Hello, I’m Linda Kaun

Here’s My Story

1973 ~ My first semester of Social Work Graduate School

I was so excited to sit in class with other students from around the country … all there to help make the world a better place.

I worked hard to put myself through college and follow my dream of being a social worker, moving half-way across America from Los Angeles to the University of Kentucky.

An innocent choice of topic for a class paper turned my world inside out and upside down.

I wanted to know if 3-to-5-year-old girls and boys in daycare centers already had a sense of identity as a boy or a girl. And what role did daycare center teachers and administrators play in passing on this identity? Was anatomy destiny? Or did the training shape the child?

Up to then, the women’s movement held no interest for me. I thought I was choosing my life’s work freely.

I was shocked to see how wrong I was!

From psychology and history … to studies about which toys we give and what stories we read to girls and boys …I was obsessed, researching, reading books and articles … long before the internet … till 2 or 3 in the morning.

The weight of history and abuse … all the stories of keeping women down … buried me under thousands of years of pain and sorrow. I was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe.

I thought I was doing what I wanted. But I’d been Duped!

Turns out girls and boys are channeled into socialized acceptable roles from pre-birth.

And yes, many things have changed since 1973. Then, a woman couldn’t have a credit card in her own name or get a bank loan without a male co-signer. Now, women work in a broad range of occupations they had little access to at that time… dentist, pilot, lawyer, bus driver, electrician. Men challenged their roles as well, stepping up to create more balanced relationships with their partners. I could give many more examples.

Yet, we just have to turn on the news to see that much remains the same. The outpouring of both anger at current events, and a positive impetus for change, sent millions of women and men to the streets in protest all over the world the past two Januarys.

That paper I wrote in 1973 was the seed of my deep connection to the women’s movement that continues to this day. I’ve supported women’s empowerment through art, culture and women’s spirituality for 45 years. Our women’s ritual circle in Los Angeles is still going 34 years later and I join whenever I’m in town.

It’s also the thread that now pulls me into a new understanding of my own feminine and masculine energies operating in my psyche.

But before I get to that part…

Fast Forward to 2005

The Turning Point

It All Started With a Fall

Literally. I jerked my head back to keep from smashing my face into the sidewalk. Healing the resulting pinched disc in my neck opened the door to a whole new world.

I’d long since left the social work field to be a self-taught, international batik textile artist. Over a 30-year career that I loved, I traveled, exhibited my work, taught, wrote and lectured around the world. I couldn’t work with the neck brace on and, besides, I was ready for a change.

A year after the fall, I nervously hung up my shingle as a fledgling copywriter. Promises of a 6-figure income rolling into my bank account, while I sat on the beach with my laptop, danced in my head.

It didn’t take long to see that I wanted to write for my own business, not someone else’s. I had no idea what that was, but for sure it was more than writing copy to sell furniture, which is what I ended up doing for several years.

Yet I couldn’t take the plunge. I was dumbfounded. I’d been an entrepreneur most of my life. How hard could this be?

Out of nowhere all these fears and insecurities boiled up to the surface when I tried to sell my services. “I’m just not good enough yet. They’ll see I’m a fraud and don’t know anything. I can’t charge that much to write a sales letter!” On and on the voices in my head put me down … and I believed them.

I immersed myself in a self-help extravaganza. I felt driven. I read books and took courses, studying with different online coaches and mentors. I jammed my brain with information on how to recognize and then overcome my limiting beliefs, rewrite my life stories, and reclaim my power. But I wasn’t doing anything!

I was hoping for a magic bullet … waiting for the clouds to part, the trumpets to blare and a booming voice telling me what to do.

Turns out, I was just saying the words but not living them.

You know, we can read all the books and take all the classes, but nothing really changes until we get it in our body and take action in the world.

So, why is there such a disconnect between what we say we want, and what we do? Inner Conflict

This inner conflict casts doubt in our mind and keeps us stuck in perfectionism and procrastination. It’s the source of our restlessness, as we feel our potential inside, yet we’re unable to call it forth.

It keeps us spinning our wheels and hoping that one more book from Amazon will deliver the answer on a silver platter.

We try so hard to figure it all out in our head because this internal conflict prevents us from tapping into the wisdom and guidance of our body so we can take inspired actions.

Making Peace Within

Thankfully, we also have the power to reconcile this inner conflict and create a profound transformation within ourselves.

Everything changed when I learned the Inner Dialogue process to speak with different parts of myself. Understanding that we all have many parts or sub-personalities living inside us was strange and amazing at first.

The dialogues unfolded organically over a few months. In the end, I spoke with my Judge, Procrastinator, Perfectionist, the Serious One, my Stockpiler, Time Manager and Skeptic.

I asked each one to tell me how they saw their job in my psyche and if they were ready for a new one. They also told me if they were male or female and talked about their concerns for me.

I discovered all of these parts are only doing what they think is their best to protect us. And we can let them know we’re now in charge.

These internal conversations were a deeply moving, profound experience that brought a new level of self-love, acceptance, and integration of who I am. The reconciliation meant I began to make peace within myself by listening to and honoring the concerns of these parts that I’d viewed as saboteurs.

I invited the experience into my body, took my foot off the breaks, and created a major art exhibition called The Power of You.

My powerful seven Wise Council dolls expressed the transformation of the different parts into their new role.

Using the actual inner dialogues as text and inspiration, I created art journals, openly sharing the intimate parts of my soul with the public. And touching many people’s lives in the process.

Beth, My Explorer, transformed from My Perfectionist, invites you to see The Power of You exhibition here. And read Stop or Go, one of the art journals here.

While I worked on the exhibition, I kept wishing I could use art as a tool for personal development, rather than simply a painting for someone to buy and hang on their wall.

Discovering the ARTbundance™ coaching process felt divinely guided.

I now offer a method to use art, words and embodied spirit to get underneath the radar of your thinking mind and bring the different parts of you into greater alignment.

Under the Surface

Diving Deeper

While I was excited to embrace my calling to lead through my new coaching services, something was still missing. I wasn’t putting my message out there. I toyed with a million ideas but wasn’t able to land on one. I tried to create 6 different programs at the same time and nothing came to fruition.

I was flooded with creativity but lacked the make things happen energy to turn ideas into reality.

I realized that stepping up as a leader in this conscious awakening movement meant I needed to finally come to terms with my complicated relationship with power and leadership.

I had to face this irrational fear running in me that if I had power, I would abuse it and destroy everything.

Over the years, several different psychics told me that indeed, in a past life I was a powerful male tyrant who’d lost his way, shattering many, many lives. By the time I woke up to what I’d done, it was too late.

My solution to first hearing this in my twenties? Hide out. Play small. Pretend I had no power so I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I struggled with invisibility my whole life. Rarely standing up and being seen. Even though growing up I often heard that I was a leader who could be anything I wanted to be. Talk about inner conflict!

Coming Full Circle

Meeting My Sacred Masculine

This internal conflict around my fear of power was the undercurrent that drove all the fears that had been holding me back.

Whether it’s my fear of not being good enough, fear of being judged, lack of self-confidence, or low self-esteem – they can all be traced back to my unconscious fear of power.

Over all these years, I thought my focus on my feminine intuition and female power was enough.

I had no idea the feminine side of me was in constant battle regarding leadership and power with my masculine side.

It wasn’t until I saw it for myself during an energy Movement Diagnostic session with Dr. Karl Wolfe. The right (female) and left (male) sides of my body were not communicating with each other at all. True, my feminine intuition was highly developed. But it was dominated by an overactive defensive male side.

I learned I needed to welcome back the Sacred Masculine qualities into my psyche to be in true partnership with my Sacred Feminine.

She was never meant to stand alone.

They work together as two polarities of the whole.

He is there to support, protect and serve my feminine creativity, power and leadership. A far cry from the defensive or shadow male sides of me.

He acts as both the bridge for my creative ideas and the one who carries them across the bridge to the outside world. He provides the container for my feminine qualities to move out of. Without his energy, I spin around and around going nowhere.

I truly believe that for us conscious women leaders, the underlying fear driving all the rest is our fear of power.

It’s time to Make Peace With Power and that means making peace with both the feminine and masculine energies that are already inside us.

Until then, we’ll continue waging an unconscious war within and project that war outward.

Unity consciousness begins inside us. When our energies are aligned internally, we can truly be the powerful, creative leaders we came here to be … in wholeness, peace, love and compassion.

If it’s time for you to be the leader you know you came here to be…
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