We began the Heroine's Journey in December 2015 with the assessment of where we stand.  Are we happy where we are?  What might we want to change?  How ready are we?  How much energy are we willing to invest in that change?  

The gift of the Body Wisdom Healing Circle is that we get a new perspective on our age-old questions.  In the first call we explored our kidney energy, which signifies the energy of our essence in Traditional Chinese Medicine.  

The January Body Wisdom Healing Circle call was about our Call To Action.  This is the moment we have to decide what we are going to take with us on this journey.  What are our reference points for who we are?  How do we know?  From the perspective of The Body, we need to know the places we can check in with ourselves.  These are the places we trust to reflect our truths... the places we cultivate our trust of our Selves.

February's Healing Circle call focused on resistance and tension.  This is the point where our journey becomes "real" and we wonder one last time if it's a journey we really want to take.  The resistance is the hesitation... the sense of uncertainty.  So, in this call we explore that tension... how do we know when it's truly telling us that it's not time for this journey... and when it is simply trying to keep us where we know the terrain?  The solution, is to be in the body.  Often, the uncomfortable feelings that come up actually push us out of our bodies... so in the face of this tendency... how do we find our way back in, to our grounding space?  We explored breath, movement, and awareness as our inroads back to the physical.  We noticed how these "simple" activities bridge the gap between our mental/emotional states and the physical.  Trust also came up again... as a necessary path to believing in our own capacity to make the journey ahead.

Meeting the Mentor was the theme of March's call.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the Mentor I refer to is the Whole Body Wisdom.  We contemplated how we know our Body Wisdom, what it means to us, and how we connect with it in a meaningful way.  

The April Healing Circle call was about finding ourselves on The Threshold.  This is the uncomfortable place where we find that we are missing something that we needed for our journey... and so it feels chaotic and we consider turning back.  In the Hero's Journey it is generally some kind of tool or assistance that he needs in order to quickly move through The Threshold space and return to the quest at hand.  In the Heroine's Journey (which we focus on in this call) the missing "object" is restoration, rejuvenation, remembering, and reclaiming.  There is a bit of lingering at The Threshold in the Heroine's Journey, but it is rich with possibility and transformation.  This call taps us into the gifts of the Heroine's Journey.

May's Healing Circle Call was an odd one.  It felt just like the energy of being in The Threshold... as we addressed Tests, Allies, Enemies.  Only... we kinda didn't really get there because The Threshold caught me up.  It seems that the Tests and Enemies thrive on the uncertainty in The Threshold space.  And when they whisper to us that we ARE this chaos, we falter, it increases the chaos and the not knowing.  But, when we can find our Allies of grounding and sense of self, we bring ourselves back to our truth... and then we can see our way through.

In our June call we got deeply into the connections between the brain, heart, and adrenals as we dove into the Inmost Cave.  Without claiming a cycle of adrenalin (rather than just dumping tons into the blood stream in order to keep ourselves going), we set ourselves up to be reactionary to the things that happen around us.  It does not help us learn more about ourselves, nor does it help us in transformation.  We tapped into the heart because it is the seat of the knowing that comes from being.  It is the voice we must learn to hear in order to more deeply know ourselves.  We also addressed the brain... because in order to share what we learn by going into the cave of our own hearts, we must be able to translate that into consciousness.

July's call is about The Ordeal.  In this context, that is about coming back to ourselves in a meaningful way.  We talked about how mastery of attention is the key to connecting within, to communicating throughout our Selves for clear understanding.  This is The Ordeal.  To know ourselves and what we want/need so that we can work toward the reality of it being so.  This call is about the fundamentals of how to use our attention to make The Ordeal full of flow and ease. It is the basis for what I will think I be teaching about self-healing in the future.

Seizing The Sword was the topic of August's call.  For the Heroine this means utilizing the attention we cultivated in July to feed and nourish herself.  It means revitalization of tissues and sense of self through building within the community and connection and communication that we desire outside of us.  It means knowing what we need and asking for what we want. 

September's theme was The Road Home.  Our work has finally put us in a position of acknowledging and integrating the new realizations we had about ourselves this summer.  It means, it's time to celebrate and allow ourselves to own what we know about our true selves.

Rebuilding was the theme of October's Body Wisdom Circle call.  After all the diving deep from early in the journey, we emerged with a new aspect to our sense of self.  And what often happens when we have this awareness of this newly forged piece of ourselves, is that we move on to the next thing.  We forget that we can build on what we have learned, and in fact, that's where the power comes... in the creation phase.  So in this call we connected the grounding chakra with head and heart, and we learned the technique of building our expression into our internal templates.  This is powerful stuff!

November was our final call to the Hero{ine}'s Journey this year.  We talked about integrating our full experience of the journey with our Authentic Self / Core Self.  We did an exercise in "bookmarking" this place for future reference as we begin again in the new year.  And, we did a few minutes of silent envisioning from this essence space... what do we want to do next?  What remains undone for us?