Sangha as Sisterhood : The Cultivation of Collective Resiliency

When girls come together to challenge culture as a group, a new energy dawns. More than anything, this energy gives me hope for the world young women can nurture into being. I’ve seen it in the women’s circles I’ve been privileged to grow in my adult life and I’ve seen it in roomfuls of girls. There is nothing like it. There’s something special about bringing young women together inside the universality of ther experience; to bringing them home to the birthright of love offered by their bodies; to turning inward to the true and eternal source of refuge in a world that constantly demands their projection as effortlessly perfect consumable objects. From Florida to North Virginia to California, from Ontario to Vancouver to Auckland, in school gyms, Yoga studios, and living rooms, Brie gathers young women together in small groups to share the gifts of mindfulness practice and yoga and to teach young women to resource themselves from the wellspring of wisdom offered by their bodies.

In a world that extolls the value of rugged individualism, independence, and personal expression, what too often gets lost is our greatest gifts of resiliency: collectivism, shared experience, communion with our true nature and one another. Our weekend retreats are a great turning inwards away from the pressures of everyday life toward the sustenance. And they are a great turning towards one another; with empathy, vulnerability, and courage.

Part of the journey to interrupting inherited patterns of not-enoughness lies in naming the lies we have been told about our bodies and our worth. We unplug from the addictive whrr of social media and plug into meaningful dialogue, emotional processing, somatic experiencing, and laughing our heads off. In the light of one another, we untether our bandwidth and heart space from harmful cultural narratives and plant new seeds that ground us in all that we are and all that we have. Girls go home filled up and on fire. We offer scholarships for young women who cannot afford it.

Girls Weekend at Sun and Moon Yoga

Our weekend retreat for teen girls at Sun and Moon Yoga Studio in Arlington, Virginia focuses on the themes of empathy, body positivity, sisterhood, and unity. We train up compassionate communication, move from the concept of body image to embodiment, recognize the community and connectedness among us, and practice techniques that bring that unity to life through yoga, mindfulness, breath, and visualization. I’ve designed our curriculum and Annie, whose basement apartment has lovingly held me on three different trips to speak at area high schools and middle schools, has lovingly promoted it through her studio, provided her space, and is offering the Yoga segments. We have girls signed up from Fairfax and Arlington counties and we’ve issued a call for young women of color to attend on full scholarships.

By the end of the weekend, their organs warmed and their bodies pliable from all the gentle Yoga and Shakti-filled laughter and emptying-our-emotional- basket connection, our subjects are ready for the most challenging part of our retreat: facing themselves not by looking into the mirror, but by looking into their own experiencing. There’s nothing like a blank wall to get a girl to look within. No futzing. No phones. No hair to flick or mascara to unblot. Just the blank slate that represents the universe staring back at you, beckoning, “come inside.” The self-monitoring that is a cornerstone of self-objectification, one that elicits constant self-surveillance for a perpetually self-improving broadcast of self takes a constructive back seat as awareness slides into the driver’s seat and slams the vehicle into reverse, driving these girls away from the precipice of their demise.

Placing a blanket and bolster beneath them, girls line up along the wall in preparation for our final practice together. Their legs cross before them, and some tuck in an extra blanket under their buttocks for height so they can find the most balanced tripod possible between their sit bones and their knees for what I call Wonder Woman practice – a wildly sexy title for the practice they will engage over the next terribly boring but radically transformative twenty minutes of their lives. Working directly with our own suffering, we will open to the thought patterns we propagate, patterns that become wired into our neural firing and calcify into the states we label as depression and anxiety. Learning to face the activity within our own brains prepares us to meet the hard moments of life with less reactivity and more responsive presence, by opening rather than clamping shut, by feeling rather than pushing away the pain. Our training ground is perfect stillness. What goes unseen from the outside is the inner wilds of our minds that like snow globes slowly settle when we sit down, settle in, and stop actively shaking them up.

The first twenty minutes of our lives we devote to simply noticing are often the most arduous. They can feel interminably long, especially when you’re 17 and in the habit of reaching for your phone to check your notifications every few minutes. But if we stay with the body breath after breath, feel the expansion of our diaphragms, and the melting of our shoulders, we can see how states feel, how we promulgate them to our detriment, how we can free ourselves into openness when we let go of our stories. This is how breathing in and out while wall gazing in a line-up of teen sisters, becomes a revolutionary act: we together wake up our intelligence, reclaim the resource of our attention, and fortify our personal – and collective – resiliency. Our walls come down as  our practice radiates out into the world, nourishing the field in which all beings arise, the compassionate sisterhood to which we all belong.