When it comes to models of reality, “as above, so below” refers to the principle that what you believe and continue to think (above) determines the reality you live in and the outcomes you get (below). When you know that belief creates reality, every time you change a belief you have the power to change your reality, even if only in some small way. This is godly power. Regardless of what you have been told or how much you have been threatened, you can change any belief any time you want. You are not stuck with beliefs and you need no one’s permission but your own to change them.

Given the cultural mindset in which we live, most people use the tactic of fighting to change their attitudes, unaware that the more you fight something, the stronger it grows. When I was a kid, there was a woven finger toy that was fun to play with. You put one finger of each hand in each end of the woven tube and then tried to extract them by pulling harder. All you did was make the toy grip your fingers more tightly. The one and only way to get your fingers out was to stop fighting the toy, push your fingers together, and gently extract them.

Though it is difficult to admit, the fight against breast cancer, the war on drunk drivers, the battle against gang violence, and dozens of other issue-wars, have had little effect to stem the growth of these problems. Yet in the face of the obvious, the general advice is to redouble our efforts, somewhat like throwing two gallons of gasoline on a fire when one gallon of gasoline didn’t do the trick. This is one of the brutal realities of dominator-based thinking and is a source of suffering for billions of people.

The Feminine Principle, on the other hand, values inclusion, nourishment, growth, and acknowledgment as fundamental processes of life. This, of course, is in harmony with the way our bodies process the food we eat and is, therefore, natural to human beings. The value of completion, the second trimtab, lies in altering mindsets by applying processes that are completely natural to every human being and that have already been proven effective for sustaining and growing every single person.

Completion gives you the opportunity to take any belief or experience you have ever had and digest it, just as you would food, storing what is nourishing and valuable to you and eliminating the rest.

To quote the lead character of the eponymous Auntie Mame, “Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” What she meant was that most people live their lives avoiding everything that could challenge their narrow worldview. By doing so, they limit the vitality, nourishment, growth, and enrichment they could get from a wide variety of experiences. It’s amazing that, as adults, we have perfect freedom to eat or not eat whatever food we choose, but in the area of our thinking, we accept minimal freedom to choose.

When you know that the human spirit is capable of the same kind of digestion that the human body enjoys, it is a lot easier to participate in the banquet of life and be vitalized by it. Charisma, the extraordinary vitality that marks leaders and draws people to them, exists in them in direct proportion to their willingness to eat “meals” of life experiences that provide a kind of “super-nutrition.”

Distinguishing Between Complete and Finished

To be able to digest beliefs and experiences and use them to expand your capacity and vitality, it is necessary to understand the difference between complete and finished. Though these words are often used interchangeably, the difference in the origin and meaning of the two words is vast.

Complete comes from a root word that means “to fill up.” It is a state of wholeness or having all the necessary parts. Without “complete nutrition,” physical problems arise. Complete can also imply the fulfillment of a process that enables something new to happen, as in “She completed the coursework requirements for her doctorate and began to write her graduate thesis.” The experience of being complete is a sense of fullness, like the satisfied feeling you get after a good meal.

Finished, on the other hand, comes from a root word that means “end.” In the physical universe, all things end. Marriages end by death or divorce. People die. Jobs end. Your automobile and clothing wear out and you get rid of them. We speak of the end of an era. These are, of course, important milestones that should be acknowledged.

In The Feminine Principle, the quality of your life and the happiness you experience depend on being complete, not finished. The major topics of your life—namely health, wealth, relationships, finances, career, spirituality, family, sexuality, and sense of worth—which connect to one another to produce a great life, go on and on. Specific events or experiences in each area may end, but the area itself does not. You can close your checking account at one bank, but chances are you will still have a checking account at some bank.

Finished but Not Complete

People experience problems when they are finished with something before they are complete with it. For example, severely premature children finish their time in the womb too soon and the process of physical development is not complete. With modern technology, many of these children live, but have handicaps because the cycle of development was not complete when they were born.

Psychologically, the problem of “finished, but not complete,” is illustrated in the following example. You and I are talking on the phone and I say something that offends you. You say that you are finished with this conversation and will never speak to me again and hang up. The call and maybe our friendship are ended physically, but chances are neither one of us feels full and satisfied. Just the opposite—our experience lives on as undigested material that has the power to give us a mighty bellyache. For days, weeks, and months each of us will go over the call, get upset again, make our justifications, and stay right where we were when we ended the call. This is finished, but not complete—a dead end. If your body did that, you would be rushed to the hospital to have your stomach pumped to remove the undigested food.

For most people, complete and finished are deeply confused and smashed together. As a psychotherapist I saw dozens of clients who were suffering because someone they were estranged from had died. Many people live with the idea that they will never be able to move on because they did not have a chance to finish. In reality, they were finished, but they were not complete. When you acknowledge all the parts or aspects of an experience, a function of the principle of inclusion, you are complete and life begins to move along. The completion process gives you the power to acknowledge all the parts, taking in what is useful and eliminating the rest. Spiritual “digestion” can have a completely miraculous effect on your life.

Complete but Not Finished

Now consider in the following example the principle “complete but not finished.” You just spent four or five hours out in your garden pulling weeds, pruning plants, and watering. Even as you enter your house and kick your mud boots off, you imagine you hear the next weed popping up. You smile. You know you will never be finished gardening—an idea you love because you love to garden. At the same time, you feel complete, that is, full and satisfied with gardening at this moment. People call this happiness. Because complete also implies the fulfillment of a process that allows something new to happen, you shift gears and take a bath, have dinner, and so on. This is “complete, but not finished,” a great way to go through life.

Individual companies come and go, but business goes on. Individuals come and go, but family goes on. Neighbors come and go, but neighborhood goes on. No one is really finished until they die, but you can be complete—full and satisfied at any moment.

Consider the sexual joy you have when you are in love. You are filled up by it. It radiates out from both of you. It is the very energy that creates your deeper intimacy, your children, and your sense of connection and belonging with another. Contrast that with the puritanical notion that when you have finished making children, sex naturally dies. Medical authorities are finally acknowledging that sexual activity is the best single thing you can do all the way through life to remain vital and lucid. It is difficult to think of any other activity that has so much feeling of being complete (full and satisfied) imbedded in it.

Hobbies like collecting art, comic books, seashells, foreign coins, autographs, and pictures of Elvis, have no particular end point in sight. Puttering may be the closest that adults ever get to the kind of play kids enjoy nearly every minute. Play, at its best, is not goal-oriented, competitive behavior. It is done for the intrinsic pleasure it provides and the creations it gives birth to. Frankly, if your life is not about the pleasure of being alive, just what is the point of it?

People who practice dance and meditation are not “practicing to get it right,” but rather deepening their experience and mastery of their chosen discipline. The mastery of life lies in maintaining it at increasingly higher levels of participation and interest, pioneering new ways to enjoy it at every stage, and celebrating how good it is to be alive for these few short years that we are given. To be complete, but not finished, lets you live life in present time and be available for whatever life has to offer. This is one definition of agelessness.

Being Complete

When I was a psychotherapist, I often had the experience that people were carrying around the weight of the world on their shoulders. Old hurts from childhood and incomplete relationships or experiences had them lugging around so much baggage from the past that they hardly had any freedom to enjoy the present. These incompletions seemed to have lives of their own. If life is indeed a banquet with thousands of experiences to choose from and be nourished by, these people had no ability to digest what they had taken in, get fueled by it, and move on.

The point is that not everything life dishes out is epicurean, but even the most unappealing “dish” can be digested and the value extracted from it. Then you are free to pick something you would enjoy more.

Completion is a straightforward process, a tool you can use to digest any belief or experience you have had, so you can use it to have greater capacity to take advantage of whatever life makes available to you. This process is based on two things:

1. How you report on a meal you have eaten.
2. How your body digests what you have eaten.

The Completion Process

Take any belief you hold or any experience you have had—for example, leadership, my job, being a woman, the neighborhood where I grew up, my level of education, my first marriage. Fix the topic in your mind and answer the following questions in the most concise way you can. List whatever answers you’d like until you are satisfied that you have said what you wanted to say. There are no right or wrong answers. If you want to, you may write out your list, but this isn’t necessary.

• 1. About this topic, what have I gotten of value that I must say to be complete?
  List all the things that have been valuable or pleasurable or useful, and feel yourself absorbing them as nourishment.
        If the topic you are completing is intrinsically negative—for example, violence you suffered, being fired, and the like—simply acknowledge that the relief you feel in completing this topic is the one and only pleasure. When you have been deeply in pain, relief is nearly orgasmic, like the pleasure you feel after getting rid of a toothache.
• 2. About this topic, what has not been valuable that I must say to be complete?
  Make your list. When you are complete, eliminate this information, just the way your body does with waste or toxic material. Mentally throw away your list. You can also visualize a computer deleting the file containing this information. If you’ve written your list, tear it up. Feel the relief.
• 3. About this topic, who do I need to apologize to and for what in order to be complete?
  Be specific: I apologize to myself for criticizing myself so much. I apologize to my best friend (employee, husband, co-worker, or whomever) for taking out my frustration on them. I apologize to the people (name them) to whom I have not expressed thanks for their help. I apologize to (name them) for my judgments about them.
        Feel the power of your apology run through you to make things right. Then delete the file and feel the relief of letting it go.
        For the completion process to work it is not necessary to call or write people and apologize to them directly, though I have done it many times with wonderful results. Many people find it powerful to feel themselves sending the energy of their apology to everyone to whom they have apologized. This is a wonderful and generous emotional pleasure.
• 4. About this topic, who do I need to thank and for what in order to be complete?
  If you believe in God, start by thanking God. Be specific. Then thank yourself and be specific. Then thank everyone else specifically for the part they played regarding this topic. Be generous with your thanks and praise. It is absolutely unnecessary to actually contact anyone to thank them personally for the process to work. It is generous to send the energy of your gratitude to everyone you have mentioned with an intention that right at this moment they are being blessed. Feel the power of gratitude run through you. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Then eliminate or delete the list from your conscious attention. This is the same thing you do when you make a list of thank-you notes you need to write for birthday presents you received. You cross off each name as you finish writing their note, until finally your list is finished and you toss the piece of paper with all the names in the wastebasket.
• 5. About this topic, what else do I need to say to be complete?
  If there is something you forgot to say in one of the other steps, whether it is a big deal or something miniscule, say it. Then eliminate or delete the list.
        Sometimes what people leave out are the feelings they have. For example, “I’m so sad that I’ve carried this belief with me for so many years and held on to it,” or “I can finally admit how delightful that chapter of my life was.” Simply feel the emotions you have regarding a completion and then let them go. There’s nothing else to do with them.
• 6. Make this declaration: “Regarding this topic, I am complete, up to date. I have taken in the nourishment and eliminated the rest. I am grateful.”
  The trick is to make the declaration and move on. The power of declaration is miraculous in that it is an act of consciously changing course. Although it is wonderful to remember your pleasures from time to time, don’t keep going over the information in the completion process. If you have written out the completion list, throw away your notes. Every time you go over your notes, you will inadvertently activate that information again.

After you have done a completion process, you have updated your consciousness—cleaning your mental house or reorganizing your files. You are left with a packet of pleasurable information with which to nourish yourself over and over, just as you do with physical nourishment stored in your body’s tissues. You will have also deleted all the rest of the information that was taking up room in your consciousness.

Moving On

We live with a belief in our culture that to be complete with the past is arduous work requiring years of counseling, insight, or simply emotional struggle. This belief is an artifact of the dominator culture where struggle is a way of life. In actual fact, the past does not even exist except as a function of the conversations you have in your head about it. When you order those conversations, extract the value from them, acknowledge what went wrong, and clean them up in your own head, the past loses its grip.

In a training I attended, there was a woman who spent her life arguing with her deceased parents about what they had or had not done that had ruined her life. The facilitator asked her how old her parents were when they had her and she reported that they were both twenty-one years old when she was born. Then the facilitator asked all the people in the training who were in their early twenties to stand up, and she picked a woman and a man. When the facilitator interviewed the young woman and man about their lives, it was obvious that they were just starting out, were completely naïve about what it would take to be parents, and were in many ways babes in the woods themselves.

The facilitator turned to the woman and said, “This is who you’ve been arguing with for nearly sixty years?” The woman, who looked stunned, finally said, “I always thought parents should be mature and know everything. I guess my parents were just a couple of kids trying to figure out what to do with this kid they had created.”

You can do mentally what the body already knows how to do physically. As you do more completions, you clean up your “personal operating file” by storing what has been valuable and deleting old, damaging, or unuseful information. In the process you rewire your perceptual filters to put special emphasis on what is valuable. That value will be more readily accessible to you because you have reconditioned yourself to pay attention to it and you have less clutter to sort through to get to it. In a world where people almost always notice and make important what is wrong, noticing the value first gives you a power to use what you have to your best advantage. In The Feminine Principle, nourishment is one of the central pleasures of life, one that facilitates health and growth. Take the nourishment that is available and flush the rest away.

How to Complete Anything in Twelve Minutes or Less

In seminars I have conducted over the years, I have encouraged people to be complete with the whole history of their lives in twelve minutes or less. Impossible, you say? Only if you live in a world where everything should and must take a long time. In the early nineteenth century, crossing from Europe to America could take a few months. A hundred years later, it had shortened to a few weeks. Now it takes a few hours.

It is not only advances in technology that have allowed for swifter passage. Behind every one of those breakthroughs in technology was a shift in the belief in what is possible. Someone’s dream and desire activated appetite steps, goals, and actions that have materialized in “fasten your seatbelts for takeoff.”

Having done personal completions with hundreds of people, I have discovered that what takes time is not the actual information of the completion process, but the stories people tell. Many people have a propensity to give long, complicated examples of items on their completion list. The story becomes more important than the completion itself, and I have even seen people forget they were doing a completion process as they got lost in the story they were telling. It is enormously powerful—and an economy of time—to list the items and leave out the stories, fascinating though they may be.

1. Choose a topic, such as your life to date, leadership, career, capacity, finances, spirituality, sexuality, or any other thing you want to bring up-to-date.
2. Divide the completion process into the following segments: four minutes for the nourishment category, two minutes for the pain and suffering category (now that’s a switch!), two minutes for apology, three minutes for thanks, and one minute for anything else, including your declaration that you are complete. Twelve minutes flat!
3. Now, set a timer and make yourself stick to it. If you are finished with a category before the time is up, move on. If you are still caught up in a category when the time is up, move on and save whatever is left over for the miscellaneous category at the end. Deadlines empower us to get things done and not drag them out. When you get to the point, leave out your stories, drop the drama, and move on, you develop more clarity and focus, two very useful tools for leaders.

When you have mastered the twelve-minute completion, you can set a goal to do the process in ten minutes. When you have mastered that, try eight minutes, and so on until you have mastered the art of doing completions in a few minutes. The trick is to get to the heart of what you have to say without endlessly embellishing and repeating, a common trap that is the downside of the way women learn to communicate.

The key ingredient for doing completions is the clear intention to be complete, not getting it perfect. You do not have to get every single word or category right to be complete.

A Sample Completion

You could tell scores of stories and give hundreds of examples to illustrate your life. In fact, people spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars talking about their lives so they can have some freedom from the past. Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t. Following is a sample completion on your personal history. Please do not worry about how this will affect your life. Your life will not be over; it will simply be complete, up to the moment. When you complete a topic, you update yourself and you start living more fully in the present. This gives you the power to make things better, because you can only change the present, not the past. (Even your memories of the past occur in present time.)

You can still choose to relate to your life in any way you desire. It’s just that you will have a brand-new freedom about it; it’s not linked to baggage from the past.

Topic: My Personal History (My Life to Date)

• 1. List what is valuable (4 minutes).
  For example: My family/ancestry and the neighborhood I grew up in. My education. The friends I made along the way. The places I’ve lived. My Faith. Lovers/marital partner(s). Mentors. My children. My career(s). The way I’ve lived. My health. Experiences I’ve had. Celebrations, particular trips, or important events. Periods of my life that were important to me.
  • Add your own unique items to the list.
  • Absorb the value from your list and nourish yourself.
• 2. List what is not valuable (2 minutes).
  For example: Fears of all kinds. The rigid values of my parents/church/culture. Ideas about myself, the world, religion, money, or sex that have limited me. Compromises I have made. Doing things I hated to please others. Guilt, heartbreak, useless anger, or worry. Chances I took or did not take that did not turn out well. Injuries/illnesses. Jobs I’ve held that were not right for me. Love affairs gone wrong. Losses of people or important things.
  • Add your own unique items to the list.
  • Delete the list and feel relieved.
• 3. Apologize (2 minutes).
  For example, for any ways that you have blamed your parents for how you are now as an adult. For criticizing yourself. For any judgments you have about yourself or others that have limited you. For any grudges you bear. For important or damaging mistakes you have made with yourself or others.
  • Add your own unique items.
  • Send your apology spiritually to the people you have mentioned, delete the list, and feel relieved.
• 4. Give thanks (3 minutes).
  For example, God for your life and for where you are now. Your parents for giving you life and the members of your family for doing the best they could or for any acts of personal kindness that you especially remember. Yourself for whatever great choices you have made. Important mentors, role models, teachers, lovers, and friends. People who were important along the way.
  • Add your own unique items.
  • Send the energy of your thanks as a blessing to those you mentioned, then delete the list and feel relieved.
• 5. Say anything else you need to say to be complete (1 minute).
  For example, special memories or sentiments that must be expressed. Leftover judgments you carry about the past. Any feelings that are left over from the past. Things you forgot to say in the previous steps.
  • Add your own unique items.
  • Delete the list and feel relieved.
• 6. Declare.
  “Regarding my personal history, I am complete, up-to-date. I have taken in the nourishment that was available and eliminated the rest. I am grateful.”

A New World

If you want to take a huge leap forward and change your life, take thirty-six minutes and do this experiment. Do separate completions on your life, on being a woman (man), and on your leader ship to date. (You can use the previous completion for your personal history.) Over the next few hours/days, notice how your perceptions change. Feel how your emotional responses change. Pay attention to the changes in your body sensations. Notice what gets freed up in you. Like people coming from the Old Country to the New World, it is useful to take what is valuable, leave the rest behind, and get whatever else you need when you arrive.

If you are like most people who have tried this experiment, you will recognize a new sense of relaxation in your body, a release of emotional pressure, and a quieting of your mind. Now multiply that by the number of completions you could do on various beliefs and experiences you have had, and you will begin to appreciate the kind of expanded capacity and freedom that is available to you.

Though it might seem like a staggering number to you right now, when I had done the completion process about two thousand times over a couple of years on various topics, something startling happened. It was as if the chain that kept me shackled to the belief that my models of reality are true snapped. I knew I would never be held captive again by any particular model of belief. I also knew that I have the power to alter my belief systems anytime I want at will, enabling me to enlarge my capacity and make room for more of what I really want. When I discovered that I have the power to alter my reality anytime I want, I cried with happiness.

How and When to Use the Completion Process

Use the completion process on any belief, experience, or topic you want to digest, no matter how recently or long ago it occurred. It is important to complete how the experience or belief landed in you, not the “facts” or what you think someone else thinks. As you know, your view depends on which side of the airplane you are sitting.

Get to the heart of the matter in each category and say what is necessary to be complete with as little storytelling as possible. There are two very good reasons for saying what you have to say quickly and moving on. First, if you are like most people, you have already spent too much time and energy on the topic. Second, if you spend a lot of time on each topic, you will feel overwhelmed. Then completions will become another work item, rather than a way to get your freedom easily.

When at all possible, say the topic of your completions in ways that acknowledge what you already have. My colleague Deborah Kelley and I were talking about what would make the completion process better. She said, “You know, it seems that when people start out with this process, they tend to focus on problems that they want to get rid of, and by focusing on them, they make them more important. It would be far better if everyone did the completion process as a way to magnetize the world they want to live in.”

I asked her what that meant in practice. She said, “It is better to affirm and celebrate what you already have that is right and then expand to have more, than to keep focusing on what you think is wrong. For example, rather than doing a completion on a health problem you have, it would be better to do it on the current level of your health. Rather than how you feel stuck, the current level of freedom you enjoy. Rather than lack of faith in yourself, your current level of self-confidence.”

If you are reading this book, you have enough health, personal freedom, and self-confidence that you are not locked away or at death’s door. One ounce of what you have is better than all the oceans of what you do not have, because when you acknowledge what you already have, it locates you “on the board,” that is, in the plus universe of the “haves” rather than in the minus universe of “have-nots.” When you are on the board, you are in a world where expansion of what you have and greater capacity for what you want are possible.

Use the completion process at major “finishing” milestones such as your birthday, New Year’s Eve, or your wedding anniversary; when you leave a job, home, town, or relationship; and after a death, the end of a project, or even a trip or vacation. These are great opportunities to summarize and bring everything up to date.

Do at least one completion each and every day. You can do the completion process in the in-between time you have during the day. This includes when you are taking a shower or bath, waiting in line or in traffic or for an appointment, taking off your makeup, getting ready for bed, or waiting to fall asleep at night. Do a completion on the day you have had, while you are waiting to fall asleep, and wake up the next morning brand new.

For many years, I have made it my practice to do a completion after every meeting during the day and at the end of the day so I sleep peacefully. It takes only a few minutes to update and fully nourish myself. This is the same principle as doing smaller loads of laundry regularly, rather than waiting till you have laundry piled up and nothing clean to wear.

The Power of “Connected and Holographic” in Completions

Right after I had formulated the completion process, a friend of mine, Carole, invited me to facilitate a six-month course for top producers in the large and very successful real estate office she managed. I asked for a volunteer to show the class how powerful this process is. The volunteer would be asked to do a completion on a topic that was so important that to digest it would be to start a new chapter of life.

A talented, intelligent, and lovely woman named Cindy raised her hand. She explained that four years before, her husband had simply disappeared. She had checked everywhere—hospitals, police, credit card companies, anywhere she could think of. No one could find him. He had vanished, leaving her and their young son in grief, with a mystery that might never be solved. She was thinking of having her husband declared legally dead. For all she knew, he was. She was at a loss for what else she could do. Needless to say, this incompletion was draining the vitality out of her life.

I explained the completion process and asked her what she wanted to digest. As with most people who have a problem, Cindy wanted to start with the disappearance. Instead, following Deborah Kelley’s advice, I asked her to do the process on the entire relationship, including falling in love and getting married, having her child, and so on—not just the disappearance itself. In other words, I wanted Cindy to be complete with the whole thing, not just the upset, so she would have the freedom to move on and create more relationship.

I had not yet invented the twelve-minute game, so the process took quite a while. During the completion process Cindy began to remember the wonderful times she and her husband had, not just the heartbreak of his disappearance. She was moved when she remembered the whole relationship, not just one part of it. She apologized for keeping her life on hold and even forgave him for disappearing. She expressed her gratitude for their relationship and for the beautiful son he had made with her. Because of the depth of the emotion she was feeling, the process took almost an hour.

Finally, Cindy declared that she was complete. She looked radiant—beautiful color in her cheeks, happy and relieved inside, relaxed, her mind still and clear. She looked and felt like a different person. Everyone who witnessed her completion process was amazed that she could go from heartbroken to peaceful and happy in such a short time; after all, an hour in comparison to four years is a miniscule amount of time. It certainly did defy conventional logic about how much time it takes to change.

A month later, at our next meeting, Cindy returned with an almost unbelievable follow-up story. She told us that four days after she did the process, out of the blue her husband called. It was Mother’s Day. She was stunned. He said that the marriage and his responsibilities were overwhelming him, so he ran off, knowing she would take care of their child. He said that somehow he knew it was all right to call now. This is the amazing power of The Feminine Principle’s cornerstone that life is connected and holographic.

A year later, I saw Cindy at a holiday party. She said that she had gotten a divorce and had found a wonderful man with whom to share her life, and that what had happened was a thing of the past. (This is a perfect example of the meaning of complete that implies the fulfillment of a process, which enables you to naturally move on.)

Though Cindy’s result with the completion process was one of the most remarkable I have witnessed, there are literally thousands of other miraculous stories, big and small, that have resulted from doing this process, including a woman who was able to complete her relationship with her sexually abusive father and move on.

Old, painful memories disappear, new people appear, and opportunities open when you have room for them. It is extremely difficult to take in new kinds of nourishment when you have not digested what you already have. Even a gourmet meal, if it sits in your stomach too long, will cause a bellyache and leave you unable to take in more nourishment. Completions take you out of the dead end of “finished, but not complete” and enable you to be whole every moment you are alive—complete, but not finished. These two states of being are as different as Kansas and Oz.

You Are in Charge

You have in your hands now two of the most powerful tools I know—appetite and desire, and the completion process—for ending the malnutrition that resulted from overlaying the dominator cultural view onto The Feminine Principle. Appetite and desire have the power to open your dreams, enlarge your sense of what you can have, and feed the future you really want. Completion has the power to store what you value, eliminate what is not useful or even toxic, and reorient your entire perception to nourishment, which you have the power to claim anytime you want.

It is so feminine to plan a big meal, have it be beautiful and delicious, and feel the satisfaction of great dining with good friends. In those moments, you celebrate life and life itself renews and enlarges itself in you.

You have the power to lead in your own unique way by planning the banquet of your own life and enjoying it down to the very last forkful. You have the power to lead by inspiring people to gather at your “table,” whether at work, at home, or in community, by demonstrating your remarkable capacity for life and by teaching them to be complete in every moment. (I have had women teach the completion process to their elementary school classes and their own young children.)

You have the power to empower other women and men by leading the way in using every experience in life for your benefit. You have the power to stop playing the victim, and you have the power to help others stop, too.

Let’s face it. Most of life is really good. It seems preposterous to keep focusing on what is missing when you are inundated with more of the good life than people in any other culture in the entire history of the world. You have more freedom, more education, more health, more material things—including indoor plumbing, air conditioning, heating, food, and clothing—than most kings and queens ever had. You are an elevated being in comparison with the billions of people who have already lived. To focus on and enlarge your incredible good fortune is an act of leadership in The Feminine Principle that forges a brand-new perspective for human beings.

Maybe most importantly, you have the power to change the macrocosmic reality we share that puts our very future in jeopardy. You can change this reality by changing the microcosmic reality in which you live. By nourishing yourself, expressing your appetite and desire, and opening into leadership in your own life, you will speak to the world around you and magnetize the world to your desire.