Embracing the Sacred Feminine for Personal and Social Transformation

This workshop is being hosted live online. Portions of this workshop will be recorded, and limited access to a recording will be made available to those who attend the live event. Instructions on how to join will be emailed to registrants shortly before the workshop start date.  
 
Accessibility
If you need to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu at least one week prior to the event. For more information, explore our Accessibility web page.

Workshop is live online and takes place over TWO days. Saturday workshop hours are 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. PDT. Sunday workshop hours are 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. PDT.

Patriarchal religious and social systems have fostered divisions among us and caused deep wounds rooted in the desacralization of the feminine, dark, and queer. While feminism has fostered significant social and political changes, many of us remain disempowered and disconnected in a world of increasing crises. A greater transformation of individual and societal values is needed—one that is rooted in the power of the sacred feminine.  

Join CIIS faculty and healing practitioner Dr. Alka Arora in a transformative workshop designed to deepen your sense of personal sanctity, sovereignty, and agency. Dr. Arora invites you to explore the “secret spiritual history” of feminism and discuss how sacred feminine concepts and myths offer a new lens on personal and planetary change. We will also consider the intersection of these concepts with racial justice, queer liberation, and ecological healing.  

In this workshop, Dr. Arora guides participants through lecture, reflective inquiry, experiential exercises, and embodied dialogues in break-out rooms. Learn how to discern between the messages of patriarchal culture and your own inner knowing. Identify how you can live in greater alignment with what you hold sacred. Explore a vision for social transformation that shifts us out of polarization and into sacred relationship with all beings.  

This workshop is relevant to leaders, activists, educators, visionaries, and all who yearn for the sacred feminine in their lives.

 
Dr. Alka Arora is Associate Professor of Women’s Spirituality at CIIS, where she has been teaching since 2011. She also served as the department chair from 2012–2016, during which time she developed the MA program in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice. Dr. Arora’s scholarship is focused on three interrelated areas of inquiry: spiritual activism, vegan ecofeminism, and transformative pedagogy. She uses what she calls an “integral feminist pedagogy” in her teaching, inviting students to see social justice work as a form of sacred praxis. She has published articles on topics related to multicultural and spiritual feminism, anti-speciesism, integral feminist pedagogy, and women’s leadership.  

As a first generation Indian American woman, Dr. Arora brings to her work a lived experience of navigating differing cultural contexts. Her commitment to feminism and women’s spirituality stems in part from her own efforts to reconcile the patriarchal aspects of the Hindu tradition with its mystical teachings and reverence for the divine feminine.  

Dr. Arora’s current work is focused on envisioning a fourth wave of feminism that integrates spiritual wisdom, eco-social healing, racial justice, and gender reconciliation.  She is a certified facilitator with Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI), a non-profit organization that draws on the power of truth-telling and dialogue to transform gender relations. She is also certified in an energy healing modality called ThetaHealing®, which helps individuals replace outdated or limiting beliefs with more empowering and useful perspectives.