Deanna Deacon’s passion for helping others inspired her to write her new book, Feminine Warrior.
An intuitive life coach in 100 Mile House, Deacon works with clients for a period from anywhere between three to 12 months to examine all the ways they’re subtly sabotaging their happiness and joy. This includes looking into their career, health, well-being, relationships, sense of happiness and all other aspects of self and life.
Watching women, whom she primarily works with, go from being insecure and lacking confidence to being embodied in what she calls “the feminine warrior archetype” and an empowered woman, is very fulfilling, Deacon said.
“I always had an interest (in life coaching) but I never knew if it would be a good path to take because who is going to hire a life coach?” said Deacon, who settled here with her husband Luke Green six years ago and is also a yoga teacher and Reiki energy healer. “Moving here to 100 Mile gave me space, gave me time to actually start exploring it more. I started as a holistic health coach, talking about nutrition and body, and it moved into more spiritual expansion, well-being and joy.”
Deacon harnessed that passion for Feminine Warrior, which was released on Nov. 9. The core of the book revolves around what she does as a life coach, which mainly centres around balancing a woman’s masculine and feminine energy, as she feels that too often in society both women and men embrace their masculine energy more.
“Feminine Warrior is an invitation for women to come home to themselves. There have been decades and centuries of women suppressing their own feminine gifts; their intuition, their wisdom, their joy, their sense of laughter, dance and play in order to achieve success as our society deems it,” Deacon said. “So Feminine Warrior is about identifying those ways that we’re sabotaging ourselves based on external validation, belief systems from our parents and then coming into what makes you happy. What lights you up from the inside out?”
The book follows many of the same beats as Deacon’s life-coach work, with the first few chapters focused on how people sabotage themselves when looking for happiness. A lot of this comes down to what she calls the masculine tendency of feeling a need to accomplish everything in life right now and always looking outward for validation rather than inwards.
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After these opening chapters, the book moves into embodying what it means to be a goddess with matriarchal or queen energy, which Deacon said is all about being the woman you’re destined to be within. This doesn’t mean changing your life so much as changing your internal dialogue and expectations for yourself.
“You just don’t give a s*** anymore. You let go of all the pressure coming outside of you and you find your joy, your bliss and peace from within,” Deacon said.
The book then focuses on uncovering your “soulful responsibility” which explores how the reader can now serve others, whether it’s within their family, community or global landscape. The final section focuses on tangible activities one can do to improve their health through journaling, meditation, breathwork and mirror gazing and other practices based around her four pillars: personal mastery, emotional resiliency, mental clarity and spiritual awakening.
“It comes from many years of my own independent spiritual and holistic studies. There are some stories in there of clients I’ve worked with, my own personal vulnerable stories, it’s really sacred to me,” Deacon said.
At around 300-plus pages and 50,000 words, Feminine Warrior is Deacon’s first book, although her dad insists he still has the book she wrote for him when she was in Grade 1, about “all the ways I love my dad.” As she lost her mother at 19, Deacon said he’s hugely supportive of her work and her loss is a big catalyst for what she does today.
She began writing the book in fall 2019 but didn’t get serious about it until this past February. She mentions in the book how, during the lockdown, she was stuck at home every day in 108 Mile Ranch and went to a “pretty dark place” before putting pen to paper.
Writing it was a very healing process, Deacon said, as there were times she just felt like she was channelling energy and letting it flow through her onto the page, rather than just writing down her own ideas and thoughts. The inspiration to write would even wake her in the middle of the night at times.
“It felt like this book was meant to happen and I’m grateful that I’ve been able to cultivate a life where I have the time, space and the finances to support myself to do so,” Deacon said.
Deacon intends to continue to write in the future and said she has a “big bold dream” of getting sent to Paris to write a book one day. For now, though, she’s just enjoying the feeling of releasing this book before moving on to her next project.
The book is currently available online via Amazon.ca or deannadeacon.com/feminewarrior and will soon be available at Nuthatch Books on Birch Avenue.
