Laurie Benson

Laurie Benson has been an entrepreneur and community organizer for over 20 years. She is an adventurer who has traveled the world leading groups of women from New Mexico to the Ecuadorian Amazon and lots of places in between.

As an author and speaker, she has had the honor of supporting and working within Indigenous communities around the world. Her first book, Leading From the Feminine has won many awards and is acknowledged as a go to guide for embodiment and somatic awareness work.

Her new book, Resilient Activism: Igniting Wild Hope in Uncertain Times embodies the guiding principles of her nonprofit, the Center for Wild Hope.

Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers’ Favorite

Heart-based wisdom is at the core of Leading from the Feminine by Laurie Benson, a non-fiction self-help book that aims to assist readers in reconnecting deeply with themselves so that we may, in turn, create positive changes around us in the chaotic here and now. Benson encourages that this can be achieved from a position of leadership, ourselves becoming the harbinger of change through a series of practices and continued work outlined in her book. Leading from the Feminine is broken down into three primary sections that are each distinct and all interconnected. These embody a journey in thirds, starting with section one, Laying the Ground Work, moving to section two, The Work and The Deeper Work, and finally section three, The Rubber Hits the Road.

The advantage of already being inclined to holistic internal work and having just transitioned into a space where I now have time to devote exclusively to digging deeper, Leading from the Feminine kind of fell into my lap at the perfect time. That's not a coincidence. Laurie Benson makes a few things clear at the onset, the first being that this is not just a book for those who identify as female, and the second being that completing the book will require a lot of work. She's right in both regards and we are able to start already freed of the expectation of a quick fix. I loved that the parts include question prompts and require interaction that goes beyond guided exercise so that we are wholly in tune with where we are in the journey and how far we have traveled to be able to push through what is ahead.

The most meaningful piece to me is in section two which covers the topic of boundaries, something I had already been working on but not in the way Benson starts us with. I was not privy to the fact that we need to set our own boundaries within ourselves before we set them around us. I felt like I'd missed an entire step, and this is where Benson's book really assisted. Whatever we think we know, there is always more to learn, and I wouldn't have found it if I wasn't training with Leading from the Feminine. Very highly recommended.