Happy October, season of the ancestors and all-around witchiness. I’m excited to finally launch this newsletter, and start sharing more about WINGS.
Where I am:
I am currently in Granada, Spain, a week into flamenco classes at a traditional school in the caves of the Sacromonte, in the Sierra Nevada. My calves are very sore. In the good way, where you think: I’m working my body and it hurts so good.
I’ll be here for another month, joined by my friend and musical collaborator Michael, to sharpen our skills as performing and ceremony artists. This artform struck me like lightning last spring, during a women’s business mastermind in Seville. Our intimate group paired business strategy with flamenco classes and a trip to Feria, the annual Andalusian festival where everyone dresses like it’s the classiest party of the 1880s. I was enchanted by how feminine energy is exalted within flamenco, and I felt immediately at home. An artform that centers passion, sensuality, expression, grief, joy. All of it. Yes please!
So I am back, deepening my relationship with this land, my flamenco friends, and the complex rhythms of tango, bulería, and compás. I am working my brain, creating new neural pathways, and improving my overall artistry.
I made a reel on the necessity of beauty rituals to awaken our true feminine essence, inspired by that trip: [link]
I will be back in the states, rooting down, and honoring the redirection of my plans for the next year(s). I'll be writing about that soon.
But I want to talk about the caves and why they deserve a rebrand.
What WINGS is:
I am launching the inaugural cohort of a women’s leadership program in February 2027.
WINGS is a leadership program for high capacity women with bold ideas who struggle to fully own them and express them.
Why? Because the idea was never the problem - in fact, you and I both know your bold ideas are brilliant, and your intuitive read is spot on. Most of us are wearing an identity, and we took on its unspoken rules without ever agreeing to them. The psychotherapist. The lawyer. The doctor. The business owner. The wife. The mother. All of these roles require leadership. Each one comes with a quiet (or not so quiet) list of what you may now say, how much you are allowed to want, and which parts of you are not welcome. Nobody hands you the list. You absorb it. Somewhere in the transition – the promotion, the licensure, the baby, the marriage, the practice you built from nothing – more of your essence quiets.
We need as many women as possible with their authentic expression switched back on: in their relationships, in their own practice, in their work in the world. Women rooted to themselves and integrated enough to lead and express from power and inner authority rather than from the rules they absorbed – in their families, their workplaces, their communities, and beyond. Our words, spoken from that place, create worlds.
I was quite literally tested by my own material over the weekend, while on the phone with a new man I'm dating. He asked me, genuinely, what is this program for? He questioned my expression, some of the language I use, knowing that I walk with two feet planted in both worlds: the spiritual and the earthly one that we inhabit on a daily basis.
His innocent yet pointed questions sent me into a spiral. Was it too weird and spiritual? I have long since outgrown the "persona" of medicine woman. So what is this program even for? Is it to prepare women to become the kind of ceremonialist I am? To teach women how to program the sacred mapacho in the way I was taught by my Shipibo teachers in the Amazon? Yes and No.
So I’ll be honest, because this is the medicine of WINGS: I do not want to train you to be like me, to walk a path like mine, or to sing my songs. I want you to find yours. I want you to lead like your voice matters and carries deep medicine. It does. I want you to stand proudly in your own expression, in a meeting, in an intimate conversation with a loved one, or with a client. I want you to trust what you know, and speak it. I want you to be able to withstand the questioning and the doubt – even when it is well intentioned – and own your truth anyway.
I wavered on that call for a moment. It was an invitation for me to recenter, trust WINGS, and myself, even more deeply. It reminded me how deeply I have needed this medicine over the years, and that it is still schooling me. It shows up in phone calls with new partners, old friends, and longtime clients.
Self Attunement. Discernment. Trust. Worth. Expression.
These are the ingredients of embodied leadership.
The rites of passage, the ceremonies, sacred feminine energetics...these are the pathways. But it ultimately leads us back home to ourselves and to our voice.
Join the next info session on Saturday October 24th at 12pm PT
If you already know this is yours, start with the info session. If you'd rather talk one to one, take the discovery call. Everything below is the why.
How I got here (story time!)
During my days as a Columbia nursing and midwifery student, I dreamed of opening a witchy midwifery practice in NYC, to give women the full spectrum of care: clinically rigorous and spiritually grounded. And in a later season of life, that is entirely possible. My nursing job on the frontlines during the pandemic in spring and summer of 2020 profoundly altered my course. Namely, I was guided away from the hospitals and the Ivy League path, to the deserts of Oaxaca, Mexico.
I arrived with a friend, psychologically, physically, and spiritually exhausted. I only carried a knowing that something deeper was unfolding in my life. I was reading up on the goddess Hekate, goddess of the witches, medicine women, midwives, birthing mothers, crossroads, thresholds, and liminal spaces. Through learning the myths and creating rituals around this primordial mother goddess, I felt the strength to move across my own threshold into the unknown, with trust that I would find my way through. She is tattooed on my arm, at the entrance of a cave, holding her two torches, which provide illumination during our underworld journeys.
In retrospect, I see how supportive my spiritual orientation was during that time. It helped me frame my path as initiation rather than tragedy. That reframe is SO important for high capacity women on a path of leadership. We know we are going to be challenged. We will fall a few times. We will lose ourselves. And we will remember. Who we become in the challenge is the leadership.
On the rugged coast of Oaxaca, in a little pueblo, I stumbled into an ancestral medicine ceremony. A temazcal: a sweat lodge ritual for the healing and purification of body, mind, and spirit. It was a full moon and it was indeed full power. There are hot stones in the center representing ancestor spirits, and aromatic water steeped in medicinal plants is thrown on them to create a purifying steam.
I was in the fetal position, enveloped in the pitch dark, cave-like structure made from earth, which represents the womb of the earth, crying as the drumming and chanting moved through me. My mind was screaming at me to leave. That I was dying. That this was not okay. And yet something in the way the circle continued to sing gave me the strength to stay, despite the heat. What arose in me was my inner warrioress. Something had shifted. As a circle, we crawled back out on the other side, reborn.
And we ate fruit.
From that point on, the doorways of ancestral wisdom tradition opened. Like in so many feminine myths of initiation, I was invited to let everything go: my medical career, my scholarship to the doctorate program, my identity as the responsible, caring nurse, my creature comforts of being a New Yorker for about ten years, even my social status.
I didn’t care. I touched the sacred. It touched me.
Why the cave as an entry point for a leadership program:
There is so much medicine hiding in plain sight, and some part of us already knows it. Gaze at an open sea to feel calmer. Climb a mountain to gain perspective. The natural world will always have a teaching for you, at exactly the right moment.
Caves are said to be the home of Hekate, and over the years I have found myself at many. I’ve sat in the dark. Literally, and proverbially. In the dark, just like a seed, I have regenerated, ignited my capacity to truly see, and in turn received vision – including the vision for WINGS. Caves, literal or not, are where Self Attunement rises from.
And then there is the energetic cave. The dark place of rest and rebirth. The empty and fertile void where our ideas take root.
It is understandable that we fear the dark, the silence, and the pause, given the stories that have been distorted and rewritten to view these underground realms as something sinister. Full of monsters. Before that, though, they were sacred sites for ceremony, ritual, and communion. Before that, we descended into the cave to meet ourselves.
The womb is a cave. And the cave is a sacred site for the Feminine. In the darkness and quiet, we can hear our own voice. We awaken dormant capacities within us. We attune to ourselves.
The seed is not a metaphor. Many seeds will not germinate at all without a long cold dark period first – known as stratification. Plant them in warmth and they simply sit there, intact and dormant and going nowhere. The winter is not an interruption of the growing season. It is a required part of it, and skipping it produces nothing.
In darkness, the rods, which are photoreceptor neurons inside your retina, begin regenerating rhodopsin, and over about twenty to thirty minutes your sensitivity to light multiplies into the tens of thousands. We are designed to see in the dark.
Two things to know about how I guide:
This program is experiential. The gift of learning together as a group is that we learn by osmosis. We will work as a circle through the inevitable blocks and resistance to sharing and authentically expressing ourselves in the world. We will sit in ceremony together. We will interact deeply with one another.
And, we are not rejecting western frameworks. Science where it enriches the material, plenty of structure to hold the work, and critical thinking. This is where Discernment is trained – not every impulse you feel is coming from that rooted place of power. Some of it is trauma. Some of it is that absorbed list talking. A woman who can tell the difference is far more effective. As the leader of this program, I do not live solely in the realms of the mythopoetic and the imaginal.
How it works:
WINGS is taking a different approach to facilitation skills training, mentorship, and leadership development. The vision I had was a passage, mirroring the literal journey I’ve been on since that first temazcal in the desert: out of the cave, through the labyrinth of the Amazon jungles and forests, up the peaks of the Peruvian Andes, back down into the rivers and seas, through abundant gardens, to arrive at a temple.
WINGS is a rite of passage. You will move through six gates of initiation, and Luz and I are the human guides. But the gates themselves – and your direct experience of them – will surface the material you came to work. That is not something I can assign you.
Meet Luz de Luna: Temazcalera, Curandera
One gate, one month. Each gate comes with two live 90-minute classes of teachings, practices, and recorded lessons from me, from Luz, and from some of my other feminine peers – plus a ceremony and initiatory process unique to that gate. Every month also includes an office hour: live coaching, questions, and personalized support. Everything is taught live, and replays and materials live on Kajabi so you can return to them.
Who this is for:
If you recognized yourself in that list of roles – the psychotherapist, the lawyer, the business owner, the wife, the mother – this is for you. It is also for the coach, the facilitator, the nurse, the artist, the founder. If you carry a role that other people rely on, the list came with it!
You may already be leading, but you you know you're not fully showing up inside of it. Your authentic expression is not fully online. The old patterns are still patterning through your life. Some of you will go on to hold ceremony and facilitate for others. Some of you will be a low-key (or high-key) badass modern priestess at work, at home, and in your relationships. Both are encouraged.
Each of the next six newsletters will introduce you to one of those gates – a taste of the themes we’ll work with that month.
Let me say this again, because it’s the thing most people get backwards: we teach the material so that you can amplify your voice, your creative work, your relationships, and every meaningful part of your life. The material is not the destination. You are!
So who does this woman become?
She knows what is hers to carry and what is not – and can let a capable adult struggle without rescuing them. Including family. Including clients. Including partners.
She moves with the cycles of nature and makes no apologies for the space she takes up, or the season she is in.
She is centered in her heart, leads from her womb and her worth.
Her voice carries and holds a room – whether that room is a ceremony, a therapy office, a zoom call, a conference hall, a boardroom, or a bedroom.
She is sensually expressed, knows what turns her on, what turns her off, and can ask and receive without flinching.
Where to start:
Curious about WINGS?
Want your questions answered live?
I’m holding the first of a few info sessions on Saturday, October 24 12pm PT.
Rather talk with me?
Not about WINGS at all? ISA Modern Medicine is now official – the home of all my work. The ceremonies, retreats, facilitation, and one-to-one work. I’m still offering bespoke 1:1 coaching and mentorship, and a discovery call is the way in. isabel-allen.com
See you at the next gate. Hint: there’s trees.
With deep care and love,
Isa
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