Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
A Radical Awakening summary
Shefali Tsabary
Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free
15 mins
Brief summary
A Radical Awakening by Shefali Tsabary is a transformative guide that helps women awaken their feminine power and embrace their true selves through mindfulness, self-inquiry, and self-expression.
Table of Contents
A Radical Awakening
Summary of 4 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 4
The patriarchy
Shefali was born in India. She grew up in a culture steeped in tradition and patriarchy. The patriarchal tentacle that snared young Shefali was India’s infatuation with light-colored skin and eyes. Shefali had both, which meant she became the object of excessive and unwanted attention.
By age six, Shefali wanted to be a ninja so she could keep herself safe from men. The plan didn’t work. By age twelve, she had been groped by dozens of strangers, and molested by two male relatives.
She would tie her bed covers above her head and below her feet, as if she were a sausage, to keep away one of the molesting relatives when he spent the night at her childhood home. But he just undid the knots. Kicking him in the privates didn’t work either, and neither did threatening to tell her mother. He knew Shefali’s tender and generous nature. He guessed she would rather suffer abuse than burden her parents with a problem. And he was right.
Patriarchy and its toxic masculinity, which has scarred women and men across the globe for centuries, also infected Shefali’s young life in less overt ways than sexual assault. She has an early memory of her grandmother absently tying knots in her sari, haphazardly fixing her hair, and then explaining she didn’t need to worry about being beautiful since her husband was dead. This felt wrong to young Shefali, but her grandmother seemed to believe it, so Shefali didn’t question her.
Shefali’s grandmother had been conditioned to see her value only in relation to another person. This is one of the defining characteristics of the patriarchy. Most women aren’t aware of it, but they have been trained from girlhood to crave approval, validation, and praise. Not only do many women all over the world look to some external other for their sense of worth, they also place the needs of others over their own.
The patriarchy conditions people, especially women, to assume predetermined roles – subservient wife, obedient daughter, silent victim – or it scares them into false roles, like Shefali’s ninja, and prevents them from discovering their true nature on their own. Yes, many women are nurturing and generous by nature. But when those instincts are co-opted and abused, they stop being a reflection of the true self.
Institutions like religions and cultural traditions also prevent us from discovering our true natures. Like the patriarchy, these institutions want individuals to seek their identity through something external – church, marriage, an educational legacy, and so on – rather than internal. Your relationship with religion, or your marriage, may be healthy – but it probably isn’t if those institutions are your only source of self-worth.
Subjugation by the patriarchy and conditioning from its institutions leave us so desperate to be seen, and push us so far away from our true self, that we assume a false identity to get the attention we crave. That identity is the Ego, and it takes many shapes.
Want to see all full key ideas from A Radical Awakening?
Key ideas in A Radical Awakening
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is A Radical Awakening about?
A Radical Awakening (2021) shows you how to heal by connecting to your authentic self – the person you were meant to be before society’s lies and conditioning morphed you into something else. It speaks from a woman’s point of view, but it doesn’t exclude men. Instead, it seeks to lift everyone from the pain of their past and into a higher consciousness.
Who should read A Radical Awakening?
- Anyone who wants to heal from their past
- Women who’d like to discover their inner power
- People who feel subjugated by society
Categories with A Radical Awakening
Book summaries like A Radical Awakening
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked these summaries
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
28 Million
Downloads on all platforms
10+ years
Experience igniting personal growth