My rebirth journey began when I stumbled upon the School of Womanly Arts (SWA) in New York City a few months after my husband died. SWA was founded by an irreverent, outrageous women with the moniker Mama Gena. She shocked this “good Catholic girl” with her words and her actions when I first started following her. Yet her message deeply resonated with me, and continues to guide my life to this day. In a nutshell, Mama Gena was advocating for a pleasure revolution. Noting that most women are burned out and tired from serving everyone except themselves, she suggested infusing life with pleasure instead. Think fresh flowers, essential oils, delicious food, warm baths and more. I certainly had not given pleasure much thought over the previous 20 years of raising children, being a good wife and building a career. So not surprisingly I was intrigued.

But there was more. Mama Gena also preached the power of “turn on.” This concept was even harder for me to grasp than pleasure and may be challenging for some of you as well. For now, suffice to say that Mama Gena was telling women that it was important to tap into their sexual energy regardless of whether they were in a relationship or not. This is a topic we will cover in more detail in future blog posts.

The third pillar of SWA teachings was desire. Rather than framing desire as a deadly sin or avarice as some religious traditions might suggest, Mama Gena taught that desire is the connection between us and that which is greater than us. Or to put it another way, desires are divine guidance and should be heeded, not repressed. Now that was a thought that was truly revolutionary.

I was intrigued enough to schedule a free call with her assistant, and a few months later, I found myself traveling to New York City to attend one of the SWA’s free weekend events at New York University Performing Arts Center. What I experienced there was truly eye opening for me at the time. I saw hundreds of women learning how to prioritize their pleasure and desires and live in turn on according to feminine principles. I was intrigued, and in the fall of 2015, I signed up for her Virtual Pleasure Bootcamp, where I connected with other women just like me.

We were all learning that we did not have to live according to masculine principles anymore. In fact, we would find more joy, success and happiness by embracing a feminine path.

Mama Gena was clear that she was not talking about the feminine path portrayed in fairy tales, all sugar and spice and everything nice. The damsel in distress that had to wait for the kiss of a prince to awaken her. Or a feminine that was plain and bland like the middle C on the keyboard of a piano. She was advocating living life full out by playing all 88 keys, from the darkest low notes to the highest highs. She also was suggesting defiance of all the ways women have been taught to behave because as she puts it: “You have to be outrageously defiant and headstrong to connect to your divinity in a world that excludes the feminine.”

By the time I attended my second free weekend in January 2016, I was hooked. I signed up for her signature Mastery Course, and traveled to New York four times for weekend sessions. By the fall of 2016, I had enrolled in the advanced course, Creation, which led to still more trips to New York and also Miami. All told it took about two years to learn this new way of living. My “graduation” took place in Paris in June 2017, and my life has not been the same since. In fact, I even marked my renaissance by changing my name from Carol to Caroline, a small one- syllable change with enormous symbolism.

When I returned home from France, I was a Mama Gena evangelist. I had experienced such a huge transformation that I had a strong desire to pass the message on and point women to the free weekends at the SWA to learn more. Since I had been hosting spiritual book clubs for years, it seemed like a natural next step to host salons where we discussed topics related to what I was learning at SWA. But it wasn’t long before I felt a calling to do more. By this time, I knew this desire was sacred and should be heeded.

So, in November 2017, three friends and I hosted the Bella Luna Retreat. Seven more retreats followed between 2018 and 2021, and what I witnessed was as revolutionary as anything I had seen at the SWA. By focusing on pleasure and desire – and yes – turn on, women’s lives changed. In fact, they experienced radical transformations. They lost weight, found new love, resurrected old loves, changed jobs and above all learned to experience day to day life differently than ever before. And they experienced this transformation without every traveling to NYC or enrolling in the SWA.

While my initial intention had been to point the way to SWA, life has a way of surprising us and that’s what happened to me. By 2019, Mama Gena abruptly decided to stop hosting in-person events and no longer organizes the free weekends or her Mastery and Creation courses. By following her own feminine wisdom, she turned out to be clairvoyant. When the global pandemic hit in 2020, she had no events to cancel or refunds to give. By that time all her offerings were already online. Meanwhile I was realizing that I was just as capable of guiding women on this new path as she was. In fact, all I needed to do was gather the women and the magic happened – effortlessly.

After the first three retreats, I connected with a new divine partner, whose wisdom will also be featured on this blog. We continued to plan retreats together that were unique, each focused on a different theme. Eventually the teachings come together in this nine-month journey that I am calling Rebirth. It encompasses all of the tools we have learned and practiced over the years and then some. And it offers me the long-awaited inspiration to write a much-desired second book in the process.

What’s more, the inspiration to start this blog came after we had already taken women on a nine-month Rebirth journey. Just as had happened in previous retreats, the process was transformative. Engagements, new homes, and amazing business opportunities and promotions ensued. But so did a process of letting go of old jobs, partners and ways of life.

This journey is not for the faint of heart. As you’ll see, you have to be willing to let go of the old before you can make room to receive the new. But believe me when I tell you that you do have what it takes to transform your life. Trust me and the sacred circle of women who have already walked this path before you. While I have changed their names and identifying details to protect their privacy, their stories are real. In fact, my own stories are embedded in the chapters that follow. I chose not to single myself out because my story could be yours or another woman’s who is bold enough to embrace this path of the divine feminine. The details may vary but each and every story on this blog is sacred, magical and divine. And if you stick with it, the same will be true for you.

To understand just how different my own life used to be, it helps to know that I once worked at the Vatican – the quintessential patriarchal structure that represents the polar opposite of all the feminine practices we will be exploring in this blog. It’s a hierarchical institution made up of men who make the rules and exert control over 1.3 billion Catholics, making it the world’s largest Christian religion. While I remain a fan of Jesus, I’m pretty sure he never intended his message of love and compassion to lead to the gilded land that is the global headquarters for Catholicism.

Incredibly I never noticed the power dynamics of this male-dominated religion back then. I was simply living my dream of working as a journalist and reporting news in English for Vatican Radio while freelancing for Newsweek and the Associated Press. As I reflect back on that time, I don’t regret my Catholic upbringing nor my time at the Vatican. It provided the foundation for who I am today. But now that I’ve learned more about the history of the church, I know that Catholic teachings were a major factor in the suppression of the feminine that we now seek to resurrect.

One of the best examples of this is the Malleaus Maleficarium, commonly translated as the Hammer of Witches. Written in 1486 by a Catholic cleric, it was once the second most widely read book after the Bible thanks in part to the newly invented printing press. Sadly, the author Heinrich Kramer used his treatise to excoriate many of the practices that I’ll be recommending in this blog. His 15th century blueprint for the persecution of witches, mainly women, turned out to be enduring. Many of you already know the sordid history of the witch hunts that followed. But why is this relevant today? Because we women still carry the wound of centuries of oppression and the legacy they inspired. Even in the 21st century, some of the core beliefs linger including the ancient tome’s main premise: witchcraft stems entirely from carnal lust, which is insatiable in women. Considering the many subsequent attempts to tamp down female sexuality, is it any wonder so many women are shut down sexually?

I choose to believe it was fear rather than malice that led men like Kramer to suppress and even demonize the sacred feminine. After all, we are creatures who bleed but do not die and can create a human being inside our bodies and then nurture it at our breasts. It’s no wonder the ostensibly celibate priest and his counterparts were afraid of women and the power of our intuition and sexuality. Even after the witch trials were long past, chastity belts and genital mutilation emerged to take their place, not to mention laws and edicts designed to keep women chaste.

Since this is a guide to transformation and not a history book, I will not take the time here to outline all the ways the feminine has been reviled throughout the millennia but we will return to this topic of suppression of female sexuality in the blog posts that follow. Chances are that you too were raised in a patriarchal religion – and if you were part of a mainstream religion it was most likely patriarchal. But perhaps you were no more conscious of this systemic repression than I was in the 1990s when I was working under Pope John Paul II. All of us, including men, swim in the same patriarchal soup until one day we look up and see the light. Not surprisingly this can take decades, and for some, it never happens at all. But when it does, it’s usually through the guidance of other enlightened women.

Certainly, it didn’t happen overnight for me. I left the Vatican to get married and live the life of a typical suburban wife – except my life turned out to be anything but typical. Two years after getting married, I got pregnant and we lost our baby boy, full term. In the grief-stricken months that followed, I wrote a pregnancy book to help other women like me. That book went on to help tens of thousands of women navigate the fears and anxiety round the subsequent pregnancy.

For years I was sure I would write another book, but I never felt inspired. Plus, I was busy raising the two healthy sons we went on to have later. Our lives were a whirlwind of playdates, sports and the everyday joys and sorrows of raising children. When both boys were in elementary school, I decided to go back to school myself so I could one day become a college professor. Having worked from home from the time my children were babies, I wanted to plan ahead for the day I had an empty nest. Little could I have known just how empty that nest would turn out to be. My husband died and both sons left for college within the next two years. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, I went from living with a husband and two children, to living alone with a dog.

If the story had ended there, it would have been a sad one. But little could I have known that a new life awaited me through a rebirth like the one I’m inviting you to experience. My rebirth was not intentional or planned. In fact, I didn’t even know to call it a rebirth at the time. But looking back, I can see that’s exactly what the universe had planned for me.

Fortunately, you won’t need a tragedy to catapult you on to this new path. Somehow some way, you are already on your way. Perhaps you heard about this blog from a friend or read about it on social media. Maybe you’re one of the women who read my first book and just happened to find me here. It really doesn’t matter how you got here. What’s important is that you’re willing and open to change.