As the light returns
One of my oldest friends, my principal copilot through my teenage years of adventure and misadventure, said something in a recent voice note that really struck me. She said that she knows what the next right steps in her life are for her, and she knows they will mean keeping some promises to herself that won’t necessarily be easy.
“But if we can’t keep promises to ourselves, how can we keep them to anyone else?”
I made a promise to myself in 2023, to slowly and thoughtfully shift my life, and work – to recalibrate at midlife. I have launched my birds and thus live in an ‘empty nest’ that has been my home for 27 years, meaning I have the privilege of no longer paying a mortgage. And I live with slowly progressing MS, which heightens my awareness of not knowing what the future holds (a truth for all of us, that we antidote by making plans!) While living in an unpredictable and changing body has taken me to some very dark places, nearly six years on from my diagnosis, it seems also to have liberated and emboldened me.
Women’s Work is a key plank of this shift, and I will keep working it like clay on a wheel, refining and releasing as much of its potential as I am able to. For myself, and for as many women as it can reach. My vision, the seed of which appeared more than 25 years ago, is to create and host spaces that resource women to refresh the design of their lives and to live them more fully. Within this, I want to create spaces for intergenerational, international/intercultural exploration of how we can live our lives with greater presence and agency.
The last couple months have been consumed by life in planned and unplanned ways. An incredible trip to South Africa, busy work weeks, a ten day visit with my elderly parents and accompanying a friend to the end of her life on 19 December. That all resulted in Women’s Work being left on a low-boil since it arrived in the world in September. As I write this on 30 January, I am aware that it is Imbolc this weekend, the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox. With the light returning I feel my own energy slowly rising again, and this key piece of the promise I made to myself is shifting back into focus.
In the dark of this winter I have reflected on the first three months of Women’s Work, which included offering two seasonal workshops, two meetings for women who are living with a neurological condition, and working individually with two women. While only a few things have happened through Women’s Work, I have been struck by how amazing and affirming that very fact is. The few things that have happened have been completely as I hoped, and my early reflections are already moving my thinking on.
The seasonal workshops have been incredible spaces, each attended by -/+ 40 women of all ages, from around the world. Each workshop, a temporary community in which participants were guided to do their own work through individual reflection and conversation, was a rich and generative space. I hope that such gatherings create the potential for something that is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, and that each woman leaves with a sense of centredness, and connection. Like I did.
The time with women who live with neurological conditions has also been rich, and appreciated by each of us. This open group will continue to develop in the spirit of ‘co-production’, as we call into being this additional resource for any woman living with a neurological condition.
So, as I resume my focus on Women’s Work in 2025, I am going to lean into hosting Life Labs and Workshops, rather than focus too much on promoting myself as a coach. Twenty-plus years down the road of being a coach and a facilitator, having thought I would foreground myself as a coach for women, I am going to lean into being a coach-facilitator of group spaces for women; while remaining available for the deep and truly transformational work of individual coaching.
As I said earlier, I consider Women’s Work to be clay on the wheel, and I will continue to feel for its ‘right’ shape emerging as I get to know it, and it responds to the many hands that I hope will enable it to find a shape that resources all women and reminds us that, in our rich diversity, we have so much in common. I look forward to Women’s Work evolving opportunities for us to inspire, stretch, support, and learn from one another through an experience of deep connection to ourselves, and opportunities to connect from this place.
Is there a promise that you once made to yourself, that you want to refresh for 2025?
May the light’s return renew your energy for it, too.
