Women in Longmont now have the opportunity to channel their authenticity and join other women in the “Temple of Sacred Sisterhood,” a group whose goal is to connect with one another and themselves in ritualistic and ceremonial settings.
Longmont residents Mary Sundblom and Lauren Pollock facilitate the Sacred Sisterhood’s meetings, the first of which took place on Wednesday.
When Sundblom and Pollock met several months ago, they realized they shared a deep interest in a “divine calling” to coach women towards unlocking their authentic and best selves, Sundblom said.
“We both have experience in creating a sacred container for deep diving into personal development and understanding more about our own patterns that may not be serving us,” Sundblom said about herself and Pollock, “and also helping move through those patterns and opening up to divine guidance.”
At the Sacred Sisterhood’s first meeting on Wednesday, nine participants showed up at Cavegirl Coffeehouse, where Sundblom and Pollock guided the group through exercises geared towards the theme of “the sisterhood wound.”
“Women are conditioned to compete, gossip and judge each other. There’s a cattiness that gets engrained among women,” Pollock said. “‘The sisterhood wound’ meeting was about addressing that wound in the sistership and going to a place of connection and co-creation with our sisters.”
The exercises were intended to bring the women together in a space where they could create awareness of and heal through the traumas that they’d experienced because of other women, Pollock described.
To kick things off, the women were asked to take a “goddess oath” by answering the question, “do you swear to be yourself, your whole self and nothing but yourself?”
For the next two hours, “women were connecting and crying and just feeling that sense of sisterhood that feels so nourishing,” Pollock said. “It was really beautiful to see people break down those barriers and walls they put up sometimes in such a short amount of time.”
For one of the meeting’s attendees, Ashleigh Sinclaire, said one of the most impactful exercises occurred when the women were paired and sat across from each other. They repeated the phrase to one another, “you can hurt me.”
Although there was a lot of love in Sinclaire’s relationships with her two sisters growing up, there was also a lot of criticism and judgment, she said, which created emotional wounds that she has long wished to heal and release. Because of an “inner strength” Sinclaire found while repeating the phrase “you can hurt me,” “I was finally able to do that,” she recalled.
“(The exercise) also healed part of an unspoken, almost unconscious thing between the women. We talked about how, in this culture, we’ve been taught to be in competition with and not trust other women, to be guarded with them instead of open,” Sinclaire added. “That’s all a lie. And that simple exercise helped that.”
By the end, the women who’d shown up as strangers left sharing a “deep connection and affinity for one another,” Pollock said — an outcome which exceeded her and Sundblom’s expectations for the group’s first meeting.
Moving forward, Sundblom and Pollock plan to continue gathering the Sacred Sisterhood monthly, while switching up the theme of each session depending on what they see “coming up for the women or what they want to work on,” Pollock said.
“We don’t want the put together personas that women have to put on for the rest of the world to show up. All sides of them, their shadows and their lights, are welcome in the circle,” she said.
