Mama Gena on Depression: A Wake-Up Call

Welcome. This is Donna Otmani, live from the Pleasure Palace, headquarters of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts. I’m sitting here today with Mama Gena, continuing our series of interviews on the Case for Pleasure. Today’s topic is depression.

Donna: So, Mama, what is your viewpoint on depression, and how does the School of Womanly Arts address it?

Mama Gena: Well, I don’t think there’s a woman alive who has not experienced depression at some point in her life. It’s epidemic in this culture—it’s epidemic in this country, and it’s epidemic in the world today.

I think depression is a key and it’s a window, an opportunity. When a woman is depressed it means that there is something in her life that is not up to her standards and she is unhappy about it. And the tendency is for a woman to feel as if she’s wrong for being unhappy or that something’s the matter with her if she’s not feeling good about her life or the way things are or the cards she’s been dealt.

I think it’s very, very, very key for a woman to begin to start taking her depression seriously in the sense that it’s a wake-up call. It’s time to look around and say, “Oooh, something’s not working!” and she has an urgency to locate what that is. It’s like depression is that first alarm that goes off in the morning, and then you press the snooze and then you press the snooze again, and then you press the snooze again. Because you just don’t want to get up and go, you don’t want to deal with it—you don’t want to wake up.

My goal is to have a woman wake up and say “Okay, you and me, you know, me and you, myself and I . . .” (laughing) “It’s time for us to have a good long talk with ourselves and let’s look around and see what doesn’t feel right.” And then she can make a promise to herself that she’s going to take it on.

So then the big question becomes: How do you take it on? And one of the designs of the program here at the School of Womanly Arts is to provide a community for a woman to receive the kind of support, inspiration, encouragement and infusion of enthusiasm and joy that will permit her to regard every aspect of her life with a sense of objectivity—enough so that she can begin to facilitate change.

For example, there was a woman just last weekend in class who, for fourteen years, had been married to a man who she had no chemistry with. There was no fire, no turn-on and it was seeping the energy from every part of her life, because every time she came home she was faced with a partner that she didn’t feel thrilled with. And it pressured her with her own doubts about herself and her decisions and drew away her life force from every aspect of her life.

This is a really good example because when there is something in your life that’s making you unhappy it’s like a slow leak in a tire. Until you find what the leak is, you can’t really get the tire all filled and fat and ready to roll you down the highway toward your desires because you’re limping along, losing steam, losing energy.

So what happened for her was, within the context of the course and the support of the Sister Goddess community, she was able to begin the art of learning, step-by-step—baby steps—how to love herself, how to really cherish herself, how to prioritize herself and how to consider her desires as being primary and important.

For example, at the end of a long day, make the decision that before you start to throw yourself into preparing dinner for your household, doing the bills or taking care of the kids, you’ll give yourself ten minutes to light some candles, put on some music, have a bath, read your favorite book, have a little glass of wine or a Pellegrino—something where you are taking a teeny tiny moment to start to put some attention and some love and some energy towards yourself.

I promise you, your husband will revive, your kids will revive, the work will wait and you will begin to restore the juice, the fire, the deliciousness of your sense of yourself as a woman. A tiny thing that takes about five or ten minutes is huge.

And so what this woman in the fourteen-year marriage began to do was to work with little building blocks of learning how to love herself, learning how to take pleasure for herself. In class we do these dance breaks all the time, so she had the CD at home and she would play that when she was feeling a little off-kilter, and she would continue to revive and enjoy herself.

She began to celebrate her body, enjoy her body. She began to have a thought that maybe she could share her enjoyment of her body with her husband (ultimately—this was about a month into class). And, indeed, the consequence of doing that led to them igniting more fire and more chemistry between them than they had ever experienced.

So there are many things that a woman can do—that’s one woman’s story, one woman’s journey. But there are many steps that always boil down to little incremental additions of pleasure, because it is the nutritional requirement of a woman to receive infusions of pleasure in her daily life, as a way to keep her balanced. It’s like a missing trace element, a missing vitamin, a missing mineral. You can’t maintain a quality of health where you don’t have all the nutrients. And pleasure, which is the key to everything, is an ingredient that we are not taught about in this culture.

By the way, you’re not going to feel like doing this if you’re really depressed, and that’s precisely the moment when that little, tiny baby step is the most important.

In fact you’re going to have this feeling almost like you’re looking through a smoky piece of glass, like everyone in the world is doing alright but you just can’t quite reach alright, and that’s the moment where you just take one little tiny step. It might be just reaching for a lip gloss and putting a little bit on your lips, because you can’t manage a whole bath right yet. And then maybe it’s making just the perfect cup of coffee for yourself, or taking yourself to a local coffee shop that you love and having them make the cappuccino just your way.

The little tiny step without any expectation of outcome is the key and it will begin to take you higher than you could possibly imagine, just by taking the most infinitesimal step.

You in? Good.

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