Kathy is new to the women’s shelter circle. She said she had never meditated but she was willing to try. She has eight siblings she has always looked after, and has never had time for herself.

In our circles with women experiencing homelessness, we create a space for the women to touch a part of themselves so deep, a seemingly remote and unfamiliar terrain. Yet in this created space the women rest. Deeply rest. Because this deeper place belongs to us. We are not separate from it. And this is why it’s said that in a woman, spirit and matter can never be separated.

Over and over in our lives, when we sit quietly, in the night or during a brief moment in the day, there is always this question: where do we put our attention? Holding this question, we can become receptive to an inner response. It is how the feminine works. We listen.

We sit in circle... six women who are homeless and living in shelters, a colleague and myself. After a silent meditation, I offer a writing exercise that begins with the words, Once there was a seed….

I returned from the 2015 Parliament of the World's Religions in Salt Lake City last month. Over 9000 people from 80 countries attended.  Walking through the vast complex where hundreds of workshops and gatherings were taking place, I remembered a dream shared by a friend nearly a decade ago. In her dream she heard these words, spoken by her teacher: When enough people come together, the world will change.

We share, because we are one. These are the words I heard as I awoke one morning. I had recently returned from a gathering of twenty women who came together to share their dreams, visions, and prayers, for the earth.

In a dream I ask, “How can humanity endure the suffering that is taking place in the world? A teacher tells me, “There is a way, I believe, to relate to the inner - this is the way.”

Is this not the feminine? To turn to the inner, which allows us to hold the outer?

The story of a woman runs deep like an underground river. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of it.

Other times, it runs so deep that it lies forgotten - its sacredness nearly lost to memory.

A friend wrote to me of a woman’s love song to the earth. It touched my heart because I know it is true. It is a deep listening to the earth’s breath, the earth’s sorrow, and the earth’s prayer.

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to three generations of wisdom on a panel:

Over time, through dreams and images, I began to understand how a woman’s life is connected to the whole. In our Western culture we are conditioned to feel separate and alone. This deep conditioning interferes with a woman’s natural capacity to live her potential. Not in the way of achievement, but in a different way.