A Mother/Daughter Workshop: An Initiation Into the Conscious Feminine:
A six-week class for women and girls ages 9 -14
How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place for you to go to be with your mother, with your sisters and the aunts, with your grandmothers, and the great-and great-great grandmothers, a place of women to go, to be, to return to, as woman
How might your life be different?
-Judith Duerk, Circle of Stones
Throughout history, rites-of-passage and initiation rituals have served to assist individuals’ transitions between developmental stages. Although the function and value of these experiences has been documented universally, contemporary culture lacks necessary and meaningful experiences to support females as they move through the phases of a woman’s life.
Our daughters are called to leave childhood and enter adolescence. Challenging biological, emotional, and psychological changes must be met. Without attention and support to this call for a new identity, a young woman can become lost, confused, and may engage in unconscious attempts at self-initiation. This often results in experiences of trauma, self-harm, incomplete transition, and unnecessary suffering.
Sitting in a circle of women while guiding and honoring the passage from childhood to adolescence can be a profound experience for a female, offering a strong foundation for conscious femininity, strength, and self-esteem. Through ritual, journaling, discussion, goddess mythology, exploration of lunar/menstrual cycles, feminist psychology and fun, we can offer our daughters an experience of conscious femininity that we may have wished for ourselves – one of value, respect, and joy.
This group meets in downtown Vancouver, WA, and is scheduled throughout the year. Cost is $325 per person for six, two-hour sessions, payable at registration. For more information contact Therese Brooks, MA, LMHC, at 360-909-9637, or visit
theresebrooks.com
Image: Persephone and Demeter in Dialogue, terracotta Aegean art from Myrina on Lemnos; ca. 100 BCE, British Museum