Dr Lindsay Jernigan
Women’s Awakening:
Collective energy towards change is the name of the game.
I hope you’ll join me!
Be a part of my Women’s Awakening movement!
I am inviting both participants and sponsors for the Women’s Awakening retreats I run so we can spread this work as efficiently as possible.
Why the urgency?
Because this work is not only deeply personal, it is also political.
My work focuses on freeing women up from the stories that hold us back – deeply personal stories about who we have to be to be good women, good wives, good mothers. While these impact us in personal and private ways, these stories come from messages that are deeply political. Women work hard to follow rules that we have ingested from the male-centric culture around us – to look a certain way, to please others, to be boundary-less caretakers – even at the sake of our own thriving.
We come to hear these rules in our own voices and believe they are of our own making. But these rules are intended to lead women out of their power, and into the shadows of the supporting roles designed for women in a patriarchy.
Not only are these oppressive voices born of politics, but they impact politics, as well. Researchers explored what characteristics most predicted that a woman would vote for Trump in 2016, and the finding was this: they scored high on measures of sexism and anti-egalitarianism. Women who voted for Trump matched their male counterparts in the degree to which they believed they themselves do not deserve equality. Sexist politics leads to internalized sexism, and internalized sexism leads to the propagation of sexist politics. It’s a self-supporting system…until we stop it.
Once we recognize that the repressive rules we are issuing upon ourselves are not inherent to who we are but are only the pleas of those who prosper from us staying small, then we begin to be free.
We can move those messages back out of our blood and our skin and our bones, out of our hearts and our hips and our breasts and our minds, and we can see who we are without them. This awakening changes everything…our sense of ourselves, our relationship to others, and our actions in the world. Empowerment, just like repression, is cyclical.
There is currently a collective surge towards this awakening. I hope you will consider being a part of it in one of these ways:
- Join me for a Women’s Awakening retreat! The next one is at the Sterling Forest Lodge, November 21st-24th in Stowe, VT. Let’s release the stories that hold you back. Can’t make it? Simply use your platform to help spread the word, and send me an email to get on the list for the next one.
- Send women from your team to the retreat. Not only would you be spreading the collective awakening, but you would be benefiting your organization. Research shows that when organizations actively empower their female workers, they see boosts in creativity, problem-solving, workplace morale, job longevity, and financial bottom lines. When we unleash women’s power, good things happen, and that’s what this work is all about.
- Provide scholarship funds to reduce registration cost so I can reach as many women as possible with this work! 100% of all scholarship funds will go directly to reducing registration costs, and contributions of any amount are welcome. In my dream world I give this all away to people who are ready to jump into their awakening thanks to contributions from those who want to empower women – it’s grassroots personal politics. This will allow me to offer more events, and allow more people to say yes to this work!
With readiness and gratitude – Lindsay
References:
Afroz, Saman. (2020). Empowering women in the workplace: Improving the quality of work life. In Women Empowerment & Economic Development (pp.110-124), ed: 2020. International Publications.
Novotney, A. (2024, July 8). Women leaders make work better. Here’s the science behind how to promote them. https://www.apa.org/topics/women-girls/female-leaders-make-work-better
Setzler, Mark & Yanus, Alixandra. (2018). Why Did Women Vote for Donald Trump? Political Science and Politics. 51. 523-27. 10.1017/S1049096518000355.