Blossoming Lotus

How Did We Get here?

I think this is one of the most important questions women can ask.

Because none of us invented our version of womanhood from scratch.

We inherited it.

From our mothers and grandmothers.

From our fathers and the way they related to women.

From religion, culture, beauty standards, marriage, money, sexuality, family roles and the relationships we watched growing up.

And from the history women lived through before us.

For much of human history, women had far less control over money, property, education, reproduction, marriage, sexuality and the direction of their own lives.

Women adapted.

They learned to accommodate. Anticipate. Endure. Caretake. Influence indirectly. Remain desirable. Stay useful. Keep families together. Read the emotional environment. Survive things they couldn't simply leave.

WHY A GROUP

Why We Do This With Other Women

You can understand an enormous amount about yourself alone.

There are other things you can only discover in a relationship.

• You can journal about comparison:
  It's different to feel a comparison arise in a room with another woman and remain connected to yourself.
• You can intellectually understand jealousy:
  It's different to encounter another woman's power and become curious about what it activates in you.
• You can tell yourself you're learning to receive:
  It's different to be cared for, witnessed, celebrated or supported by another woman and notice what actually happens inside you.
• You can say you want sisterhood:
  It's different to practice being honest, visible, imperfect, powerful and vulnerable with women who are doing the same.
• You can say you want to inhabit your power:
  It's different to occupy that power in a room with other powerful women without shrinking, competing, performing or needing anyone else to become smaller.

The group isn't simply where Blossoming Lotus happens.

Relationship is part of how we develop.

THE TRANSFORMATION

What Changes?

Sometimes development looks surprisingly ordinary.

You realize you're angry while you're still in the conversation instead of three days later.

You let someone help you without correcting how they do it.

You know what you want before asking what everyone else wants.

You meet a powerful woman and feel curiosity where comparison used to take over.

You say no without writing a five-paragraph explanation.

You stop trying to turn a man into someone you could trust and become much better at discerning whom you trust in the first place.

You can be cared for without immediately needing to repay it.

You stop confusing being needed with being loved.

You take your money seriously.

You create structure around your own dreams instead of continually pouring your best energy into someone else's.

You become more capable of creating safety for yourself, which changes what receiving from another person means.

You feel powerful without becoming hard.

Soft without becoming passive. Relational without disappearing. Independent without having to prove you need no one.

You have more access to yourself.

That is the Whole Woman I mean.

Not perfected. Not finished. More developed. More conscious. More capable of meeting the complexity of her life.

FOUNDER STORY

Why I Created Blossoming Lotus

I've been studying human development since 1997.

At the time, some of what we now call coaching was called spiritual counseling. From the beginning, I was studying family of origin, personality patterns, relationships, beliefs, consciousness, Ayurveda and constitution, health, energetics, meditation, yoga and the body.

Alongside that work, I spent 24 years in full-time clinical practice, often seeing 25 to 30 people every week.

Over nearly three decades, I've continued studying attachment, nervous-system regulation, somatic psychology, trauma and survival patterns, relationships, couples work, parts work, embodied facilitation, masculine and feminine dynamics, functional health, Ayurveda, meditation, yoga and consciousness.

And I've lived through a great deal of this inquiry myself.

I've known what it is to become highly capable and still question whether I could truly create safety for myself.

I've had to examine the ways I chose men, the places I became maternal or controlling when I didn't trust what was happening, and the difference between my own history being activated and a relationship genuinely asking something of me.

I've had to develop my relationship with money, business, power and responsibility.

I've had to learn how to direct my energy toward my own life instead of continually using it to support, develop or care for everyone around me.

And I'm still developing.

I don't teach womanhood from the position of having completed it.

I teach from nearly thirty years of studying what shapes people, what helps us change, and what becomes possible when we consciously participate in our own development.

Blossoming Lotus is where I bring that work specifically to women.