Finding ourselves with other women: Women's Integral Retreat

I've been reflecting on the experience of the Women's Integral retreat which ran in Bali in March this year, and some of the key themes that arose between us, such as finding our voice and our passions, and being in community with other women, and how we'll be working with these even more deeply next year.

In her beautiful work “At the root of this longing”, Carol Lee Flinders examines some of the key meditative injunctions: Be silent, “Put yourself last … Unseat the ego”, “Resist and rechannel your desires. Disidentify yourself with your body and senses,” “Enclose yourself. Turn inward”.
She observes that these instructions “cancel the basic freedoms” and “sound remarkably like the mandates young girls have always received as they approach womanhood.” They are at direct odds, she concludes, with the messages of feminism.

She proposes that the principle concerns of spiritual practice for women, an essential aspect both of women’s development and wellbeing and an important focal point for feminism must, at the present time, be quite different1. Women’s practice must acknowledge hurdles on the path that are socio-culturally specific to women at this time. Thus, women’s practice must include “finding voice, strengthening the sense of self, supportive enclosure with other women and girls … identification of desires … recognition of a historical lineage of strong women, establishment of a female community, and validation of one’s own capacity to choose”

The Women's Integral Retreat is designed to follow these principle concerns of spiritual practice for women: we make these themes manifest by consciously creating a supportive circle with other women, by focusing on physical and writing practices that find our voice, identify our desires and passions, and we work to activate our choice of being from this place. And we place ourselves in a historical lineage of strong women who have walked that path before us by sharing and learning the stories of our female spiritual ancestors.

Footnote 1: Her conclusions are absolutely in keeping with the work of gender development theorists such as Gilligan, Debold, Belenky et al and the Stone Centre.

For more information on the 2011 Women's Integral Retreat:
http://womensintegralretreat.eventbrite.com/