CIRCLING UP
Sisters, let’s dance
WITH MELISSA MICHAELS
Too often, we stand alone.
We compete. We compare. We judge. We fight. We freeze. We shrink. We separate.
We forget…
That we, as women, need each other.
We need each other to be clear mirrors for one another, loving allies, generous friends. We need each other to inspire creativity. We need each other to lend a hand. We need each other to honor the power and vulnerability that we all feel. We need each other to help us up when we are falling. We need each other to stand by our sides when we are stepping up.
We need each other to protect and serve life in ways that we can only do together.
So let’s CIRCLE UP!
We will step out of the day-to-day demands, investing in our bodies, hearts, and souls.
We will dance.
Into the warmth of our hearts, reweaving the fabric of women as allies.
We will dance until there is nothing left, but our most authentic selves intimately dancing within our sisterhood.
Let’s gather.
Find our ground. Open our hearts. Be in our truths.
Create.
Together.
Women of all generations are welcome.
All who identify with the feminine are welcome.
Our Team
Melissa Michaels, Ed.D., creates movement-based cross-cultural community rites of passage events focusing on life’s major thresholds. She has served for over three decades as a movement mentor to people around the world, those in the birth cycle of life, in adolescence, and in life crisis and normal developmental changes throughout the adult cycle of life.
As the founder and director of the not-for-profit organization Golden Bridge, Melissa has developed the first contemporary international leadership program rooted in dance. This process has empowered hundreds of embodied social entrepreneurs and peacebuilders around the world. From schools to inner cities, to refugee settlements, to the United Nations.
Melissa is a first-generation teacher of the 5Rhythms® and a Master Somatic Educator and Therapist (ISMETA). Her books, Youth on Fire and Threshold Dancing (forthcoming), offer deeper insights into her work and tell the story of its development and application over the decades.
Boulder Presenter
Assétou Xango is a poet and community activist born and raised in Colorado. She’s been performing poetry since 2009, was featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices in 2010, and is a two-time TEDxMileHigh Speaker. She has represented Denver in competitions across the nation. In 2016, she was published in Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s literary journal entitled Glyph. Xango was the Poet Laureate of Aurora, Colorado (2017-2019) and Lighthouse’s Poetry Out Loud coordinator. In all of her work, Xango is dedicated to the visibility and rights of women and gender non-conforming people of color and promoting the use of storytelling to dismantle binaries and divisions.