My Wish for Circles of Women Came True (liberated from their binders, please)

Mountains or beach? I think this is one of the questions dating apps ask, and one that comes up in wedding shower games to see how well the bride and groom know one another, or how well their friends know them. It has been a long time since my participation in either of those activities, but I am most definitely Team Mountains. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that my spiritual awakening began in the clear, cold air near Mt. Baker, Washington.

The date things kicked off was December 16, 2022, which I know because I have written in a journal pretty much every single day since my last Day 1 on 11/4/22. I had taken some time off work to get away to a mountain cabin with my dog. Naturally, mom wanted to be able to tell people she was going to the mountains, so even though she is an avid indoorswoman, she came with us to a remote one stop sign town, the nearest Starbs at least 40 miles away. She had said something so triggering the day prior, I filled up 2 pages in my journal, writing things like, “I know I should expect this! But I didn’t drink at her and there is no alcohol here even if I wanted to.” And, “ I know so well DRINKING DOES NOT HELP. It lets the bad people win.” 

Walking out of the cabin early that Friday morning, my dog anxious to feel the snow crunching under her paws, the stars above feeling like a million blessings soothing my brokenness, I took a deep breath. All was okay at 6 am in the mountains, where the only mother I cared about was Mother Nature. As we walked and the beam of my headlamp created little vignettes of sparkly snow frosted branches, I brainstormed topics for my call later that morning with the recovery coach of the group I had recently joined. She had introduced the elements used in astrology to our group as a means of understanding our embodied experience. I was thinking that I needed to bring more Earth into my routine, given that I had so much intrinsic fire, I seemed capable of combusting things like Drew Barrymore in that Steven King movie. Dousing my fire with alcohol had made everything much, much worse for me, especially because I never let the fire out. When I got back from my walk, I jotted down some notes about how drinking had kept me from putting myself first and wrote down a question I left unanswered, “Could I literally be burned out from the fire within me?” 

When you start using a substance or a behavior to numb yourself from the real problem, it may work at first, enabling you to juggle all the complicated components of life while appearing to outsiders calm or fun or determined or whatever model face was required of the day. But eventually the superficiality of what you are doing catches up with you, and underneath all the bullshit is what you have tried so hard to avoid. At that stage, the shit I was smelling was me playing small everywhere it really counted, and giving in - subconsciously resentfully - to what I thought was expected of me (it would be several more months before I got deep enough to see the nugget I was really avoiding). I knew coach Payton would understand my early sobriety spiral, and would make some sense and logical next step out of it. But when she made a perfectly wise suggestion that I perhaps think about planning a vacation in 2023, a road trip with my beloved dog, maybe, I blurted out something about “Circles of Women” as something I wanted in 2023.

It makes me giggle even now, as I can’t help but think of Mitt Romney and his “Binders of Women” in the 2012 Presidential Election. Maybe subconsciously, I wanted to snap my fingers in the style of a presidential looking white male and have Circles of Women appear, but my conscious mind was a bit puzzled. The first CoW (yeah, the acronym is kinda cute, right?!) was Payton’s own recovery group, which I had stumbled upon as somewhat of an outsider, as the other women all knew each other already. They welcomed me in, and for the first time, I didn’t feel so alone as a someone who was high-functioning on the outside yet screaming on the inside, still very much afraid to go public with my alcohol use disorder. 

For the rest of the Mt. Baker trip and after, I managed to stay sober, despite my mom’s frequent drainpipe to the knees antics. About a month later I had my first astrology reading, which led me to the next CoW. This CoW materialized like a fairy ring of mushrooms, and the others would appear magically, too. The astrologer who did my reading was offering an Astrology for Self-Care class. Every Wednesday for 8 weeks, six of us met for 3 hours, learning astrology using each other’s charts and lived experiences as class material. It was just what I needed. Something new to learn to occupy my anxious mind, validation as I learned that my cosmic blueprint was to thank for some of my struggles, and the community of awesome women. We couldn’t have been more different on the surface: a brilliant East Coast math genius entrepreneur, a Midwestern pastor, a California real estate agent, a retired school counselor, a massage therapist, and me, a director at a pharmaceutical company, but we shared a desire to understand ourselves better and hopefully, to then treat ourselves better. . I loved the eclectic mix and immersive learning (this affinity can be explained by my chart, naturally)

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The third CoW was an online network of women at various stages of spiritual development, led by wonderful witchy women with expertise in different modalities, as well as expertise running solo spiritual businesses. After I joined, the synchronicities which had begun to appear amped up to the undeniable stage. It was here that I discovered I was able to communicate with the spirit realm as a medium, which was both scary and exhilarating and ultimately, one of the biggest sources of personal growth for me thus far in my life.

Then it was a mini CoW, one I have written about before because these women are very much my sisters at this point, even though we have never met in person and have only known each other since late October 2023. I feel I have known them for lifetimes (I suspect this is no lie), and we meet weekly and share everything going on in our lives, as well as compare discoveries as we grow into professional hypnotists and entrepreneurs.

And the CoW hits just keep coming, not unlike Mitt’s endless binder memes. Most recently two fellow lightworkers and I decided to meet every other week to support one another as colleagues in what can be energetically draining and lonely work. Ta da! Another fairy ring growing where only grass had existed underfoot.

I cannot put into words what these Circles of Women mean to me. How they sustain me. How they give to me what I don’t even know I need, right when it is needed. That they are what I wished for in the thin mountain air that December morning. Team Mountains all the way. And team CoW.