Elizabeth Debold & Andrew Cohen - Liberation Without a Face

What is an enlightened expression of gender? That question frames this compelling dialogue between spiritual teacher (and EnlightenNext founder) Andrew Cohen and gender theorist (and EnlightenNext magazine senior editor) Elizabeth Debold. Taken from a one-day virtual seminar entitled “The Hero’s Journey for Women,” led by Cohen and hosted by Debold, the dialogue charts a new, liberating direction for women, free from the overidentification with being female that has been so much a part of women’s identity since the 1960s and '70s.

Cohen begins by explaining the subtle nature of his teaching on gender, which he calls “Liberation Without a Face.” This teaching calls us to set aside the self-images and fixed notions of what it means to be women (or men) in order to free us to realize a more deeply authentic, and evolutionary, expression of who we are. At the end of the dialogue, Cohen brings the full measure of his fifteen years of working with women into a lively exploration with Debold on women’s relationship to conscious evolution. Casting light on what women face on the path, they reveal the potential for a new kind of women’s liberation that has the power to change culture at its roots. Wide-ranging in scope, this dynamic dialogue drives ever deeper into the heart of what it means to bring an enlightened perspective to gender.

BIOs

Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext magazine, is a spiritual teacher and acclaimed author widely recognized as a defining voice in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. A life-changing awakening in 1986 brought Cohen to the end of his own search for liberation while simultaneously starting him on an exploration of the meaning and significance of enlightenment for our time. This has led him to a profound investigation of the human predicament and into dialogue with sages, saints, and spiritual luminaries from nearly every tradition and beyond.

In 1992, Cohen released the first issue of EnlightenNext (formerly What Is Enlightenment), expanding his own inquiry through the public forum of a magazine and pioneering an innovative form of spiritual journalism reminiscent of classical Socratic dialogue. Over the last decade on the pages of EnlightenNext, Cohen has brought together leading thinkers—mystics and materialists, philosophers and psychologists—to call for a higher and wholly contemporary synthesis of the spiritual truths found in the East and the empirical rigor of the West. Through the magazine and his writings, Cohen is creating a new context for understanding enlightenment as a human evolutionary imperative. Together with a growing network of integral visionaries, including Ken Wilber and Don Beck, he is helping to define a culture of thought that places spiritual transformation at the center of any vision of transforming the world.

Elizabeth Debold, Ed.D., Senior Editor, brings her experience as a pioneering researcher in human development and gender conditioning to her work for EnlightenNext magazine.

Debold is coauthor of the bestseller, Mother Daughter Revolution, and has published numerous articles about human and moral development, gender issues, and girls' self-knowledge and growth. She has consulted to a variety of organizations ranging from corporate law firms to nonprofit educational organizations, has lectured widely, and has appeared as a guest on numerous television and radio programs, including Oprah , Good Morning America and NPR’s 51%. Debold is currently the Academic Director of the Master's Program in Conscious Evolution that EnlightenNext magazine is running in partnership with The Graduate Institute, in Milford, Connecticut. She is also writing a new book, tentatively entitled The Evolution of Love: Men, Women, and the Possibility of Transformation, to be published by Pantheon.

She received her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University, and was a founding member of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, which was directed by Dr. Carol Gilligan.