Are you accomplished, smart, savvy, and successful?

Yet you’re also experiencing discontent
~ from gnawing irritations to full blown meltdowns ~
either inside yourself or your health
or in your outer world of work or relationships.

It’s time to Become Sovereign

the next step in your evolution.

Or maybe you’re already experiencing breakdowns.

The career isn’t working. Or the relationship is dissolving or has already ended. Or your body hurts and you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

What you once counted on now feels like quicksand.

Even though you’ve manifested expertly in the past, you’re now uncertain about which steps to take next.

And you’re realizing that your life really isn’t working.

Not the way you want it to. Not the way you can feel inside that it could be.

I want to let you know that the problem isn’t unique to you. That you didn’t do anything wrong. And that it’s not that you didn’t try hard enough, or that you aren’t smart or savvy enough.

The issue is much larger than you.
And yet you are experiencing it deeply in your own life.

We are living in an accelerated timeframe in which we are moving through many more experiences in one lifetime than our foremothers experienced in several. Compiled challenges, and with them rich opportunities.

Let’s step back for a moment and remember that as women we lost our sovereignty under patriarchy.

For thousands of years we were defined simply as a man’s daughter, sister, wife or mother. Our options were limited, our lives not our own. This legacy continues to haunt us, even though so much has changed.

Fortunately over the last 50 years we’ve been expanding our experience into every area of life, from education, to the worlds of work, sports, and politics. Whatever your experience has been, you’ve already been exploring vast possibilities unavailable to our foremothers. Together we are making new realities for ourselves and our daughters every day.

Yet as it turns out, you may not be truly happy with achieving success as defined in the terms defined by men in the past. I know I haven’t been.

This is not as simple as it might appear

But I am not going to tell you that if you just write affirmations, make vision boards, and get emotionally involved with your goals that you will create the soul-satisfying life you long for. It’s just not that simple.

We are communal not solitary beings. As women we are deeply connected, as Alison Armstrong says: “like an aspen grove with individual trunks and one root system.” We need each other.

You’re looking for the understanding, support and guidance of a Wise Woman mentor who’s “the real deal” and who’s been where you’re at.

• Someone who has lived a full and complex life of self-made opportunities, many accomplishments, rich challenges, terrific breakdowns and profound breakthroughs.
• Someone who has taken plenty of risks and had them pay off, while also turning apparent failures into stepping stones to deeper truths and new definitions and experiences of success.
• Someone whose wisdom and confidence inspires relief, excitement and a kind of thank god/goddess
  she’s here response.

If you feel I could be the mentor for you, then I would
love to speak with you and see if working together is a fit.

Maggie Ostara, PhD. ~ My Story

Curious? Then I invite you to read my story. Yes, it’s a bit longer than usual ~ and that’s so you can get an inside view of the depth and breadth of what I have to offer you.

My life has been rich, varied, purposeful, playful and joyful. At times confusing and fairly often challenging. I have not settled for good enough, making my soul path (once I got what that was!) and personal evolution my priority.

I’ve been captivated by “consciousness” from an early age. I grew up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood during the Civil Rights era, so perspectives outside that of mainstream America were not new to me. As a teenager, “Consciousness raising” became a regular practice in my home as my mother (pictured above with my brother and to the right speaking at a NOW Conference) moved from being a 50s style stay-at-home mom to a radical feminist during the 1970s.

I entered adulthood steeped in social justice and political activism, and in graduate school chose to focus on African American studies and women’s and gender studies. My intention was to further question the assumptions of patriarchal scholarship that had marginalized women and people of color, and to make visible movements for freedom that had not been acknowledged previously.

When I was 33, I completed my PhD, and was hired out of graduate school to set up and to be the Director of the Undergraduate Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Columbia University in New York.

During the 1990s, I was a rising academic star with multiple important publications. I had a book coming out when I decided it was time to leave academe because I felt like I was dying inside. At the time, I didn’t really understand why — I just knew I had to leave. Looking back, I realize I had reached the limit of social justice consciousness and its “fight against” attitude.

During my last year at Columbia, I turned in another direction. My body, my energy and indeed my whole perspective on life had shifted by changing what I eat! So I decided to study food and healing, doing two years of study in 9 months with Joshua Rosenthal, the man who later founded the internationally renowned Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

I thought nutritional counseling would be my next step, but instead I discovered and partnered with a leading-edge network marketing company in the health and wellness industry. I was captivated by two ideas I learned in this new environment. One was residual income (who knew!), and the other was the metaphysical understanding that we create our own reality with what we focus on. This idea challenged my social justice orientation to life, and turned my world upside down.

Once I grasped it, I very successfully used the tools of visioning and affirmations to build my business. I was rewarded by doubling my income from Columbia in 15 months. Now that caught my attention, and that experience definitely sparked my entrepreneurial spirit!

Around this time I discovered the conscious dance movement, and started dancing 2-3 times a week. I had danced a lot in college and taught dance aerobics in graduate school. I was delighted to discover ways in which movement was being used as a spiritual practice. Movement-oriented somatic practices enabled me to balance out my overly developed analytical brain with embodiment skills that I continue to use today. I also was fortunate enough to fall in love with a fellow dancer, get married and have a beautiful baby girl at the age of 42.

My passion for spiritual growth also led me into Clarity Breathwork(R), which transformed me deeply from the inside out. With the breath I rooted out core limiting beliefs, released past life trauma, and connected with guides and angelic beings, as well as with my own inner being. I quickly became a Clarity Breathwork practitioner and soon joined my mentors as a trainer, bringing to the professional training program my skills with curriculum development and somatics.

In my pursuit of higher consciousness, I also began to study the corpus of advanced meditation work called “Awakening Your Light Body”. I was so taken with it that within a year I became a teacher of the work. I discovered how to build my body of light, create with energy, and transmit high vibrational states to myself, my students, and the world around me. For a number of years I worked with breathwork clients, helped train breathworkers, and practiced and taught advanced meditation skills. Eventually I knew it was time to move on, but I was unclear of the direction.

Then my husband lost his major client in 2009, and we lost his income overnight. In response to this crisis, I jumped started a business coaching business which I had been considering. I had been good at business ever since my network marketing days, and this felt like the right next step as I was able to bring together so many of the skills I’d developed over the years, and I was able to support people like myself who were dedicated to healing and spiritual growth. Within a year I had created over $200,000 in revenue, and shortly thereafter I developed a half-million-dollar-a-year business with hundreds of clients, mostly in the healing arts, with an international reach.

Yet in 2015 I walked away from that business when I realized that not only was I getting burned out and disillusioned — despite my apparent success — so was my family. The experience of rapid growth and burnout contributed to the dissolution of my marriage and the reconfiguration of my family. Fortunately we’ve recovered, and my former husband and I are cooperatively co-parenting our beautiful teenage daughter.

Since then I’ve been in deep conversation with myself about
my life experiences.

In reviewing my past, I’ve noted the times I took on and manifested other people’s versions of success, even though I thought I was creating what I wanted (sigh). I also acknowledge the times I waited too long, refusing the change before me, and life crumbled underneath me like quicksand. Finally I see the places where I moved on in an empowered way once I had learned what I needed to learn from the experience.

Through all of this, my focus has been on identifying and following my soul path.

I have been consistently passionate about developing new skills, shifting my perspective as needed, and being willing to do the inner work required to meet the challenges I’ve experienced.

I voraciously learn and consistently apply what I learn to my experience of daily life. As a result, I’ve become a master of change, moving through several lifetimes of experience in this one life. People who know me well often remark upon the depth and breadth of my experience, knowledge, and expertise.

I now feel a level of mastery with hearing and following my inner guidance, and riding the waves of change and uncertainty alongside discerning and creating my desires that only comes with years of purposeful and well-understood experience.

And I get that my journey is situated inside that of a larger journey of western women emerging from patriarchy and discovering what we really want and need. In turn that journey also lies inside an even larger journey of humanity evolving at this most critical on our planet, when our very survival as a species is at stake.

As I and each of us develop this new form of Sovereignty, we move out of power dynamics of domination and subordination, self judgment and self sacrifice, and harmful forms of competition. In their place, we foster creative, collaborative, and life-giving ways of being that are both new and ancient.

My intention is to continue Becoming Sovereign,
and supporting other women to do
the same, for myself, for all of us.

If working with me feels like a yes! or even a strong maybe,
please reach out and we’ll have a conversation
to see if working together is a fit.
I look forward to hearing from you.