A note from Erin:
Hi beautiful human,
Thanks so much for taking the time to open this newsletter.
Carl and I are heading into a potent 4-day grief ritual with our dear friends and cohosts Alexandre Jodun and Alyona Kobevka, who arrived a few days ago from Peru, and we’re looking forward to being with a wonderful group of people gathering from near and far on the sacred ground of grief. As Martín Prechtel says, “All war is unmetabolized grief.” We do this metabolizing, sacred work on behalf of all life, past, present, and future. If you’re so inclined, feel free to reply to this email to share a thread of grief you’re carrying, and I’ll be honored to bring it into our ritual space over the next several days. May the healing ripples of this ritual weekend make their way to you and yours.
Carl and I aim to share inspiring, soulful, and useful content with you in these newsletters. For the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing writings and reflections as I lead up to the start of my Women Embodied group in late September. This will likely be the final year I offer this beautiful circle. If you’d like to stay on our mailing list but don’t want to hear about this upcoming offering, no problem. Just click here.
In Women Embodied so much of what we’re cultivating is a return to our direct, embodied experience and a deepening trust in ourselves. We nurture potent cultivations through movement, meditation, neuroplasticity practices, ritual, community, and embodied conversations. I continually remind people in my circles that we’re not aiming to be the same. I don’t want people to be like me. I want them to be well-resourced and empowered to fully be their unique selves.
In Women Embodied, we practice cultivating potent qualities that are important for our own becoming and for our capacity to meet the times with presence, compassion, and soul. The cultivations include:
integrated embodied experiencing,
greater intimacy with life,
courageous kindness,
spacious awareness,
a courtship with our unique gifts and soul medicine,
a sense of workability,
a quality of village-mindedness,
and many ways to keep slipping out of the conditioning from the patriarchal, capitalist, hyper-individualized, dominating overculture.
Inside these powerful cultivations, there is vast room for people to be themselves in all their uniqueness.
A favorite story was told to me by mythologist Michael Meade many years ago. It is the story of Zushya, the beloved Rabbi, on his deathbed.
As he was dying, Zushya’s followers surrounded him. “How do you feel about meeting your maker?” one asked. The old teacher answered with characteristic honesty. “I am afraid to face God,” he said, “I fear that I will be found wanting in the world to come.” The students were shocked; how could such a thing be possible? Their teacher was an exceptional spiritual leader who had taught them generously and guided them wisely. The students began to reassure the teacher: “Rabbi, you are a pure and righteous man. You have shown the leadership of Abraham, the courage of Jacob, the vision of Moses. What do you have to fear in facing God?”
Death is a great teacher, they used to say, and often a true teacher will use their own death as a final lesson on life. With his failing breath Zushya replied, “I am not afraid that God will ask me why I was not more like Abraham or Moses; I can answer honestly that I did not have the god-given abilities of Abraham or the talents of Moses. But, if God asks me, ‘Zushya, why were you not more like Zushya?’ for that I have no answer at all!” In so saying, Zushya passed into the world that waits beyond this one.
This story always brings tears. I ask myself: Erin, why were you not more like Erin??
The question to ask is not why you were not more like Tara Brach? Why were you not more like a Kardashian? Why were you not more like Mary Oliver? Why were you not more like Francis Weller? Or David Whyte? Or Maya Angelou? Or Gandalf?
The question Zushya’s story invites us to contemplate is why were you not more like yourself? That deep self your soul knows you are underneath all the layers of posturing, hiding, conditioning… that self?
Michael Meade asks it in this potent way: Did you become yourself?
To fully become ourselves is a central wish I hold for the people in my groups, and for all of us. And it’s not a one-and-done thing – we keep becoming and keep unfolding. How beautiful.
It’s not easy, however, because of the conditioning so many of us have received. Conditioning that invites us to continually compare ourselves with someone else’s idea of the “right way” or the “right version” or “the right experience.” Often, we end up analyzing how we fit or don’t with someone else’s idea of the right way, and we suffer. We end up doubting the validity of our own lived experience.
But what if we don’t need to conform, but we simply need to fully become our unique selves? To shed all that is not that?
The truth is, there’s not a right way to do a yoga pose.
There’s not a right way to interpret a poem.
There’s not a right way to exercise. Or eat. Or manage your money. Or make art. Or parent. Or be a partner.
There’s not a right way to experience meditation. Or movement.
There’s not a right way to respond to these trying times.
There is Zushya.
There is you.
There is me.
There is what arises in our experience – our struggles, our insights, our unique lived experience. If we can learn how to inhabit and learn from our embodied experience, again and again, without making our experience the “right way” for anyone else, what a gift that is. It’s a key to a full and soulful life.
In a recent Women Embodied group, we started to joke about how IF the group were a cult and IF I wanted everyone to follow me and be like me, what would that look like? Well, we’d bring quart mason jars for our beverages (room temperature water, btw.) We’d wear big earrings. (I love big earrings.) We’d frequently wear comfy jumpsuits, and we’d all wear our prayer beads. We’d quote poems and wisdom teachers regularly. (I can’t help it – that’s what my brain is full of.) We can laugh about it because I have no interest in leading a cult or encouraging homogeneity. Quite the opposite! I don’t want people to do the weird things I do. I want to see their own weird and wonderful display and marvel at their beauty and uniqueness.
So, let me tell you how happy I was to celebrate several months ago when one woman, after some months in Women Embodied, dared to bring her Diet Coke to class. It was edgy for her. She was worried that in this group we don’t do aspartame or something. From my perspective, I celebrated. You do you! How brave!
I love being in the company of diverse and unique people. Don’t you? I have no interest in being part of a boring-ass monoculture that suppresses our uniqueness.
I relish being in a circle that is rooted in kindness and that does not want us all to be alike, but rather offers potent support for us becoming ourselves and courageously bringing forth our gifts.
Emerson said it long ago: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
I have deep faith that our unique selves and souls each have medicine, gifts, unique perspectives, and insights to offer to others.
And in an intimate group like WE, we get to witness and be witnessed in the uniqueness of our becoming. We get to be curious and learn from each other’s uniqueness, without surrendering our own. We are supported to find our emergent, never-before-seen way to live. What a gift!!
One of my favorite moments in groups is when someone says, “I hear that so many of you loved that, and it just didn’t work for me.” My heart bursts into confetti. Or someone says, “I hear that you all got a lot out of that myth, but to me it just reinforces a harmful stereotype that I’m trying to get free of.” I want to jump up and say YESSS!
Because I’m so happy to be in a group where we don’t suppress ourselves in order to conform, but instead learn more and more to trust ourselves, to contribute our unique perspective, and know that it matters. Never imagining any one of us has the one right way, but honoring that we each carry a valid facet of wholeness. And when we can express ourselves and hear each other in this way, we all learn more and can see more clearly. This way of being together feels both endangered and so necessary in these times. And it is so deeply nourishing.
I’m grieved when I hear that in various contexts, people feel they have to abandon, delete, pathologize, or misrepresent their experience to align with others, or to avoid being punished or rejected. I find practices and community that are rooted in embodied presence, rooted in soul, rooted in curiosity and respect, rooted in a commitment to kindness and a willingness to listen, to be profoundly supportive of shedding the false skins we carry. Shedding into our authenticity is liberating and encourages others to do so as well.
I love the person who loves TV unabashedly. The one who loves social media and the one who eschews it entirely. I love the people who have never been religious, the ones who are disentangling from high-control religion, and the ones who go to church. I love hearing from the introverts, the extroverts, and the ambiverts. I am fascinated to hear from people who work in the corporate sphere, people who don’t work for money, people who are therapists, teachers, artists, healers, singers, and so many other unique lived experiences.
I love hearing from people who are athletes, people who love immersing in the wilderness, and people who are more devotedly indoorsy. I love hearing from the ones who find it super healing to be with other women outside of the male gaze. I love hearing from the one who is discovering their identity to be more nonbinary than woman. I love hearing from the woman who is daring to learn to trust women again after having been betrayed or hurt by women in the past. I love the ones who so easily love others in the circle.
I love being with people who are open to trying something new while honoring their needs and preferences. I love hearing from people who are devoted activists and people who are quietly focused on their own healing. People who have traveled widely and immersed themselves in different cultures, and people who have gone deep by staying in one place. People who are health foodies, and those who love their Diet Coke.
All are welcome and cherished – as long as we can inhabit our own perspective while simultaneously honoring and respecting others, and never lording over anyone else or trying to make them be just like us. There’s room for it all.
If you are drawn to join such a circle of respect for your uniqueness and your journey of fully becoming yourself, there is a spot for you! And I can’t wait to welcome you and get to know you in all your uniqueness as we deepen our embodied presence, courage, and kindness together. I believe the world needs such people and such circles of soulful, embodied support. These are intimate groups of no more than 12 women.
Applications are open. Women Embodied starts 9/24.
May we follow Mary’s wise advice:
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
With love and fierce devotion to your embodied freedom,
Erin
p.s. One item of note: If you think you’ve filled out an application for WE but have not heard back from me, you may have neglected to hit that persnickety “submit” button on the application. I’ll usually respond within 48 hours of receiving your application. I’ve recently heard from a few people who thought they’d applied, but their applications hadn’t come through. Please reach out if you’re in that boat – or just make sure to hit “submit.” Thanks!
p.p.s. Our dear friend Francis Weller has a new book just released. We had a beautiful conversation with him about these essays when they were originally released. Give it a listen here. Such good medicine for these times.
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