When I received her email response, my stomach dropped. I felt my body tighten and heat rising to my head. My heart started beating really fast and all I wanted to do was throw up.
About 6 months ago, I put together a collaborative project called “The Goddess Ritual Guidebook.” The project was inspired from a similar project that I participated in called the “25 Rituals for Sacred Living & Business”.
I had a conversation the creatrix of the “25 Rituals” project and shared with her my project and she agreed to participate.
I thought everything was cool and clear. When I recently invited her to my new collaborative project coming out in March, she wrote that she had been holding onto something for months and needed to clear it with me.
“My experience of how you presented the project to me was one of disempowerment and disconnection.”
She could have continued to hold on to it, eventually cutting me off.
I could have reacted defensively, creating more of a wedge between us.
But we didn’t.
Instead, we chose to trust ourselves, our relationship and the divine to heal this instance of the sisterhood wound.
We set up a call and leaned into one another to come back to love and affinity.
This happens all the time. We feel hurt or disempowered by one another and because it is so difficult to share how we feel, we hold it internally, which turns into disconnection.
It is our responsibility as feminine leaders to stop perpetuating the sisterhood wound by leaning into these difficult conversations with one another.
Here is how you can handle a similar situation if you find yourself on either side:
Lesson #1: No one is wrong; no one is at fault.
Before anything else, you must get clear that nothing and no one is wrong. We are all good women doing the best we can. We make mistakes, we do thing unconsciously that hurt one another, but rarely is it intentional.
If you learned that there is always a right and wrong and that someone should always be at fault, then you will have a hard time with this. But the more you can see the good in all people – to see that everyone is a child of the divine – you will cultivate compassion for others and be able to heal these old wounds.
The truth is, the more that you see the good within yourself and know that YOU are trying to do the best you can with what you know, the more you will see that in others. The practice here is to stop being so hard on yourself and start to see that there is nothing wrong with you and you have done nothing wrong. A mistake is not wrong, it is an opportunity to learn, heal and transform.
Both of us came onto the call without blame and set the intention at the beginning that no one was at fault and we both wanted to experience connection and affinity on the call.
Lesson #2: Own your part.
In her email, she brilliantly took responsibility for her reaction and how her inner child felt. It made it easy for me to stay away from being defensive and more in tune with my own sense of responsibility.
I took some time to reflect on the lesson and what I could have done differently. I wanted to fully own any impact my actions made on her and how I could have hurt her.
What I saw is that I never asked her what she needed, nor did I check in to make sure she felt good after our first conversation. I assumed she was ok.
I saw that I could have asked how I could credit her, or if she even wanted credit. I could have asked how she would feel honored as the inspiration behind my project.
I shared this on our call and how I would take this lesson going forward.
Lesson #3: Practice Ho’oponopono.
Ho’oponopono (ho-o-pono-pono) is an ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. The Ho’oponopono cleaning process consists of repetitions of the following phrases:
I Love You
Please forgive me
I am sorry
Thank you
By apologizing to her for any harm I caused and she receiving my apology, we were able to heal the wound between us. By leaning in, getting the lesson and making a commitment to take these lessons forward, we can hopefully stop perpetuating our own patterns and help more women heal as a result.
I admire her for her courage to speak up and how she embodied the work of feminine leadership by taking responsibility and speaking with love to create more connection among women in the world. She is a powerful woman who walks her walk.
Please share your experience
Are you currently experiencing hurt from a past incident that you have not shared with another sister? What fear is stopping you from sharing with her?
Have you had a courageous conversation that brought you and a sister back to connection?
Share this message
If you have a friend who is experiencing hurt and withholding her truth from another sister, please share this with her.
Share this with your community to help heal the sisterhood wound.
