The Women's Group Guide, Pt. 4: The Illumination of Events

What happens behind closed doors...is the topic of our tale.

Several years ago, I became suicidal.

It was the winter of 2020. The COVID pandemic was in full swing, and everywhere I looked, it seemed, people were suffering. I had gone off and on anti-depressants in preparation for an ayahuasca retreat. The world was spinning around me, and I was spinning with it. I was in my room, with a knife to my wrist.

In that moment, it was like something had taken over my body. I didn’t feel in control. I was isolated, confused, scared, watching myself from the outside as I prepared for a step I wasn’t sure I wanted to take. But there was nobody to stop me.

Then, a group of women started knocking on my door.

We were going on a retreat together. 3 days at an Airbnb in the woods, well-quarantined, to celebrate one woman’s birthday. It was a loose coalition of friends - not yet a Women’s Group in capital letters, just some female-bodied people who all knew the same birthday person. It was, to be frank, a pretty weird group of people to find me contemplating suicide. But here they were, mercifully early for the carpool.

In a fugue, I walked downstairs. I let them in. I drove with them. I didn’t publicize the state I was in, but I couldn’t hide it, either.

That weekend was hard. We were all a little mad from the chaos of COVID. We didn’t know each other well enough to relax, but we strained at the edge of our guards until they broke and our messy inner selves spilled out. We cried. We shouted at each other. I spent a lot of time by the fire, staring at nothing while a motherly group member held me.

We also cooked together, and mended over meals. We wrestled. Laughed. Cleared simmering conflicts over men. Read together. Played Authentic Relating Games. In a weekend, we turned the chaos inside and outside of ourselves into something we could talk about and understand.

Amazingly to me, this group wanted me there - as broken as I was. They showed me their brokenness too, and it mirrored what I was seeing in the world. When everything is a little broken, my own cracks didn’t seem so strange.

When I came back to the world, the pain around me was the same. The pain inside me had normalized a little. I was no longer alone in it. I had friends now, yes - that group kept meeting throughout COVID, every 3 months, for retreats. But even if that had only been a one-off retreat, it would have done its magic. I had been caught, and held, and lowered gently into a field of beings like me. Transplanted into the iron-rich ore of a women’s group, my compass had re-aligned.

This is a strange story to start with. But I want you to understand what I mean when I say: women’s groups have saved my life. And that’s why I’m writing this guide.

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This is Part 4 of a 5-part series on how to start, and run, a women’s group or an affinity group of any kind.

In Part 1, we covered the Formation: different ways groups can start, best and worst practices for organizing, how to hold a group together, and what to do if it falls apart.

Part 2 was on Invitation: ideal group size, the benefits of closed vs open groups, who I DON’T invite, and how to elegantly disinvite.

Part 3 was about Preparation: aesthetics, choosing a space, dividing up responsibility, and framing expectations so everyone is there in the same time and mind.

Now, we are on to the real meat of the thing.

• What happens at a women’s group event?

• How can you create truly transformative structures, or open the space for them to arise?

• What brings together a disparate group into a cohesive whole?

• And, is there any way to fuck it up?

This last article will be in two parts. First, we’ll look at my favorite format for women’s groups: the retreat. I’ll tell you how my groups settled on this, and what the upsides and downsides are. Then, in the second part, we’ll look at a more standard women’s group format: daylong or evening events.

Let’s get into it.