basic survival, all that was left to do was to go wholeheartedly for my magnificence.

Thriving

You are thriving when you get more than enough of what you need to stay healthy, alert, and active. For example, where I live, many people eat “super foods” and supplements that are designed to increase vitality, activate more of the brain, and produce physical results that are not the norm. The people who use these products also tend to exercise, balance their diets carefully, and stay away from chemicals and drugs that suppress the body’s natural vitality. They value optimum wellness. These are people with energy to burn and radiant health. Relatively few people in our culture of fast food and obesity live in a physical state of thriving, though we often praise it as a noble goal—especially for others.

People who are thriving are robust, exuding health and well-being. They are normally full-bodied, energetic, and dynamic. All the equipment is operating the way it should, and it shows. Their mental state is enthusiastic and spirited. We call them hearty, unafraid to enjoy their lives. They have a feeling of operating at peak while remaining in balance. They are a pleasure to be around, because they take pleasure in everything around them.

Sufficiency

You have sufficient nourishment when the muscles, glands, and organ systems of your body operate smoothly and efficiently. You have enough energy to last through the day and get things done. Your immune system works well and, although you may have occasional bouts of illness, for the most part you are healthy. When you have enough nourishment, you have the ability to focus and to absorb and process information in ways that are seen as appropriate. Mental, physical, and emotional processes are synchronized and you live your life against a background of wellness.

In developed countries, almost all people have sufficient access to food to meet the minimum requirements for health. They get enough nourishment to promote their vital processes and stay relatively healthy. Many countries require that foods have labels that tell you their nutritional value and government agencies that require sanitary standards to be met to insure the basic quality of food. If you do not have enough money to buy food, most developed countries have assistance programs that enable you to get the food you need.

Life in the plus universe of nourishment is stable. You have a platform that enables you to live your life day to day with an ease that most of us take for granted. To be thriving, you must stand on the platform of sufficiency first. What distinguishes thriving from sufficiency is a qualitative difference that may be best expressed by comparing ordinary people to Olympians. Olympians follow special regimens that support optimum performance. They are committed to the kind of physical results that are beyond the requirements for a good quality of life. As I heard one Olympics commentator say, “The winner of the gold in this race will win by tenths of a second. Every one of these athletes is extraordinary—the best of the best. The winner is the one who can reach just a little bit farther today than all the rest.”

In the world we envision, where all people are able to lead productive lives, one of the necessary conditions is sufficiency of nourishment. For example, women who are malnourished give birth to children who are also malnourished. Early malnourishment often results in physical and mental conditions that put a cap on a child’s ability to grow into a healthy and productive adult. People who have not developed adequately physically and mentally often require more attention and services than people who have had sufficient nourishment. Unless interrupted, the cycle continues from one generation to the next.

The Minus Universe

The minus universe of nourishment is the universe of problems, and it can keep you leading your life as if it were a constant set of problems to solve. Like the plus universe, it covers a spectrum, only this one starts at barely surviving and spirals down to starvation. In the real world of hunger, the minus universe starts with poverty and ends in death.

In the world of empowerment or spirit, the minus universe starts with never having quite enough or ignoring certain needs, and can end with the loss of the capacity to open to and enjoy areas of life that are essential for human beings. When you live in the minus universe of being human, you develop blind spots in your perception of your gifts and talents, the value you could have to others, and the quality of life you could have for yourself. Once you begin to recognize where you need to be nourished, you can begin a process of filling to sufficiency. Sufficiency is the starting point of the plus universe.

For two years I volunteered in Joan Holmes’s office at The Hunger Project. I did things I did not necessarily think were important or crucial—addressing envelopes, running errands, and the like. One day while I was typing envelopes, I felt a big presence behind me. When I turned around, it was Joan. My first reaction was that I had done something wrong. Joan smiled at me and said, “Bill, I was just sitting at my desk and saw you here and I suddenly realized that without you I would never be able to do my job, so I wanted to thank you and let you know how much I appreciate you.” I was speechless. I couldn’t imagine why a women in her position would have noticed me.

Later that day, as I tried to tell my fiancée what had happened, I burst into tears. That may have been the very first time I had a clear experience that someone recognized my value apart from what I was doing. On that day I began a process of nourishing my sense of worth and visibility that has continued to this day. First there was the recognition of the blind spots; then there was the journey to sufficiency. Later on, thriving became available.

Chronic Malnutrition

The challenge with the third level of nourishment, chronic malnutrition, is that it is invisible to most people. It is a condition where you get some nourishment, but never enough. The best way to talk about it is to give an example. You are visiting a developing country. You have heard that many people in this country do not get enough to eat every day, though most people do eat every day and there is no starvation. You realize you have not actually seen people who look hungry and emaciated. One day you notice a beautiful little girl who appears to be about six years old. On inquiring, you find out that the beautiful little girl is really ten years old, but because she chronically does not get enough essential nourishment, her growth is stunted. If she were six, she would be perfect. At ten, she breaks your heart. Her malnutrition is invisible unless you know more than what a first glance provides.

That is what makes chronic malnutrition so insidious. It looks as if the person is doing well when really she is not. Even her death certificate will not say she died from the effects of chronic hunger, but rather from some disease that would never kill a healthy, well-nourished person.

When you are malnourished, you are simultaneously ravenous for what you lack and lacking the ability to take in what you need. Even when you get nourishment, you feel as if it will never be enough. Malnourished people gorge and, because they have no capacity for what they have taken in, throw it up. There is a kind of desperation that goes with chronic malnourishment that permeates your thinking. You feel that you will never get enough and believe that you, yourself, are not enough. Malnourished people feel justified doing whatever it takes to get nourishment. In fact, crime is highest in areas where people are poor and do not get enough.

Many people who have sufficient material resources experience deep psychological poverty. Like physically malnourished people, psychologically malnourished people also feel justified doing whatever it takes to get nourishment. “Dog eat dog,” “Nice guys finish last,” and “He who has the most toys wins” are, in my opinion, all strategies of people whose malnourishment is primarily spiritual in nature. Gorging may take the form of buying more of what you do not need, hoarding what you have for fear of losing it, or feeling upset when other people get something you want. Greed, stinginess, and jealousy are the hallmarks of psychological malnourishment and stunt the spirit of humanness. We describe people like this as “small-minded.”

In the minus universe, there is never enough to go around. No matter how much there is, everything seems scarce. Chronic psychological malnourishment is a torture because no matter how much you have or how much more you get, it will never be enough to satisfy you.

Starvation

The fourth level of nourishment (though it can hardly be called nourishment) is starvation. When people are starved they go into shock and stop feeling. The body shuts down, preparing to die. If you put food in front of a starving person, she does not have the energy or desire to pick it up. In a spiritual way of saying it, the soul has left the body, though the body itself may still be alive. It is a state of living death.

The people who die from hunger are the most confronting example of the chronic malnutrition and starvation that all of us live with in one area of our lives or another. The malnutrition of the Western, developed world, as Mother Teresa so poignantly stated, is a spiritual poverty. It is a mirror for the physical poverty and malnutrition of the developing world and is a good example that life really is connected and holographic. In other words, in a world where hunger is killing seven million children a year, you cannot escape it by closing yourself off to the condition or physically overeating or pretending it does not exist. The hunger is holographic in human beings. Whether it manifests physically or spiritually is less important than that it manifests in everyone in one way or another.

To recognize where you are nourished and where you are malnourished is the beginning of the ability to increase your capacity to thrive. It is also a way to take a leadership position in The Feminine Principle. When you demonstrate your willingness to make yourself a priority in a world that tells you that everyone else comes first, you let yourself think outside the dominator model that has oppressed billions of women. Until you nourish yourself, you have nothing extraordinary to offer. What would be extraordinary is millions of people pioneering and demonstrating real sufficiency and empowering others to have it, too.

Real Hunger

During my thirties and early forties, I made a habit of fasting once or twice a year. I really enjoyed giving my digestive system some time off, cleaning out my body, and losing any unwanted pounds. Dieting sounded like having a weight problem. People were in awe of the willpower it takes to fast. Spiritual people throughout the ages have done it. Fasting had cachet.

Normally, for the first three or four days, I felt hungry—what people who study nutrition call appetite, the desire to eat that if not fulfilled will cause no real harm to the body. After that, appetite disappeared. My practice was to keep fasting until I had appetite again—usually ten to fifteen days.

The very last fast I did went on for fifty days. It started out just like any other fast I had done, but after fifteen days, appetite had not returned. After twenty-five days, I felt light as a feather and the cries of amazement from friends were loud. At forty days, I had the eerie feeling that I was passing some mystical threshold. I have a distinct memory of watching people eat food and thinking it was disgusting. I would no more have thought of putting food in my mouth than trying to eat a rock. I was skin and bones.

By day fifty, the signal for real hunger—eat or die—went off in me. It was one of the most terrifying sensations I have ever experienced. I was ravenous, nearly insane for food. Having some understanding of the subject, I was acutely aware that if I did not eat right away, in a short time I would go into a state of starvation, with lasting damage. At the same time, my capacity for nourishment had shrunk to nearly zero.

I forced myself to take nourishment. A small piece of apple was torture, though I felt insatiably hungry. After a mouthful of broth, I felt full beyond endurance. It took more than a week just to be able to eat a whole piece of fruit. This was a very frightening experience—one I would never care to relive. Finally, after five weeks, I regained my full appetite and came back to life as I knew it.

Opening to nourishment when you have been chronically malnourished or even starved is very challenging. Starvation brings with it a state of apathy that shields you from the horrible pain you would otherwise experience as you shut down to die. When you open again, you feel the pain. When people come out of any kind of starvation, whether physical or mental or emotional, they often think something horrible has happened. They begin to feel again, and the first thing they feel is pain. In the fifteen years that I have been helping people to open to leadership in The Feminine Principle, even though I tell them over and over what to expect, from time to time I have been accused of doing something terrible to them when they start opening again, because the pain can be intense. Let’s face it, if something were not painful, you would not have shut down around it to begin with.

On the other hand, people who have been chronically malnourished or starved have a tendency to gorge when they finally start getting what they want, often sending them into shock or forcing them to throw up food that the body has no capacity to handle. Malnourishment is such a ravenous condition that you begin to feel you will never get enough to be satisfied. There is the temptation to stuff yourself, causing severe discomfort and a whole new set of problems. The one and only solution to the problem of starvation or chronic malnutrition is to systematically build capacity for the things that are really missing.

If you have a pattern of “overeating” in one area of your life to make up for what you cannot have in another area, you must reopen the area of life you have shut, re-pattern your behavior, and learn to live in balance. As with most things in life—whether growing a baby or a business or your power or effectiveness—increasing your capacity is a progressive, holographic process. All the requirements in all areas must be met if there is to be real increase in capacity, because life is connected. People like to pretend that they can selectively choose the areas they will open and the ones they will keep closed. This is like deciding to have your blood flow only to your right arm, but not your left, or like telling your body that it should only digest protein, but not carbohydrates.

Every time you open an area that has been shut down or malnourished, you create a wave of opening that impacts every single part of you. The style in which you open makes all the difference in the quality of the result you achieve and even your willingness to keep opening.

A State of Nourishment Survey

It is important to make an assessment of your own state of nourishment, to see where you are starting. Here is a checklist of basic topics. It is not a test. There is no right or wrong answer. You do not have to show it to anyone, so give yourself permission to be as honest as you can. My recommendation is that if you are not sure which category you fit in, pick the one that feels closest to where you think you are. Also, feel free to skip a category or even add your own to make the checklist more appropriate to you.

First, select all the areas where you are thriving. Then select all the areas where you feel you get enough. Then, select all the ones where you feel you chronically do not get enough. Finally, select those areas that feel starved. It is best not to analyze or think too much about each topic, but to take your first reaction and mark “T” (thriving), “Su” (Sufficient), “M” (Malnourished), or “St” (Starved) before each one.

How Well Nourished Am I?

If you are like most people who have taken this survey, you will find that you have:

The good news is that most people who have done this checklist get enough or are thriving in more than fifty percent of categories. On the down side, there are on average six to sixteen categories where people report they are not nourished in the way they would like to be, including being starved. If you have six categories of malnutrition or starvation, you are operating at 85 percent; if sixteen categories, 60 percent. Compare this to the idea that if your child does not get at least a grade of 70 percent in school, she fails—and you certainly want more for her than 70 percent.

Of course, most of these categories are not physical or precisely measured, because how you rate your satisfaction is an experience you have, not a thing. These categories are not exchangeable. They are the composite that makes you whole. Think, for example, how it would be…

• To make a lot of money, but have no intellectual stimulation.
• To be intellectually brilliant, but have no access to spirit.
• To live in a beautiful environment, but have no turn-on or intimacy.

That is life with holes in it, a common human experience. The goal is life at 100 percent—wholeness.

Most human beings live with a fictitious idea we have inherited from the war-based thinking models. We pretend that as long as we have the categories covered that are vital for our survival—money, place to live, etc.—we can forget the rest or do without them. Because of the dominator indoctrination, we even expect some areas to be broken, to never work. People give up trying to do anything about them and say defiantly, “That’s just the way I am. Take it or leave it.” Subject closed.

Many of the women and men with whom I have worked are exceedingly successful. They walk into a room and command attention. They are well dressed; they speak well, are well schooled, and well traveled. You would like them immediately and envy their lives; however, when you have intimate conversations with them, you discover that pieces of their lives are missing. Their souls often feel injured in ways that do not allow their full joy. Their dreams are compromised. They have no clear appreciation of their gifts and talents. They may be estranged from their families and expect that things will never change. Like the malnourished ten-year-old who looks like a healthy six-year-old, these people’s malnutrition is invisible. In fact, in intimate conversations with them, I have had scores of successful women express despair that no one ever offered anything, because they were doing such a good job of covering up their need.

People make up for “this” with “that.” They do not think that they will ever get an adequate helping of “this,” so they better take twice as much “that.” Regrettably, “this” does not replace “that” any more than carbohydrates replace protein. As in chronic malnutrition, everything looks great at first glance. The condition reveals itself only when you peer into it more deeply.

The Balance Point

You can gorge on what you don’t need and never feel satisfied. When I first started bodybuilding in my early forties, I was a vegetarian. My trainer, Beth, a competitive bodybuilder, told me to eat a healthy meal after I finished my workout, in order to build muscle mass. I would go to the local burrito place and get a big veggie burrito. I ate and ate until my belly hurt and I thought I would explode, yet I still did not feel satisfied. When I complained, Beth said, “Bill, you are focusing on the wrong thing. After a workout like this, you need protein. When you get a vegetarian burrito, you get mostly carbohydrates. You have to eat a little chicken or fish or red meat; otherwise, you will always be hungry.” After just a few ounces of fish, I would start feeling satisfied, though it was nothing I would have thought of myself.

To increase capacity you have to bring every area up to speed and expand from there, in the same way that you need every kind of nutrient to be healthy and thriving. What you really need to nourish yourself may or may not have anything to do with your opinions or beliefs about it. Fortunately, beliefs can be changed, though most people act as if they have no idea that they can change their minds (beliefs) anytime they want in favor of something that expands and fulfills them. It bears repeating: you are not stuck with any belief. Beliefs can and should be changed when they do not give you the pleasure of life.

If you are not getting everything you need, start by changing your belief system (model) before you do more of what already has not gotten you what you need.

You may also pay greater attention to the parts of your life that are working and still not achieve greater capacity. In my years of bodybuilding, I often noticed that young men worked incessantly on their chests and spent much less time on their legs. The result was a body that was out of proportion, with a gigantic chest and arms and spindly, underdeveloped legs. In bodybuilding, as in life, well-rounded looks, feels, and functions better.

Finally, building a state of real nutrition is a process that takes time. People join gyms to get in shape, work out strenuously for two or three days, and then are so sore that they get discouraged and quit. The same is true for people with hunger of all kinds. This phenomenon has been especially true of the human potential workshop crowd, who go to intensive weekends where they are blasted open emotionally, beyond their capacity to hold the opening, and wind up going back to the way they were in a week or two. Then they take the next workshop to open again and spend years “working on themselves” rather than building a sustainable capacity. As with any long-term venture, slow and steady leads to sustainable capacity.

Increasing Your Capacity

There are three conditions that can make all the difference in the way you build your capacity and your success with it. They are as necessary for you to win as light, water, and soil are for a plant to grow.

Start Where You Are

Here is an excerpt from a conversation I had with my friend, Jewel, a co-founder of The Women’s Leadership Program, and a woman with an enormous capacity. We based our conversation on the information in the State of Nourishment Survey. “In my spiritual life, I need a sense of something bigger than myself to which I am connected, a way to communicate with my spirit, and the sense that life wants the best for me and I can trust it. I also want to experience my spirit as it comes through me as a woman, not in relationship to some male image of God. When I nourish myself with these elements, my spirit grows and develops.

“Mentally, I need creative ideas that open new vistas, a sense of the continual learning process of living, and intelligent people to get input from and to bounce ideas off. I crave conversations with people who have spiritual and emotional depth and are blazing new trails. Emotionally, I need to feel, but of all the feelings I need, the one that nourishes me most is love—every kind of love, including altruistic love. Physically, I need food, water, air, and exercise, but also to touch and be touched. I love feeling relaxed and excited at the same time, not necessarily about anything in particular, but just about being alive and enjoying the energy I feel.

“Sexually, I need enough pleasure frequently enough to be relaxed and open, turned on and living in my body. I also love feeling erotic and sensual. I love clothes that feel good, fragrances that are beautiful, and all manner of romantic accessories—candles, beautiful scarves, comfortable furniture, erotic literature, and massage. I also need intimacy—to feel and be felt—not only with a lover, but with family and friends, my child, and people who hold the same spiritual belief in the joy of life that I do.

“Professionally, I need career opportunities that challenge me to grow and be more skillful, professional relationships that stimulate me, and work that contributes something useful to the quality of life at large. Socially, I need family, lovers, friends, playmates, and acquaintances. Community is a must. I also require attention and personal acknowledgment from my community.

“I know that I need all these things in all these areas all the time if I want a great life. Life is not a trade-off—lots of sex, but no intimacy, or lots of thinking but no emotion, lots of work but no play. In my own view, a great life is not an accident; it takes careful and conscious managing, like anything of value and importance. I have to keep monitoring all these areas to make sure I’m not selling out.

“I don’t always have everything in balance. Sometimes when I’m feeling especially out of sorts, I wake up, so to speak, and realize that I have not been nourishing some important areas of my life. When you live like this, you stop taking things for granted because you know that whatever you don’t cultivate goes to seed in a hurry.”

Jewel is at the far end of the spectrum of women who are leading in their knowledge of what they need and in their ability to get it. She has been developing her voice for her real needs for more than fifteen years, in what she refers to as an ongoing dialogue with herself and women friends who really know her.

To begin, it is very important to get a baseline measurement so you know where you stand right now. It certainly does not have to stay that way, but it is extremely hard to get where you are going if you do not know where you are. This can be challenging and bring up experiences and emotions that you might have carefully put away.

When you take the State of Nourishment Survey, you begin to get a clear picture of which areas are really nourished and which are not. Your judgments of how you got that way or what it means about you as a person are not really very important. What is important is to get turned on about having full nourishment and capacity in every area of your life.

Actually, you had very little to do with the models of belief that have systematically nourished or starved you. We live in a culture of trade-off—a success-based culture. It was here long before you ever appeared on the scene. We are taught that if you want this, you can’t have that. It is called making your compromise with life. When I hear that someone has “settled down,” more often than not I hear it as “settled for.”

Congress believes deeply in compromise. Almost every bill that is passed is a compromise measure of some kind. In order for the people who proposed the bill to get it passed, they had to give up something else they really believed in. Sometimes they had to promise to support something they did not really believe in. Selling your soul for one thing to get another is the Devil’s deal and is a standard practice of war- or success-based thinking. In medical terminology, when your body is compromised, it becomes sick. If too compromised, it dies. The spirit of our humanity is no different. Give up your heart and you lose your soul.

Put Yourself First

If you listen to the safety information provided by flight attendants as you are readying to take off, you know that airlines suggest putting your own oxygen mask on first and then putting on your children’s. It makes sense. You are the one responsible for the safety of your children. If you put your children’s masks on first and run out of oxygen yourself, who is left to take care of them?

If you do not give to yourself, you have nothing of value to give anyone. This is not some mystical advice. Even the battery in your car automatically recharges itself while your car runs. Everyone knows what happens when you leave the headlights on all night after you have turned the car off. By morning, the battery is dead. Human beings are no different.

To increase your capacity, you have to put yourself first. This violates what many women have been taught to think is the essence of The Feminine Principle. In actuality, this is only the dominator model talking and is the antithesis of The Feminine Principle, which values inclusivity. To put yourself first is an act of feminine leadership that breaks the back of thousands of years of cultural suppression of women’s importance and worthiness. To include yourself in the generosity that you normally are so willing to give to others is the beginning of a New Feminine Principle, free from the “starvation of self” that women have been taught to expect as their lot in life. In a world where women are seen to be second class or not to even exist as true human beings, women have traditionally been allotted what is left over when everyone else gets what they need. This is still true of food in many developing countries where women and girls eat last.

The African American community has a piece of wisdom that addresses this directly: “When Mama’s happy, everybody’s happy.” Women have been taught and encouraged to be generous with the people around them. You can count on that from most women. When a woman puts herself first and fills up, she automatically starts feeding the people around her. The generosity you experience as a woman is empowered, not suppressed, by putting yourself first and feeding yourself in the ways you need to be effective. The point is that if you are going to nurture others, you have to have something to nurture them with. If you are malnourished or starved, you have nothing to give.

Go Step by Step

The only safe and sure way that I know of to increase capacity is to enlarge it step by step. This is similar to the advice people who are taking yoga classes receive. They are told to stretch to the limit of their comfort and then relax into some small additional amount of stretch. Even a quarter of an inch is fine. Over time, the additional stretch becomes their new standard, enabling them to reach for another small amount of stretch. That does not mean that breakthroughs or leaps cannot occur. They often do. It might even be that the constant small gains are what facilitate the breakthrough.

Filling yourself when you have been malnourished has a life and requirements of its own, no different from a child who is developing in you. You cannot rush it without risking adverse effects, even considerable harm. In a world where we expect everything to be instantaneous, you might not like to hear this, but refilling takes whatever time it takes. To rush the natural processes that are built into you is to risk the quality and sustainability of the result. Having stated that caveat, there are also ways to encourage and maximize the process that are safe and pleasurable.

Trimtabs: Fine-Tuning Capacity

There is a device on the rudders of large ships called a trimtab (it’s like a rudder on the rudder). This relatively modest-size device uses small amounts of leverage to move the ship’s rudder, which in turn steers the ship. In other words, small movements of the trimtab have the power to set off, so to speak, a chain reaction that can move massive ships weighing thousands of tons.

Two of the most powerful and effective trimtabs for building capacity are…

• Appetite and desire
• Completion

These trimtabs can move a huge mass of material in your life and get you going in the direction of full capacity safely and elegantly. The next two chapters show you how to use these powerful trimtabs to arrive at a new capacity with minimum stress and maximum enjoyment. Before you leave this chapter, it is a good idea to let go of the hallowed belief of the dominator model, “No pain, no gain.” A few months ago I looked up this saying, which millions of people chant robotically day after day and make their reality. Much to my surprise, I found the quote ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, a personal hero of mine, who reportedly was a kind and gentle man. What Mr. Franklin actually said was, “Without pains, there is no gain.” In his time, “pains” meant meticulous attention to detail, as in “she took pains to make sure that every person felt comfortable.”

Please do take pains to understand and practice appetite and desire and completion, but forget pain and suffering. They are just not part of the equation and, belief to the contrary, really don’t improve the result. Often, they are actually counterproductive and slow down the process of learning.

Nourishment and growth are part of the pleasure of The Feminine Principle. Take pleasure in learning to use the trimtabs. Have fun with them. You’ll learn them more quickly if you do; and you will at the same time validate an essential aspect of The Feminine Principle, namely that the style is just as important as the result.