Jennifer’s Boldest Life Initiation

After doing Boldest Life Initiation, I put on an event called, “A May Day Celebration - In Honor Of Women’s Radical Dreams Of Emancipation”. It was inviting college students and community to come explore what working-class and immigrant women’s histories of protest and plant medicine can teach us about liberation today through performance, art, music, movement and herbalism. Here’s a link to it here:

https://sites.smith.edu/mayday/

As a professor and historian, I wanted to create a space for young women students to see that this is part of what we’re passing down to them - these traditions. A lot of students came and they loved it, they stayed the whole day. I wouldn’t have had the courage to design an event like that had I not done Boldest Life Initiation. Because it was edgy to do an event like this in an academic setting. I noticed I was really anxious when I initially reached out for funding and support - a level of fear came up that really surprised me. “What will people think, they’re gonna think I’m crazy because this is so not how you would normally do this.” Basically, I was telling people in academia that rather than the typical lecture, “I want to hold an event with artists and body workers and and poetry and song and numerology and herbalism, and it’s going to center on anarchism, and it’s going to be a day-long retreat and be about honoring the divine feminine through politics and art. It had so many mystical components - it was really witchy!”

Boldest Life Initiation got me to the point where I COULD do it. Where I could voice this vision even though it was unconventional. My voice and my courage to express who I truly am and what I want to create - that’s what Boldest Life Initiation freed up.

The program also really helped me process all of the feelings that come up around my changing body. My grey hair in particular. Looking in the mirror and seeing somebody new - at first I didn’t want to see this older woman looking back at me. But the program created an environment where I could really embrace her - a deeper level of embodiment: “I’m going to be this woman who’s got a meatier middle and more wrinkles and grey hair, I’m just going to be her, I’m not going to fight her or resist her and instead I’m going to watch for other women doing the same thing and notice how gorgeous they are, and that will embolden me further.” Because in the program, we were witnessing each other, and that helps me do it out in the world.

Women our age always say, “I feel invisible”. What I’ve discovered is that yes, I am invisible - to the people I want to be invisible to. But I see the kindred spirits and they see me. Everybody else has faded away in my priorities.

The practice of being with other women and opening our hearts and supporting each other in Boldest Life Initiation - that in itself was so powerful. That’s another reason I felt the courage to truly express my vision, because I was buoyed up by a whole group of peers who were cheering me on.