Women Embodied: Widening Circles
Friends, I’m thrilled to invite you to this year’s beautiful manifestation of the one-of-a-kind and once-a-year training program and women’s circle which it is my great honor and pleasure to facilitate:
Women Embodied 2019: Widening Circles
Also known as WE.
The short and simple details are here:
We begin our journey with two retreat days: January 27th, 1-6pm, March 3rd, 1-6pm. Then our weekly 2.5 hour classes run on Monday evenings from March 4 - June 3. We'll end with an outdoor retreat-day, ritual, and celebration in a local canyon on June 1st at 4 pm.
Our first gathering will be an introductory retreat day from 1-6pm on January 27th at gorgeous Vitalize studio.
Our second retreat day will be held on March 3rd, 1-6pm at Vitalize. (I’ve made them mid-day so though it’s a retreat day, you still have your mornings and evenings free. Brilliant!)
After each retreat day, I'll offer suggestions for ways you might deepen your learning and practice between our meetings.
We'll begin our weekly gatherings on the evening of Monday, March 4th, 6:30-9pm, and continue meeting on Monday evenings through June 3rd.
We'll have a final outdoor retreat day, ritual, and celebration on Saturday, June, 1st, in one of the local canyons, from 4 pm into the evening.
Cost for the 3 retreats, weekly workshops, your private session, two books, and delightful food at each gathering is $1800.
If you pay all at once you’ll save $100. If you sign up for my Embodied Listening class in January & February, you can take another $100 off your WE tuition!
Your tuition includes all of the above: 3 powerful retreats, weekly workshops March-June, plus some special gifts, including 2 books I'm thrilled to gift to you! We'll also have an online course home where you’ll have access to recordings of all classes and retreats, plus additional readings. These are rich resources you can return to anytime you like.
I'm thrilled to include a special addition this year: Your tuition also includes one 60-75 minute private session with me ($150 value) to be scheduled during the time of our course. And one more bonus: If you show up for every class and retreat, I'll give you an extra free private session to be scheduled after the course ends!
All in all, it’s going to be the most beautiful Women Embodied Circle I’ve offered yet.
I will prioritize giving space to the women who want to commit to participating as fully as possible. I know sometimes travels come up or you might need to miss a few classes, but I’m hoping you’ll be as fully IN with me and the community as I and we commit to being with you. You'll be invited to really show up.
Payment plans are available: One option is this: A nonrefundable $600 deposit is due now to reserve your spot. The next $600 is due January 1st. And the final $600 is due March 1. You may also choose to do $250/month. I'm open to making it work for you. Please understand that if you commit to taking one of the spots in the class, you are responsible for full tuition whether you attend all classes and retreats or not. Kind of like registering for a college class or buying a concert ticket. Claim a spot and it’s all yours! I want you to be all IN! I put my whole heart and soul and 20+ years of deep study into this course and I only do it once a year for 22 women. There are many offerings which I do for donation or that are less expensive. This one I throw my whole heart and all my tools in to supporting just 22 women in going deep into learning through this work and community. If you need an alternate payment plan, please ask.
Please read my cancellation policy here.
I am offering two scholarship spots for $800, with a flexible payment plan available. Contact me if you’d like to be considered for the scholarship. I will choose one from the applicants by the end of the year.
p.s. This course is 100% guaranteed not to improve you at all, but rather to connect you with the intelligence that is inherent in your uncontrived, embodied presence. This course has nothing to do with burning calories, toning your abs, losing weight, or "fixing" yourself. It has everything to do with powerful life-changing learning saturated in courageous friendliness and woven throughout with powerful invitations to a new, non-objectified relationship with yourself and with life.
Want to join me? Yippee!
Email me to request your application right here. It's pretty short and sweet.
We begin with self-compassion. Embodying maitri (courageous, unconditional friendliness) is our foundation. But we can’t stop with ourselves…. We must add to our self-compassion the practice of authentic reflection: reflecting honestly on how we show up in the greater world, and seeing clearly the cultures and the world we co-create every day of our lives. Seeing the challenges of the times in which we find ourselves and discovering how we might be of benefit to the whole. There’s an invitation to take your practice beyond your own heart, body, and mind and out into the world in ways that are meaningful to you and of benefit to more-than-you. More than ever, I believe it's time to de-center the idea of our own enlightenment, our own well-being, or our own "self-improvement project" and include, more and more, the suffering and beauty of the world.
The world desperately needs awakened, embodied people who are willing to feel what's here to be felt and see what's here to be seen, willing to courageously envision a life-giving culture and world for all life, willing to stay present and embodied (or at least have reliable ways to return to embodied presence) as we discover life-giving ways to transform the many metaphorical toxic waste dumps back into beautiful wetlands.
We do this work and engage in this learning not only for ourselves but for Life. This is of utmost importance.
And as Francis Weller says so accurately,
"This is the solitary work we cannot do alone."
Want to join me? Yippee!
Email me to request your application right here:
We will be training to cultivate
- embodied, courageous kindness toward our inner and outer lives,
- a grounded, centered, flexible, upright, fully embodied presence,
- a warm heart capable of courage, wholehearted participation, and vast tenderness,
- a clear mind and reliable access to our vast, spacious awareness that can welcome it all,
- new movement habits - reducing unnecessary effort and growing greater pleasure in the dailiness of being embodied
- and a sense of joy, gratitude, and humor to sustain us through it all.
More details for the enthusiastic readers:
I’m so thrilled for this year’s class.
It's going to be a super fun, powerfully impactful women’s circle with a wise and kickass curriculum. It will be a sanctuary of sanity and slowness in a speedy, suffering world. It will be dedicated to the well-being of all Life.
Women Embodied will include
- powerful retreats,
- somatic practices,
- meditation,
- writing prompts,
- positive neuroplasticity training,
- great reads,
- authentic conversation,
- transformative movement lessons,
- deep listening,
- poetry,
- powerful community rituals
- resources to support daily-life-integration,
- a compassionate and welcoming community of support,
- and so much love.
Stephen Jenkinson wisely says that to awaken during these times is to awaken with a sob. While as ever I will emphasize the cultivation of “less effort and more pleasure,” and profound self-respect, when we’re authentically deepening our cultivation of presence, of courage, of self-reflection and clear seeing of ourselves and our world, and when we are committed to becoming more fully embodied and awake for the benefit of all life, we are likely to discover our edges and our blind spots, our shadows and our grief, as well as the suffering that surrounds us. You’ll be invited to lean in and continue to stay engaged in the work. It's not always pleasant, but it is so very worth it. You are invited to stay engaged with the process throughout our time together so you can come out the other side more fully yourself, more fully in your integrity, more clear, wise, and empowered to live a life of love, courage, beauty, and benefit to the world.
That means you’re invited to keep showing up and staying engaged, even when you’re challenged. You'll be so glad you did.
Each week we’ll move and we’ll be still. We’ll meditate. We’ll courageously listen to our inner lives, our bodies, each other, and our world. We'll learn from and through our bodies. We’ll share ourselves. We’ll laugh and we’ll cry. We’ll expand our circle of compassion, starting right where we are, with our embodied selves, and from there grow to include more and more of our world. Widening circles, baby! And we’re going to have so much fun along the way!!! This work is far too important to be taken seriously.
I'm inspired to share two quotes from wise teachers that have been hovering in my heart for the past several months and are exactly why I'm offering this class. First, from Thich Nhat Hanh:
“I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.”
And second from Karen Maezen Miller:
"What do you practice? Whatever you practice, you'll
Let's do these things together, shall we? Go deeper and practice with intention.
Brilliant Feldenkrais lessons will help you grow a new and deeper relationship with your embodied self, your creativity, your capacity for attentional flexibility, and your sense of creative possibility. Feldenkrais lessons powerfully support us to embody mindfulness in every moment and every movement. It's also a potent training in the powerful practice of slowing down.
Embodied meditation practice will support you in growing a sense of stable presence, a warm heart, and mind that can be spacious and open enough to welcome anything. Embodied meditation will help you see clearly that your thoughts are just thoughts. Embodied meditation helps us flip the dynamic - so that our thinking minds are in service to our deeper values rather than our deep hearts being hijacked by ungrounded thinking. Embodied meditation will help you to grow stability like a mountain, spaciousness like the sky, warmth like the sun. The world needs people who can embody such qualities.
Embodied listening will make you kind. It will support you to learn the language of your own wise, feeling, body-mind, and thus have reliable access to integrated wisdom. (Not just thoughts, not just feelings, not just your body - but the integration of each of these together with this moment in our lives = powerful wisdom for you and for the world.) Embodied listening also gives us powerful tools and practices to listen to the others in our life, and to life itself. Listening liberates.
Poetry woven throughout our gatherings brings beauty, poignant insight, and touches our deepest hearts.
A life-giving community circle offers the power and beauty of authentic human connection, solace, laughter, hugs, powerful wisdom, tears, deep care, and love. We learn so much from each other. Community is healing, and this is a healing community. It's truly a precious gift to be a part of such a circle.
Reading excellent books together buoys our spirits and allows us to relate to specific wisdom in the field between us.
Dark times call for bright new visions of the world we want to inhabit.
We must be the change we wish to see. And the means we use must embody the end we are seeking. If we want freedom and respect for all, we must free and respect ourselves and others. If we want a world of beauty, kindness, dancing, laughter, and poetry, we must notice and nurture beauty, embody kindness, dance, laugh, and read poetry now. The world is asking for our wholehearted participation and our clarity about what we deeply care about. As Alice Walker wrote, “What we love can be saved.”
This is so much more than a course.
It's a powerful and one-of-a-kind community experience.
You're warmly invited to be a part of it.
Email me to request your application right here:
Here’s the invitation from my heart:
In Women Embodied
I invite you to join me
to embody living ancient wisdom
to grow courageous intimacy with your life
to practice listening deeply
to plant and nurture beautiful seeds
to make room for the full range of your capacity to feel: grief and praise and everything in between
to bow deeply to what is and to rise to your full uprightness, without apology
to be still, silent, and spacious
to move with clarity, flexibility, integrity, and pleasure
to tune to the living intelligence humming in everything, including every cell in your body
to grow your grounded, clear-eyed warmth
to live intentionally with the wish to benefit others and all of life
to play and to laugh (a lot)
to powerfully deepen your inner and outer trust
to grow your willingness to abide in not-knowing
to inhabit your bones
to revel in paradox
to empower your hara and heart as a powerful foundation for a clear head
to free the genius hiding behind your wounds
to undomesticate your curiosity
to live your life as an act of love
to remember your sovereignty
to root yourself in the depths
to make your optimism contagious
to free yourself, free others, and serve everyday
to dwell in possibility
to welcome the beautiful mess of life
to use whatever arises in support of these intentions
to become empelvised, embellied, empowered
to be a fully embodied woman of wisdom.
I hope you’ll consider joining me.
With love,
Erin