Our Sacred Containers Regarding Safety, Sovereignty & Responsibility

In the Chamber of Frequency Integrity and at RETURN TO THE CIRCLE Retreats, I, Traci Trimble and my team at True Path Consulting Group, care deeply about the quality, integrity and care of the spaces we create together.

For this exact reason, I do not promise you that a “safe space” will be comfortable.  

Not because safety doesn’t matter here. It matters profoundly. No one else can determine what safety feels like inside another woman’s body. And that is no one’s business but her own. 

Something that feels deeply nourishing to one woman may activate another. A truth that liberates one woman may bring another to an edge. An invitation that opens one heart may awaken grief, resistance, anger, fear or an old survival strategy in another.

Activation is not automatically harm. That belief, claim and ideology is spiritual bypassing. 
Discomfort is not automatically danger and safety is not the absence of either.

Transformation sometimes asks us to encounter the places where we have learned to leave ourselves. The places where we silence our truth, override our bodies, abandon our boundaries, give away our authority or expect someone outside of us to know what is right for us.

I will not ask you to override yourself in the name of healing, spirituality, sisterhood or belonging and I will not take your sovereignty from you by pretending I can guarantee that nothing here will ever activate you.

What I can promise is integrity.

I can commit to bringing presence, care, discernment and responsibility to the spaces I hold.

I can, will and do establish clear agreements and boundaries including:

I can honour consent.

I can listen when something needs attention.

I can remain willing to have difficult conversations.

I can take responsibility when responsibility is mine.

And I can continually ask “Does what we are creating support women in becoming more sovereign, more self-aware and more able to remain in relationship with themselves?”

The purpose of this Sisterhood based, self awareness work is not to create a world in which nothing activates us.

It is to develop the capacity to remain with ourselves when life does.

This is a co-created container.

When you enter this space, I ask you to remain in relationship with yourself. Listen to your body. Notice your yes. Notice your no. Notice when you contract, disappear, perform, please, defend, freeze, over give or override yourself.

From a place of kindness, we ask that you communicate your boundaries, ask for what you need, choose what you participate in, step away when you need to and return when it is right for you.

Allow another woman’s experience to belong to her without making it mean something about you as you become her witness.  And when something activates you, where possible, become curious before deciding what it means without putting it on someone else. 

What is happening in me?

What does my body know? 

What belongs to this moment? 

What belongs to my history? 

What is mine to communicate? 

What is mine to take responsibility for?

You never have to endure something harmful in order to prove that you are healing and you also do not have to flee every uncomfortable edge in order to protect yourself.

Part of self-mastery is learning the difference.

We practice repair here.

We are human beings gathering with human beings. There may be misunderstandings. There may be projections. There may be moments when we don’t get it right.

The measure of a conscious community is not that rupture never happens. It is what we do when it does.

Can we tell the truth sooner?

Can we listen without immediately defending?

Can we own what belongs to us?

Can we make repair where repair is possible?

Can we honour a boundary without requiring agreement?

Can we allow another woman her sovereignty while remaining rooted in our own?

This is part of the practice.

The Chamber and the Circle Retreats are not escapes from real life.

They are places to practice being fully ourselves inside relationship.

Many of our deepest patterns were formed relationally. So there is something profoundly powerful about discovering that we can now remain connected without abandoning ourselves.

We can belong without conforming.

We can disagree without exiling.

We can be witnessed without performing.

We can encounter discomfort without immediately assuming danger.

We can say no without withdrawing our love.

We can say yes without betraying ourselves.

We can be responsible for our own experience while still caring deeply about the experiences of others.

That is the kind of community I want to participate in.

Not a perfect space.

Not a space without edges.

Not a space where someone else is responsible for keeping me comfortable.

A space of integrity, of consent, sovereignty, responsibility and a space of truth where we exist within a space of repair and where we practice staying with ourselves while being in relationship with one another.

I will do my part to hold that container with the highest integrity I know how. I promise you that. 

I ask you to do the same.

Because ultimately, the sacredness of this space does not come from my ability to guarantee your safety.

It comes from what we agree to practice together.

Heal. Remember. Rise.

~ Traci
Host
Your Doctor of Metaphysical Psychology