Tickets are now on sale for the Oct. 18 appearance by Regena Thomashauer.
Regena Thomashauer - motivational speaker Mama Gena Regena Thomashauer has dedicated her life to the discipline of pleasure and fun.
But it’s about more than laughing with friends and buying pretty clothes; it’s about finding what brings women joy so they can live healthier, happier lives.
“You know that old saying: ‘When the Mama’s happy, everybody’s happy,” said the 1978 graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts. “There is no way to make the Mama happy if she doesn’t know how to make herself happy.”
Thomashauer’s unique six-month Womanly Arts Mastery Program has helped thousands of women realize the power of pleasure and discover their dreams.
As “Mama Gena,” she will be doling out advice on how to maximize personal power, passion, enthusiasm and creativity when she takes the stage at CityStage for a night of interactive fun and pleasure on Thursday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m.
She is a frequent guest on NBC-TV’s Today show and has appeared on 20/20, The Rachael Ray Show, Lifetime Live and The Other Half and has been interviewed on numerous national and regional broadcasts including NPR’s The Next Big Thing. She also has hosted Starz Encore’s Love Stories channel.
A native of Philadelphia who now lives in New York City, Thomashauer—mother of one daughter—is an enthusiastic and unabashed proponent of women taking heed of what gives them pleasure. “Being selfish is the most generous thing you can be in your life,” she said in a telephone interview.
She wonders why women’s internal light gets dimmer rather than brighter as they grow older, and she seeks to help women learn how they can be responsible for their own inner glow.
“If women would give up being ‘nice’ and toss in a huge dose of truth, everything would change,” she said. “Actually, truth is way more nice than ignorance. When a woman risks her truth, the world around her recalibrates and everything is elevated.”
“Nice” never elevates, never educates, she added. “Women have been taught to dumb down rather than true up.”
Inserting pleasure into one’s life creates better health while a lack of pleasure allows stress and related consequences like depression, irritability, sadness, loneliness and anger, Thomashauer said. That’s when women reach for anti-depressants, junk food, caffeine and alcohol, leading them to health risks like diabetes and heart disease.
The trick is to find what is a pleasure. For some it is reading a Shakespeare sonnet, walking a dog on a beach, sleeping under the stars, taking a hot bath or stamp collecting. “Women have not been taught to guarantee their joy,” she said. Rather, they have been taught to care for others.
She wants to inspire women to find what gives them pleasure and to pursue it. To do that, they must “pay attention to what lights them up,” she said, rather than following what other people think they should do.
Her Springfield presentation is for all women, like those who want a “little push into the experience of living their beauty, living their power, living their brilliance” and those who want to jump start things like dating, a relationship or career.
Tickets are $48; VIP tickets are $75 and include front row seats, a champagne reception with Mama Gena before the show (limited to 30 women) and a copy of her book, “Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts: Using the Power of Pleasure to Have Your Way With the World.”
For tickets, call the Box Of?ce at (413) 788-7033 or go online to citystage.symphonyhall.com or ticketmaster.com
For more about Mama Gena go to www.mamagenas.com.