Throwing Thunder: Awakening the Forces of Nature Within Every Woman

Do You Remember Your Wildness?

Thunder does not always speak in bone-shaking, cloth-tearing, cracking, clashing cannon bursts. Her language is not always a purring, growling, shivering reverberation, leaving us expectant. She is unpredictable, moving in her own time, at her own rhythm, a roaming changeling within a crush of cloudscapes with teachings to share if we will only listen.

The presence of Thunder is a shock, a wake-up call of electrical ferocity, shaking something loose in us. As her feral energy echoes through our hollows, it excites a primal longing within us. We know we have the capacity to feel this vibrant, this free, this confident.

Charged with introspective questions and journaling prompts, Throwing Thunder is an immersive journey into the heart of our confidence challenges, awakening the memory that unworthiness does not exist in the matrix of the living earth. An earth-based model of confidence reminds us of our innate enoughness, which exists despite our fears, flaws, and insecurities and the ways we try to separate ourselves from the wholeness of our being.

Kendra Ward, L.Ac., MAOM, is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and herbalist. From 2003 to 2020, she co-owned the Whole Family Wellness Center in Portland, Oregon, immersing herself in a busy private practice with over 25,000 patient visits. Kendra's primary teachers are not the long-dead figures of history or dogma, but the land where she lives, her lifelong meditation and spiritual practices, and the complex, honest, radiant human beings she has been fortunate to hold space for in her healing practice. Kendra now lives with her family in western Vermont, which is the unceded territory of the Abenaki peoples. When she is not in the clinic or writing, you can find her conversing with the many barred owls in the forests near her home. Throwing Thunder is her first book.