Lea Bayles, a transformational speaker, coach, performer, author, and teacher, joins Tonya Dawn Recla to explain women’s intuition. She has helped thousands of people connect with the wise delight of their bodies and the expansive creative power of spirit. Her playful, practical, compassionate and mystical approach draws from her master’s degree in psychology and experience with theater, dance, mind-body healing, energy work, shamanism, yoga, tantra and chi-kung and her personal challenges and joys with living in a body. Listen in as she talks about the power of women’s intuition.

Hello everyone. This is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert, and I have such a treat for you today. Lea Bayles is this magical, yummy, just warm hug of energy today, and our conversation is already very beautiful, so I’m sure you can feel where I’m sitting energetically with it, but we’re going to talk about the power of women’s intuition, and she brings a lot into that dialogue, so I’m excited for you all to pick up on what she embodies and what she’s bringing forward into these conversations, mostly from that place of just a real natural way of being, and I know that sometimes within ourselves, we don’t always feel like that’s the case, but I want as you’re listening to her, really tap into that piece of you also, because we all exist in this space, and she just does a phenomenal job of speaking it in to existence as well as embodying it, and so use that.

I’m all about borrowing or what they call stealing like an artist. Grab on to that and emulate that for yourself as you get more and more confident in your ability to do that. She’s a really phenomenal model for that, so without further ado, welcome Leah to the show.

Thank you so much, Tonya. It’s such a great honor to be here. I love what you’re doing. I love your mission and your work and your community, fabulous so thank you.

Well thank you so much, and we adore you and the work you’re doing, so let’s share that with other people and start by asking you what are your superpowers?

I believe we all have many of them, so I hope everyone listening really feels to yourself that you have so many superpowers, and last night I was tuning in to this community and this call and what you’re doing, and asked, “Well, what superpowers want to be talked about tomorrow?” And the one that came up was mama lion love, and the second one was the creative life force, and so they’re pretty entwined, but both of those just feel really strong to me right now as we’re sitting down here and talking.

Mama lion love

Mama lion love, I think of like that it’s fierce and it’s tender and it’s instinctual, and as my own kids have grown up, I find that my mama lion love that used to be like, “Man, I could do anything for my kids,” whatever need there was, I could rise to that occasion, and now I feel like that love, now that my kids are grown and one of them has her own children, that love is becoming a more universal mama lion love, and that sense that this whole amazing, beautiful, precious world and all these children are my children, and being able to step in to that place so that our love becomes, yes for our own families, our own communities, but also really expands as a very powerful, healing force for our own bodies, for our lives, and as a force of healing for the world.

I love that, and I love coupling that with the women’s intuition conversation, ’cause I think a lot of times, we associate intuition with being a passive thing, with being … I hear people all the time be like, “Well, I’m just trying to settle into my heart space,” and somewhere along the line, we took up this connotation that that was a weaker place to be, or maybe even it was the turn the other cheek concept, and so there’s this passive receptivity to it, and that’s really not my experience.

I think that intuition in general, and particularly the feminine aspects of that are very multi-faceted, and part of that is fierceness, and you talk about mama lion love, and there’s an undeniable fierceness in that dialogue, and we’ve watered it down. We could go into all kinds of conspiracy theories and everything else about the patriarchy, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I think that it’s clearly a space that we stepped into and allowed to unfold, and we get to look at that now and make a different choice if we so desire, and I think there’s value in that.

Absolutely there is, and I love that you’re saying the heart space isn’t this just tender, weak suite like yeah, turn the other cheek. It’s the place of courage and conviction. In fact, the word courage comes from the French word “coeur,” which is a heart. The courage is there in our heart, and the ability to be able to see from that that cuts through so much illusion, and being able to say, “I will take a stand for love, I will take a stand for this, for being able to be grounded and strong and show our true selves and out big love for the world through our hearts.”

And when you’re talking about the strength of that, makes me of the term of heart warriors, and this is an archetype that I really identify with and a lot of my clients really work with. How can you expand that part? There’s a great mythical figure, Durga, who’s a goddess from India, and you see her, she’s very beautiful and very calm and sweet-looking, and she’s riding a lion or a tiger, and she goes into battle, and she goes into battle with this equanimity, but she goes into battle when things have gone too far out of balance, and she stands for that that is sacred and vulnerable.

That’s beautiful, and the warrior aspect is such a powerful place for women to move in to in a solid way, and I think what we’ve seen is reactionary force, if you will, as opposed to intrinsic power, and that’s one of the things that has been in the backbone of everything I do around that self-authority, self-dominion, full on autonomy in and of ourselves, and so we embody that strength, and you and I talked before the show that there comes a point where we’re very clear that it’s not self-generated.

It’s collectively generated through oneness, through the divine, through whatever ideology resonates with people, but there’s a force at play that’s so much bigger than any single one of us individually, and yet we have the ability and capacity to encompass it, and it’s like being one of the ones and yet really truly having the experience of that multi-facetedness all at the same time, and recognizing that one doesn’t negate the other.

Yes, yes. And that embodiment of it in that we have to start with noticing where we’re being harsh and cruel and denigrating ourselves, and that we often talk about being abused, which is an issue that needs to be looked at, but we can’t look at it with looking at how we’re also abusing ourselves and how we’re second-guessing ourselves. We’re talking about intuition, and I think women often have such a deep, deep knowing of what they want to create in their life or what feels right to them, and yet then they second guess themselves, so it’s needing to be grounded in that and kind with ourselves and supportive, inside ourselves and also with each other as community.

It’s really interesting that you bring that up. When I wrote my book, the book W.A.R. – Watch, Assess, React, it was all around the cognitive aspects of power, and what I uncovered in that, I talk about a rape situation in my background and the realization that I came through in my own self-journey that … And I even lay claim to the fact that I was raping myself in every single moment, in not taking ownership of that, and again, not in a blame the victim way, and certainly, people have to be accountable for their own actions.

However, I too had to be accountable for my actions and recognize that I had crafted an entire persona that, on the surface, appeared to be very confident. I was an agent. I was armed, I could’ve killed the guy, but it didn’t matter because internally, I had not inserted myself in to my existence, and my claim was is that if you don’t do that work, it doesn’t matter how much martial arts or self-defense training you have, if you’re not defending yourself in a moment to moment situation, you won’t do it in a life-threatening situation, and that’s exactly what my experience was.

And it was so confounding to me to observe that behavior that it was like, “Okay, something’s here. I need to dive into this and dig it up,” but it’s exactly what you just mentioned. Until we’re willing to own what we do to ourselves, our projection or what we see in the world can’t change. That came up a lot after this recent presidential election, and I observed so much of the insecurity of human behavior and it was like recognizing that nothing is outside of ourselves, so if we’re seeing a hyper archetype being portrayed, we have to stop and ask ourselves why would we even need that still? What is it in our collective consciousness that we’re not willing to look at that it forces that projection upon us.

Absolutely, and what can I do in my … Where can I see that in myself and work with it lovingly? Yeah, as well as whatever we do on the outside. This isn’t to say we just do the inner work and don’t do the outer work, but it’s realizing we can’t like you said, we can’t just project it into the outside and make other people wrong. There has to be that owning that within each of us, there are parts of all of these, and how do we work with those?

And I do see a trend in the spiritual growth communities or personal development communities. The fun part, even when we started Super Power Experts, the fun part was the superpowers like, “Wooo, I can do this, and I am mind reading, and I think I’m psychic,” and everybody was really excited about that piece until it got to the part where they had to do that work and the real internal working, and that means diving in to those icky gooey spaces and sitting in them, and I’m like, “Lather yourself up, folks. You might as well just roll around in it, because until you get comfortable in those spaces, you’re hiding from yourself, and as long as you’re hiding some aspect of yourself, you are at the mercy of whatever gets perpetrated against you because you have no internal fortitude.”

And even when we give lip service to doing the work, if you will, most people keep it at a very superficial level, and I remember distinctly a conversation with a client, and I’m like, “You have to go deeper within,” and she’s like, “I’m going as deep as I can,” and that was true for her. She couldn’t even feel where in her body or in her experience, she had put this barrier in place and literally, she was hitting the bottom of what she could conceive, and it’s like, “Wow, there’s a whole expanse underneath of that. What are you resisting? What is it about that space that we’re so deathly afraid to enter into?”

With women, a lot of times it’s the womb. It’s the womb work, it’s the creative energies, it’s our real power centers that scare us the most, and we have too many stories in our collective consciousness of wielding that in less-than-honorable ways, and so we’re a little bit timid to harness our inner Durga and move in to those spaces, because we know the destruction that it can yield.

The number of women who, when I just say the word “power,” flinch or withdraw is really quite amazing. Like, “Oh, no no. Yeah, I want to do this work, and I want to be autonomous, but powerful?” And that’s fascinating to me, because a real power comes from that inner place that you’re talking about, and I think we’ve just gotten this perversion of power as being power over people rather than this power that we all have inside that we need in the world.

True power is the foundation we stand on in total self-dominion.

It’s so fascinating. We’re on such parallel paths. Even 10 years ago, people told me I couldn’t use power. That’s part of the reason why I did. That’s the subtitle of the book, is The Ultimate Guide to Personal Power and Safety. At some point, we have to acknowledge the fact that we think it’s become a four letter word. True power is the foundation that we stand on in total self-dominion, and if we don’t have that, then we are at the mercy of whatever appears in our environment, and not even realizing that we’re creating it, but you’re right. I think that’s a stretch for a lot of people.

And that’s where, for me, when we’re talking about it with a sense … We can go into these very deep, sacred places with a sense of play. It’s like, “Well, let’s just see where it goes today,” and a sense of love, and if people really tap into that love energy first, and sometimes that’s like having an inner ally who is more loving than anyone who’s ever been in your life, or for me it’s often connecting to the great heart of the universe, and so I’m not having to just use my own personal love, but there’s that source of the great heart of the universe that’s abundantly filling me all the time when I’m open to it.

And when we can go into those deep, scary, dark places and explore why power is scary, then it can shift I think much more quickly when we’re aligning with love, because so many of us have been taught that to grow, we’ve got to do it from the place of self-criticism or something is wrong with us, and if we come from the place of “Ugh, you’re such a masterpiece in the making, you’re a miracle, you’re amazing, and there’s more of you that wants to emerge, so you’re great as you are and wow, there are these parts that want to emerge, and they’re stuck in the sludge, and how can we create an open, loving container to allow that to be safe for that to come?”

Beautiful, beautiful. We’re going to take a quick break. I told you all this was going to be a yummy conversation, so we’re talking with Lea Bayles about the power of women’s intuition, and so stick with us. When we come back, we’re going to dive a little bit more into that power dialogue and show you how you can harness both of those and really create this fun, playful existence that Lea’s talking about. Give us one moment and we’ll be right back.  

Find out more about Lea Bayles at leabayles.com

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