Asian Boss Ladies Retreat: Embodied Well-Being

Who: Asian Boss Ladies ("ABL") is a culturally responsive community exploring, creating, and funding projects within our collective, based on current events impacting Asian American women. We provide transformational personal and professional development experiences, centered on sisterhood and impact, to nourish and fuel Asian American women leaders and accelerate their impact across sectors. We fuel each other’s growth to become healthy, genuine, impactful leaders.

What: The Asian Boss Ladies ("ABL") Liberated Leadership Retreat's focus on Embodied Well-Being supports our community of Asian American women as they discover, explore and embody rest and healing. During our weekend together, we will have a sampling of curated workshops with ample space for rest and community building. We'll share meals together (duh, we're Asian!) and enjoy the beautiful grounds and activities (yoga! tai chi! meditation! canoeing!) of the OMEGA Institute.

Why: In the past three years, Asian women have faced constant attacks on our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. Add to this that we've received lifelong messaging within our families, communities, and workplaces that we should not rest, and we have a recipe for bone-deep exhaustion. This retreat carves the space and time to learn and re-learn what it means to embody our well-being. We will spend this time together grounding ourselves in the strength of our present-day and ancestral communities.

Our tailored workshops (descriptions below) will meet needs you didn’t know you had. You will leave with tools, resources, and connections that could transform the trajectory of your life, slowing you down so you can see yourself – in all your worthy being – with clear eyes.

When: Friday, August 18 to Sunday August 20, 2023

Where: OMEGA Institute, 150 Lake Dr, Rhinebeck, NY 12572

Ticket Options:

1. All-Inclusive Weekend In-Person:

Includes the full ABL retreat experience (housing, all meals, workshops, materials, OMEGA activities, swag bags!)

Swag Bag Includes: Collective Voice makeup, Partake cookies, Fly by Jing hot sauce, and more!

Housing Options*:

a. Dorm Twin Bed ($500) - single private room with twin-sized bed and nightstand inside dorm building with shared bathrooms

b. Single Room Queen Bed w/ shared bath ($680) - single private room with queen-sized bed in a two-room-building, bathroom shared with one adjoining room

c. Single Room Queen Bed w/ private bath) ($800) - single private room with queen-sized bed with a private bath

*All housing includes AC, heat, and wifi.

2. Support a Sister Donation

Want to make sure other ABLers have access to this incredible weekend? Choose this option to make a one-time donation of any amount to make scholarships available for our incredible community. Suggested amount: $100.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS AND SPEAKER BIOS

Feeling into Freedom: Poetry and Dance for Embodying Safety and Wellness

led by Neelam Patel

Whether we’re in the “messy middle” of finding our professional paths or healing from trauma, we need tools for coming home to our sense of safety and our authentic centers. Neelam Patel embraced tools of poetry and dance as she burned down her career as a high-tech executive to follow her passions. In this session, you’ll feel into the freedom to be exactly who you want, embracing the beautiful, difficult emotions that arise as fuel for change.

-

Neelam Patel is the author of Burning it Down, Dancing in the Rubble, an Amazon bestselling poetry collection in two categories. She is a custom poet, dancer, actor, speechwriter, entrepreneur and playwright, invested in honestly exploring, and even celebrating the often uncomfortable layers of life’s imperfect “messy middle”. Neelam presented her keynote and workshop, "The Messy Middle Awakening" as an official SXSW 2023 speaker, encouraging her audience to avoid the trap of "before" and "after" thinking when in reality, we are all out here in the middle. She claims the light is not at the end of the tunnel, but in the rich, complex middle. She gathers experience from her tech career which spanned from program management at Microsoft, and User Interface management at Network Solutions, to Customer Success and Sales leadership in the cyber security startup world. She writes custom poems and performances through her website Tailored Poetry, with the intention of creating an ambience of connection and openness, deepening the experience of important moments.

Whom We are Called into Becoming: Building on our Ancestral Gifts & Legacies

led by Rita Louh

Finding our way to liberated leadership requires embodying our inherent worth and drawing from the deep well of our ancestral legacies. Rita Louh will guide us to connect with our ancestral gifts and areas in need of healing. We’ll draw strength from the stories that inform our ways of being in the world, connect with the power and agency we have in our relationships to our ancestral legacies, and learn how to manage our energy and energetic boundaries so that we may be more rested, grounded, and centered leaders.

-

Rita Louh is a first-generation Chinese American immigrant woman, healer, mother, and leader (among other identities). Her worldview is a blend of influences from being born and growing up in a multi-generational household in the US and, for a few years as a child, in Taiwan. Her spiritual beliefs are informed by the Taoist and Buddhist beliefs embedded in these cultures. Rita has nearly 25 years of professional experience, including work with nonprofits, intermediaries, foundations and companies in strategy development, organizational development, program management, facilitation, leadership coaching, and supporting organizations with change. She is certified as a liberatory coach, through Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation. In her current professional life, she founded and leads Envision Change, through which she and others provide facilitation, advising, and coaching to support organizational and individual transformation.

Negotiation Skills for Embodied Wellbeing

led by Carlyn Cowen

How do we create the conditions in our daily lives that allow us to be deeply well? Carlyn Cowen will introduce us to a negotiation framework that allows us to negotiate for the life we want from employers, friends, family, and our communities. As Asian women socialized to be respectful, have humility, and suffer for the wellbeing of others, we sometimes forget our own worth and power. This workshop will equip us with the means to create the life we want so that we can walk into the world and live as our fullest, authentic selves.

-

Carlyn Cowen (they/she/siya) is an advocate, activist, and Filipinx-American dedicated to building social, racial, and economic justice through radical systemic change. As the Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer of the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), the nation’s largest Asian-American social services organization, they oversee public policy, advocacy, government affairs, and community engagement. As part of this work, they launched a multi-lingual, multigenerational training series, a leadership development program for front line social services staff, and helped win New York State's first ever AAPI Equity Fund in 2021, which has grown to a $30 million fund in 2023 to support AAPI community based organizations. Previously, Carlyn worked at FPWA, an economic equity nonprofit, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, and consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and Oxfam International, among others. Carlyn was named to City and State's 40 under 40 NYC list in 2020, and to the LGBTQ+ Power 100 the last two years running.

The child of immigrants and raised in North Carolina, they moved to New York to earn their Master’s from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and fell in love with the city. Carlyn can also be found organizing with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), where they serve as a member of the steering committee of the Jewish Vote and a board member, doing mutual aid with Uptown Wagon, bartending on weekends, and baking and hiking with their dog Buko for fun.