The Mothers Way: Deep Community at the Intersection of Motherhood & Social Change
When the world is on fire, and you’re a mom who can barely find time to brush her own teeth, how the hell are you supposed to find time to make a difference?
The Mothers’ Way: Community at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change
A 6-week group program for moms
You long for deeper connection with other thoughtful, progressive moms.
You’re pissed off and heartbroken about the state of the world, but you don’t know how the heck to make a difference with the absurdly full life you lead.
Do any of these sound like you?
✔ You feel lonely, burnt out, and exhausted, buried in the day to day of work and parenting, and like you have any “extra” to give.
✔ You have some surface-level community with other moms, but it doesn’t feel all that satisfying.
✔ You’re outraged about the ways that inequality, violence, war, and ecological destruction are wreaking havoc on our planet, but hopeless about your ability to do anything about it.
✔ You long for community with other conscious, progressive mamas who aspire to all the mindful-parenting things – but it feels like everyone’s too busy and caught up in their own families’ lives to get together.
✔ Even if you’re somehow managing to attend rallies, call your representatives, or text-bank during election time, it feels like you’re never doing enough.
✔ Your time and capacity are (much) less since becoming a mom, but your sense of urgency about being able to do something is more than ever.
YOU are not the problem.
Patriarchy – and the ways it divides moms from each other, and humanity from all of life – is the problem.
What the heck can we as moms do to shift the ginormous tide of patriarchy?
We recreate the village.
→ We mothers need the village.
→ When the village is intact, our healing powers are amplified.
We reclaim (& re-value) what we already know how to do as moms.
→ The mother’s way of healing is what’s needed the most in our communities in our world.
→ The mother’s way of healing is already inside of you.
Imagine deep, heartfelt community with other thoughtful, progressive moms at the intersection of motherhood and social change.
Imagine finding:
✔ A community of moms with shared struggles and shared values of collective healing, anti-racism, anti-supremacy, care for the earth, basic kindness, and creating systems that work for everyone
✔ A space where you can bring your whole self and be seen for all of what you carry as a mom – including your anxiety, despair, and horror at the state of our world
Imagine feeling:
✔ A greater sense of mattering, alignment, dignity, and purpose, as well as connection to your unique gifts in service to the web of life.
✔ Greater clarity about your unique gifts and skills, and how to express them in ways that are both meaningful and respectful of your limits as a mom.
✔ Like it’s possible to be the role model you want to be for your child.
✔ Together, we’ll explore an approach to social change that feels accessible, within reach, and inclusive of yourself and your world as a mom.
We’ll explore what it means to hold compassion for your limits, appreciation for your gifts, and clarity about the most effective ways for you to contribute to systemic change, alone or with other moms.
Hi, I’m Marina!
A therapist, coach, stepmom and mom to a beloved four year-old. I keenly know the way in which becoming a mother can feel like a death – the death of all that is familiar, comfortable, and spacious in our lives - and the ways in which finding the time to simultaneously care for our little ones and fight for a more sane, just, and kind world can feel completely untenable.
I know, too, the way in which activism feels impossible precisely when it starts to matter the most, when the loves of our life are about to inherit the world we brought them into, and that we’re about to leave to them.
I know that, despite the ways that the capitalist western world divides us into our miniature “personal” spaces, overwhelmed and at our wits’ end, we moms deeply need each other.
And I believe that in this war-torn, ecologically ravaged, poverty and oppression-stricken world, moms hold the key to our collective salvation.
What to Expect
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Meet your fellow moms seeking ways to radically parent, foment social change, and actually care for ourselves. We’ll discuss the main tenets of the program, and lay the groundwork for our six weeks together.
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Learn about patriarchy, how it’s interwoven with capitalism and white supremacy, and the ways that it divides, numbs, and shames us, and disguises our instinctual impulses toward well-being and our responses to harm. We will explore what it means to heal as moms from patriarchy through an NVC lens.
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To stop the cycle of violence, and to create anew, we have to dare to feel what is already inside us. Together, we’ll open the doors to our grief, from which we can connect with our longing, our vision, our hunger for ways of being that support moms and liberate all of us.
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Explore the archetypal Mother’s Way of working with and for life. The way of welcoming, healing, weaving together, and restoring. Explore and imagine mothers’ collective leadership, for our communities and for our world.
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Learn about the power of small actions, small connections, and daily ways of being to make an impact in the world at large. Clarify your gifts, the things you already do naturally and with ease, and explore what it would look like to make space for you to do them more fully, while honoring your very real limits as a mom.
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Acknowledge our community, clarify our commitments, close our circle, prepare for emergence.
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6 gatherings, 90 minutes each, via Zoom. Expect a combination of large and small group reflection, exercises, and sharing.
You’ll need a device to get you online, and a quiet space where your body can settle and you can have privacy.
To support connection, please be somewhere you can have your video on and be present for our time together. (Close that neverending email!)
Infants-in-arms are welcome.
Ah, and please have a flat surface for your device to rest on to prevent motion sickness in your fellow mamas.
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As this is my first time offering this program, I’d like to see which of the two works best for folks. Select your preference on the registration form. There will only be one program — either Sundays or Wednesdays.
Sundays, from May 5th through June 9th, 1pm-2:30pm Pacific / 4pm-5:30pm Eastern, OR
Wednesdays, from May 8th through June 12th, 11am-12:30pm Pacific / 2pm-3:30pm Eastern
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Total cost for the course is $217
*25% will be donated to the collaboration of Women of the Sun and Women Wage Peace, Palestinian and Israeli organizations respectively, in support of their joint efforts, as mothers, “to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children.”
Payment plans are available, and if need be, a discounted rate.
*If you’d like to join, I’d like you here. I’m committed to making this program accessible to any mom who feels called to be a part.
*This includes an optional discount for BIPOC participants: While I don’t assume that all BIPOC participants will need or want financial support, I offer this discount for those for whom it will make access to this program easier, as a form of micro- reparation in a nation that has, from its origins and ongoingly since, stolen from and disenfranchised communities of color.
✅ This is for you if….
✓ you already have a poopload of conscious parenting tools in your toolbelt, regularly forget (or are too overwhelmed) to use them, and primarily are seeking community with other human mamas at the intersection of motherhood and social justice
✓ are ready to share and make inviting space with other moms – listening to, learning from, and reflecting one another, while making space for multiple experiences and perspectives
✓ are humbled by the struggle to raise little humans in a broken world, and are finding your way
❌ This is not for you if…
✗ you’re seeking communication tools for parenting (we’ll touch on this, but it’s not the focus. A separate communication course is forthcoming.)
✗ you struggle with listening, reflecting, and sharing the space with others, or don’t do well with tolerating diverse beliefs and perspectives
✗ have all your shit figured out
FAQ’s
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Hell yes. This program is open to all sexual orientations and genders of self-identified mamas who in any significant way identify as “mom.”
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Hey mama, I know you’re busy. This program will consist of our 90 minute weekly calls. No homework or other components.
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To create a safe, intimate container for our work, where we can lean into each other and feel ourselves held and known, I ask that each mom commit to attending at least 4 of the 6 gatherings.
The “lecture” component of each call will be recorded, but not personal shares or exchanges.
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Hell no. You just have to be a mom with a heart who’s like, “What the eff do we do with this world?” and who believes things could be, like, really different – economically, environmentally, socially, politically – all the realms.
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Oh! I’m glad you asked. I will refund your payment until one day after our first gathering. In other words, you’re welcome to try it out and see if it feels like a fit. If it’s not, just let me know.
Feel the call to join with like-minded mamas figuring out how to raise our children while the world is ablaze?
Join Us.
$217 for the 6-week program. Payment plans and discounts available as needed.
More about me and the space I hold
In addition to being the mom to my beloved four year-old and stepmom to a delightful fourteen year-old, I am a marriage and family therapist, life coach, and Certified Nonviolent Communication (NVC) trainer.
My pronouns are she/they, and some of my identities include Jewish, white, anti-racist, animist, and liberation-loving. For many years pre-baby, I facilitated women’s NVC support and empowerment groups. I’m committed to holding compassionate, safe, radically-accepting space for participants to listen deeply and connect with their shared humanity, and to upholding the sacredness of all life.
It’s essential to me to aim to create a safe and welcoming space for moms of color and queer moms. I believe, as aboriginal activist Lilla Watson asserted, our liberation is deeply bound up with one another. Naming the ways that white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and heteronormativity mess with our wellness individually and collectively, whether we experience oppression or privilege, is a part of our healing, and will be a foundational aspect of this group.
What if I have more questions?
Email marina at marina@shamelessheart.com