Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Citore.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
If I wrote a book, its title might be “The Wounded Way” because my wounds have definitely had a big influence on the course of my life’s work.
Like many women, I was sexually violated as a little girl and again as a young woman. I never talked about my experiences with anyone. I stuffed them in my body and went on with my life, which was chaotic and filled with addiction, until one day, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer and forced to begin my healing.
Along with psychotherapy as well as conventional and alternative medicine, my healing journey led me to Tantra (which is the yoga of sacred sexuality) and eventually a three year Tantra teacher training program based in California. At the time, I lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I was a single mother raising a daughter. I worked for a company called American Greetings, where I wrote greeting cards for a living. It was a fun job, but I was gettting bored.
It was during this three-year learning and healing period that I began to truly befriend my feminine sexual body and specifically my yoni (another word for vagina) through a daily self-pleasuring practice. This was less about me having orgasms and more about me having “conversations” with my yoni through touch.
My sexual awakening came in stages. The first was fully facing what had happened to me, then feeling the feelings I couldn’t allow as a child or even a young woman. What came next was humbling – which was seeing my own anti-feminine, antibody, anti-sex beliefs. Beliefs like: “The feminine is weak,” “My body is ignorant,” and “Pleasure is dangerous.”
My yoni had been holding all of this for me.
Next, I saw how these beliefs were connected to patterns in my life.- like how my beliefs around receiving pleasure were connected to blocks around receiving money and success. And my negative beliefs about my body were keeping me from fully embodying and trusting my innate bodily intelligence. This was shocking to me because I had always been an athlete and super physical. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I was disrespecting my own body and treating it like a pack mule to carry my head around.
Finally, I had what can only be described as a spiritual experience with my body. I experienced waves of tears, of awe and reverence, especially for my female sexual organs – my womb, my ovaries, my yoni, my clitoris, and cervix. It was like they were my elders. I had been holding this grandmother council inside my own body all along that I could turn to for guidance, resource, and reassurance.
This inner elder council guided me to move to California, quit my corporate job and over the next decade explore everything from shamanism and plant medicine to shadow work and Goddess/ Wiccan practices and ritual. Alongside of my personal growth was an explosion of my creativity.
I wrote, directed and performed in four theater productions, two of which were one-woman shows – Riding the Dragon and Keep it Wet. I wrote and recorded two sexy, funny music videos, one called Testosterone and the other called On Your Knees. I started a women’s performance collective, which later became Anima, Theater of the Feminine Underground, that empowers women through creative expression.
As the relationship between my sexual healing and creative awakening became more and more evident, I formed the first outline for my Women’s Sexual Mystery School, which has evolved into more of a modern priestess training called Awaken Your Feminine Fire.
My vision for this mystery school was to create a safe sanctuary for women to explore our sensual selves and psyches and hold space for one another so we can each open up to our deeper bodily intelligence and creative power.
In forming the outline, I asked myself these questions:
What makes me uniquely me?
How did I get to be who I am? Where have I been? What have I learned?
What have been my steps along the way?
I think this is the greatest challenge for anyone seeking to bring their gifts to the world – to track the details of our unique path and to recognize and value our own genius, which we often can’t see because it comes so natural to us.
From these questions, I came up with eight sections for the course curriculum:
Awakening Your Feminine Essence
Awakening Your Primal Feminine
Awakening Your Pleasure Body
Awakening Your Feminine Super Powers
Awakening Your Dark Feminine
Awakening Your Tantrika
Awakening Your Divine Masculine
Awakening Your Creativity
After coming up with the overall curriculum, which again was based on my personal healing path, I came up with the descriptions, along with the teachings and practices for each one. I wanted the course to be a more experiential, versus lecture heavy because I believe lasting learning happens in the body and through the nervous system.
I taught the course for five years in person, along with offering private coaching, to experiment with different practices and gather feedback. Along the way, I put out a newsletter and blogged on and off, slowly building a following. Eventually, women from different cities were contacting me to bring my sexual mystery school to their communities and I began leading circles outside of Santa Barbara, from San Francisco to New York!
What I discovered is that my natural gifts were what many women were seeking. Go figure!
I believe this is the next evolution for humanity. We’ve spent enough time trying to fit in. Rather than waste so much energy suppressing what makes us unique, we need to be finding ways to share our freaky genius with others. Because we all need each other’s gifts. I need yours. You need mine.
This past year, I took the next step of creating an online course for Awaken Your Feminine Fire, which was a huge stretch for me, especially technology-wise. And I leaned heavily on other gifts.
This first round, I had women sign up from as far as London, Bali, and India, as well as from cities around the US, from Seattle to Kansas City to Pittsburg and New York! This has been so exciting for me – turning on women over the world!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The first mountain I had to climb was my own healing. Otherwise, I would’ve just remained a shallow person. My gifts would’ve remained asleep, along with my wounds. I wouldn’t have even conceived of a women’s sexual mystery school, let alone believed in myself enough to carry it through from creating the course and website to all the hats one must wear to market a program and a coaching business. My transformation became the curriculum.
During the process, my whole guidance system shifted from my head to my body. In any big shift, there are going to be bumps. Every step of the way, I’ve had to keep focusing on the road ahead rather than the bumps, which trigger my self-doubt.
I think this is why it’s so important to start with a clear, mission statement that ignites your passion for whatever you’re putting out into the world and set equally passionate intentions along the way that keep you forward focused. These intentions were sometimes all I had to hold onto.
If you want to see where you’re at regarding self-love – if you want to clear all your beliefs around “not enoughness,” CREATE SOMEtHING, present it publicly and charge money for it. I regularly had to choose between my old beliefs around scarcity versus new beliefs around my worthiness and abundance.
This ties into the secondary goal for my work – awakening women’s visions and voices, because sexuality and creativity go together. Along with my Awaken Your Feminine Fire series, I started Anima, Theater of the Feminine Underground, whose mission is to give expression to the feminine soul through dance, song, spoken word and performance art. I choose ten artists per show. (No previous performance experience is necessary). Everyone is encouraged to share from their “edges.” In the process, individual artists go through their own transformation and the audience gets to receive the transmission.
This past year I chose to up my game, creating an online version of my women’s sexual mystery series. This required about a year of writing content for the course, including audio and video scripts, as well as pdf material. Then there’s recording and finding photos and royalty free music for 80 some practices and meditations.
I changed the name of the course to Awaken Your Feminine Fire, partly because it’s been a pain in the ass to promote a “sexual” mystery school” on Facebook. On top of creating the online version of the course, I needed to market my new brand and keep building my list, so I had to be on social media more, which is not my thing.
I hired a business coach and learned about opt-ins, and such. I LOVE the free opt-ins I created! The first one is an essential oil ritual, the second one was a yoni egg manifestation meditation, the third one is a downloadable Tantra ceremony for couples. I also learned about creating ads for opt-ins and how to track which ads work best, etc. All of this seems so fancy to me. I’ve never thought of myself as a business person, but I guess I’m becoming one.
Launching an online course has been a whole next level learning curve for me, as I’m not a salesperson. But I learned that promoting myself is less about selling and more about having conversations with people – being curious about them and finding the common ground between us.
What else was challenging for me? Technology in general. I gave myself lots of time and space for each new task – like putting on a webinar, for example – because working in a relaxed state is a priority for me.
Teaching on film was also more edgy for me than performing on stage for me. Maybe because I’m supposed to look like I know something. Haha! More opportunities to conquer negative talk.
All in all, I’m grateful for the rollercoaster ride of creating and launching an online course, which is now a passive stream of income for me. I’ve become way more organized with my time, ’cause I’ve had to be.
I remember, at one point, regarding organizing tasks, my business coach says to me, “This is a job for your social media specialist and this is for your tech support and this is for your copywriter,” etc. to which I replied, “Well, since I’m all of those people, I’d better get busy.”
Awaken Your Feminine Fire – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
The mission for both my Awaken Your Feminine Fire series and Anima, Theater of the Feminine Underground is to liberate women’s bodily intelligence, creative power, and divine feminine dharma.
A big part of what I do is to help women value their feminine aspect, including their bodies, emotions and sexual being. I give them back their original, feminine navigational system.
Many women don’t even realize how influenced they are by patriarchal conditioning until they experience something different.
In my study of Tantra, including traveling to India, I discovered many of the teachings and practices were designed for male bodies and awakening male minds. I wanted to create a more feminine-based sacred sexuality school.
Traditional meditation has never resonated with me. I prefer to meditate with my body, through things like sound and movement and with my eyes and all my senses open. I also find that doing spiritual practice in nature is ideal for connecting with the yin or feminine aspect of the soul, that can sometimes get scrambled in an energetically masculine/yang dominated world.
My work isn’t for everyone. I don’t teach women, for example, how to give a good blow job or squirt or shoot ping pong balls out of their yonis.
I do teach women how to become orgasmic and how to source their own desire and pleasure, so they don’t have to rely solely on others for their sexual needs. And can share their sexual energy when they choose to.
I teach women how to become more vulnerable, open and authentic in sex so they can experience their own deep pleasure rather than just derive satisfaction from their partners.
I also teach women how to channel their sexual energy through their bodies for their own physical and creative vitality. I teach inner energetic sustainability, so women can have more sustainability in their relationships, finances and in their lives.
Along with my in person and online courses, I also do one on one coaching with women, which includes everything from sexual shadow work to guided psycho-somatic practices for enhancing intimacy. I sell crystal yoni eggs, which have been a big part of my own sexual healing. And awakening.
My mission is turn on as many women as possible so we can turn on the world and turn on the soul of humanity.
One of my favorite success stories was a woman in her early sixties who could take or leave sex. She and her husband had basically learned to live without it. She was post menopausal so like many mature women, she thought, “Why bother?” But she was a seeker and her spiritual practice was what led her to me. “The Grandmothers sent me,” she told me. Over the course of 4 months, I watched this woman completely transform, not only in her renewed passion for her husband and her life, but she looked ten years younger! Her eyes, her skin, her hair, her face was glowing. She had the radiance of a maiden. Her husband even sent me a bouquet of flowers, thanking me. Not only had their relationship blossomed, this woman returned to her art. She started painting again. She had a show. She started an art circle and so on.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I live for witnessing other’s transformation. It’s spiritual food to me. Over the years, I’ve had the honor of being a part of many women’s sexual and creative awakening.
One success story that stands out is a young woman in her thirties, who desperately wanted to have a baby and/or find her soul’s work.
She was with a partner she loved, who was devoted to her. She had a good job, but it wasn’t fulfilling her. They’d been trying to have a baby for three years when she came to me.
In our work together, she got in touch with shame around not being able to conceive that was connected to unacknowledged shame around having an abortion in her early twenties that had even deeper roots in shame she was carrying from an early childhood experience, all of which she was holding in her pelvis. This shame had been blocking her feminine receptivity and creative energy.
In reclaiming and clearing her pelvic temple, she not only got pregnant, she started a support group for women experiencing difficulty conceiving and began taking steps to become a “fertility” coach.
Just like me, her transformation became her offering.
Pricing:
- Awaken Your Feminine Fire 8 module/ 4 month online course: $599.99
- Private phone/Zoom coaching sessions: $75/ 30 minutes or $150/ hour
- Yoni eggs: $34.99 to $54.99
Contact Info:
- Address: 1530 Mission Canyon Road Santa Barbara, CA 93105
- Website: www.LisaCitore.com and www.AwakenYourFeminineFire.com
- Phone: 805-450-1772
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisacitore/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lisa.Citore.Inc/
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