Conscious Feminine Leadership Training

Discernment Invitation: How are you being called to live peace amidst fear, welcome amidst unwelcome, lunar movement amidst brash light? How does a woman awaken to her true Self in communities she cherishes, even as they may be resistant to her own experience and intuitions? 

Pillars of Conscious Feminine Leadership

This training invites participants into the several pillars of Conscious Feminine Leadership formation, built upon and in the Motherline wisdom of Women Writing for (a) Change, founded in 1991 by Mary Pierce Brosmer (www.womenwriting.org):
  • Conscious Feminine Herstory – re-examining our orientation to patriarchy (internalized and externalized), systems of oppression, toward a grounded view of patriarchy as a “parody of the power principle” (Marion Woodman)
  • The Story of WWfaC, a conscious feminine movement of women and men celebrating the individual voice and women’s gifts in practices of community since 1991
  • Examination of the Unconscious Feminine/Masculine
  • Reclaiming the Young Feminine – Father’s Daughters, Motherlines, and Gently Fierce Girlhood
  • The Slow Emergence of the Conscious Feminine/Masculine, in Integration and Rhythmic Balance with one another
  • Archetypal Currents that invite individual and collective awakening, initiation, grounding
  • Writing as Transformational Tool – within circle and into other environments of leadership
  • The Personal Work of Leadership: fear, courage, self-care, vulnerability, healing, discernment, finitude and more
  • Components of Conscious Leadership Practices
    • Leading from Within the Body You Have: gifts, challenges, consequences in (traditional) systems – body practices to re-dress trauma and family of origin patterns
    • Group Dynamics/Systems Thinking – intersectionality, tools of analysis to assist continual awakening in ethnic, racial, class, gender, age, and other frames of perception
    • Energetic and Other Boundaries for Healthy Leadership
    • WWfaC Circle Practices (looking behind the curtain at decades of development) & Stories from the Field
    • Systemic Resistance: circle-way practices into other systems (what can you expect?); Stories from the Field

Required Reading (a sample selection...)

Required Reading (a preliminary listing – will develop in concert with the community that gathers):
  • Brosmer, Mary Pierce. Women Writing for (a) Change: a Guide for Creative Transformation. Notre Dame University: Sorin Press, 2009.
  • Multiple articles and essays, selected from Zweig, Connie, ed. To Be a Woman; bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black; Arrien, Angeles. The FourFold Way; Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity;
Choose at least one: Jean Shinoda Bolen, Crossing to Avalon: a Woman’s Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine (revd ed; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004); Octavia Butler, Kindred (Bluestreak, 2004); Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter (HarperOne, updated edition 2016); or Ann Linnea, Deep Water Passage: A Spiritual Journey at Midlife (PocketBooks, 1997).

Facilitators

Lisa M Hess, PhD—licensed by Women Writing for (a) Change, Cincinnati, graduate of the 2013 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy (CFLA), staff of the 2015 CFLA and main circle-holder/crafter of 2017 CFLA—is a companion, contemplative, spiritual director, scholar, poet, wife, daughter, sister, and teaching-elder (PCUSA).  She has held sacred spaces for teaching & learning in Central Ohio for over 15 years, most visibly at United Theological Seminary in north Dayton and in WWfaC, Central Ohio in both Dayton and Columbus circles. A shy author she is... 
Lisa Heckaman—certified by Women Writing for (a) Change, Cincinnati, graduate of the 2015 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy and co-facilitator of WWfaC, Central Ohio circles in Dayton and Columbus—is also a spiritual director, companion, contemplative, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, and sister with decades of contribution in ministry and educational settings. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of Wellstreams Spiritual Direction Training program. A tender of souls she is...

​“We serve the common good as active, conscious-feminine leaders in traditional and non-traditional communities of practice, bringing deeply rooted wisdom wherever it is welcome.”

Context, Method, Aims

Context and Methodology: Conscious Feminine Leadership is necessarily contextual and organic within a community of practice, crafting conscious webs of relationship to root in the city of one’s core-circle and deepen there in streams of mentoring and collegiality upon the conclusion of the training. This CFLT is an open discernment with all interested women who have found themselves connected to the Central Ohio WWfaC affiliate, serving the circles in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. [Women interested in ConFem training but living elsewhere without a local core-circle may be in touch with WWfaC in Cincinnati (www.womenwriting.org) or WWfaC in Bloomington, Indiana (https://womenwritingbloomington.org)]. 
 
Our method: Discern together, write-sit-play deeply, lean into discomforts for growth, mirror gifts and challenges gently, and integrate together, slowly.  
  • Writing, SoulCollage®, and body practices weave the threads of individual reflection and communal connection.
  • A safe and confidential container is held within which to learn, experiment, explore, and celebrate—both in large group and in small groups’ practices: invitation, not obligation; presume goodwill
  • Intellectual, emotional, spiritual, & physical ways of learning for participants & staff
  • Welcome of the life experiences and contributions of each learner – every voice matters, each voice is equal
 Format & Learning Tools
  • One week residential formation (Aug 10-17, 2019)
  • One 9-week semester, weekly circles, for integrating and nuts&bolts learning
  • Practicum Project (holding 3 circles in topic/series of choice; reflections on practicum-learning)—tentative deadline Jan 31, 2020
  • Writing Project (10-12 pages, at least, integrating the CFLT experience – can be poetry, journal, essay, memoir, fiction, etc.)—tentative deadline Jan 31, 2020
  • Graduation Weekend: A Friday-Sunday residential reunion in spring 2020, March 6-8th, sharing learnings, concluding with communal Commencement to which friends and family are invited.
Participants gain
  • Immersion in a community of increasingly conscious, creative, and fiercely engaged women across the country, each rooted in her own circle(s) [Cincinnati, BloomingtonIN, JacksonvilleFL, Willamette ValleyOR, IndianapolisIN, Grand Junction CO, MadisonWI, Catawba IslandOH, and Central Ohio] with invitation to gather with other C/FLA sisters each June for Annual Retreat in Cincinnati (as desired)
  • Training in the use of writing and ritual to build community
  • Training in the practices of writing for healing and innovation
  • Opportunities to facilitate circles in Dayton and Columbus areas with the WWfaC name/trademark
Continued mentoring in the growing web of Central Ohio CFLA sisterhood – regular leadership circles to deepen our connection and our ConFem journeys together 

Dates & Details

Dates/Times/Locations:
Residential Week: August 10-17, 2019 @ The Procter Center, 11235 St. Rt. 38 SE, London OH 43140
Semester CFLT Core (9 weeks): Week of Sept 16 – Nov 11, 2019, 6:30 – 9 p.m. (day tbd)
Graduation Weekend: March 6-8, 2020 @ The Procter Center, London OH 43140
Tuition: $2000.00
(includes residential week, semester, Graduation weekend & instructional-supplies costs)
​

How to Apply...

CFLT Application
  • Communicate your interest at womenwriting.centralohio@gmail.com or 937-269-3024.
  • Attend two discernment circles (or at least one) January 26th, February 23rd: 10-11:30 a.m. (location tbd, Springfield, OH – between Dayton and Columbus)
  • Complete the written application by April 30, 2019, along with nonrefundable deposit to hold your place ($400), mail to 3977 Turnberry Way Dayton OH 45430
 

WWfaC Vision

to bring the feminine more fully into expression  by supporting the voices and stories of girls and women of all races, classes, and nation
​CFLT 2019, Central Ohio certifies participants in the Motherline practices and wisdom of Women Writing for (a) Change, offering a web of connection and ever-deepening skills in bringing conscious feminine, circle-way wisdom into multiple contexts—work, civic organizations, family, and writing circles.
2019 CFLT welcomes self-claimed writers and women who ‘write on the sly,’ in the privacy of their homes and hearts. These questions are for us to invite you to ‘come to words’ about your own experience, what draws you to this training, what gifts you know you bring, what gifts you might like to discover within you, what ‘growing edges’ you sense ahead of you or within you. Your words will be held with the respect, appreciation and confidentiality that are hallmarks of WWf(a)C in its 28 year history. There are no “trick” questions or “right” answers. Conscious Feminine Leadership learning is an invitation to deepening inner work, light and shadow (things we cannot see about ourselves, both perceivably ‘negative’ and ‘positive’). Each of us arrives into this stream when it is time, helpfully and generously, graciously, discerned with sisters who have swum these waters in their own lives. We want this invitation to be life-giving, challenging enough to stretch you, steadying enough for you to learn your own Center in ways you’ve (perhaps) never known.
 
1. Write a short essay (2-3 pages?) that gives insight into how your life has led you to this present moment of desiring to commit to Conscious Feminine leadership. (Why?  Why now?) Sit with your life for a while, see if 4-5 ‘events’ or memories rise, which you can describe in some detail for yourself…
2. How has ‘writing’ lived in your life over the years? Always? Intermittently? What are 2-3 things about writing in which you have learned something about yourself?
3.  How do you listen to your life with others…? Reading, if so, what kinds of reading? Book clubs? Library books? Or perhaps you explore creativity in some way?
4.  How do ‘spirituality’ and/or ‘religion’ taste on your tongue? What experience do you have with either, both, or neither?
5.   What reservations do you have about this commitment to Conscious Feminine leadership training?  What hopes?
6.   What are your coping strategies for dealing with physical and emotional discomfort: the stress of new challenges, difficult people, less-than-perfect weather, food or beds?
7.  Craft one sentence describing who you are right now, who you want to more fully be in the world. (It can change tomorrow if you’d like.)
8. Do you have any new questions, now that you’ve written on these? List any, feeling free to answer them, as ye may (or not…invitation, not obligation J)