A Women’s Circle is a gathering of women of various ages and backgrounds. Before Covid, we’d literally sit in a circle, but now on Zoom we create a sacred container for women to be present and witness each other, speaking their truth in a judgement free zone.
Every gathering is different. But, typically, it begins with an opening meditation to focus on the present moment by grounding. (Grounding just means pausing, breathing and putting your feet on the floor to feel the support of the ground.) Then, women share why they’ve come. The gathering ends with a final meditation that’ll support the group based upon what’s been brought up in conversation.
I’ve attended Women’s Circle every month and sometimes every week for the past year because I’m exhausted. As Kate Northrup said, “Exhausted people don’t question. Exhausted people don’t have the energy to mount a change. Exhausted people are excellent upholders of the status quo”. Getting caught in the hustle and the daily grind makes it tempting for me to avoid thinking and feeling by checking out. However, Women’s Circle keeps me accountable to feeling my feelings by learning how to connect with other women, myself and my feminine power.
Feminine power has many names like womb space, dantien, intuition, inner knowing, gut feeling, etc. In Dance with the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd explains feminine power as a “woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural instinct, guiding wisdom, and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is”. Wow. Right. Being able to tap into your innate wisdom seems super important, yet it’s something that I never learned how to do growing up.
In Sarah Jenks’ blog post The Sacred Feminine + Why it Isn’t That Weird, she suggests that women haven’t been taught about their innate wisdom because it’s been purposefully erased. For centuries from the Burning Times/Witch Hunts to colonization, women have been persecuted and killed, resulting in the loss of ancestral knowledge being passed on. Not having this wisdom passed down to me from the women in my family led me to get stuck in an exhausted state of being.
However, in Mary Magdalene Revealed, Meggan Watterson states that the good news is “that like Mary Magdalene, like Thecla, Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Marguerite Porete, and Theresa of Avila demonstrated, no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power. Because it’s not a power over us or outside of us. It’s a power that rests within us”. Learning how to access my feminine power has been an ongoing journey. But, being able to tap into it has become my superpower. What’s so cool is that I don’t have to look for answers outside of myself. I just have to ask and listen.
In Untamed, Glennon Doyle explains how she accesses her feminine power in this step-by-step process:
“HOW TO KNOW:
Moment of uncertainty arises.
Breathe, turn inward, sink.
Feel around for the Knowing.
Do the next thing it nudges you toward.
Let it stand. (Don’t explain.)
Repeat forever”.
The concept of “sink” was a little abstract for me at first. But, how I connect with my Knowing is by getting out of my head and getting into my gut. The gut’s a space below your belly button, where energy and creativity flow from. As Kate Northrup describes it in Money a Love Story, it’s located in “the second chakra of your body, where your reproductive system hangs out”. As I “sink” into my gut, I imagine a floating sphere that’s below my belly button but pushed back almost to my spine. I’ve also heard Vida Groman recommend, imagining a staircase from your heart to your gut, where you walk down as many steps as you can. When you’ve arrived, you’ll know.
I try to “sink” daily, but I’m human. It’s very easy to get lost in the busyness, numb out, and forget to be in my body. Women’s Circle is my weekly invitation to get back on track. It gives me the time to pause, recharge my battery and reconnect with my mind, body and spirit, so that I don’t return to an exhausted state of being.
There’s Women’s Circles throughout the world. The Global Sisterhood created circles for women “to find power and healing–breaking molds of competition and replacing them with sisterhood and connectedness”. If you’re interested in creating deep bonds with women, yourself and your feminine power, I’d highly recommend finding a local Women’s Circle and attending an event because when you gather with women, you hear their wisdom. You feel their power. You learn how to support other women.