This movement exists because one woman decided to stop believing she was broken.
So Women Flourish is not a coaching business that added circles. It is a movement—rooted in decades of experience, born from personal transformation, and built on a single conviction: that the world changes when women are fully, freely themselves.
I remember the moment something cracked open.
I was in a workshop and we were asked to hold a hand mirror up and really look at ourselves — not glance, not check, but look. I began to cry almost immediately. I didn't know where the tears were coming from or what exactly they represented. But I saw something I hadn't let myself see before: deep pain, sitting quietly in my own face, waiting to be acknowledged.
Long before women's circles, there was the work of learning what the body knows.
For more than two decades, Paula Pierce has been building the practice—in parallel streams—that now lives inside every So Women Flourish circle.
In organizations and leadership settings, she became a professional facilitator—guiding teams, executives, and communities through the kind of conversations that change things. She learned what it takes to hold a room. What conditions have to be present for real insight to surface. How structure creates the freedom for truth to emerge.
At the same time, she was running a wellness center — teaching yoga, TaiChi, Qigong, breathwork, and meditation to a community of women who returned, week after week, because of how they felt in their bodies when they left.
She learned something there that no facilitation training teaches: that the body has to arrive before the heart can open. That a woman carrying the tension of her day in her shoulders and her chest is not yet fully in the room, no matter how present she looks.
That insight now shapes every circle. Each gathering begins with a gentle movement practice — drawn from Paula's years of teaching yoga and mindful movement — to help women transition from the rushing, performing world into the circle space. It is not exercise. It is a threshold.
"After a long day of sitting at work and sitting in the car, sitting in the circle was hard on my body. I missed having some movement like we used to have in class."
—A circle participant and former wellness center member, whose feedback shaped how every circle now begins
Alongside the facilitation and the movement work, Paula trained in intuitive coaching and energy work—practices that work at the level of the nervous system, the energetic body, and the spirit. Women feel the difference this brings to a circle, even when they cannot name it. The room holds differently when the person at the center understands not just how to facilitate conversation, but how to sense what is moving beneath it.
Two bodies of work. One philosophy. The circle has always been the practice — whether the women in it are navigating an organizational challenge or the challenges of their own lives.
20+ years professional facilitation
Organizational Effectiveness Consultant
Wellness center owner & instructor
Yoga, TaiChi, Qigong, Breathwork
Certified Inuitive Reader
Risk Taker & Entrepreneur
Something is happening among women right now.
Women are tired. Tired of performing. Tired of holding everything together alone. Tired of communities that stay at the surface, friendships that never quite go deep, spaces that ask them to show up as a polished version of themselves rather than the real one.
And they are carrying it in their bodies. The tension of the commute. The shallow breath of a day spent managing. The shoulders that haven't dropped in weeks. The quiet ache of a life lived mostly from the neck up.
Women's circles are one of the oldest gathering practices in human history. They existed long before wellness was an industry. They are not a trend. They are a return—to community, to the body, to the kind of honest presence that most modern life makes nearly impossible.
So Women Flourish exists to make that return possible—for women in Northern Virginia, for women online, and eventually, through a network of trained facilitators, for women everywhere.
We are building a world where no woman has to carry it alone.
That is not a tagline. It is a direction.
Our Mission
We advocate for women's rights and freedoms by helping women cultivate a relationship with their true self—and by building the circles, communities, and containers that make that possible together.
Our Vision
A flourishing world rooted in compassion, collaboration, justice, equality, and peace—built circle by circle, woman by woman.
Our Core Values
These are not organizational values written for a wall. They are the convictions brought to every circle, every gathering, every woman we work with.
Love
We extend ourselves for the spiritual growth of others.
Love
We extend ourselves for the spiritual growth of others—not because it's easy, but because it is the most essential work there is.
Contribution
We exist in an interdependent world. Flourishing privately is not enough. Our work must benefit all life—rippling outward from every woman, through every community she touches.
Growth
This life is for our becoming. We use every season, every gathering, every honest conversation as an opportunity to grow.
Freedom
True freedom comes when we release the ideas and identities that were never ours to carry. That is the work of the circle.
Gratitude
Everything — including the hard things—is ultimately for our benefit. We practice experiencing life with openness rather than resistance.
This is the beginning, not the finished thing.
So Women Flourish is currently running in-person circles in Northern Virginia and launching online circles in the coming weeks. The Grounded workshop — a full-day immersive connecting women with themselves through nature—is in development. Facilitator training, so that women everywhere can learn to hold circle in their own communities, opens later this year.
If you feel called to this work — as a participant, as a future facilitator, or simply as a woman who wants to stay close to what's unfolding — the best place to start is here.
