The Mother And Daughter Journey Experience

A new journey track to re-establish and

strengthen an essential bond between

mothers and daughters. 

Journey as a Mother and Daughter

This year we are introducing a Mother-Daughter Journey that will offer additional opportunities in the Women’s Mountain Journey for mothers and daughters.  Each woman will journey with her small group, be part of the larger community, and in addition have special time with her mother or daughter.

Our summer weeklong journey is for mothers of any age, and daughters of 13 years of age and older.

Whether your mother-daughter relationship is as a young woman to an adult mother, or as two adult women, this journey is for those who desire a connection that can be lived with deeper meaning, authenticity, and satisfaction.

Your relationship will be given a unique opportunity to make a significant shift to your ways of being together – and perhaps have moments of awakening – that will help move you beyond where your connection has been.

Who Is The Mother and Daughter Journey For?

We are likely to have women as young as 13 years of age and older.  There will be a separate track for a group of young women between the ages of 13-18, which will be run by Cindy Petrakis Mason and Nancy Lishack.

Therefore, daughters who attend with their mothers may be either in their adolescence, young adult life, or perhaps in mid-life.  Mothers who attend with their daughters may be as young as 40, they may be in their elder years, or somewhere in between. This representation across all the stages of adult life will enrich the collective experience of all who attend.

 What Will The Mother-Daughter Journey Be Like?

YOU WILL BE AN ACTIVE MEMBER PARTICIPANT WITH  SMALL ‘ALLY’ GROUP OF WOMEN

Your mother or daughter will not be a part of this group.   Being with other women will give you an opportunity to share your personal interests or struggles that you might be comfortable sharing with your mother or daughter.  In this group, you can speak about things you might not be ready to share or feel concerned about discussing with your family member.

 

This group gives you a chance to learn and grow in ways that can help your mother-daughter relationship.  These groups are useful ways to get real and honest feedback about your ways of being in relationship.  As you gain more confidence or clarity about your ways of communication, you can bring these learnings to your conversations with your mother or daughter in real-time, while the learning is fresh and clear. 

There will also be times to spend together during evening councils and during morning and evening meals. These will provide more ground for the growth and learning to continue to flow in to relationship in supported settings, without too much structure. 

Facing the Challenges of The Mother-Daughter Bond

 

Navigating The Essential Developmental Struggles

  • How do we honor the established traditions and heritage of the past, while also making room for new ways that have never before been established?
  • How do we learn to better communicate about our inner lives with one another?  How can we struggle in worthwhile ways to find language for our interior worlds?
  • How can we express ourselves with words that reveal who we are, rather than use our words to obscure our vulnerabilities and enforce our positions of power?

As Mothers – Facing Fundamental Quest(ion)s

  • How do we learn to acknowledge and allow for our mistakes and our failures to be a part of our relationship with our daughters?
  • How do we practice asking for forgiveness for our mistakes?  How can we become better at understanding how our mistakes have impacted our daughters?  How do we learn to forgive ourselves for the ways we cause our daughters pain?
  • How can we better understand that what will be most burdensome to our daughters is the reality of our own unlived lives?
    • How do we learn to give to our daughters what was never given to us?
    • How do we learn to shift from being ‘the one who knows better’ to becoming ‘the one who accompanies our daughters’ in ways that allow them to know us better, and us to know them better?

    As Daughters – Facing Fundamental Quest(ion)s

    • How do we wrestle with both wanting our mothers’ encouragement and approval, while also wanting to strike out on our own individual path that our mothers may not be able to understand, appreciate or approve of?
    • How do we continue to look up to our mothers, while at the same time witnessing and withstanding our mothers’ flaws, failures, and contradictions?
    • How can we gradually learn how to ‘humanize’ our mothers?  How do we understand that seeing them as ordinary people is a sign of our own growth as women?
    • How do we learn that forgiving our mothers for their absences, mistakes or harmful behaviors is not an exoneration of what went wrong, but rather is an act that allows for something to be repaired, or for something new to become established?
    • How do we experience forgiving as an act of empowerment?  How can we learn to share with our mothers the pain we have experienced while allowing them to accompany us in new ways?
    • How do we come to accept that repairing or developing a bond with our mothers is always done one step at a time, and is always ‘partial’ and ultimately can never be exactly as we might wish for?
    • How do we learn to also ask our mothers to forgive the ways that our own clinging to childish thinking or childish behaviors did not allow for them to be imperfect yet caring fathers for us?

    In our Journey process, conversations emerge spontaneously as a result of formative experiences that require all women to enter into the unknown together.

    In this way, conversations that are essential and meaningful do not have to be avoided, forced or contrived.  They arrrive unforeseen, and unfold naturally, from the moment being lived together.

    The Wilderness Setting Of The Weeklong Women’s Journey

    As women who attempt to become our best as mothers, partners, sisters, and daughters – we understand that in order to think in new ways, and grow our capacities to live and love in the world – we need a to be a part of something vital, and greater than ourselves.

    On the Women’s Journey Weeklong Intensive, we set the space and create the conditions for something larger than ourselves to be the holding container for our experiences.

    We are immersed in the majesty of nature, in the privacy of a wild mountaintop, in the responsive community of women providing, meals, rituals, and meaningful companionship.

    We also offer essential, ‘elemental’ experiences that all women go through together.  These challenging experiences require cooperation, mutual reliance and shared effort, and a collective vulnerability as witnesses to each other’s lived experience.

    At times, mothers and daughters will share in these challenge elements with a larger community, and there will also be opportunities to share an experience together, for yourselves. 

    Anyone who is paying attention to all that is taking place in our world these days has an ever-growing concern for what our future holds, individually and collectively.

    We are all uneasy witnesses to increasingly challenging times; it seems as if our individual and collective worlds are increasingly combative, volatile, and endangered.  We appear to be unraveling as we enter a ‘tipping point’ in our evolutionary development as human beings.

    Not surprisingly, at the same time, this is exactly how an authentic ‘hero’s journey’ seems to play itself out: Going off on an adventure into the great unknown, only for the adventure to turn into an ordeal.

    It is becoming increasingly evident that none of us are being spared the ordeals of life these days.  We are being drawn in, more and more, to the realities of established ways of life being endangered on personal, local, national, and global levels.

    Our Women’s Wilderness Journey is our best response to what is now needed in the world – an opportunity to open ourselves to go beyond where we have been, and to find the courage to enter into capacities we have not yet obtained – growing in complexity as human beings, becoming more kind, considered and compassionate in our thoughts and our actions, and in service to that which is greater than ourselves.

    What are the essential heroic tasks being required of us in these increasingly challenging socio-cultural conditions?

     What is life asking from each of us?

     

    How are we being asked to change, to mature, and to respond?

    These are the questions we are being faced with now.  These are the quests we are being bound to, and perhaps we were born for.

    Our new Mother and Daughter Journey is designed to address these larger questions that we are all facing these days as women.

    It also allows for the mother-daughter relationship to deepen as each woman reflects upon his place and purpose in the world, and in relationship with one another.

    Join Us For The Mother & Daughter Journey