The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and The World: The Essential Guide to Women's Circles

By Jean Shinoda Bolen

A guide to using female connection and empowerment as a force for change. “Short and poetic . . . a fine resource for building community.” —Spirituality & Practice

The minds and spirits of women are powerful forces, particularly when harnessed in communion with other women. Women’s circles have been around for quite some time, and their presence is a healing and strengthening source for many. Furthermore, author and psychiatrist Jean Shinoda Bolen believes that women’s circles act as catalysts for change around the world. In this inspiring and spiritual book for women, Dr. Bolen provides both a guide and vision for women seeking purpose and change.

Through her poetic language, Dr. Bolen emphasizes to her readers the importance of using their intuition and drawing upon their own insights. In bringing feminine values such as relationship, nurturing, and equality together, Dr. Bolen shares how women create a space for compassionate and radical growth.

By focusing on both the psychological and spiritual, women open the doorway for great change and empower one another to be leaders of positive change in their own lives and beyond. In this way, women empowerment itself acts as a tool for societal and psychospiritual change. After all, when strong women join together, who can stop them?

Read The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and the World and find . . .

A tool for creating positive change

Words of insightful and powerful feminine wisdom

A book for women everywhere

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781609252557

Jean Shinoda Bolen

Jean Shinoda Bolen, M. D, is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and an internationally known author and speaker. She is the author of The Tao of Psychology, Goddesses in Everywoman, Gods in Everyman, Ring of Power, Crossing to Avalon, Close to the Bone, The Millionth Circle, Goddesses in Older Women, Crones Don't Whine, Urgent Message from Mother, Like a Tree, and Moving Toward the Millionth Circle. She is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, a past board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women and the International Transpersonal Association. She was a recipient of the Institute for Health and Healing's "Pioneers in Art, Science, and the Soul of Healing Award", and is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She was in three acclaimed documentaries: the Academy-Award winning anti-nuclear proliferation film Women—For America, For the World, the Canadian Film Board's Goddess Remembered, and FEMME: Women Healing the World. The Millionth Circle Initiative www.millionthcircle.org was inspired by her book and led to her advocacy for a UN 5th World Conference on Women. Her website is www.jeanbolen.com.

Book preview

1

Zen and the Art of Circle Maintenance

… in the circles where we face ourselves,

we listen like a miracle,

and I reclaim the song which is mine….

—Janice Mirikitani, Where Bodies Are Buried

Zen and the Art of Circle Maintenance

THIS IS AN unusually short book for what it proposes, which is nothing short of changing the world and bringing humanity into a post-patriarchal era. It is written for women, who will be the ones to do it, if it is to be done. Though interested men are certainly welcome to read it.

The Millionth Circle was written to inspire women to form women's circles that have a center, and for women whose current participation in them will now be seen in this larger context. It is my contribution to accelerating a process and a movement that has already begun. It depends upon a simple hypothesis, whose mechanism has been proposed and observed, and is one that can be intuitively and immediately grasped: When a critical number of people change how they think and behave, the culture does also, and a new era begins.

Once the principles are understood, the significance of women's circles can be appreciated as a revolutionary—evolutionary movement that is hidden in plain sight. It appears to be just women getting together and talking, but each woman and each circle is contributing to something grander.

The Millionth Circle intruded itself on me while I was writing another book. I was working on the manuscript of Goddesses in Older Women, about the archetypes in women over fifty—one of which is not a goddess at all, but the archetype of the circle—when I wrote four pages of double-spaced thought, which was a complete and whole visionary statement. It felt as if its purpose was not to become several pages in a thick book, but rather that it go out into the world by itself, as an idea whose time has come. Within days, this perception was validated. Isabel Allende had asked me for ideas for a keynote lecture, and I faxed those four pages to her. When she quoted from them, the audience of 2,000 interrupted the talk with spontaneous applause.

Then came chapters 3 through 9, the How to portion of this book. For years now, as I encouraged women to form circles, I wished for an instruction book, a Zen and the Art of Circle Maintenance, which this is. These chapters have the visual appearance of poetry, and the number of words is quite sparse for such an ambitious undertaking. The form came about when I serendipitously discovered the effect of using the centering feature instead of standard margins on my computer and, as a result, wrote a "How