Site offers membership for new Conscious Community for Women

Women can connect with each other and to preeminent experts in health and nutrition, spirituality, style and beauty, and more.

The Best of You Today has launched a new community membership program to support even more connection between like-minded women experiencing a conscious lifestyle. A community forum allows members to create profiles and build even stronger communities.

The communities are broken into specific groups and when a group reaches a certain momentum, experts in the field of discussion are assigned to the group to provide feedback and support. It’s about real, authentic connections where women with similar interests can establish relationships online.

“The purpose of The Best Of You Today is to provide our members with a single place that gives women back their power and offers the best information to support them in transformation,” said Mojgan Joukar-Rady, founder of the site. “Nowadays, it can be difficult to establish the kind of balance that allows you to have a career, be a mother, be a great wife, be active and healthy, and nurture friendships, so this community gives you tips to living the best version of your life while connecting you to amazing women to support you on your journey.”

Membership starts at $29 per month. A portion of the monthly membership fee is donated to a select charity dedicated to improving the lives of women.

The Best of You Today is dedicated to connecting women of all ages to one another, to the preeminent experts in their fields of interest, and to the best information on the products they use and styles they wear. The Best Of You Today family of contributors is comprised of the nation’s foremost experts, including Byron Katie, John Holland, Doreen Virtue, Gay Hendricks, Dr. Shefali Tsabary, Kathy Kaehler, Phillip Bloch, Scott Barnes, Melissa Odabash, David Kirsch and Christine Avanti.

For more information or to become a member, visit www.bestofyoutoday.com.

In the past three weeks, I’ve been speaking and listening and feeling a shift in the field, as women increasingly want to be involved in contributing their way to seeing and doing as solutions to bigger problems. I returned yesterday from Mobile, AL, where I keynoted the WomenSpeak 2010 conference on “Women in Circles Changing the World.” I had come to Mobile directly from New York City, where I participated in events centered around the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. I was there as the leading advocate for a UN 5th World Conference on Women (and Girls).

Since writing The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and The World and Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World, I have been seeding circles with a spiritual center and have taken on the role as a message carrier. There was an extraordinary response to what I had to say in Alabama and a shift in receptivity at events at the UN. The online petition “Support a UN 5th World Conference on Women” (go to www.jeanbolen.com, click the GoPetition logo) is another sign (went from 2,000 signatures to 8,000 in a month.

I am looking forward to coming to Plymouth, MN, to keynote and give a workshop at the Alive Aware Awake! Women’s Gathering. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has been at the leading edge of social responsibility and citizen activism. The largest group of girls (ages 10 to 17) to the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 was organized in Minneapolis.

If grassroots activism influences the UN through their governments to have a 5th world conference, the first since the internet and the 21st century, it may very well be the tipping point. Only when a critical number of women become involved in making decisions that affect us all, will the planet be a safe and good place for all children.

When women come together and make a commitment to each other to be in a circle with a spiritual center, they are creating a vessel of healing and transformation for themselves, and a vehicle for change in their world. These are circles of compassion that can become incubators for personal and political change.

An egalitarian circle with a spiritual center is a model most easily created by women, but is a form not limited to women. Circles with a sacred center are the means through which a third wave of feminism, based upon spiritual equality and compassion, can bring about an evolutionary change in human society which would end the conditions that foster terrorism. The premise: A world that is safe for children will not breed terrorists; a world that is safe for women is a world where children are safe. For this to come about, the principles of circle and hierarchy must come into balance, otherwise the acquisition of power over others prevails and no one can be safe.

Holding hands to form a circle immediately connects us, one to another. Touch comforts, the clasp of hands forms an unbroken circle – a non-verbal statement that we are together. When silence for reflection, meditation or prayer is added, it is also an experiential introduction to the archetype of the circle with a spiritual center, which I have been seeding as an idea through lectures, workshops and my most recent books, including Goddesses in Older Women.

When I describe how to form and maintain circles, the analytic vessel and Jungian concepts of the psyche provide the structure and spirit through which a circle can become a vessel of healing and transformation. Further, if the collective unconscious and the morphic field are actually the same, circles become vessels for the transformation of culture, as well. An alchemy or reciprocal effect that changes both, occurs between the individual circle and the archetype of the circle. (In essence, this is an application of theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s thinking to Jungian psychology; humanity’s morphic field is Jung’s collective unconscious.)

A proliferation of circles has the potential to become a force for social justice by bringing feminine values of relationship and interdependency into a culture of hierarchy and dominance through power. Women as a gender use conversation to bond which makes the circle a natural medium and form.

Women in small groups became the Women’s Suffragette’s movement, gaining women the right to vote in 1920. Women in small consciousness-raising groups led to the Women’s movement of the 1970s. As a result, what was once unthinkable for women to do became usual and incorporated into cultural values. If women’s circles with a spiritual center become the source of a third wave of feminism, the effect in Jungian terms would be to bring feminine and masculine principles into balance within collective consciousness.

Jodi Christenson will be ordained to Subdeacon on Saturday, April 25, beginning at 10 a.m., at Saint Francis Liberal Catholic Church of Minneapolis. The progressive church opened Holy Orders to women in 2003. Jodi has been a dedicated server at Saint Francis for a number of years, and she will be welcomed to her new office as a minister for the High Eucharist. In addition, Rev. Judie Cilcain will be raised to the priesthood on Sunday, April 26, beginning at 10 a.m. Judie has served Saint Francis for many years.

“It is with joy and appreciation that we welcome her to this important new role,” the church announced. “Judie will be the first woman from Minnesota ordained as a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church.”

Both services will to be followed with brunch in the church parlors.

Jodi Christenson said she “feels grateful to have discovered Sunday services at the Liberal Catholic Church of St. Francis.” She was received as a church member on Oct. 8, 2000, and admitted to the minor order of Cleric on June 5, 2004. “It is a unique and special privilege to participate with the Liberal Catholic community,” she said.

Rev. Judie Cilcain has been a member of the Church of Saint Francis for nearly 40 years and has served on the Altar for the last 20 years. Judie views herself, in the words of her former Rector, Bishop Newton Dahi, as a “karma yogi,” doing whatever job needs doing. When she was first asked to deliver a sermon in 1989, she stepped up to the pulpit. Judie has long believed that no church should refuse any help that it is offered, and that a woman may serve as faithfully and in as dedicated a manner as a man.

Bishop James A. Zinzow will officiate at these two ordinations and is pleased to be able to raise both of these women to their new offices. He assumed the role as Bishop for the Midwest Diocese of the Liberal Catholic Church in the United States of America on March 29, 2008, and resides in Waukesha, WI.

Saint Francis Liberal Catholic Church, an open communion church, is located at 3201 Pleasant Ave. S., Minneapolis. For more information, call 612.823.4276 or visit www.StFrancisLiberalCatholicChurch.org. Information on the global Liberal Catholic Church can be found at www.TheLiberalCatholicChurch.org

Like most women in Western culture, I grew up hearing the tale of "Sleeping Beauty." Naturally I imagined that one day, just like the sleeping princess, I would be discovered and saved by a handsome prince. As I became a teenager, my fantasy expanded and I also imagined that my Prince Charming would know how to awaken my sexuality and turn me into a radiant, adult woman. And I wouldn’t even have to tell him what to do…somehow he would just know….

This fantasy of a perfect man who possesses the key to awakening a woman’s sexuality is still embedded in the psyche of many women. Deep inside their hearts and minds, even very powerful and successful women are often still waiting for that special lover to come along and wake up their bodies to deeper pleasure and vitality. They believe that there is someone out there other than themselves who has the power to unlock the secrets of their ecstasy.

So what happens when, after years of waiting, the prince still has not shown up? Or what if the prince has shown up and, although he loves his partner dearly, he doesn’t miraculously hold the key to her pleasure? After years of marriage, this woman still finds herself feeling frustrated, misunderstood or neglected. Or even worse, what if an insensitive or abusive man has shown up, leaving the woman wounded and shut down?

If waiting for a prince doesn’t pay off for so many women, then why do they keep buying into this myth? Because we live in a patriarchal society where men generally possess more power than women and where the majority of women expect to be rescued financially, emotionally and sexually by men. And if, as a society, we want to move towards harmony and balance between the masculine and the feminine, women have to do their part in waking up to and owning their power – including the power of their sexuality.

A sexually empowered woman is a woman who is connected with her life force energy, her feminine intuition, and her compassion. Such a woman knows how to make love to herself, to her partner, and to the world.

Another big challenge for women in our culture is that it’s full of images of how a sexy woman should look. However, these images are mostly based on a male visual perspective. So many women find themselves confused and discouraged in their search for their own unique expression of eroticism. Instead they desperately try to fit into some unrealistic idea of how they should look or behave in order for a Prince Charming to pick them.

These and other forms of internalized patriarchy keep ringing in women’s ears. It’s the voices in their heads that keep saying: "I am too old; I am too fat; I shouldn’t rock the boat of my marriage; I am too wounded, I am too broken…." When they search for that perfect lover, they are really looking for someone who will not believe those voices in their heads and instead only see the infinite beauty in them, someone who will lovingly hold their hands, and show them the way within towards ecstasy.

The good news is that we don’t need a Prince Charming to heal us and awaken our sexuality. We can take responsibility for rescuing ourselves and awakening the Sleeping Beauty within. As we turn our attention deeply inwards, beyond the fear, shame and other places of holding, our erotic energy – our life force – is waiting to arise. However, for women who have neglected their sexuality for a long time, coming back to themselves can be a challenging process.

I encourage women to be patient and gentle with themselves and seek help if necessary. In my individual and group work, I assist women through all the steps of reconnecting with their natural eroticism. Then, when a special person does show up, these women are able to communicate what they want and need, enhancing the ability of the woman and her partner to raise sexual energy even further. This also takes pressure off the partner to awaken and heal the woman through imagined knowledge and skills. Then both partners have a chance to connect and explore the beauty and richness of their erotic energy together.

Awakening the beauty within us is a lifelong spiritual commitment to keep choosing life and remembering to be awake in our bodies and our psyche.

Through my work, I have observed again and again that the Sleeping Beauty inside is eager to wake up. No matter how old a woman is or how long she has neglected her sexuality or what she went through in the past, a woman’s inner beauty desires to manifest and shine through her eyes and smile again into the world.