Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex & the Single Girl, published in 1962,
helped launched the 20th century’s sexual revolution.

“Sex” is code for the erotic power concentrated within your body’s center. Cultivate this pro-creative power — your power to promote creation — and come home to your sacred self.

Our focus is honoring and energizing the tan tien — the one-point, the womb-point that, through our body’s center, connects us to Source Energy. An ancient Chinese name for the tan tien is The Gate of the Mysterious Female.

Our intention is to affirm and magnify the presence of the Sacred Feminine within us, realizing that we already embody the Goddess.

As we cultivate the tan tien with movement and breath, as we celebrate our body’s center with image and story, we pass through the gate. We meet the Great Mystery herself.

How will you benefit? As you center yourself all the more in your divine nature, you will

• heal into a greater degree of wholeness
• stand in the life-affirming power that is dominion, not domination
• live into new levels of inspiration, insight, creativity, vitality, and confidence
• claim and enact your life purpose
• discover your essential self-esteem

One woman says this about her experience with the power-centering exercises that you’ll be learning:

For the first time I experienced fully what it means to be in touch with my belly. Now I’ve manifested a power which has left me with a sense of appreciation for being a woman. My entire being, body, mind, and spirit, filled with a beauty sensed both inside and out. With each pulse I grew more beautiful. This sense of being rests with me. In connecting with my belly, I have found that I am part of a greater whole.

What will you experience? During our days together, we’ll have deep fun. You’ll

• learn power-centering movement, breathing, and sounding practices drawn from qigong, Feldenkrais, and yoga
• practice the 23 movement and breathing exercises you learn as woman-affirming ritual
• move in ways that enact timeless myth
• activate ancient images of the Sacred Feminine
• animate affirmations that uniquely answer your deepest needs
• play with art-making, journal-writing, and storytelling as ways to express the wisdom that’s already within you

The movement and breathing exercises you’ll learn expand upon what you’ll read in The Woman’s Belly Book: Finding Your True Center for More Energy, Confidence, and Pleasure. We’ll shape the movement sequence into two rituals that you can practice in twelve to twenty minutes.: a Rite for Reconsecrating our Womanhood and a Rite for Invoking the Sacred Feminine.

This form provides a matrix through which you can embody the Sacred Feminine all the more clearly and directly. The tan tien, our body’s center, will become an altar, a place where we lay down the tensions, conflicts, doubts, and worries we have been holding and witness the healing that transpires. Each woman will have the opportunity to blend the experiences she gathers into a practice that she takes home and enjoys for ongoing inspiration and empowerment.

Many say that these times herald a revolution in human consciousness, the emergence of the Sacred Feminine, suggesting that the feminine principle will be informing and reorganizing every aspect of human experience.

These times reveal their possibilities in many layers of meaning, knowledge phrased in terms of indigenous peoples’ prophecy, ancient scripture, sacred image, myth, legend, music, mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. In brief, these meanings converge in what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls “the mystery number of the Goddess.”

Rather than marking the catastrophic end of the world, these times may signal the completion of one cycle and the beginning of another. As we embody the Sacred Feminine, we’ll be equipped to participate in — and shape — the evolution of human awareness with wisdom and grace.

Whatever your level of experience with qigong, yoga, movement arts, body image, or women’s studies, you’re invited! This workshop is for you if

• you’ve had enough of feeling bad about your body. You’re ready to feel good about yourself as a whole
• you think that if you could only make peace with your body, you could tap into a wealth of creativity, wisdom, and inner guidance
• you want to take charge of your sexual energy and fully own your procreative power
• you’re passing through menopause and want to access the core energy that’s becoming all the more available to you at this stage of your life
• you’re seeking a body-centered path to personal and spiritual empowerment
• you’re a yoga or qigong teacher, dance instructor, bodywork therapist, counselor, or health educator working with clients in relation to body-centered issues — such as digestion, reproduction, body image, disordered eating

While cultivating the tan tien is central to qigong practice, its location within our body’s center — within our bellies — can be a problem for women in contemporary Western culture. One qigong student reports:

I have struggled with belly abuse since I was a teenager. When I was 24, I discovered “nourishment,” but only after years of feeding myself garbage. At 34, I discovered Qi Gong, an ancient Chinese exercise which centers all energy in the lower abdomen. But I cannot keep energy focused in my belly! My teacher (male) doesn’t understand my problem!

For thousands of years, and continuing to this day, our culture has devalued women’s bellies. Accordingly, many of us have made our bellies the focus of shame and self-denial. But when we withdraw our awareness and appreciation from our body’s center, we cut ourselves off from the healing, creativity, and intuitive knowing that’s already within us.

We need these powers, for our own sanity. We need these powers, too, if we’re at all interested in co-creating humankind’s just and sustainable future. These powers are ours to express as we pass through the Gate of the Mysterious Female and into the presence dwelling within our center of being.