If you’re going to devote your career to teaching women about pleasure, desire, and what you call their “erotic life force,” you should have a name that suits the job. Regena Thomashauer is better known as Mama Gena, a persona she created decades ago as she began guiding women through a better understanding of relationships, sensuality, and feminine power. In 1998, she launched the School of Womanly Arts with 12 women gathered in her living room; it eventually grew into a global community. She’s also written four books, including the New York Times bestseller Pussy: A Reclamation — so, as you might have gathered, she’s never been particularly interested in tiptoeing around a subject.
But Thomashauer’s latest book arrives after a period when her confidence in pleasure and personal power was put to a much harder test. In On Our Knees: Loving Your Life Even When You Hate What’s Happening, she writes about hitting the height of professional success while privately dealing with burnout, a painful rejection from her publisher, and her daughter’s eating disorder. The experience forced her to reconsider some of the very ideas she’d spent years teaching — particularly what it means to surrender when life refuses to cooperate.
We asked Thomashauer why success can disguise unhappiness, what women miss when we become too good at pushing through, and why she believes getting brought to your knees doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve been knocked down for good.
The title of your book is On Our Knees: Loving Your Life Even When You Hate What's Happening. Most people spend their energy trying to change difficult circumstances, not love them. What do you mean by the title, and how do you distinguish acceptance from simply giving up?
The title On Our Knees isn’t about collapse, it’s identifying embodied truth. Think about it: we get on our knees to pray, to make love, to plant something in the earth. Being on your knees is a position of surrender and devotion at the same time. I didn't title this book On Our Knees because life brought me to my knees and I stayed there defeated: I titled it that because I discovered something down there I never found standing up trying to white-knuckle my life into shape: erotic intimacy.
Most of us were taught to believe that if we just do the work and transform enough, our life will "behave" and we'll live happily ever after, which is a lie. Because life always breaks us and remakes us again and again and again — not as punishment, but as an opportunity to grow. I'm proposing that we love what’s happening first. Not because it's good but because it's yours and it's real. And turning away from it doesn't actually stop it from happening — it just makes you absent from your own life, and your own emotional range, and distances you from the gift that lives inside the rupture.
You write candidly about reaching what looked like the pinnacle of your career while privately struggling with burnout and your daughter's eating disorder. Looking back, were there warning signs that you'd become disconnected from yourself, and why do you think they're so easy to miss when everything appears successful from the outside?
Looking back, yes — but they didn't look like warning signs, they looked like virtues. I never dropped a ball. I could run a company, write books, hold space for thousands of women, and still show up for everyone who needed me. I was crushing it. Nevermind that it was crushing me. When you can perform that flawlessly, the performance becomes proof you're fine, so you stop checking.
Success is the best camouflage there is: Nobody stages an intervention for a woman who's crushing it. And it's not just other people who get fooled — you get fooled by your own outside. I was reading my life the way everyone else was: look what she's built. I wasn't asking the only question that mattered: Am I in here?
My daughter's struggle is what stopped me, and not gently. It was life grabbing me by the collar: You can teach women to come home to their bodies and still not be living in yours. That's not a contradiction I could coach my way around. It's the one that brought me to my knees.
One of the recurring themes in the book is surrender, but that's a word many people resist because it can sound passive. How has your understanding of surrender changed over the years, and what does it actually look like in everyday life?
I used to think surrender meant learning to let a man lead. I'm a warrior woman, so that was not an easy lesson for me. I actually wrote a whole book about it and submitted it to my publisher. They rejected it.
That rejection brought me to my knees — literally, the phrase became the title — because my last book had been a New York Times bestseller. I thought I was riding the edge of glory again, and instead I got a big fat no.
Here's the thing: that no was the best thing that ever happened to that book. Because with it, I learned that the surrender I'd been writing about was too small. It was never really about learning to let a man lead. It was about learning to surrender to the erotic life force that runs through everything — the wind, the rain, the earth, the human body — whether circumstances are going my way or not.
In everyday life, surrender isn't passive, and it isn't about who's in charge. It's staying erotically alive — awake, responsive, in your body — no matter what life is handing you. A rejection letter. A hard year. A daughter in crisis. The Goddess doesn't stop moving through you just because your plans got rejected. Surrender is remembering that and staying available to everything.
You argue that women are often taught to keep pushing through exhaustion rather than paying attention to what their bodies are trying to tell them. Why do you think so many women have learned to distrust their own instincts, and how can they begin rebuilding that relationship?
We learn to distrust our own instincts because we're trained out of our bodies from girlhood on. Every time a woman is told to smile more, take up less space, push through the cramps, push through the exhaustion, or push through the "no" that her gut is screaming, she's being taught that her body's signals are an inconvenience to override, not information to trust. Do that for many generations and of course we can’t hear ourselves. It's not that women don't have instincts. It's that we've been extensively trained to override them and call that habit strength.
It's easy to miss because exhaustion becomes the water we swim in. When everyone around you is also running on empty, running on empty starts to look like normal — even virtuous. Nobody hands you a warning sign. Your erotic body just gets quieter and quieter until you can't hear it at all.
You don't rebuild trust with your body through more willpower — that's the same muscle that got you into this. You rebuild it through pleasure. Small, unglamorous moments of actually feeling something — a deep breath, a stretch, a dance break, a bite of food you actually taste — because pleasure is the language your body and soul understand. That's erotic aliveness: not sex, but the current of life force moving through you when you're actually inhabiting your body instead of managing it from the outside. Start there, in the small moments, and over time, the bigger instincts — the ones about which job, which relationship, which "no" to finally honor — get louder because you've finally started listening to the quiet ones.
