Heather Ash Amara - The Warrior Goddess Way: Claiming the Woman You Are Destined to Be

Also by HeatherAsh Amara

Warrior Goddess Training

Warrior Goddess Training Companion Workbook

The Toltec Path of Transformation

Copyright 2016

by HeatherAsh Amara

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Emma Smith

Cover photo by Elena Ray

Interior design by Frame25 Productions

Hierophant Publishing

8301 Broadway, Suite 219

San Antonio, TX 78209

888-800-4240

www.hierophantpublishing.com

If you are unable to order this book from your local bookseller, you may order directly from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950703

ISBN: 978-1-938289-57-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA

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For the ancestors, the ones to
come, and those embodied now.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that
makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

This book you are holding now is a follow-up to my previous book, the best seller Warrior Goddess Training: Become the Woman You Are Meant to Be (Hierophant 2014). While it's not necessary to have read that book to read this one, you may find doing so beneficial, as this book goes deeper and expands on some of the information presented in the first book. The potent Warrior Goddess Creed found on synthesizes each of the ten lessons in Warrior Goddess Training.

I began working with women's groups in 1987 quite by accident. After spending a mind-expanding summer reading every book in the University of California at Davis's library on earth-based spirituality and goddesses, my best friend Autumn and I decided to share what we were so passionately exploring. We hoped at least ten or so women would show up to the one-hour talk we offered on campus and were shocked when sixty women showed up instead, eager to learn about a spirituality that honored the cycles of nature and the divine feminine.

I'll take thirty if you take thirty, Autumn said to me, and I nodded, swallowing a lump in my throat the size of a small country. I had never spoken to such a large group before, and my knees were honestly trembling. But I found I was deeply happy when I was sharing my enthusiasm for the wisdom of our female ancestors. Soon women were begging me to teach a class. I remember I charged thirteen dollars for my first eight-week series through the Experimental College at UC Davis. I've been teaching ever since, and I'm still as passionate today as I was then about sharing the most potent tools from a variety of world traditions.

Of the many teachers I've been blessed to work with, my most influential mentor was don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. His guidance, love, and vision shaped me from a young woman unsure of herself and riddled with self-judgment to the self-loving, dedicated, playful Warrior Goddess I am blessed to be today. The Toltec teachings (the Toltecs were ancient Native Americans who built the pyramids in Teotihuacan, Mexico, two thousand years ago) are a foundational part of the Warrior Goddess path, and I am deeply grateful to be part of the Ruiz family's vision of sharing Toltec wisdom in an accessible, practical, transformative way.

In my first Warrior Goddess book, Warrior Goddess Training, I was able to take the core of my twenty-five-plus years of apprenticeships, living, and teaching and distill it into ten lessons for helping women find their inner freedom. When I first gave the manuscript to my publisher, Randy Davila, I told him about my dream of Warrior Goddess Training being much more than just a book; I saw a Warrior Goddess global movement of women inspired to reclaim their full voice and power. Randy's response is what I love about working with him: Let's do it!

What we didn't know then was that the movement would grow beyond both of our expectations from the first day Warrior Goddess Training was published.

On September 4, 2014, we launched Warrior Goddess Training with a party and a request: I asked everyone I knew to buy a copy of the book online or at a local bookstore. That night Warrior Goddess Training soared to the number one bestselling spot in Shamanism and Goddesses on Amazon, which is not too unusual when you get all of your friends to buy your book on the same day. What was highly unusual was that Warrior Goddess Training stayed number one in those two categories day after day, month after month, year after year. And it began to show up on best seller lists in other places too: in independent bookstores, libraries, and wholesale book distributors.

And suddenly the emails started coming in from women all over the country: I've just finished Warrior Goddess Training and I want to start a discussion group and share this book with all my friends. I've never done anything like this before. Any suggestions? And so we created a Warrior Goddess book club discussion guide, and the ten lessons of the Warrior Goddess movement spread from living room to living room, circles of women coming together as their ancestors did, sharing and supporting and inspiring each other.

Next I created a Warrior Goddess facilitator training program and began teaching women how to lead their own Warrior Goddess classes. So along with the book clubs, there are now women trained to share the Warrior Goddess message as well as bring their unique flavor of the teachings to their communities.

I have tears in my eyes when I think about the many deeply personal emails I've received from women struggling with serious challenges in their life: divorce, chronic illness, children with disabilities, job loss or difficult work situations, sometimes all at the same time. Email after email, women thank me for the glimmer of hope they felt while reading Warrior Goddess Training, or for how the book motivated them to take action for themselves for the first time or to forgive themselves and start to really listen to and follow their inner needs and desires. Women already on a spiritual/healing path found life-changing tools in Warrior Goddess Training that they hadn't found in their years of study and practice. At workshops, I often hear women say, I never knew I could feel this supported and seen and inspired by a group of women I just met! We may start as strangers, but with the new language we are creating with the Warrior Goddess principles, we become a family, we become a tribe (and if we are going to transform ourselves and the world, we need a conscious, kick-ass, Warrior Goddess tribe!).

After witnessing the healing ripple of Warrior Goddess Training and seeing women rise to the Warrior Goddess call to actionto shed the old layers of who they think they are supposed to be to become the women they are meant to beI feel even more dedicated to supporting women's inner liberation. My passion is to bring practical, step-by-step guidance to women, not just intellectual theory or feel-good words. Imagining what we would like to be different and looking at beautiful quotes and pictures on Facebook are not enough. In order to make change, we must act. And in order to act to make change, we must stop trying to fix ourselves using judgment, comparison, fear, blame, and self-punishment.

We are not broken, or helpless, or beyond redemption. Within each one of us, regardless of our outer circumstances, is a sacred spark that craves to be rekindled and stoked back to a sustained, wild, fiery blaze; an ancestral wisdom deep in the marrow of our bones and in the very fabric of our DNA that yearns to be touched and awakened. It is time to let go of striving to be perfect, looking outside of ourselves for answers, and waiting for something or someone else to save, fix, or transform us. It is time to release the heaviness of taking care of everyone else and putting ourselves last, time to stop being our worst enemy, time to stop putting our dreams on hold.