Book excerpt: Women are constantly faced with choices and demands. They can achieve great success in life, yet they still have a deep, nurturing center that longs to be expressed and fulfilled. They want to be a leader for their families and communities, and attain all that they desire, require, and deserve. How can women fully manifest their power while honoring their fluid and flexible feminine nature? After traveling down this road herself, Sierra Bender experienced a hard-won spiritual breakthrough and discovered that the answers to her questions couldn't be found in traditional healing systems or in our spiritually disconnected society-they were found, quite simply, within. In Goddess to the Core, Sierra offers a new way of living with true power and purpose by redefining fitness, beauty, and power for the twenty-first-century woman. Her unique method of healing from the inside out breaks the cycle of stress and disempowerment by developing all four bodies-spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical-to help women reclaim, restore, and rejoice in their core feminine essence. Cultivate inner knowing to understand one's true nature Learn silence so the mind and heart can evaluate and reflect Work with the breath to deepen emotional intelligence Gain a stronger, leaner, more stable muscular foundation Using an innovative mix of yoga techniques and indigenous spiritual tools such as smudging, prayer, ritual, and meditation, Sierra offers women practical guidance and inspiration for taking back vital energy while rediscovering happiness, health and wellness, inside and out. Praise: "Her unique integrative program offers women a blend of ancient and modern, spiritual and physical tools for strengthening themselves from the inside out. When women leave her workshop at Omega, their transformation is absolutely visible!" —Carla Goldstein, Director of the Women's Leadership Center at the Omega Institute "...[A] force of nature, an inspired teacher who has through direct experience created an astonishing technique of transformation certain to reveal the goddess within." —Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society and bestselling author of One River and The Serpent and the Rainbow "She has seemingly interminable knowledge about how to help women 'be women.' She herself is challenging, compassionate, and radiantly confident, a model of how to balance the warrior and goddess energies women have." —Sharon M., Ph.D., Harvard Medical School executive coach for women "Sierra Bender is not an academic who was dying to teach because she was afraid of living; she is a "Warrior of Life" who can teach because she allowed nearly dying to release her to discover living." —Warren Farrell, Ph.D., author of Why Men Are the Way They Are and Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say