A soft swell of music, a spoken invitation to "rest a while," and then a voice addressing half the world at once. That is the opening of "Live Awake: A Letter to the Women of This World," a roughly six-and-a-half-minute video Sarah Blondin published on November 2, 2015, as an installment of her Live Awake series. It is not a lecture and it is not a how-to in the usual sense. It is a single, unhurried letter built on one reversal: the qualities women have been taught to apologize for, including tears, tenderness, and the wish to feel everything, are described here as the very instruments of their strength. Blondin moves from an attack on the cult of appearance, through a list of gifts she says were present at birth, to a closing practice in which a grown woman goes back to the girl she once was and offers her a hand.
The first move is a refusal. Blondin asks her listeners to look past "the image of external beauty you so diligently work to tend," and past "the idea that your appearance is equated with your worth." The phrasing matters. She does not say beauty is bad or that women should stop caring how they look. She says something smaller and more radical: that there is a "tremendous depth" beneath the appearance question, and that the depth is where the real value sits.
The image she offers in its place is wildness rather than polish. She speaks of "something far more wondrously wild and uniquely yours," a "beauty of no standard," meaning the raw and unfettered self. For a listener who has spent years calibrating herself against a mirror, that is an instruction to stop measuring and start inhabiting.
Notice the sequence, because the letter is built like a set list. The video opens on appearance (around the 0:51 mark), then turns to softness and healing, and only then arrives at the heart of the argument. The order is deliberate: you cannot hear the claim about inner power until the claim about outer worth has been put down.
This is the spine of the piece. At around 1:49, Blondin tells her listeners that their "gifts of feeling empathy and love are not weaknesses to sever yourself from." She names the usual responses directly: they are "not something to run from to feel ashamed or to stifle." Then she gives the reframing its sharpest form: "so much of being woman means to be fierce feelers."
The word "fierce" is doing a lot of work. Feeling, in this account, is not passive absorption. It is a faculty with force, the same way a fierce predator or a fierce storm is not gentle. She goes further, placing the capacity to "feel and touch and nurture the life that is both conceived in your womb and swimming around you" inside the same frame, linking the emotional and the bodily without apology.
Then comes the claim that reorganizes the rest. Around 2:50, she says the sensitivities "were meant to be used for greatness to feed and nurture the world into proper order." The softness, she adds, "was meant to be taught shared showered." Here is the practical implication: a trait is only a weakness if you have no use for it. Blondin's argument is that the use is already built in.
"Dear women of this world let me remind you of the ocean of strength that lives within you." (Sarah Blondin, Live Awake, 2015)
That "ocean" recurs throughout the letter, and it is worth pausing on. An ocean is not a single wave. It is volume, depth, and a pull that moves other things. Blondin's image asks the listener to think of her emotional life not as a fragile surface to protect but as a body of water large enough to carry others.
The most striking passage is a sequence of "before" clauses, delivered at about 4:02. Blondin wants her listeners to remember "the vastness of your being before we got lost in the small box of what we've been taught as woman." Then the list begins: before "we were told to stop crying so often," before "we were taught to toughen our skins," before "we were taught to be hard," before "we were distracted into thinking the roundness of our eyes and the plumpness of our lips somehow held value and importance."
The grammar is an argument in itself. Each clause names a small injury, a moment when a girl learned to edit herself. Stacked together, they become a timeline of loss rather than a single grievance. The final "before" is the most important: "before we forgot that we are the portals of life for great reason that we have throughout history been the soft Earth in which all life grows."
She closes that sequence with a question, not a verdict: "at what point did we get so lost to the value and importance of these very things?" It is a question meant to be answered privately by each listener, which is why the video keeps returning to the individual body and the individual memory rather than to politics or society in the abstract.
Blondin also insists these inclinations are not finished. They are "humming in your background," she says, and they "require your attention and nurturing." The implication is that they have not disappeared; they have gone quiet, and quiet can be tended back to volume.
The letter's final movement is the practice. At around 5:05, Blondin names the condition she is addressing: if you feel "lost, disconnected from Source, alienated from yourself," the remedy is to "Journey back into your wildness." Her instructions are physical and simple: "sit with yourself, place your feet bare against the Earth, breathe back into the little girl you once were."
Who is that girl? Blondin describes her in three moves. She is the child who "led with her heart," who "felt all the joy in the world and all the pain too." She is also the child who "became afraid of all her abilities to see and feel so much," and who "decided it was safer to close than to open." And she is the child who "listened to the people around her criticizing her sensitivities, calling her too soft."
The return is not an act of pure nostalgia. Blondin asks the adult to travel back "and offer your hand now from your place of mother or woman or lover," and to "show her the way back into her most fulfilling form into her place as the divine feminine." The adult woman, with all the experience she has accumulated, becomes the one who can give the child the permission she never received.
"Your sensitivities were meant to be used for greatness." (Sarah Blondin, Live Awake, 2015)
That line, from the middle of the letter, is the one to keep. It holds the whole argument in a sentence: the trait that was criticized is the trait that was designed for use.
The video runs about six and a half minutes, and it rewards slow listening. If you want to work with it rather than just hear it, try three things. First, notice which of the "before we were taught" clauses lands hardest for you; that is probably where the small box is tightest. Second, try the bare-feet practice Blondin describes, sitting with yourself and breathing toward the girl who felt everything. Third, write down one trait you were told was too much, and one sentence describing what it could be used for. Blondin's letter does not claim these answers are simple. It claims they were always yours.
For the full letter, watch Sarah Blondin's "Live Awake: A Letter to the Women of This World," published November 2, 2015.
