Themes and Intentions

• Theme

• Intention

• Common threads

• 1) CONNECT in meditation
• 2) ENVISION the women gathering
• 3) OPEN & COMMIT to next steps
• 4) STAY CONNECTED through GTW

Theme

Each year Gather the Women's Regional Coordinators choose a focus for gatherings on International Women's Day. We feel that uniting around a common theme, intention, and process will increase our awareness of connection and amplify our energy around the world.

The theme for 2008 was:

WOMAN TO WOMAN
(Each gathering created its own subtitle,
e.g., WOMAN TO WOMAN: Being the change.)

Now is clearly the time for women's voices to be heard, their wisdom and vision to be activated. We ask those who gather to include an opportunity for every woman to be heard, with respect and with consideration for everyone present. We also ask that an invitation be extended to create an ongoing GTW circle in your community.

Intention

Our shared intention is to inspire, connect, collaborate and partner as a global community of compassionate women on International Women's Day.

Common Threads

We offer the following processes to better align us as sisters gathering all over the world…

• A meditation to connect us
• A reading of the vision of women gathering
• A call to open and commit to next steps
• An invitation to stay connected in Gather the Women's LightPages

1. MEDITATION/ VISUALIZATION OF CONNECTION

The following is a meditation to connect the energy we are producing during March 2008. Feel free to modify this to suit your gathering.

Please join me now to connect with women around the world who are gathering.

Let us begin by closing our eyes. Take a few deep breaths and just settle into the room. Breathe in deeply and exhale deeply, letting go of any tensions and pressures you may have brought with you today. For this moment, you have nothing else to do except breathe deeply, relax and be here in this safe circle of women.

With your eyes closed, let yourself feel the energy of the woman in this circle, the woman on your left and your right, and all of those around the room. They too have heard this call to gather here today.

With another breath, expand your awareness to include the women beyond this room, beginning with those who have gone before us -- our mothers and their mothers and their grandmothers. Let us honor these ancestors as we join together today to declare our intentions.

Expand your awareness to all the other women around the world who have ever gathered for International Women's Day over this past century; imagine them standing with us today, as we stand together in a new way.

Now, I invite you to visualize our Earth in all its beauty and glory right here in the middle of the room. Take a moment to register this beautiful round planet, with its deep blues and greens, its majesty and wonder. Register its wholeness: there are no borders or boundaries here. Breathe deeply, letting your breath infuse the planet with life sustaining love.

Take a moment to image in your own way, a web of light settling around and covering the entire Earth. At each intersecting point of the web is a bright light….each light representing other women who are standing with us today all around the world. Sweep your mind’s eye across the seas to Egypt and Cameroon West Africa on the African continent, to England and Vienna in Europe, to Israel and Nepal, Canada, Germany, Australia and all across the United States.

Women in the Middle East have come together to teach one another about their religions. Others are meeting around issues of peace and non-violence. In Africa, women are supporting one another as they face the realities of the HIV virus. Women in Tibet are teaching others how to deal with threats of physical abuse. The challenges of extreme poverty in the villages of Mexico bond the women of that area together. In the United States women are uniting to overcome the deep divisiveness that threatens their society.

Around the world, women are sitting in circles as we are today and sharing their stories, with music and dance. Wonderful things happen whenever women gather. Women from all walks of life, the privileged and those without privilege, we are all connected by a golden thread in the feminine heart. Some of us have given birth to human life; all of us have given birth to ideas, projects, dreams. All of us feel compassion and love for the fragile life on this planet. We come together today in our differences and in our alikeness and stand in our power and our wisdom, bringing all we are as a resource for the highest good. We are women helping women change the world.

With a final exhalation, I invite you to travel all the way back to the circle of women gathered in this room. Now I welcome you back from this journey of connection and spirit.

Let us begin our work together….

2. THE VISION OF WOMEN GATHERING

Gather the Women's Vision underlies our common intention to connect and inspire one another forward on International Women's Day. Please read this version aloud at your gathering and/or provide it as a written handout:

Our shared intention on International Women's Day is to inspire, connect, collaborate and partner as a global community of compassionate women.

FROM GTW'S VISION: We invite ourselves as women to demonstrate
our courage, to risk leaving old conformities
to join with millions of others throughout the world
celebrating women's true worth.
We come together to express shared concern for our human family,
and to create and support actions
that will enable humanity to live together
in a balanced, harmonious and peaceful world.

We evoke at a profound level
our experience of our own worth as women participating in this world.

As women we bring life forward.
We are in touch with the cycles of life,
and we function in a context that is deeply relational.
We have the capacity to generate
creative solutions that benefit
life on the planet.

We call forth
a rich exchange of cultural values,
dissolving the ties that bind us to the illusion
that one segment of our human family can win
while another loses.

Together as women we are contributing
to a new collective wisdom,
and we lend our strength
to that which we wish to embrace.
From this emerging balance is being born
a new dimension of our humanity.

3. A CALL TO COMMITMENT

Your gathering can be a context that evokes a next step for every woman there. Deciding to take that step and voicing that commitment to supportive listeners is a powerful catalyst for change. Please devote some time in closing for each woman to speak her commitment to her own growth. This is very effective as a brief communication to the whole gathering, but may also be exchanged with a partner or a smaller circle. Some possibilities:

…Can you commit to a new behavior or action that will deepen your understanding of others whose lives are very different from your own?

…Can you join an existing organization or group to contribute your skills and resources?

…Can you take an action which will bring you closer to one of your personal dreams?

…Can you speak out on an issue that you feel passionately about?

…Can you create your own circle of women to meet regularly or join an existing circle?

…Can you identify an area of prejudice or judgment in your own life and commit to examine those beliefs?

…Can you begin to share more openly with your family and friends, your own valuable perspective, contributing to the wealth of women's wisdom already nurturing our communities and our cultures?

…Can you share your financial or personal resources in a new way?

…Can you make a change in your interactive patterns with your immediate family that will create more mutuality and respect?

…Can you believe in yourself and your gifts a little more than you did yesterday?

4) AN INVITATION TO CONTINUE THE CONNECTION

Gather the Women is committed to both the local gathering of women, and to their visibility and connection as a global force. Please refer women to our website, so that they can stay connected to each other locally, and participate in the big picture as well.

Join GTW's Global Matrix and its interactive web presence called LightPages at www.GatherTheWomen.org .

Every women of good heart and intention who participates in GTW's LightPages will help build the resonant field needed to:

• encourage, connect, and activate women’s circles,
• bring together existing organizations to collaborate in creative new ways,
• build a grassroots matrix of women and women’s organizations,
• co-conceive and co-create gatherings that activate women's wisdom on every level, local, regional, national and international.