My Story

Where it started

I wanted to be a boy.

Boys seemed to have the freedom. But after leaving home and going on my own perpetual rumspringa for a number of years, I realized that being a woman had its own distinct set of reasons to love it, too.

Then after getting married, and it not working with the natural harmony or rhythm that happened in my grandparents’ home, I realized Freedom wasn’t based on your gender.

Freedom was something people either learned how to build and protect, or slowly gave away.

Both my grandparents and my parents made it to fifty years of marriage. We are Pennsylvania Dutch.

Here’s how I learned to view viewpoints (men’s and women’s) before I had learned much more about life.

My grandmother would send me down to Grandpa’s woodshop to deliver messages to him. He’d then give me a message back to her. I loved the run back and forth — passing the humongous old pear tree, the chickens, and even the two-person outhouse along the way. You read that correctly. It was very practical in a ten-person family.

Little did I realize I was learning how two different ways of seeing can belong in the same structure. Turns out it is the structure of anything that lasts.

You’ll notice that my grandmother is the voice I hear when I write. Plain speech, tested against reality, said once. The barn out back, the garden rows, the quilts on every bed — none of it was decoration. All of it was a working answer to the question of how people build lives that are prepared for tough times while staying warm enough for everything to grow well.

I’m not here to teach women how to defeat men. I’m not here to teach men how to manage women. I’m here to ease the load for everyone by teaching what nobody taught us about building a life that works.

I still work a day job but want to share the PA Dutch Way of Living & Loving as much as I can because I’m proud of where I came from. We’re tried and true.

Where I come from

Pennsylvania Dutch, plain and simple

I’m Pennsylvania Dutch through and through. You just read where I was raised and how — the woodshop, the garden rows, the quilts. That home is the blueprint for everything I teach.

We didn’t use fancy words for any of it. You did your part, your neighbor did theirs, and the work got done. Nobody dressed it up. That plainness never left me — it’s still how I teach.

Out of my comfort zone

My ultimate rumspringa

In 2001 I walked into a class I had no business being in — the Art of Exotic Dancing. I had never danced a step in my life. That was exactly why I went: it was as far out of my comfort zone as I could get.

One class and my life was changed. I was coming out of my shell — more confident as a woman, more comfortable with myself in every area of my life, not just one. So I kept going, and then I did the thing that changed everything: I went from student to instructor. CNN came and filmed it. The clip still lives on my YouTube channel.

Let me say plainly what those cameras saw for themselves: nothing sexual happened in that class. Sexy shoes, feather boas, walking, eye contact. Even the eye contact was early training for what I teach now — project your intentions, then check how the other person is receiving them. And what the women took home lit their hearths. It turned out to be the most hearth-building thing I ever taught — for couples, not for networks.

Several people have told me to change something about who I am, or how I present myself, because of this story. Nope. I can’t and I won’t. I know who I am. I like who I am. And that is a feeling I want others to experience too.

A rumspringa is supposed to end at a door. Mine did. The Perpetual Rumspringa is the problem with America today.

What Grandma knew

“You go to the corner and squat.”

That was my grandmother’s whole teaching on giving birth. PA Dutch knowledge, eight words long. And it holds up: squatting opens the pelvis wider than lying down ever could, and gravity helps the baby travel. And you faced the corner — leaned into it, braced on it — so that when the rest of you felt like you were in it alone, the structure itself was supporting you. Quite literally. Out in the fields, it was a tree at the edge of the field. Get somewhere safe. Get low. Let the structure hold you, and let the body do what it knows.

Now look back at that dance class: stationary hip rolls, squatting hip rolls, kneeling hip rolls, floor work. For over twenty years I never truly knew why those movements reached women so deep. I was teaching the oldest female knowledge there is — the same postures my grandmother prescribed for the hardest, most creative work a body ever does. The nightclub didn’t invent them. Nature did.

The women in the circle weren’t learning to perform. Their bodies were remembering.

What I kept noticing

Same story, circle after circle

Every class began in a circle, before anybody moved. The women talked. And woman after woman, I heard the same story in a different scenario.

A mother of four, married sixteen years, said a part of her had gotten lost in the shuffle — the wife and the mom stayed, and the rest of her got pushed to the background. Another had been told by her friends that it was time to start being old, and she was not ready. Another had spent most of her adult life feeling clumsy and unsensual — scared, and trying anyway. And one woman came straight out of breast cancer surgery and chemotherapy to reconnect with the creative force in her, in a room of women who had her back.

Not one of them came for anything titillating. They came for joy. And underneath every story was the same longing: a woman who wanted to feel safe and seen while being treated fairly and with a sense of freedom in every day.

People carry loads in the wrong place every day. Not because they’re weak — healthy people carry plenty. Healthy people carry weight; they just don’t become it. The trouble was whose weight was being tended.

Weight in the right place turns into strength. Weight in the wrong place turns into a burden. Heavy isn’t bad. Misplaced is.

So I stopped asking “Whose fault was it?” and started asking “Why was I being judgmental to begin with?”

Judgment in the right place is discernment. And discernment runs in one sequence: inner, inner, outer. First you look inward at what you are feeling. Then you look inward again at what you are thinking about what you are feeling. Then, and only then, can you look outward. Look outward first, and judgment turns into criticism. Correction isn’t bad. Criticism is.

And criticism will always find its way back home. You can blame other people for a while. You can do all you can to try to prove them wrong. The scenario only goes on and on until someone stops the cycle. If you’re carrying blame or shame for someone else, neither of you is healthy.

That’s what a lived boundary is really for. It doesn’t cut people out. It marks where your work ends and someone else’s begins. And when something’s broken, you don’t rebuild the roof while the foundation’s failing. You find the first beam that is bending under pressure, and you set that right first.

Life is built with an architecture that is load-bearing when everything is used for its intended use. When done the PA Dutch way, life gets lighter. That’s not magic. That’s just good building (and baby making).

What it became

The Twelve Perfected Boundaries

Over time this grew into what I teach now. It’s built out of verbs, not adjectives or nouns (roles). Most advice tells you what kind of person to be — confident, resilient, empowered. Mine asks what to do next:

What are you carrying? Where does it belong? Who should carry it? What returns? What corresponds? What moves?

A body can act on a verb. It can’t act on an adjective. And a noun traps you in one spot. That’s the whole difference, and it’s why the work sticks.

The two words that hold it up

Congruence and concordance

You can become congruent by yourself. You cannot become concordant by yourself — that only begins when two congruent people meet. The first eleven boundaries prepare the person. The twelfth is about how weight moves between people without turning into a burden.

What I’m building

Femme Essence, and the books

Femme Essence Inc. is the home for all of it — the teaching, the books, the work. The name reaches back to those movement classes: helping women find their femme essence. The books are on the shelf at the homestead: The Twelve Perfected Boundaries, the Workbook, the Field Guide, and Revelation — a bedside book for women. And when somebody wants it told straight, there’s The Talk.

It all points the same direction: help people carry their own weight, in the right place, so a home — a marriage, a business, a life — can actually hold.

What I stand for

Keep the plain things plain

I’ll say straight out what I’m for. Stop trading freedom for convenience. Hold one another with care and an unwavering standard, through every season — because the seasons always change. And keep the plain things plain: daylight, fresh air, and clean water, for everyone, at every stage of life.

The last teaching is Grandpa Leitzel’s: “It’s better to feel the shame than the pain.” He usually said it as he lifted one leg, let a big ol’ fart loose, and walked away — always outside, in broad daylight. It still makes me giggle like the little girl who followed her grandfather’s every footstep wearing her paw-paw boots.

That line — and “We’ll see,” and “Nothing has gone wrong here,” and all the other kitchen sentences that raised me — now live in one place, in broad daylight, with pride: Leitzel’s Lines →

— Tammy