by Tiffany Razzano
Wendy Rathjen, who still lives in Rockville Centre, quit her 16-year career in sales and marketing to spend more time with her daughter, Sydney, and husband, Brian. Jane Burke, who now lives in East Atlantic Beach, is an energy healer who had just graduated with a B.S. in energy science from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing in Florida. The two women, who have been friends for 30 years, were inspired to form a rejuvenating, social group for women, which would also inspire their creativity and educate them on various topics at the same time.
"You meet great women during the day, but you're surrounded by kids and the conversations are so choppy, but extremely interesting and funny," Rathjen said. "We wanted to put something together where people can just get together for a few hours, chill out, and talk about things of interest."
After finishing up her degree, Burke decided she wanted to reach out to more people. "We wanted to set up a way so that people could gather and get together to form healthy relationships with each other," she said. "We wanted to inspire people in their own creations in life. These women are often home with children or in jobs where they may be unhappy and maybe they want to do something else. We wanted to inspire them to bring out more creativity."
Their initial talks began in January 2006, with their first meeting taking place in April. Thirty-five women attended this first meeting, and as the word spread, they eventually had 55 attendees at their monthly meetings.
"Basically, it's a pretty diverse group, from 25 to 80-years-old, and [the women are] singles, married people, mothers with children, divorced, widowers. It's very broad," Rathjen said.
The group meets once a month, on the first Thursday of each month, at the American Legion on Maple Avenue. They bring in speakers on a variety of topics that they feel will be interesting to their group members, such as conscious parenting, energy healing, and addiction. At their next meeting, on October 5, they will have a wine tasting of local wines, and a guest speaker on the topic. It costs $50 to become a member, and $10 for members each meeting. Non-members are welcome to all meetings at $20 per meeting.
One member, P.J. Foley, said this is a great group that she couldn't wait to join. "It's great to get a perspective of all different types of age groups and women," she said. "We needed something sort of progressive in this town, whether we come together for issues of healing ourselves or learning about different topics and the social aspect is great too."
The group also focuses on the women in it as well. Burke said they try to feature the talents of different members at each meeting. "If one women is a painter, then we ask them to bring in their artwork," she said. "Another woman always wanted to do Italian cooking. So we did a spotlight on her and now she does in-house catering. Each month we have a five-minute spotlight on someone bringing out their creation."
"It's just a great vehicle for women to build healthy relationships and for networking," Rathjen said. "We try to encourage that and inspire creativity." She said some members have even gone on to form their own small business after showing off their talent at a Love the Journey meeting.
The pair have also launched a web site for Love the Journey, which includes message boards and a place for members to advertise their businesses. Burke said the web site is a great way for the members to communicate with each other outside of meetings so that they can set up outside meetings, such as walks, nights out and book clubs.
Foley said the web site will be useful for forming subgroups. "Say some people are interested in starting up a bike riding group or starting an after school program," she said. "It's nice that you can link together a book club over the internet and form subgroups from the larger group, bringing together people with the same interests."
Rathjen and Burke hope the web site will be the key to fulfilling their dream of turning Love the Journey not only into a national group, but an international group as well. Already, they have friends and acquaintances in other states interested in starting a chapter in their area. The web site would link all the chapters together.
"What we want to do is build other chapters in other areas, building a community in each area and building a global community," Burke said. "We want to build a global, international community, with the women from all different areas communicating through the web site. so they can inspire each other and know they can do anything."
She added, "So [this group] opens up their world and helps them to grow. Every time we grow, we thrive and it brings more health to our bodies and energy."
