It’s only a matter of time before our ideas about our life and who we are come crashing down.
When this happens, when events align like falling dominoes to bring us to our knees, we have two options:
1. Get up off our knees. Frantically reassemble the old life and the old identity. Keep on doing the thing.
2. Let the falling apart happen. Choose to sit in the rubble and feel the feels. Breathe.
Historically, I've done a great job choosing Option 1.
But in 2009, at 29 years old, with a 3 year old, 2 year old, and 6 weeks pregnant with my 3rd child, a series of unexpected life events forced me to come face to face with a hard truth.
I'd lived with an equation that had never before been proven wrong: be good and life will be good to you.
The only reason this equation worked up to this point was that I'd been able to purchase or charm or earn my way into the things I wanted. My privilege had helped insulate me from pain and because of this, I’d maintained the illusion of control and capability.
Without my permission, some cosmic hand reached down and ripped the veil that stood between the life I’d made and my actual life, the self I’d created and my actual self.
I realized my striving had not made me safe, my capability had not protected from pain. My hustle had not proved my worth. All of my effort expended to be a good girl had guaranteed nothing.
I felt lost and scared. And then I felt ungrateful and ashamed and stupid for feeling lost and scared. So I tried to do what I'd always done when the feelings got to be too much to handle- I stuffed all of it and pretended things were fine.
Except my strategy didn’t work this time.
I couldn’t mobilize myself into action. I couldn’t pretend things were going to be ok. And because I was pregnant, I also could not self-destruct or numb out.
I knew I could not go back to things as they had been, but I also could not see the way forward.
I couldn’t do anything but feel my feelings, which was the thing I’d been managing to avoid for 29 years.
It was the most terrible relief of my life.
Everything I'd defined myself by had fallen away and I was stripped bare, sitting in the rubble with nothing but my heartbeat and my breath and somehow, it was enough. I was enough.
And then this miraculous thing happened.
A few women sat down with me, right in the middle of it.
One friend found me a therapist, made the appointment, and made sure I showed up. An older woman in my spiritual community offered me free weekly life coaching. Another woman invited me into a yearlong once-a-month mentoring program. Another woman met with my partner and I for a year of inner healing work and counseling.
One of my mom's best friends (who would become a guide for me) gave me the book The Human Condition by Thomas Keating, and another friend sent me a TED talk by Brene Brown on vulnerability.
I was not alone.
And what I was experiencing did not mean I had done something wrong or lost my way.
In fact, it was starting to seem like this falling apart was the way.
After a year of painstakingly picking through the rubble of what was my life, it became clear there was a deep disconnection between who I was becoming and how I was living. If my partner and I wanted to make a new kind of life together that reflected our insides, everything on the outside had to change.
We moved out of our suburban townhouse in June 2010 and became nomads for the next year and a half, making home in such varied places as a double wide trailer on a tiny island off the coast of North Carolina; housesitting and living out of boxes in a British friend’s split-level in the woods of Virginia; 450 square feet on the 2nd floor of my Dad’s office building with air mattresses stuffed under desks and a pack n play in a closet; and our vanagon and tent while on the road between destinations. My partner applied for jobs in all kinds of places, convinced a door would eventually open.
But nothing happened.
January 2011 rolled around, a new year, a new beginning, and I needed a place where I could express doubt, be raw, be full of rage, be sad, be nothing…a place where I could fall apart.
I wanted a space to crack open without falling through the cracks.
And I needed people who would help me keep feeling my feelings and telling the truth about my life.
I could not find this space between my old life and the life I held out hope for, so my mother and my mentor and I decided to invite twelve multi-generational women to join us on a Saturday morning in early January. We stayed till late in the afternoon, speaking our hopes and fears out loud while we ate soup and listened to each other. Woman after woman cried as deep soul truths rose to the surface and found voice.
This holy, beautiful thing took shape right in front of us- this remembering, this ancient way of being.
We called it V-Day, for vulnerability, vision, and vagina; it was the precursor to Arkitekt.
It was the space I had been looking for: a nurturing place where women could ask hard questions, engage their lives with intention, dig deep spiritually, and connect with other women.
We met two more times during 2011 and we were all changed by bearing witness to each other's honesty and courage.
At the beginning of the year, I had picked Harvest for my WORD of the year, believing for beauty out of ashes, a season of joy after so much difficulty.
But on November 6th, 2011, while my family was at church listening to a sermon on how to live a good story instead of a safe and successful story, our house caught on fire.
I was 39 weeks pregnant with my 4th child.
We lost many of our belongings- nursery up in flames, clothes ruined by smoke and water, pantry gone, furniture gone, books burned, art burned, plants burned.
Buddy, our twelve year old red lab, died trying to suck in air from under the front door.
I went into labor a week and a half later, having an unplanned home birth on the bedroom floor of our temporary housing situation because we couldn't get to the hospital in time.
My partner delivered our baby with the same hands he'd used to bury our dog and dig through the rubble of what had been our life.
We named our son Phoenix.
The outpouring of support we received in the aftermath of our fire was like nothing I’d ever experienced. We were surrounded by community, many of them strangers who gave themselves with wasteful, wild generosity. Nobody asked us to prove whether we were worthy of receiving support or what our game plan was for rebuilding. Nobody vetted us to make sure we would be good stewards of their donations.
They just gave.
We moved four more times within the next eight months, making a total of nine moves from June 2010 (when we’d first moved out of our home) to July 2012 when we moved across the country to Fort Collins, Colorado. The door to a new kind of life had finally opened, but we knew no one on the other side of it.
Not surprisingly, I got deeply depressed.
There I was in the rubble again, only this time I didn't have any women to help me and no community to hold me together. Nobody knew me. Nobody cared.
There was no safety net woven by years of living somewhere to keep me from falling down a deep, dark hole.
So this time it was my partner who got me out of bed and found a spiritual community for us to join even though meeting people was the very last thing I wanted to do.
I met a woman in that community who introduced me to a few other women, and when January 2013 came around, six months after I moved to Fort Collins, I decided to invite those four women (since they were the only women I knew) to a Colorado V-Day.
It was what I knew to do: show up, even if it was the last thing I felt like doing. Try to tell the truth even though I didn’t have the energy to put words into sentences. Try to feel my feelings, even though my feelings felt like torture.
It was the turning point.
We laughed and ugly cried and saw and held each other, and once again, I knew I was not alone.
V-Day continued every month through the rest of 2013.
It became a place where I experienced the truth that I was loved without having to do anything to earn it. It became my life line, my safety net, the touchstone reminder of what matters and who I am and how I don’t have to do this life alone. It became a practice of radical presence, compassionate listening, and spiritual awakening.
I dove deep into the work of Brene Brown, Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, and Father Greg Boyle during this time, and it was like someone flipped on all the lights. These writers were putting words to this journey of shedding the false self through wrestling with shame and embracing vulnerability.
I apprenticed myself to their work, along with other mystics, philosophers, seekers, and people of faith.
In the spring of 2014, Carly Barron, one of the women at the original Colorado V-Day, invited me to be part of an empowerment group for women of all seasons of life called M.I.T. (ministers in training), focused on leadership principles, personality types, and discussion around the voice and value of women in the body of Christ.
At the end of that Spring, Carly and I started talking about what it would look like to start a vulnerability movement to truly empower women. We scribbled notes on a ripped sheet of paper, buzzing and giggling at what might come of it, dreaming of a place where women could rise together so free, so empowered, so strong in their sense of worth, identity and purpose, and so bold in their commitment to show up for their lives without shame.
Fueled by the same mission as way back in 2011: to create safe space where women could ask hard questions, engage their lives with intention, dig deep spiritually, and connect with community, Arkitekt began to take shape.
Twenty women signed up for the first gathering, held in my backyard shed. Our Circle followed a simple structure: prayer and a short meditative practice, a short teaching from the Curriculum co-written by Carly and I, and then RoundTable Practice where every woman had a chance to share their story and speak their truth.
The group kept gathering once a month through the rest of 2014 and Spring 2015.
On the off weeks, Carly and I would work on vision, structure, and curriculum at her dining room table while our seven combined kids played in the basement.
In Fall 2015, Carly branched out to start a new gathering with a woman from the original circle focused on exploring the spiritual journey through a Judeo-Christian lens while I paired up with another Arkitekt sister to start a gathering for women who did not identify with a specific faith tradition.
Word of mouth spread.
More and more women in the community wanted to join so ten out of the twenty original participants stepped out to start circles. Fall 2015 found Arkitekt with a total of seven circles reaching over 100 women.
By Fall 2016, there was a Facilitator Handbook, a Facilitator Training Course, a comprehensive Curriculum covering 8 monthly gatherings, the formation of a Vision Team to help Arkitekt grow, and a website.
By Spring 2019, we had over 30 facilitators and 15 Circles.
We started our first gathering for college-age women, our first gathering of matriarchs, our first gathering for public school teachers, and our first gathering for men. Arkitekt alumni planted an Arkitekt Circle in Scotland and one in Washington D.C.
We created monthly newsletters for members and facilitators, a calendar of monthly events, consistent mentoring of new facilitators, weekly Core Team meetings with a 6 member team, and the creation of Facilitator Training videos and Member Curriculum videos.
Arkitekt became a not for profit in May 2019 with a vision to create Arkitekt Circles across the United States, training up facilitators, partnering with local healers and spiritual communities, and giving any proceeds back to our respective communities to empower women to pursue abundant life through self and soul care.
As Arkitekt continued to grow, I began auditing classes at CSU in the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. I started reading the work of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, the Combahee River Collective, and other BIPOC activists, and facing off with my whiteness and privilege, finding a whole new blueprint for the work of coming into alignment with the true self that I’d never even knew existed. It was a profoundly humbling and awakening time as I realized my complicity with systems of oppression.
I kept editing the Arkitekt curriculum to reflect my widening perspective, excited about adding in language around the work of Decolonization and expanding the focus on social activism.
But then, in Fall 2019, my youngest son Phoenix, the boy born out of the fire, was diagnosed with lymphoma.
The Arkitekt Core Team continued to hold Arkitekt while my life once again burned to the ground.
Phoenix went into remission in January 2020, right before COVID deconstructed the whole world.
As our Core Team began to meet again in the summer of 2020, we knew we were caught between an old way of doing things and a new way that had not yet emerged, so we went underground, officially releasing and burying Arkitekt in a ceremony in December 2021.
Arkitekt is slowly resurrecting as I revise the Curriculum yet again to reflect the last few years’ learnings about somatic practice, the nervous system, trauma-informed practices, and the necessity for an embodied approach to healing circle work.
Who knows what’s next?
Who knew when we started that this was what we were building?
We can see what we did, now that some of it is in the rear view mirror, but we still don’t know exactly what we are doing.
I try to be faithful to what is in front of me, just like I’ve always asked my Arkitekt kindred to do: create the space, show up, do the work, and surrender.