{"id":15,"date":"2010-09-01T12:43:44","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T12:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/insweetcompany\/2010\/09\/when-women-gather-ii.html"},"modified":"2010-09-01T12:43:44","modified_gmt":"2010-09-01T12:43:44","slug":"when-women-gather-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/2010\/09\/when-women-gather-ii.html","title":{"rendered":"When Women Gather, II"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Divine Feminine, the Divine Mother, is a living force in the world. She is simply another way to understand God, or the Mother\/Father God.”<\/i> — Reverend Lauren Artress, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE<\/p>\n

On September 24-26, women of all ages and backgrounds will convene in the heart of the Hudson River Valley in Rhinebeck, New York, to attend Omega Institute’s 9th Annual Conference on Women and Power: Our Time to Lead.<\/i> If you have longed to connect with your authentic voice, if you have hungered to integrate your core values into the whole of your life, if you have dreamt of bringing hope and healing to yourself and to others, this gathering has your name written all over it.
 
A rich diversity of speakers and performers will marshall their talents to not only help you take the lead in your sphere of influence, but to reframe your understanding of the nature of power, move it beyond a hierarchal conception of “who has more” and “might makes right” and expand it, deepen it, redefine it to include the ability to manifest The Greater Good. Omega’s Founder, Elizabeth Lesser, sounds this call: “The work of women in the 21st century is to bring our instinct to love out of the closet and along for the power ride.”<\/p>\n

The web site features a moving collection of women’s voices   … <\/p>\n


\n(http:\/\/eomega.org\/omega\/wi-power\/)<\/a> Gloria Steinem defines this new power paradigm as “… power on behalf of someone else, but also power over our own lives, power to express our own voices, our own inborn uniqueness.” Eve Ensler calls for a paradigm that ” … includes, inspires, lifts up; that is not holding, but sharing and expanding; power in the service of …” Jensine Larsen, of World Pulse Magazine, believes “the creative human potential of women and girls is one of the greatest untapped resources on earth … and one of the greatest forces for global transformation of our time.” <\/p>\n

Three Nobel Prize Winners share their thoughts: Jody Williams (1997), “No one individual alone changes the world; we change the world by coming together.” Wangari Matthai (2004), “We have to live for something we believe in. Other people cannot transform you; it is you who must believe in yourself.” Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992), “If you don’t have power, you accept anything.” Jane Fonda speaks out. Maya Angelou opens her heart — and ours. Majora Carter declares “We need leaders who will stand up and say ‘we are not willing to leave this world in the same starved, sorry state that we created.'” <\/p>\n

Perhaps because I am “technologically challenged” — or perhaps because of the grace of God — I found myself listening to concurrent playbacks of the video — the words of one speaker somehow overlapped the words of another — and the narrative became a choral performance, something unexpectedly holy, as if I were listening to the voices of women echoing across time. When we gather in the name of the Greater Good, when even two or three are gathered in Her name, She is there in the midst of us.   
 
Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Divine Feminine, the Divine Mother, is a living force in the world. She is simply another way to understand God, or the Mother\/Father God.” — Reverend Lauren Artress, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE On September 24-26, women of all ages and backgrounds will convene in the heart…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":231,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-divine-feminine","category-womens-retreats"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Women Gather, II - In Sweet Company<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/insweetcompany\/2010\/09\/when-women-gather-ii.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Women Gather, II - In Sweet Company\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“The Divine Feminine, the Divine Mother, is a living force in the world. 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She speaks and writes about things women care about: how to make our lives and our work be about what we value most; how to navigate challenge and change; how to live with integrity and grace, to look at error in ourselves and others in a forgiving way and view life as an invitation to transform ourselves into instruments for the Greater Good. \"I laughed, I cried, I was silent, I cheered. Most of all, I loved.\" Spoken by a woman at In Sweet Company Retreat, these words express what women experience when Margaret engages them in dynamic, soul-searching conversations about their lives. Margaret holds degrees in art therapy, psychosynthesis, and leadership and human behavior. Her work takes her to universities, to conferences and retreat settings, to living rooms and board rooms -- wherever women gather. 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