Talia Arnow

       When I met Ronit and the Leap Forward community, I was 26 years old.  I am now 35.  Nine years ago, I was urgently trying to change the world through social entrepreneurship and impact investing.  I was driven, idealistic, and convinced it was my responsibility to “fix” what was broken.  What I couldn’t yet see was that beneath this drive lived a well of anxiety, guilt, and relentless inner pressure.  My desire to do good was real, but my sense of worth depended on it.  Fear of being unworthy, of being rejected if I failed to achieve, was quietly running my life.  It was from this place that I began talking with Ronit and experiencing the Leap Forward community. 

       From the outside, my life looked “successful.”  I had a boyfriend, a beautiful apartment in Boston, had co-founded a startup, and was being recognized in leadership circles.  By conventional standards, I was doing everything “right.”  But Ronit saw beyond just the surface.  She experienced a young woman deeply committed to truth, justice, and community, yet profoundly suppressed – contorting herself to fit external structures, performing competence to earn worth, while quietly suffering from disconnection, superficiality, and hollowness.

       In my earliest meetings with Ronit and the community, something inside me quivered.  The level of honesty, vulnerability, responsibility, and intimacy felt uncomfortable, yet unmistakably real.  As I was moved to get to know Ronit and the community, to my surprise, an entirely new world began opening in front of me.  Ronit introduced me to a living, integrated body of work and practice – psychology, trauma, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, spirituality, and embodiment – woven together with ecology and evolutionary biology which I had studied in school.  A realization emerged that rewrote my life: lasting change in the world requires profound change within me.

       With Ronit’s guidance and the support of this community, I began meeting fear again and again.  This meant learning to feel and release what I had long suppressed – rage, anger, grief, and sadness – and to express boundaries in healthy and assertive ways.  This was possible through Ronit modeling how to channel anger in constructive ways, how to say no, what it meant to listen to her needs and be able to express them.  Through this process, I have developed a strong voice and a growing sense of agency that I now carry into most areas of my life, while remaining aware that the work is ongoing.  I have made significant strides in disentangling my worth from money, appearance, and my compulsive addiction to productivity.  

       Through five years of nomadic travel, I’ve loosened my reliance on external material sources for safety and learned to experience home increasingly within myself.  My relationship with nature shifted from observation to lived intimacy, from something “out there” to a creative force I experience within and all around me. I now have a budding relationship with Spirit that steadies me each day.

       Looking back, my life has expanded from a narrow box, one that would have left me bored, depressed, and profoundly unexpressed.  Now my life is expansive.  It is adventurous, relationally rich, international, and far more alive than I could have imagined.  I no longer romanticize impact, growth, or community.  I am learning instead that humility, gratitude, curiosity, integrity, and loving relationships are the true cornerstones of a meaningful life.  Ronit has helped me see and begin to live into these values not only through her teachings, but through the force of love she embodies and calls forth in all of us.  I am deeply grateful to walk this path in community – living, growing, falling, rising, and learning to serve the world together.