On Our Knees Is One of the Smartest Business Books of 2026
What Mama Gena’s On Our Knees teaches founders about surrender, identity, resilience, and knowing when success is no longer the right thing to keep carrying.
There was a moment during Regena Thomashauer’s book launch in Brooklyn when a woman who had spent 25 years in an unhappy marriage found herself on her knees in front of a room full of strangers.
She had just begun the process of divorce. She talked about betrayal, gaslighting, deceit, and the years she had spent convincing herself that things were fine.
Then she said something women say all the time.
“I think it’s going to be okay.”
Regena stopped her.
Not because she wanted the woman to suffer. Because “okay” was the language she had used for 25 years to survive something that was never okay in the first place.
Within minutes the woman was pounding cushions, crying, moving, raging, softening, laughing, and eventually saying that she felt more like herself.
It was messy. It was theatrical. It was deeply uncomfortable in places.
And it may have been one of the clearest demonstrations of what Regena Thomashauer’s new book is actually about.
This is not another reclamation story about becoming more powerful. It is about what happens when power is no longer enough.
This Was Not Really a Book Launch
The livestream from House of Yes in Brooklyn began with gratitude.
A lot of it.
Regena thanked the production crew, her streaming team, her editor Anne Barthel, PR adviser Mark Fortier, dancers, friends, Team Pleasure, her staff, the women who had supported the book, the people hosting watch parties, and the communities that had been with her for decades.
Then she announced a singing debut.
Because apparently when you have spent five years writing a book that required you to dismantle half of what you thought you knew about yourself, you are allowed to sing Lionel Richie in the middle of the launch if you bloody well want to.
That was the tone of the night.
There were dancers. Vulvas. Goddesses. Knee pads. Temper tantrums. Erotic movement. Audience participation. Women shouting from the floor. Women crying. Women being witnessed.
None of it looked remotely like the carefully moderated launch events publishing houses usually organise around a new title.
That was precisely why it worked.
Pussy Was the Reclamation. This Is What Comes Next.
Regena Thomashauer became famous for teaching women about pleasure, desire, embodiment and what she called pussy power.
Her earlier work, particularly Pussy: A Reclamation , was built around the idea that women had been separated from parts of themselves they were taught to distrust.
Desire. Pleasure. Sexuality. Instinct. The body.
The reclamation was radical because the culture had spent centuries telling women that these things were dangerous when women possessed them and useful when somebody else controlled them.
But there is a question sitting underneath every reclamation movement that eventually has to be answered.
What happens after you reclaim yourself?
What happens when you become successful?
What happens when the work you built around liberation becomes the thing you can no longer carry?
That is where On Our Knees begins.
And it is a considerably more complicated place.
The Most Interesting Part of the Evening Was Not the Sex
It would be very easy to watch this event, hear the language around pussies, goddesses and erotic surrender, and conclude that this was a slightly unhinged evening of feminine spirituality in Brooklyn.
That is the surface.
Underneath it was a founder talking openly about what happens when the creation that made you successful becomes unsustainable.
Regena read from the introduction to the new book and described the final years of Mastery, the programme she had built over decades.
From the outside, everything appeared to be working.
She had the audience. The platform. The books. The press. The television appearances. The community.
She had built a business around an idea that thousands of women had embraced.
And privately, she was exhausted.
She was not sleeping. Her daughter was struggling with an eating disorder. The very programme that had given Regena identity, meaning and a place where she felt most fully herself had reached the point where she knew she could no longer continue it.
That is where this becomes a business story.
Business Culture Is Very Good at Telling Us How to Keep Going
We have entire industries built around helping founders continue.
Scale it. Optimise it. Hire around it. Automate it. Rebrand it. Push through. Find another market. Create another offer. Get better systems. Build a stronger team. Raise the price. Extend the runway.
Most of those strategies are useful.
But business culture has far less to say about recognising when something has completed its purpose.
The assumption is usually that if something is successful, the intelligent move is to continue making it more successful.
That is not always true.
Sometimes the most important strategic decision a founder will ever make is ending something that still works.
That takes a very different kind of intelligence.
The Business World Has a Control Problem
Regena described reaching a point where she had to attempt the thing she said she was least skilled at.
Surrender.
The word makes business people nervous.
We like control. Forecasts. KPIs. Five-year plans. Dashboards. Processes. Risk management.
We create entire operating systems around reducing uncertainty.
And then life does something that does not appear on the dashboard.
A marriage ends. A child becomes ill. A partner leaves. A market collapses. Your health changes. The company you spent years building suddenly feels like someone else’s life.
Those events are usually filed under “personal.”
That distinction has always struck me as slightly absurd.
The Founder Is Part of the Operating System
This may be the most useful business argument inside On Our Knees.
We talk constantly about company infrastructure. Marketing infrastructure. Sales systems. Operational systems. Technology. People. Processes.
Very rarely do we treat the emotional and physical condition of the founder as part of that same infrastructure.
Instead, we assume the founder will absorb whatever the business requires.
Until she cannot.
Regena’s language is far more embodied than anything you are likely to encounter at an MBA seminar, but the underlying idea is remarkably practical.
The body gives information. Exhaustion gives information. Resentment gives information. Grief gives information. Desire gives information.
None of those automatically tells you what decision to make.
But ignoring them does not make the information disappear.
It simply means you are making decisions without reading all of the available data.
The Woman Who Was Missing From Her Own Marriage
That became visible in real time during the audience interaction.
One woman described living for decades in a marriage where she knew she was unhappy and stayed anyway.
Regena took her through a process that began with rage. A temper tantrum. Then tenderness. Then movement and erotic energy.
By the end, the woman described feeling more alive, more herself.
Regena looked at her and named what had been missing from the marriage.
That line followed me out of the event.
Because women disappear inside businesses too.
The company still exists. The clients are still happy. Invoices get paid. People praise what she built.
The founder quietly becomes an administrator of everybody else’s expectations.
That is not the same thing as leadership.
Sometimes it is disappearance with excellent branding.
The Underworld Is Not Failure
The mythology running through the launch was not decorative.
Regena talked repeatedly about the underworld.
Kali destroying what had finished. Demeter searching for Persephone. Freyja teaching the warrior.
The goddess, in Regena’s telling, does not prevent descent.
She helps women navigate it.
You do not have to accept the mythology literally to understand the model.
Every business has an underworld.
Eventually.
The product stops working. The partnership ends. The strategy becomes obsolete. The founder loses faith in the thing she once fought desperately to create.
Business culture tends to interpret those periods as deviations from success.
Regena interprets them as part of the cycle.
That is the more intelligent reading.
We Have Confused Resilience With Endurance
There is another business idea running quietly underneath this work.
Women have become extremely good at endurance.
We can make something work long after it has stopped working for us.
We accommodate. We adapt. We carry. We manage. We tell everyone we are fine. We tell ourselves we are fine.
Sometimes we are praised for precisely the behaviour that is hollowing us out.
That gets called resilience.
I am no longer convinced they are the same thing.
Resilience is the capacity to move through change and remain connected to yourself.
Endurance can be the capacity to tolerate your own disappearance.
Those produce very different lives.
And very different businesses.
This Is the Continuation of Reclamation
This is why On Our Knees feels less like a departure from Regena’s earlier work than the next stage of it.
The first reclamation was desire.
Women are allowed to want.
The next reclamation is harder.
Women are allowed to lose. Women are allowed to change. Women are allowed to discover that the thing they once desperately wanted is no longer the thing they want now.
Women are allowed to end something successful.
Women are allowed to fall apart without turning the experience into evidence that they failed.
That may sound obvious written down.
It is considerably less obvious when your identity, income and reputation are attached to the thing you need to release.
Why I Think This Is One of the Smartest Business Books of 2026
I suspect On Our Knees will be shelved nowhere near the traditional business section.
That may be a mistake.
Because most business books are written for the version of the founder who is still trying to gain control.
Regena has written for the founder who has discovered control is temporary.
That is a much more mature business problem.
How do you recognise when something is over?
How do you separate identity from the thing you created?
How do you make decisions when the numbers say continue and your life says stop?
How do you remain intact when a business, marriage, career or identity breaks apart?
How do you rebuild without rebuilding the exact same cage?
Those are strategy questions.
They are leadership questions.
They are succession questions.
They are questions about founder psychology, organisational design, personal authority and the ability to recognise reality before reality makes the decision for you.
Regena simply arrives at them from a place most business books refuse to enter.
The body.
There Is Something Very Smart About Getting on Your Knees
Toward the beginning of the event, Regena told the audience they were not going into the underworld to be rescued.
They were going there to be fed.
I wrote that down.
Because we are conditioned to treat breakdown as something we need to escape as quickly as possible.
Fix it. Recover. Get back on track. Become productive again.
What if the interruption contains information?
What if the collapse tells you something the success was too noisy to reveal?
What if the version of you that emerges afterwards is not interested in rebuilding the same thing?
That is not failure.
That is intelligence.
And perhaps that is the real continuation of reclamation.
First, women reclaimed desire.
Now comes the harder work.
Reclaiming ourselves when desire changes.
At House of Yes in Brooklyn, Regena Thomashauer launched a book by asking a room full of women to stop standing quite so hard.
Maybe business leaders should pay attention.
