Women often agonize over a single question – am I too selfish? – struggling with the belief that focusing on ourselves is selfish when it comes to spiritual or religious concerns.

All religions instruct us to pay close attention to our intentions and actions in order to become responsible for our ethical and spiritual development. And yet, women have been uniformly discouraged in acquiring a knowledge of self-determination in their major life roles.

Related Workshop: The Psychological and Spiritual Problem of Giving Yourself Away; Working With the Tale of “Rumpelstiltskin”

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.,  is a Jungian analyst, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont and in private practice in central Vermont. Polly is the originator of Dialogue Therapy, designed to help couples and others (for example, parents and grown children) to transform chronic conflict into greater closeness and development. She is past president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies and a founding member of the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies. She is also a Mindfulness teacher and has been a practitioner of Buddhism since 1971. Polly is the author or editor of eighteen books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent work book is Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path (Shambhala, 2019).