Discover Your Evolutionary Purpose

You are invited to join Dr. Elizabeth Debold and Mary Adams of EnlightenNext to help forge the next stage of women’s development.

A Call from the Future

We women are at an extraordinary crossroads. So many of us feel the pull of destiny, the desire to contribute in deeper and more meaningful ways at work, in our relationships, and to LIFE itself. Often we think of this desire as a personal longing that leaves us with a sense of dissatisfaction with our lives and uncertainty about how to move forward.

But if we only think about this longing as personal, or as a problem, we miss something really important: That longing isn’t simply a personal matter. It’s much bigger than that. Think of it as a call from the future. You and all of us with the ears to hear are being called by history to write the next chapter through our own transformation as women. You are being compelled to discover your deepest purpose not only to guide your own life but also to change the trajectory of history.

We often hear these days that women are going to change the world—that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for! At EnlightenNext, we realize that we women have to change ourselves in order to change the world. The women and men we are right now are the result of patterns in our psyches and in culture that stretch far back into the past. Even with all of the breakthroughs of the last fifty years, so much of who we are is motivated by impulses and desires based on the past. We each bear the weight of history—and we each hold the potential to transform it. Those of us at EnlightenNext feel that for women to really change the world, we must define and actualize higher values, deep trust, and unleashed creativity within and between us as women, and between women and men. That’s what The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women will enable you to do.

Become an Expression of Higher Values and Strength

The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women is a ten-week program that will enable you to see through and transcend these old patterns and discover a new kind of womanhood that is courageous, free, clear, and directional. The Agreements create an enlightened context for a sisterhood among women that goes far deeper than the girlfriend culture that has sustained us. Shattering the old separations and competition of the past, the Agreements create the foundation for a new culture. Each provides a different transformative view into who we have been, who we are now, and who we can be in the future. Internalizing the Ten Agreements liberates us at the deepest dimension of Spirit to engage in a new world of relationship between women based on higher values.

In this new virtual course, The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women, you will realize how your own transformation is not separate from the evolution of all women. You will to learn how to evolve the very structures that make up your self to release greater capacities for liberated action, awakened clarity, and profound communion with others. You will discover how to find within yourself a deeper and higher motivation for your own development—a motive that opens the door to discovering true purpose and new capacities as a human being.

Each week, EnlightenNext’s Dr. Elizabeth Debold and Mary Adams will introduce an Agreement that will give you a vast perspective. Each week you will go higher and deeper into the process of conscious evolution. Together as women we will create a living matrix of transformation that will redefine our relationships and reveal a new future for our culture.

What Will I Learn?

Through this program, you will be taken into a process each week in which we will collectively agree to live to a new standard so that we embody our transformation. The program will give you both a context for shifting how you think about your life as well as specific ways to change that will reveal a higher motivation and intelligence arising from our enlightened engagement. During the ten weeks we will work together, you will learn how to:

• See your life in a larger, evolutionary context that will change the life choices you make.
• Discover dimensions of yourself that are deeper than even your sense of being a woman—which can free you from limiting ideas about how far you can develop.
• Realize that you are the driver of destiny for all of us.
• Step beyond the subtle and often unconscious ways that women defer and pull back from creative responsibility.
• Develop new capacities for emotional rationality that bring a liberated clarity to your relationships and choices.
• Stand strong and undefended so that you can engage from the depth of yourself.
• Break through subtle forms of inertia in order to catalyze evolutionary momentum.
• Meet other women in a new sisterhood rooted in trust in our capacity to evolve through our committed actualization of a higher expression of our being.

And more!

Why Ten Agreements for Evolving Women?

At every major turning point in human history, agreements are created and shared that define the standards for living that bring a new cultural epoch into being. These aren’t simply casual agreements—they structure the ways we relate to each other, our morality, and the deep assumptions we make about what is real, of value, and true. In this program, The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women are designed for postmodern women who are beginning to find the status quo of materialism and superficiality stifling of their spirit and long to find deeper meaning and purpose. They provide us with guidelines—for relating to life, to our experience, and to each other—that make it possible to consciously create the future.

Think about it: When Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, those rules—which we now see as so basic and almost unnecessary—were at the time a real stretch for human beings to live by. Cultural agreements that are obvious to educated, postmodern sophisticates like us now—such as “Thou shalt not kill”—were not at all obvious then. The Ten Commandments created a code to live by that helped human beings reach a higher level of civilization, at least in some parts of the world.

It’s less well known that at the beginning of the Modern Era, in the seventeenth century, “conduct books” were written to help people negotiate the upheaval in society that was caused by the end of feudal monarchies and the beginning of the middle class. These conduct books set forth the ideals for men’s and women’s behavior that are familiar to us even today. Women, for example, were taught to set aside their own opinions and desires in order to capture and keep a husband. These codes of conduct in modernity created the ideals of the Good Woman, Good Wife, and Good Mother that still loom in our psyches and separate us from each other.

The postmodern era has had its own credos. The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose called for equal access to education, pay, and legal protection, and offered a new vision for humanity: “WE BELIEVE THAT women will do most to create a new image of women by acting now, and by speaking out in behalf of their own equality, freedom, and human dignity—not in pleas for special privilege, nor in enmity toward men, who are also victims of the current, half-equality between the sexes—but in an active, self-respecting partnership with men.”

In the nearly fifty years since that vision was put forward, women and men have still not achieved active mutually respecting partnership at work or at home. What is becoming increasingly clear is that we cannot break through the glass ceilings in the workplace until we break through the inner glass ceilings that, despite the overlay of independence and freedom, keep us trapped in patterns of dependence, insecurity, victimization, and competition with one another. At work and at home, often unconscious survival patterns that are no longer useful are keeping us from forging a new world where real partnership with each other and with men is the norm. Women’s half of that world is what The Ten Agreements are designed to create.

Who Are We?

EnlightenNext is a nonprofit educational organization founded twenty-five years ago by spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen that is committed to catalyzing the next step forward in human consciousness and culture. Cohen has also been working with his closest women students for over fifteen years to discover a new kind of women’s liberation rooted in spiritual depth. His twenty-first-century teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment liberates the human spirit so that it can guide us in evolving consciousness and culture. And it also reveals how essential it is for us women to reach beyond who we think we know ourselves to be in order to become expressions of spiritually enlightened values and leadership.

Dr. Elizabeth Debold and Mary Adams are senior teachers of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Debold has been part of EnlightenNext for the past fifteen years, while Adams was one of its founding members twenty-five years ago. Debold was an activist in the women’s movement where she held a leadership position in the National Organization for Women in New York City. After earning her doctorate at Harvard University, she worked with Carol Gilligan on groundbreaking research on women’s development, and she is the author of a bestselling book, Mother Daughter Revolution. Debold came to EnlightenNext to work with Cohen to forge a path for a new women’s liberation.

Adams, born in Australia, began her quest for enlightenment immediately after receiving her degree in philosophy. She had the privilege of studying in India with some of the greatest spiritual masters of the twentieth century, such as Nisargadatta Maharaj and J. Krishnamurti. Also trained as a psychotherapist and a former director of a Buddhist meditation center, Adams has held a variety of responsibilities at EnlightenNext, including founding and leading its London Centre. Currently, she directs EnlightenNext’s educational programming and is instrumental in creating the women’s program.

Both Debold and Adams are part of a core group of women who have made it their life’s commitment to bring into being a liberated, enlightened sisterhood that will not only transform women’s relationships with each other but also change the fundamental dynamics between women and men. Out of their collective experience, The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women have emerged. The Agreements describe the context, the inner position, and the revolutionary relationships necessary for the next stage in women’s development to become a living reality.

How Does the Program Work?

We will meet once a week on Monday, either at 3:00pm or 9:00pm EST (to accommodate different time zones), for ninety minutes via Maestro teleconference. Each session will consist of a combination of presentation, Q&A, and small-group discussion. The program will begin on May 2, 2011 and will end July 18, 2011. (We will not meet on the U.S. holiday occurring on May 30. A full schedule will be provided at registration.)

FREE BONUS CALL: Saturday, July 23, 2011! We’ll offer a special bonus Q&A session for all program participants after the end of the program to explore and support the significant ways that you, and your life, have begun to change.

When you register for the course, you will be given access to The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women website. This website will provide you with the Agreements, contemplation questions, and readings or audios to complement the week’s inquiry.

Participants will also be given assignments to help facilitate deeper engagement with each Agreement following each session

Program Fee

Standard price:	$350
Special Offer: For a limited time	$285	For non-members
EnlightenNext Evolutionaries Level 1 & Level 2: (What’s this?)	$95	For EnlightenNext Evolutionaries (members)

Please note: you can sign up to become an EnlightenNext Evolutionary for the duration of The Ten Agreements for Evolving Women program and become eligible for the $95 rate. For information, contact: evolutionaries@enlightennext.org.