Katy on Wellbeing

Women on the Edge of Evolution

(Lovely photo by Patia Stephens)

In my last post, I said that there are many pioneering women out exploring the edge of what it means to live most fully as a person and as a woman.  What it means to live your best life individually, and also as an active, evolving member of society.  Spiritual leaders, film-makers, writers, musicians, teachers, social activists, psychologists, scientists, business women.

A great way to hear and be inspired by many of them is through a terrific free tele-seminar series called "Women on the Edge of Evolution: Awakening to the power to co-create our lives and shape our collective future".  This series is produced by transformational coaches and visionaries Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit. Interested people can listen and participate on the live calls, or download recordings afterward.  Here are the talks currently available in the archives:

• Awakening the New Feminine Power - with Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas
  
• Fearless Love: Living lives of searing authenticity and audacious courage - with singer / song-writer Melissa Etheridge
  
• Answering the Call: Life is talking.  Are you listening? - with Reverend / teacher / speaker August Gold
• Celebrating the Differences in Our World: Creating a thriving global community - with speaker / author / life coach Peggy O'Neill
• Shining the Spotlight on Your Mission - with publicist / marketer Arielle Ford
• Igniting a Consciousness of Change: How to be the solution - with spiritual activist / peace-builder Eisha Mason
  
• Turning the Tide: Restoring the feminine and reclaiming our whole selves - with Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons
  
• Creativity and Co-Creativity: What women can contribute to our evolution - with mind-body integration teacher Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks
• It's Not the End of the World: Developing resilience in times of change - with integral health pioneer Dr. Joan Borysenko
• Creative Activism: How to realize your highest vision for yourself and our world - with Creative Visions Foundation founder Kathy Eldon
• Let it Shine: Activating your feminine radiance - with interfaith minister / life coach Devaa Haley Mitchell
• Doing Well While Doing Good: The power of social entrepreneurship in action - with Spryte Loriano
• Unleashing Your Passionate Creative Spirit Upon the World - with Music and Arts Director of the Agape International Spiritual Center Rickie Byers Beckwith
  
• Creating a New World: Meshworking evolutionary intelligences for the human hive - with Integral Institute founding member Dr. Marilyn Hamilton
  
• The SHIFT: A movie being made by a movement - with film-maker Rochelle Marmorstein
  
• Creating Heaven on Earth: Leading our communities toward greater levels of happiness, health and wholeness - with spiritual leader Rev. Dr. Kathy Hearn
  
• Sister Giant: Rousing the sleeping giant of American womanhood - with spiritual teacher / author Marianne Williamson
• Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World - with clinical research scientist / medical anthropologist / writer / President & CEO for the Institute of Noetic Sciences Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz
• Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the women, save the world - with Jungian analyst / author Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen
  
• Having Enough of Life - with voluntary simplicity pioneer Vicki Robin
• Women Leading Change: A new perspective on ourselves and our world - with CEO of the Center for Human Emergence in the Middle East Elza Maalouf
  
• Opening to the Fierce Feminine: Tuning in to archetypes of feminine strength - with yoga teacher / Yoga Journal columnist Sally Kempton
• Caring for Ourselves While Caring for the World - with yoga master and iEvolve core founder Sofia Diaz
  
• Living Deeply in a Rapidly Changing World - with Association for Global New Thought co-founder Mary Manin Morrissey
• The Feminine Co-Creator: The evolutionary woman as the next step for our species - with furturist / social innovator / conscious evolution pioneer Barbara Marx Hubbard
  
• The Next Women's Liberation - with EnlightenNext magazine senior editor Dr. Elizabeth Debold
• Embracing and Evolving the Feminine: Engaging the gender paradox - with Zen priest / integral spirituality teacher Diane Musho Hamilton
  
• The New Woman and The New World - with scholar / philosopher / human potential pioneer Dr. Jean Houston
• The Power of Our Collective Intention to Create a New World - with The Field author Lynne McTaggart

I wanted to give the complete list here to illustrate the richness of the offering.  Obviously, some topics will appeal more than others.  And the list, while impressive, is not exhaustive.  I'd love to hear as well from Oprah, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena).  And some business leaders and political figures.  Perhaps in Round 2 ......  But overall, this is an excellent resource for evolutionary-minded women.  There's something useful here for everyone. 

If you're interested in this whole "evolutionary" thing, but could do without the feminine lens, there is another series you may want to check out.  It's called Awakening the Impulse to Evolve.  I have not started listening to the recordings yet, so I cannot give as wholehearted a recommendation as I do to the Women on the Edge ones.  But some of the topics look intriguing.  Here are a few:

• The Evolution of Spirit: God, enlightenment and the path ahead - with integral philosopher Ken Wilbur
  
• Lessons from Evolution: Learning to walk in the rhythm of life - with biologist / futurist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris
  
• A Moral Imperative to Transform - with EnlightenNext founder  / evolutionary enlightenment teacher Andrew Cohen
  
• Learning to Live in a Living Universe - with futurist / voluntary simplicity leader Duane Elgin
  
• Reinventing the World: Creating a new cosmology - with cosmologist Brian Swimme

In summary: three cheers for Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit, and hurray for the iPod!!  Should I worry that there is smoke curling out of mine ..... ?

Navigating Self Actualization and the New Feminine

This week, over a civilized lunch at Jacque's Omlettes with my friend Sarah, the conversation turned to the complex place in which we find ourselves and our women friends. It's like we're shooting the rapids at the confluence of two great psychological and social rivers.  And it promises to be a long ride.

Challenge #1: Self-Actualization

We are a privileged group by world standards: well educated and enjoying an unprecedented level of personal security and social freedom.  If you picture psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, we are fortunate to have the basic business of shelter and survival in hand.  Also social support, and a measure of achievement.  Increasingly, we are trying to navigate the less-traveled terrain of self-actualization.  Maslow described self-actualization as "the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming."  It's easy to dismiss any terrors and growing pains in this process as nice problems to have.  And indeed they are.  But the need to grow in this way is no less insistent than the need for food or friendship.  And the anxiety, when this need is blocked, is intense.

I am reminded of my doctoral program.  The early years -- classes through comprehensive exams -- were quite structured, as we all marched lock-step through together.  But then most of those support structures fell away.  We were left flailing about, crafting researchable proposals, carrying out our research, and writing the dissertations.  Each candidate had to find his or her individual path: by definition, unique and uncharted.  The paradox was that it was virtually impossible to navigate alone.  There is no way I could have done it without guidance from my advisors, companionship and intellectual play with my colleagues, and the support of friends and family.  And so it is with self-actualization, with expressing our whole selves and full potential in the world: by definition a unique and ultimately personal endeavor, while also impossible to manage alone.

Challenge #2: Redefining the Feminine

Meanwhile, we're entering this stage of our lives at a time when our feminine identities, our roles as women, are also in a state of flux.  The women's movement of the 1960s reflected a large-scale collective hunger to stretch beyond the traditionally feminine roles of wife and mother, care-giver and home-maker.  A hunger to push and express and hazard ourselves in the wider world.  The courage and determination of that generation of women, and the generation that followed, have given Sarah and me, and our peers, the platform to ask "are we there yet?  Is this it?"

My sense is that western women, collectively, are feeling that this is not "it", not yet.  Too many of us have, in the immortal words of Gloria Steinem, "become the men we wanted to marry".  We have adopted, often with great success, traditionally masculine ways of thinking and acting at work.  Then we go home and try to assume more "feminine" ways in our personal lives.  The result is a pervasive feeling that something is missing, that life doesn't quite fit either at work or at home, that some essential light has gone out.  Others, who have chosen to stay at home and raise their children, do so with a nagging sense that their choice is somehow unsupported or out of step.

Fortunately, this discomfort is balanced by an equally strong feeling that something new is trying to be born through us.  What if we could evolve new ways of being women, that were:

• Powerful and generative in the world
  
• Deeply connected to our inner selves, other people, and the planet
  
• Supporting the fullest development of our potential, individually and as a society
• Grounded in love and respect for our bodies, and our value
  
• Beautiful, brilliant, joyful
• In loving partnership with men
  

What might that look like?  We don't fully know yet.  But something new and alive and hopeful is already beginning to come through.  We're catching glimpses of it in other women and in ourselves.  That itchiness you're feeling?  It's collective.  And the good news is that there are lots of passionate pioneering women exploring this frontier.  I'll introduce some of them in my next post.

So that's what Sarah and I were talking about at lunch: the complexity of living at the intersection of these two powerful impulses, in the Wild West of so much uncharted territory.  Only one thing is clear to me: the two must be engaged together.  I cannot be fiercely whole as a person without being so as a woman as well.  Who else is here, too?  How can we help each other as we go?  And what wonders can we create?