Being a woman is tough. Add motherhood, career, and the pressure to follow society’s beauty standards to that equation and all you get is a girl who’s lost herself. Sarah Jenks, a mom of three, life coach, emotional eating expert, and sacred space holder, helps thousands of women find their true self and get the courage they need to face challenges. Sarah reveals how being in the winter season of her life led her to become a priestess. She talks about Whole Woman, a moonly online membership for women she founded, and Live More Weigh Less™, the most popular online emotional eating program, and how these platforms are committed to helping women find their own unique path and celebrate each other’s success.

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Sarah Jenks | The Journey To A Whole Woman

On this episode, I’ve invited a friend of mine, Sarah Jenks, to the show to talk about evolution transition and her mission behind the Whole Woman.

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I just got off this interview with Sarah Jenks and it has me fired up. I cannot wait to jump into this episode. However, before we do that, I want to remind you that if you have not yet left a review, please go ahead and do that. Because we are nearing the 100th episode of this show which is very exciting, what I have decided to do is if you are one of the first 100 people to leave a review, I am going to pick out somebody at random and give them a special prize. This prize is going to include some one-on-one time with you and me digging into your life and your business. Be sure to be one of those first 100 people. If you have not yet left a review, please go to that. You can find it at UnbecomingPodcast.com/itunes. That is the best place to leave a review, so you can do that on your web browser or you can do that on your phone. I would appreciate it.

As you are reading this, if anybody on your sphere whether it’s your friends, family, colleagues, clients or whatever pops into your head, I would love for you to share the show. That is how we get more amazing people like Sarah Jenks on the show is by having more people following, getting a bigger listening community behind the show. Keep that in mind as you are reading this because Sarah Jenks is a powerhouse on a mission to help other people stand up and speak out for what they truly believe in.

We share similar passions and it’s very evident in this show for figuring out the who piece and fusing the masculine and feminine to create a holistic approach to life and business. She is going to talk about how her work has evolved and why she has transitioned to a more honest and meaningful expression of who she is. It’s been beautiful to watch as I followed her and her story and her mission for the last couple of years. What strikes me throughout this conversation is the depth, time, research and also the intentionality with which she has arrived at some both painful and passionate truths.

We go a little into the woo here, which is awesome and is an area I love to play in. If you would not consider yourself a spiritual person, that is totally fine. You’re still going to get a lot out of this and I would invite you to suspend any preconceived notions or beliefs as you read because there are many gems hidden in this interview and I don’t want you to miss it. If you’re a gentleman, it would be so easy for you to skip to the next episode and catch us next week, but I encourage you not to do that. It is so important that you hear all that Sarah has to say. She talks about her relationship with her husband and how that has been such an important conversation to have and to be intentional about. I love that. This is as important for you, gentlemen, as it is for the ladies.

As always, as I do with all of my interviews, I asked Sarah to stay behind to impart some business wisdom on us. If you’re looking to build a more connected community or want to grow your membership, look no further. She is the expert in doing that. She has grown her community to over 100,000 members and has so much to share with us about her experiences. She even goes a little bit into the mistake she’s made, what she had to let go of and how she continues to stand out online even as her business has evolved and transitioned. That’s so important. I got a lot out of this conversation. You can listen to all of this and more at our After-Hours segment. Get all of her recommendations by visiting UnbecomingPodcast.com/95. Let’s go ahead and jump into this episode with this beautiful human, Sarah Jenks.

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I am so excited to welcome our guest, Sarah Jenks. Sarah, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I want to start off with a little bit of context for people that may or may not know how we became friends. I don’t even know if you know this, but I was in your Live More Weigh Less program. I was in it when I was living in Berlin. I remember where I was listening to your audios, sitting on my little balcony in Berlin going through a tough time. I have that. You lived in San Francisco and we never got to connect because you were about to move, but then you are hiring and then you had family in Austin. I am so grateful that you’re here. To kick things off, I would love to hear who the real Sarah Jenks is?

I am on the anxious side. I will be real about that and I am a mother of three. I’m always in this dance and this balance around motherhood, work and self-care. I’m constantly looking at that and figuring out what’s right for me. I have had a very long dance of paying more attention to who I think I should be versus who I am and all this pressure to be normal, to fit in, to blend in, to not rock the boat and to follow the rules. I’m every day finding my way back to who am I as the rebel. Who am I as the rule breaker? How am I creating my own code of motherhood? How am I creating my own code of work? How am I creating my own code of self-care and my spiritual practice?

I am a priestess initiate in the 13 Moon Mystery School, which means that I am on the path of training to be a priestess. I’ve been doing that for eight years. That has informed my life and my work in the world at this point. It also took me a very long time to say that out loud. I used to be an emotional eater. Once an emotional eater, always an emotional eater. It comes out from time to time. I’ve learned how to use that as my guidepost to understanding what’s off in my life and where I need to be more of a rebel. I have an amazing marriage and that is constantly challenging me.

Finding a balance around motherhood, work, and self-care is like being in a constant dance. Click To Tweet

I like to break things down into. I talk a lot on this show about the idea of seasons, seasons of life, business and purpose. I have this picture of you where you post it somewhere on social media, your hair is wet and it’s like you’re shaking or something. It feels like the expression of you is coming out. I would love to go back a little bit and if we were sitting here with two versions of the younger Sarah, one maybe being around nine or ten and one maybe being about a few years ago, how would those two Sarahs answer that question about who is the real Sarah Jenks?

My nine or ten-year-old would say I am such a feminist and girls are the best. I was so gung-ho about women’s rights when I was little and I still am, but I thought it was unique for someone at that age. I loved to dance. I was playful and I could feel the magic all around me. However, I was starting the dive into the darkness around my body around that age. It was probably like you either would have caught me a week before or a week after, like the fall off the cliff into the abyss of self-loathing around my body. If you were talking to me a few years ago, you would have gotten the answer like, “I have no idea who I am.” I think I want to be an advertising executive or maybe an event planner in New York. My whole life revolved around shrinking my body at that point in my life.

That is such a great analogy for many different things, especially as I have followed you on social media and seeing this transformation of how you’re stepping out in the world. What season of life do you feel like you’re in?

I’m in an interesting season. I had my third and final child last June. I have had three kids in five years. For the past six years, I’ve been either pregnant or postpartum with one of my kids and my first two are eighteen months apart. I got pregnant when my oldest was nine months old. During this time, my husband was in his surgical residency. He was working between 90 and 100 hours a week.

It was so hard because we were living in San Francisco and he made less money than we had to pay for our nanny. I was the primary breadwinner and the primary parent because he wasn’t around. I attribute that period of my life as winter. I say that because it was very hard. It wasn’t the winter where I’m resting on the couch and doing the whole thing. It was dark and it forced me to question everything. It forced me to let go of all of my attachments, my attachments to fame, relevance, money and to my body. My attachments to how I thought motherhood was supposed to look for me and that’s when I found the workaround the sacred feminine.

Part of that journey was getting clear about the work I wanted to do when Jonathan was done with residency. We knew we wanted to move from San Francisco to Massachusetts, which is where I grew up and where my family is. I also felt called to be back here because I wanted to help land the Sacred Feminine in New England because it felt alive and well in San Francisco. I felt like there’s a need to have a bit of a boost over here. I ended up manifesting this house and we ended up buying this retreat center in Medfield, Massachusetts about 35 minutes outside of Boston. I got pregnant a month after we moved. We were hoping to wait a year or two so I can catch my breath.

I got pregnant again and money was super tight because we bought this huge situation. I found myself in a similar situation where I was needing to hustle a bit for money for us to continue this pattern of working and pushing through pregnancies, which felt hard for me. I think it’s hard for most of us, but I’m not going to speak for everybody. I had Hazel in June and I continued the patterns of pushing unconsciously without understanding what was going on. Finally, in January I said, “Enough, I can’t do this anymore.” I didn’t have as much financial pressure anymore because things had gone well for me. Things have gone well for Jonathan and I can relax.

I fired the majority of my team that works for me and I canceled all growth plans that I had for my business. I had not worked for that long in my life in the past few months. I feel like in that, I got the real winter, the cozy, relaxed by the fire type winter and it happened to happen during winter, which was also quite convenient. Now, I feel like I’m in this sweet early spring, but I’m timid about it. I’m learning and it’s messy. I’m trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to express myself in this next iteration of this next season of my life where I’m post-kids. We are not having any more babies. I’m a financial partner with my husband instead of carrying all my by myself. I’m co-parenting with him. He’s much more available. It’s like an open blank canvas. When we have a canvas, it sounds like it’s going to be awesome, but in practice, I realize that it’s challenging.

I think so much of, especially even entrepreneurship. It’s like when you can do anything, you can do anything and I find it paralyzing. It paralyzed me for a lot of years where I would dip my toe into something but not actually be coming out with both feet into anything. I do want to mention when I reached out to you. I said I’d be so honored to have you on my show and your text back was, “I’m currently in a state of being particularly fired up.” I want to know what are you particularly fired up about? What was that in reference to?

I’m so sick of the BS around women living for other people. It’s time for that to be done. The other thing that I was thinking about when you texted me was I’m working on this article that’s called “Feminism starts at home” because I’m seeing so much anger around how our culture treats women rightfully so. There are lots of power around it and lots of marches and all of these amazing things. When I talked to the hundreds of clients I have in my Whole Woman membership program, when I get emails from the women after I send a blog post in response, it’s very clear to me that we are not showing up as a whole feminist, powerful women at home. That’s the hardest part. It’s so easy to show up to a march for five hours with everybody else who’s doing it and with a sign and all that stuff. That’s awesome and important. The real work has to be how are we claiming what we need and desire in our relationships or with our kids or with our parents? I want women to take some time and center themselves and understand what it is they want and why they don’t feel empowered to ask for it.

As you are talking about this more openly, what is coming up from either your members or why do you think women aren’t stepping up and asking for what they need? What is the reason behind that?

A lot of it is generational. Our closest teachers are our parents. I’m very lucky to have grown up with a mother who was home with us and yet was the total power center of our household. She did not take any shit from anybody. She was such a great role model because it showed that the money didn’t hold power in our house. She was clear about what she needed and she asked for it. We respected her and she took the time to take care of herself and do the things that she loved and all those things. A lot of us have seen in movies and magazines, from our parents, grandparents, friends’ houses we went over to are inundated with this set of rules around the roles women are supposed to play.

These rules can go back far, but we can trace them to the dawn of capitalism. This is beautifully written about in the book, Caliban and the Witch. The woman who wrote it talks about how in order for capitalism to have worked in the beginning, because there are ways to move into conscious capitalism. Capitalism was a labor-centric way of making money where people had to show up to the factories and produce things. In order for that to happen, there needed to be an entire population of labor producers, AKA women. These labor producers couldn’t question their role of producing labor or else it would upset the needs of this specific model of capitalism. All these things were put into our culture around women are supposed to have kids, stay home, do the housework, do this and do that.

Our foremothers have done incredible work around the vote and the workplace. We’re working on equal pay and yet, I haven’t seen a real shift at home in the housework. Women don’t even know that they have permission to ask for help. There’s also this rule around it’s part of our worth and it’s part of the way we pat ourselves on the back around like, “Look at all these things that I’m doing. I’m holding down a job and I’m doing the kids, I’m making sure the lunches are made, the dishwashing is done and the laundry is done.” There’s all this brainwashing around guilt for hiring help, guilt around asking our spouses for help. I even see a lot of guilt in my friends who live alone who feel guilty hiring a housekeeper. I’m like, “Who cares? Just because you don’t have to clean up other people’s mess, doesn’t mean that you can’t have support in that area if you can afford it.” I see how we’re in this a bit of a trance and that there’s a real opportunity to wipe the slate clean and take time to look at how we want to be spending our time instead of falling in line with the things we feel we’re supposed to do.

That’s so much of what this show is. I talk so much about how we have to have this unraveling, this releasing of judgments and expectations and all of these things that we’re supposed to be as women, as entrepreneurs, as sisters, as daughters and also the men. It’s interesting to me that this show started off as a show for women. I have a lot of very vocal men in my audience, which I appreciate. I’m grateful that they’re here and they’re allies. They want to help and they want to listen and be heard, which is exciting. I see so much crossover, overlap and alignment in what you’re doing with the Whole Woman. I would love to hear more about what that means to be a Whole Woman and why is this so important, not in general but specifically to you.

I do want to say something since you brought up the men. I feel pretty clear like this is not men’s fault. It is our responsibility to wake up to the trance and to ask for what we want. Usually, if we’re married to good men and I know most of us are. They’re like, “I’ve been waiting for you to be clear about that forever.” To me, being a Whole Woman is around understanding that all parts of ourselves support the other parts. I came up with this name, it was many years before I even launched the Whole Woman, which is my moonly membership program, because I read this article about the Four Burner Method, which was written by a man who believed that you can only have one burner on high. The only way your business can be super successful is if you turn down the volume on your relationship and kids and other things. I felt like I did not want a life like that. I didn’t want to have a life where I had to trade my business success for my happiness and motherhood. I didn’t want to have a life where I had to trade my relationship for motherhood or my health for my work. I didn’t believe that these things were in opposition to each other.

I wanted to believe that they supported each other. I started doing some experimenting and my whole thing is that work has always been on a high for me. That’s always been my burner that’s on. There have been times and I talked about this earlier where it hasn’t felt in alignment, it’s felt hard and it’s felt overwhelming. I’ve gone past the point of burnout. I kept fixating on what am I doing with work? What am I doing? Why is it so off? One day I turned and said, “What’s going on with motherhood right now?” I realized, “I feel out of alignment in motherhood. Let me spend half an hour journaling about how I feel I am meant to mother.” I spent some time on that and then I shifted how I mothered that day.

All of a sudden, I can see work differently. I had all these different ideas. There was a time when my spiritual practice felt so dead in the water. I’m trying to sit down and meditate every day. I’m doing all the things, I’m pulling the cards and I wasn’t feeling the connection. I kept being fixated on it and I said, “What is my relationship like with my body right now?” I realized, “My relationship with my body is out of alignment. Let me look at that.” I spent some time and I asked my body, “What is your ideal day look like? How do you want to move to? How do you want to eat?” I was able to make some shifts and then my spiritual practice got so much stronger and I felt so connected.

I saw that we’re only as strong as the weakest part. It’s important for us as women to take time to tend to all of our parts. I overlay our parts onto the elements being earth, air, fire and water, which also overlay over the directions. You can also look at this with the tarot suits, with the moon phases, with the seasons and with our menstrual phases. They are all aligned with similar energies. I’m always going around the compass and asking myself how is each part so that I can be woven together into this Whole Woman.

Is this only for women specifically? Do you think that any of this applies to men or is this women-specific?

It applies to men, though I haven’t necessarily studied it. If I’m looking at my husband, I see how he is so much more of a big dreamer now that he’s working out every day. He is so much happier in fatherhood now that he’s dreaming on a regular basis. I will say looking at him, I do think it’s true.

On your site and in a couple of things that you’ve written on social media, you talk a lot about this coming back to life, which would insinuate that something has died. What part of women do you think dies most often or first or what are the red flags and why do you think that happens?

Feminism starts at home. Click To Tweet

With women, if we look at the course of our life, the first thing that dies is our relationship with our bodies. At a very young age, we are taught that if our bodies are not a very specific way, then we are broken. I believe that this is a very specific, deliberate tool to keep women in a constant state of overwhelm and striving. It’s like striving and shrinking so that we never get around to the important work of our purpose. I think that’s the first thing, plus as part of that body stuff, we are brainwashed into thinking that we are only as good as how little we weigh.

That affects how we think about ourselves in romantic relationships. It affects our sensuality. It affects our spiritual practice because it steals our worth from us. That’s the first thing. Another major thing that’s happened for me is that when I became a mother, I instantly felt like my entire life was taken away from me. I felt like I wasn’t that respected in society anymore. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be a sexual woman anymore. I felt bad for working. It was like, “Am I ever going to work and be a terrible mom or be a mom and lose myself?” For me, those are the two major times that I felt like my vibrancy was ripped out from under me.

Did you feel like you always wanted to be a mom? Was that important to you?

It was always very important to me. I always knew I wanted to be a mother and my initial experiences of being a mother were terrible. It was nothing like I thought and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake on the planet like, “How did I get myself into this mess? This is terrible. I’m going to be miserable for the rest of my life. I can’t do this. What’s going on?” I blamed it all on me and my own emotional well-being. Instead of being like, “Sarah, of course, you’re feeling terrible. You’re on the other side of the country from your parents. You have to support your entire family and your child is crazy. This is hard. It has nothing to do with you.” I think because of this pressure for women to do it all, we feel crazy, terrible and depressed doing it all, we think we need to meditate more. I would say, “No, your life needs to be completely reconfigured so that you have a thousand times more support than what a lot of us are currently getting.”

There’s so much about when you need self-care, people are like, “Go to the spa, get your nails done.” It’s all like, “That’s cute,” and it’s self-care. It’s so not what it needs to be. Even when you’re saying about you’re becoming a mother. I have a good friend of mine who I remember. I know exactly where I was when I was talking to her and she was bawling on the phone to me saying, “I thought I was going to be good at this.” I was like what does that even mean? As somebody who is not a mom yet, I had so much compassion for her at that moment and I was even confused because I don’t know what that feels like. I can relate it to other areas of my life. I hear it a lot from women who are mothers and they think it should be this way or, “I’m being shamed as a mom because I’m not the homeroom mom,” or whatever it is because you have to choose. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was this idea of two things, which is the idea of balance and the idea of women having it all. You’ve touched on it a little bit, but I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the two of those.

It’s important for all of us to understand that none of us is meant to know what we’re doing when we first become mothers. That would be like showing up to a PhD program in Biophysics having never opened a Biophysics book and thinking that we’ll be able to understand what’s going on. I did the same thing. I was like, “I’m going to be great at this. Motherhood is intuitive. It’s built-in. I’m a nice person. I coach my clients.” None of us had any idea of what we’re doing. It’s important to have mom mentors. It’s important to lean on our own mothers if we have a good relationship with them. I think it’s a good impetus if you don’t have a good relationship with your mother to work on it. Even if you don’t want to do motherhood exactly the same as your mom did, they know so much more than we do when we first have kids. I lean on my mom so much more now than I did when I had Marshall, who’s my first.

What areas do you lean the most heavily on your own mom for?

I’m talking to her to things like, “Will my kids learn how to swim if they don’t take the lessons during the year?” Before, I would have been like, “No, I need to figure this out. I need to pay attention to what I want in my kids.” Now it’s like, “Why don’t I get my mom’s opinion?” She raised all three of us. I think we did some lessons, but I don’t remember. It’s things like that. It’s also things like I’ll admit to her that it feels so hard and I’ll cry and be like, “Can you tell me that it was hard for you too?” She’s like, “You have no idea. It was hard.” A lot of it is whatever we need to do to not feel like we’re under the microscope and to have permission to be human and permission to not be a great mom all the time. I love it when my mom tells me I’m a great mom. That goes a long way. Every time she tells me that, I’m like, “Thank you so much for telling me that. Please keep telling me that.” Oftentimes, she’ll offer advice and sometimes I’ll want to be annoyed, but I have to stop and be like, “This is great advice and I don’t know what I’m doing, so I should listen.”

Listen and do what you want, but where do those two intersect?

Listen and then remember that you’re an adult. You’re not ten years old anymore and you can then decide but get all the information. To talk about balance and doing it all, this is my opinion on the whole thing. My opinion is that we each have an incredibly unique way of doing everything. If there’s any part of us that’s trying to follow the rules or follow a program we read in a book or, “I’m going to do homeschooling exactly the way everyone does homeschooling or I’m going to run my business and have the same hours as this successful businesswoman that I know.” If we find ourselves doing any of that, we’re missing the infinite quantum intelligence that we have in our souls around what is right for us.

What we need to do is stop looking out there at what everybody’s doing and commit to having space in your day every day. I suggest that women take at least fifteen minutes every morning to sit in silence. I love sitting at an altar and coming into our souls and asking if we have all these questions, “How am I meant to mother? What does it look like for me to mother? What does it look like for me to work?” Assume that the way we are going to do things has never been done by anybody else before. When we look at all parts of ourselves and we think about each area and how we have a unique expression in it, that’s what ends up creating balance. Somehow, we have to make radical choices too.

 

Talk to me about that. What are some radical choices that you’ve had to make or you see people having to make?

Something that feels pretty radical for me is since Marshall was born, I’ve been working with the plan to have a full-time housekeeper. This isn’t something that all of a sudden, we discovered we could afford and hire. I’ve been planning, punching the numbers, saving money, figuring out how we can do this for five years. We have an amazing woman. She’s also Annabelle and Hazel’s nanny. She takes care of the house 100% because for me when I tuned into myself, I knew that those responsibilities weren’t in my system. I did not find joy from that.

One of my best friends, Nisha Moodley, she loves to clean her house. It’s a spiritual experience for her. She does a whole cleansing thing and she loves it and she loves creating beauty. It’s not my thing. Claiming that and that’s something I desire and then doing it and spending very real money on something like that feels radical. The other thing for me has been, and this is something that’s in process and hopefully, we can talk again in a few years. I will have to figure it out. I would only like to work ten to fifteen hours a week and be a multimillionaire. I feel very clear that I can do that. I don’t know how, but doesn’t that sound great?

I’m in alignment with so much of what you’re saying. One of the things that I see so often is that we don’t know it’s possible because there aren’t as many people doing it or speaking about it. I struggle a lot with role models. I love the thought of I get to be a role model in the way that I’ve chosen to live my life for the right people. The right people get to resonate with you being a multimillionaire, working ten to fifteen hours a week. You have proven that that’s possible.

Not quite yet, but I will. I love that you brought up the term role model because the perfect role models are people who are unapologetically themselves. To have a role model doesn’t mean you are going to be how they are or have a life that looks like theirs, but it’s important also to see what it looks like and feel the frequency of being unapologetically yourself. It’s usually the person you’re jealous of.

I love hearing that because I want to hear who do you look up to?

A few years ago, I came across Rebecca Campbell, the Rise Sister Rise. I read her book and I loved her book. Then I got jealous and judgmental. I got her deck and I never used it. I’m like, “What about the shadow work?” I had a moment with myself because I’m always curious about who I’m jealous and judgmental of. I was like, “She’s good at being her.” She owns her stuff and we do similar work. I’m also doing Avalonian sacred feminine work, so she is a sister of mine. I had this whole thing in my head and I got over it. I started working with her deck and her deck shifted so much for me. I had this whole experience. I pulled the same card seven times in five days. That was wild. In the car with one of my friends and she’s like, “One of my good friends is coming to visit. We should all get together.” I’m like, “Who?” She’s like, “Rebecca Campbell.” I’m like, “Of course.” I look up to her. I love how she owns that she’s a spiritual teacher because that’s been an edge for me. She does a great job being her and I appreciate that.

You said that you are in the process of becoming a high priestess. Is that what you were saying at the beginning?

Not really a high priestess. The 13 Moon Mystery School was founded by Ariel Spilsbury and it is an Avalonian-based mystery school. Avalon is the location of one of the last light temples that touched down on Earth. Another light temple would be Lemuria or Atlantis. It’s a place where there was a hub for the sacred feminine and all of these beautiful teachings. A lot of people have read the book, The Mists of Avalon. It’s very similar. Ariel has taught my teacher, Kalila, and it’s all based around thirteen feminine archetypes. The archetype would be the great mother, the high priestess, the weaver dreamer, the primal goddess, which is a lot like the wild woman, the goddess of love. You can see lots of different deities from all different cultures in each of these feminine archetypes.

The way we practice is by holding temple. In the temple, you’re creating a very specific frequency or vortex of connection to the sacred web or the goddess. It’s a place where we can drop our personality and tune into our soul’s pure essence. For me, it’s been such a profound way of no longer figuring things out, but instead being empty and seeing what wisdom arises and to also be in a temple space that has candles, beautiful colors, sacred pictures and sacred tools. I had all of these past life memories of having a church-like experience, but for the sacred feminine. When I say church, I’m thinking more like Catholic cathedrals that have so much beauty. Catholic cathedrals were built to have people feel like they were in heaven. This is like that, but the frequency resonates more with the path I’m walking in this lifetime.

How do you create that? What does that look like as far as a temple and creating these experiences?

Stop looking at what everybody is doing. Be committed to your own unique expression to make radical choices. Click To Tweet

I have a temple on my property, which is such a gift. It’s a round building. I hold temple once a month, but it’s been a little bit less since I’ve been taking this break. What it looks like for me is I do a beautiful usually mandala altar in the center of the room and everything is candlelit. We set the frequency like doing the things that I’ve been trained to do before people even come. I’m setting a sacred container based on calling in the directions, me connecting to the heavens and the earth, having other women come in who are trained in this to also hold different parts of this circle. When women come in, it’s like you can’t explain it. You step into a room and it feels different. It doesn’t feel like a room. It feels something deeply sacred and we smoke cleanse them. We’re starting to anoint them with oils and they find their place and they drop into this container. We let the personality fall away through guided meditation and then I take them on some journey that I feel needed at the moment.

A lot of it for me is learning how to get my own plans out of the way and sit in the empty presence and connect with what is needed. What’s been cool is that I’ve started doing this in the Whole Woman because you can do temple in your living room, you can do temple at a community center. I’ve also been working on how do you hold an Etheric Temple where we all journey to this commonplace. I explained what the template looks like. I hold the gate. I have women see themselves stepping in. The difference in Whole Woman from before we were holding Etheric Temple to after is such a huge shift. You have this sense of, “This is who I am and I must do this now.” We can feel the power of source or the goddess or however you want to name that Higher Power behind us. We feel supported and we feel we have this web of magic all around us. All these ways we were feeling stuck before, we can gracefully step through because we have a completely different source of courage.

As I’m listening to you talk about all of this and also at the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about how you want it to be an advertising executive. Where did that shift come in? Because it seems you’re very aligned but also confident in what you’re saying and how this is running. You’re taking people on journeys and all that. You have so much training in this, but also was there something that shifted for you? You also said that’s an edge for you. I’m curious how has that evolved from the ad exec to you holding temple?

When I moved to New York, I worked in advertising for a couple of years and then I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. When I was there, I started working with Gabrielle Bernstein in her home, when she did her group coaching in her home. That’s when I discovered A Course in Miracles version of spirituality, meditation and miracle work. It shifted so much for me. What I realized was that when I brought up that work into my emotional eating work, women healed quickly because it was leaning on different courage than permission from everybody else or all the roles that we’ve been talking about, all the brainwashing and all the trance that we’re in.

When I moved to San Francisco, I was struggling. I didn’t have any friends. Jonathan was working all the time. I got this therapist that I thought was in San Diego. It turns out she was down the street from me in San Francisco. We did therapy together for probably three months. One day I walked in and there were all of these purple chairs on the floor and pillows. The incense was burned down and then the candle wax was everywhere. You could smell the incense in the air. My whole body went bananas like goosebumps everywhere. I heard this voice like, “Pay attention.” I asked her, “What happened here last night?” She looked at me in this knowing look and she’s like, “When you’re ready, I’ll tell you.” I was like, “I want in.” I remembered and it’s so hard because we can’t explain those feelings in linear time.

A lot of us have had those experiences where we can call it Déjà vu. We walk into something and something feels so familiar. I walked into that room and I remembered being a priestess. We did more therapy and finally, I kept banging down the door. I was like, “You have to tell me what’s going on here.” Finally, we talked about it. She started a circle for me and some other women that we knew and we did a full two-year process together. Since then, we’ve been doing more guide-oriented work. That part is not important. Through that whole time that I was in San Francisco, I was just the Live More Weigh Less person. I was talking about spirituality and our last module, but it was very intro. It wasn’t something I was talking about on social media or my blogs or anything because I was worried that people were going to think I was weird.

I was planning on having Live More Weigh Less be this huge situation and I didn’t want to be the weird woo-woo woman. I got sick of doing Live More Weigh Less and other things were calling me. I had two babies and I felt like I didn’t know who I was. I worked with this amazing woman, Katina Mercadante, and through our work, she got me to see that I’m a spiritual person first. It’s not a tool in my tool belt, but it’s what I’m here to do. I wrote this five-year vision and I got clear that I want to come to New England. I want to gather women here, have huge gatherings in open fields, have moon circles in the woods and do these cool ancient practices.

I was like, “I’ll do that in five years, but first I got to move to New England. I’ll get a cute small house. I’ll have another baby in a couple of years. We’ll lay low and have a normal life.” Two weeks later, this retreat center comes up on Trulia and it’s everything on my list like opening fields. I was planning on building this huge Four Season Temple already built here, a lake and all the things. I was like, “I have to do this now?” It was a constant practice of going to my morning practice and connecting, “Is this what I meant to do? This feels scary. What is this?” I got clear. This is big and scary. I meant to hold temple in this place and I did. Once you have a temple in your backyard, you can’t hide it anymore. I had to own it and here we are.

I feel like I could talk to you for a thousand more hours because I have so many more questions, but I do want to respect your time. I do have one final question for you. Before we get to it, if people are interested in learning more about you, about what you’re doing with the Whole Woman, if they want to learn more about the Live More Weigh Less, can they do that? How can people find and learn more from you?

The best way to spend time with me is to join the Whole Woman. I give out a secret link sometimes that I will give to you. It’s WholeWoman.me/secret. Normally, I only open Whole Woman up like it ends up being once or twice a year, but you can get in through the back door. It’s affordable and you can cancel anytime. We do a temple every month and a full moon group gathering where we do questions and then I teach a lesson every month. It’s a combination of sacred feminine work and strategy plus an amazing community of hundreds of women who are all committed to being real and finding their own unique path and then cheering each other on. It’s a great program.

For Live More Weigh Less, you can join that if you feel like you’re struggling with emotional eating. It’s an amazing program and it’s all set up as a self-study. It’s LiveMoreWeighLess.com. There’s a cool video there that I love. It’s still my favorite video to date. If you want to follow me on Instagram, it’s @SarahJenks and then you can always go to SarahJenks.com to check out my blog. With my blog, it’s a lot of oversharing.

The final question that I have for you is if this episode was broadcasted to the entire world for the next 30 seconds, what would you say?

You are way bigger than you think you are. The biggest dreams that you have is your path that you are meant to walk. It’s your map. Dream as big as you can and know that is the blueprint that was built into you when you came to this planet in this lifetime.

Thank you so much. I truly thank you for your time. I know that we ran a little over and I’m so grateful. The way that you step in and share is so inspiring, either on social media or on here. I’m so grateful that you took time out of your schedule and knowing what you have going on in the background is so awesome, so impressive. I am excited to share this and share you with my audience. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me. You are an incredible interviewer. It was such a joy.

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Was that not an amazingly empowering episode? I found the layer or the level of depth in this conversation to be refreshing. You can tell how passionate she gets when she’s talking about her life, raising kids, having relationships and running a business on her terms. If you’re inspired by that and you want to see how she has built her membership, her community to over 100,000 members, then you don’t want to miss this After Hours conversation that she and I had where you can get all of her recommendations for how to grow a connected community, grow a membership and the mistakes that she made because you can learn a lot from this as much as I did. Head over to UnbecomingPodcast.com/95. Before we go, I wanted to leave you with this one thing. I show up every week and try to bring you the most impactful and empowering people like Sarah so that you can gain some new insight and some new knowledge to help you grow, transition, evolve, whatever it is in your life and business.

If this show resonates with you, I would love for you to share this show. Take a screenshot, share it on your Instagram Stories, whatever it is, share it on your Facebook, go Live, talk about the show because of the more momentum that we have moving forward with this show, the bigger the community that we are building and connecting around the world. The better the conversations and the relationships we’re going to have in our life and also the higher-level people we can bring on the show like Sarah. If you enjoy this show, please leave a review. Share it with the people you love, your friends, family, colleagues and community. I would appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to seeing you on another episode.

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What is the greatest strategy, tool or resource that you have integrated in the last few years that’s had the most significant impact on the growth of your business?

Writing very heartfelt emails.

I’m assuming you have a big list. Have you always had a big list for years? How did that work?

I grew my list through affiliate launches. That’s been my major mode of list growth and it has not grown much in the past few years. It hasn’t been a focus of mine. I’ve been nurturing the women who are there.

Number two, what is the biggest mistake that you see female entrepreneurs are making as it relates to sharing their gift or using their voice?

The biggest dreams that you have is the path you are meant to walk on. Click To Tweet

They’re trying to mimic other people instead of being themselves.

This might be related, but what is one action step that someone could make now who’s reading that wants to stand out online?

Be motivated by creativity instead of attention. When I have created a piece of writing, even if it’s an Instagram post that feels creative, I don’t need to see who likes it because the joy was in creating it. There are other times when I write Instagram posts that I think might get more likes or something I should do or it’s like, “I’m trying to get my followers up.” I’m constantly checking to see if other people liked it and I work with that.

What is one thing that you’ve had to stop doing to become more successful?

I have to stop doing Facebook ads. I don’t know what it is. We’re like oil and water. I’ve been blacklisted. It hasn’t worked. I’ve tried to hire many different people. It never seems to work out. It ended up being a huge energy leak. When I stopped doing Facebook ads, I was able to focus on the things that did work for me.

That’s a real answer. I appreciate that one. The last one is when people approach you about stepping into being a Whole Woman, what is the most commonly asked question that you get? How do you respond?

The most common question I get is, “I don’t know what I want. How do I even figure out what I want?” I always say, “You don’t know what you want because you’re exhausted. All you want is a nap or a break. That’s going to take over all actual desires that need to spring out of rest.” It’s hard for moms, but you’ve got to get away for a day and a night. You have to sleep alone on your friend’s couch even and get some headspace to start figuring out what it is you want.

Thank you so much. The last thing I will ask is what is one thing that our audience and community can do to help you spread your message?

The actual action step would be to tag a friend in one of my Instagram posts, something that resonates with you. I also say that because many women feel there are very few women out there who get them, especially in their immediate friend circle. Instead of making new friends, why don’t you bring your friends into the circle of the goals that you’re doing? Tag your friends on a point on Instagram posts that I make. Once you join the Whole Woman, I have a code that you can send to your friends to try it out for a month for $5. There are ways to get your circle into the things that you’re doing. I would love to help educate and create a new language for you and your community.

Thank you so much. That was so helpful and I learned a lot as well.

Important Links:

• Whole Woman
• Sarah Jenks
• 13 Moon Mystery School
• Caliban and the Witch
• Rise Sister Rise
• The Mists of Avalon
• WholeWoman.me/secret
• LiveMoreWeighLess.com
• @SarahJenks on Instagram
• SarahJenks.com
• Sarah Jenks’ blog
• www.UnbecomingPodcast.com/itunes
• www.Instagram.com/phoebemroczek
• www.unbecomingpodcast.com/95

About Sarah Jenks

Sarah Jenks is mother to 3 rambunctious small humans, a life coach, emotional eating expert, and sacred space holder. She is the founder of Whole Woman, a moonly online membership for women seeking the answers to “Who am I? And why am I here?” and Live More Weigh Less™, the most popular online emotional eating program. Between her online programs and as proprietress of Hawthorn Farm, her 23-acre retreat center in Medfield, Massachusetts, Sarah holds sacred space to empower women and support them in finding their magic and rediscovering their most authentic selves. Since 2009, Sarah’s community of women seeking a fuller, more meaningful life has grown to almost 100K members.