For over a decade, I pursued the elusive path of transformation by throwing myself at more things than I care to admit. And while each experience for sure taught me valuable lessons, a large part of that journey felt arduous, alone and left me feeling confused and frustrated most times. The Heroines’ Journeys program has helped bring a kind of understanding and community to help me navigate the terrain of self-transformation like none other before. In the short couple of years of study in this program, I’ve gained a more intimate understanding of the structure, function and evolution of the mind. More pertinently, my mind - its programs, language, motives, coping mechanisms and much more. And in parallel the exploration of beauty, relationships and ancestral work has helped me to begin discovering what my inherent values and hence my unique gifts are.
Another key highlight of this program is the community of fellow classmates that are fierce, driven women also journeying their own path of transformation. This community has served as a practical lab where engaging with it has forced me to come face to face with the limited nature of my mind. These explorations are alive, real and filled with differences in opinion just as they would be in the real world, hence serving as potent opportunities for creating real transformation. And since each one of us have come together with the intent of personal transformation, in these tense moments its allowed for us to cultivate skills such as non-violent communication and engaging with another in the true spirit of dialogue. This to me is invaluable as it is in true support of helping each one of us reveal more and more of our true nature.
For eg: I’ve wanted to write / share my thoughts and learnings for as long as I can remember. Especially since I started on my quest in search of - ‘there’s got to be more to this thing called life’. But, the fear of sharing my thoughts with anyone felt paralyzing. I felt like I didn’t know enough to be sure. I found myself being overwhelmed with imagined opposition, questioning and justification or worse feeling like I had to say nothing at all in order to stay safe. If you read @Hana’s experience above, when we tried the exercise of recording our thoughts for a few weeks, I noticed how much time I spent rehearsing how I would defend myself or stay prepared to justify my feelings or thoughts. Through this course, I started to uncover where some of these strong programmed reactions to revealing more of myself came from and I started to recognize that I didn’t need to operate from that place of keeping myself safe anymore every time I opened up.
Imagine having a group of women with whom you’re encouraged and sometimes even prodded to share what _you_ think or feel about a certain topic regularly. Then imagine your ideas being challenged not for the sake of opposition, but truly to seek understanding of your point of view because it mattered.
As an experiment, over the course of a week, each time you didn’t say what you actually desired to, try to write it down. You can slowly extend this to also include missed actions. Also try to annotate each instance with what was running at the back of your mind that justified not saying / doing what you truly desired. For eg: ‘Don’t say that thing, that’s too much’ or ‘Don’t say that thing, they’ll hate you / it’, so on and so forth. See what starts to show up as common reasons for what prevents from being yourself fully.
In this group, diving deep into our feelings, beliefs and values is nurtured. So, instead of shying away from uncomfortable topics, I started to practice sharing what I really thought and felt about them. Then when asked to say more or an opposing point of view was presented, instead of feeling overwhelm and threat, I started to cultivate letting my armors down to instead engage from a place of empathy and true dialogue. Slowly but surely I’m now able to share my voice without feeling crippled by an imagined fear of attack / challenge. This has started to transform challenging relationships even outside of this group and I’m beginning to have a new found softness and hence a deepening in them. Second, it also gave me the courage to finally start an online community a few months ago, in which I’ve been regularly writing, sharing my musings on growth and transformation :) (ForHearts.Arts). I’ve also started to find my voice to conduct regular workshops to help support more people in their journey.
In summary, the frameworks presented in the Heroines’ Journeys lectures along with this community has created a very fertile environment for me to not only uncover my true values, but also cultivate the resilience, courage and skills needed to start living in alignment with them. If this is something you’ve been looking for, we’d love to invite you to our community of Heroines :). Welcome! <3
If you have any questions or would like to share your experience of the exercise above, please feel free to get in touch with us. We look forward to hearing from you!
Divya