When I invited women into Know Yourself, a year-long program, I knew that asking someone to commit to a year of personal work might give them pause. We live in a culture that values efficiency, productivity, and measurable outcomes. We are accustomed to programs that offer a great deal of information, follow a rigorous schedule, and promise to take us somewhere new. But personal work doesn’t always follow a schedule, and understanding something intellectually is not the same as learning how to live it.
Why Personal Growth and Embodiment Take Time
One of the women currently participating in Know Yourself shared that she was initially hesitant about committing to a year. She had participated in programs before that involved demanding schedules and so much content that she would become bored or burned out halfway through. What she is discovering in this program is something different. She describes the structure as supportive of integration, giving her space to work with each month’s material and find her own relationship with the practices. She also recognizes that the program’s approach to decolonization supports slowing down and learning her own rhythm through the ebbs and flows of life.
She believes the length of the program is also giving the group time to deepen in intimacy and develop the support needed to explore the tender places this work touches.
Her reflection speaks to something important about why I chose a year as the container for this work.
Moving Beyond Intellectual Understanding Through Embodied Practice
The intention isn’t to fill twelve months with content or to keep everyone moving through a curriculum at the same pace. It is to create room for learning to meet life. We explore the practices, bring them into our daily experiences, and discover what happens when we try something new in the middle of an actual relationship, a difficult conversation, a familiar pattern, or a moment when we find ourselves abandoning our own needs.
We have time to return to a practice, to question what we have learned, and to notice what we didn’t see the first time. We can begin to recognize the difference between understanding a concept and embodying it. We can meet ourselves where we are today without assuming that we should be further along than we are.
Decolonization and the Beliefs That Shape Our Relationship With Ourselves
This is especially important when we begin looking at the influences that have shaped our relationship with ourselves. Much of what we carry was learned over a lifetime. Our beliefs about our bodies, our sexuality, our worth, our responsibilities, and our relationships have been influenced by family, religion, culture, and the larger systems in which we live. We didn’t necessarily choose these beliefs consciously, and changing our relationship with them isn’t simply a matter of deciding to think differently.
One of the things we explore in Know Yourself is a connection many people have never been invited to consider: how the larger systems we live within influence our most intimate relationship—with ourselves.
We may recognize racism as a social issue, capitalism as an economic system, and patriarchy as a structure of power. But how often do we consider how these systems shape our relationship with our bodies, our sexuality, our pleasure, and our sense of worth?
Internalized bias influences what we believe about ourselves and others. Capitalism teaches us to measure value through productivity, achievement, and consumption. Patriarchy shapes expectations about gender, power, desire, and whose pleasure matters. Cultural and religious messages influence what we consider acceptable, shameful, desirable, or forbidden.
These influences don’t remain outside us. We absorb them as we grow, often before we have the language or awareness to question them.
Exploring Sexuality, Pleasure, and Internalized Beliefs
Our sexuality develops throughout our lives, beginning in childhood through our earliest experiences of connection, touch, safety, boundaries, and the messages we receive about our bodies. It continues to develop through adolescence, our relationships with partners, our sexual experiences, and the culture surrounding us. Along the way, we form beliefs about what sex should look like, how we should behave, what we are allowed to want, and whether our own pleasure deserves attention.
By adulthood, some of these beliefs may feel so familiar that we mistake them for our natural preferences or personal shortcomings. We may not recognize how much we have learned to accommodate others, disconnect from our own desires, or measure ourselves against expectations we never consciously chose.
When we begin to examine these influences, we open up new questions. Do I actually want this? Does this way of relating serve me? Am I choosing from my own desires, or responding to what I have learned I should want? What would it mean to approach my body, my pleasure, and my relationships with greater curiosity and less shame?
These questions aren’t about finding fault with ourselves. They are about understanding how we became who we are, so we can meet ourselves with compassion and make more conscious choices about how we want to live now.
Building Trust, Intimacy, and Connection Through Women’s Group Work
This kind of exploration benefits from time, but it also benefits from relationship. Over the course of a year, a group of women who are willing to show up honestly, listen to one another, and share what they are discovering can develop a different kind of connection. There is room to become more comfortable asking questions we might once have kept to ourselves, speaking about experiences that have felt too vulnerable or taboo to share, and practicing how to express our feelings, communicate our needs, and establish boundaries without abandoning ourselves.
Trust doesn’t need to be rushed. Neither does vulnerability. A year gives us the opportunity to build connection while we are doing the work, rather than expecting ourselves to navigate everything alone.
And the work doesn’t have to end when the year does. Participants are invited to remain connected within a larger community, carrying forward the relationships and points of connection that have grown through the experience.
The Value of a Year-Long Journey of Self-Discovery
For me, this is part of the answer to why a year matters. We aren’t trying to become a different person by the end of twelve months. We are making space to know ourselves more intimately, to recognize what has shaped us, and to explore how we want to live in relationship with ourselves and others. We have time to practice, to stumble, to begin again, and to discover what becomes possible when we stop treating our own lives as something we need to get through efficiently.
A year gives us room to live the questions, not just ask them. It gives the work a place in our lives, and gives us people with whom we can continue to explore what it means to be more fully ourselves.