Why Women Cry Together: A Powerful Experience of Safety and Connection

Over the weekend, I attended Dr. Mindy Pelz’s Live Like a Girl conference, a beautiful experience created for Reset Academy members and coaches. I went because I knew the event would be meaningful. I expected to learn, reflect, connect, and probably walk away with a few new ways to think about hormones, fasting, health, and intentional living.

At the beginning of the conference, as we gathered for mocktails and healthy appetizers in the teaching kitchen and garden, I got a huge welcome hug from Mindy herself. Later, during mocktail hour, Mindy invited all of us to introduce ourselves and give one word that expressed why we were there. Many women could not use just one word, which made perfect sense to me. How do you condense something so big into one tidy little word when your whole body may have brought you there for reasons your mind hasn’t even fully organized yet?

The women attending used different words and stories, but many circled the same ideas: connection, expansion, healing, education, community, and belonging. My one word was energy. In addition to learning which was a given, I also wanted to feel something. I did not know exactly what. I just knew I wanted to feel whatever came up. What I did not expect was how deeply the room would feel.

Choosing Ourselves

Many of us attended the conference alone, which seemed meaningful for a lot of women. At first, that struck me as interesting because I have traveled alone for years, often for work and more recently for pleasure too. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that for some women, traveling alone was not just about getting on a plane, booking a room, or finding their way around a new place. It may have been the unsaid act of choosing themselves.

That matters because showing up for yourself can be a powerful next healthy step. Whether a woman was just beginning to listen to her body or already well into her health journey, there was something meaningful about being in a room where so many women had chosen to be there for themselves. Underneath all of it, there was a feeling in the room that was hard to miss.

Women were carrying weight, and I do not only mean pounds. Sure, some women carried their weight where everyone could see it. Others carried theirs behind polished smiles, quiet nods, strong posture, or the kind of laugh that says, “I’m fine,” even when the body knows better. Some shared deeply personal stories with a level of vulnerability that felt almost too raw for a room full of people they barely knew. Others kept their stories closer. But by the end of the weekend, I had the sense that most of us had cried at least once. Talk about feeling something.

A Room That Let the Armor Come Off

One of the things that struck me most was how intentional the whole experience felt. The conference was about the whole picture: fasting, hormones, food, mood, health routines, and intention. Cortisol, insulin, and oxytocin were discussed extensively, but the message was not only about naming hormones. It was about learning to understand what the body needs, what it is trying to tell us, and how all of these pieces work together.

The speakers were authentic, sincere, and deeply invested in helping women move forward. There was genuine concern in the way they spoke, not in a dramatic or preachy way, but in a way that made it clear they truly wanted women to believe something better was possible for them.

That may sound simple, but in a world where women are constantly marketed to, corrected, compared, pressured, polished, and told what else they need to fix, it felt rare. It felt clean. It felt like a room where women were not being told they were lacking or behind. They were being invited to remember they had power. So refreshing.

Mindy and the other speakers created what I can only describe as a “safe container.” That phrase can sound a little woo-woo, and I know I am usually the first one to side-eye anything that sounds like we are about to put a crystal in the conference room and call everyone healed. But this was different. This was grounded, human, and real.

That kind of room does not happen by accident. It happens when the person leading the room is authentic, when the speakers are not hiding behind polished perfection, and when the message is firm but compassionate. It happens when women are invited to think differently without being shamed for how they have lived up to that point.

When One Woman Cried, the Room Felt It

There were many moments throughout the conference when someone became emotional. Sometimes it was a speaker. Sometimes it was a woman in the audience. Sometimes the emotion seemed to rise out of nowhere, as if one sentence had slipped past the mind and landed directly in the body.

One minute I would be listening, fully engaged, and the next minute tears were in my eyes. Sometimes I understood why. Something was said that struck a chord in me. It touched something from my own story, my own body, my own journey, and my own experience as a woman who has had to learn how to listen to herself after spending too many years overriding the messages.

Other times, I cried simply because another woman cried. I felt her. That was the part that made me curious. I understood crying when something personally affected me. I understood being moved by a powerful story or a heartfelt moment. But there were times when I did not share the exact experience being described, and still, when another woman’s tears came, mine followed. And it was not just me. More than once, many women in the room were crying too.

I needed to understand that, so out of curiousity, I did a little research. What I found is that shared crying is not random, and it is not just women being “emotional,” which is such a tired explanation. Humans are wired for connection. We read each other’s faces, voices, posture, energy, and tears. When one person becomes visibly emotional, the nervous systems around them may respond too.

This is often called emotional contagion, which sounds a little like we all caught a feelings bug, but it is more beautiful than that. Emotions can spread through a room because we are social beings. We are built to notice each other. Tears are a clear, nonverbal signal that something real is happening, and the body often understands that before the thinking mind can make sense of it.

There is also the idea of mirror neurons, which are believed to help us feel with another person by reflecting what we observe. When we see someone in pain, grief, relief, or deep emotion, something in us may respond as if we are not separate from it. We may not share her lived experience or know any of the details of her story, but the body recognizes the language of vulnerability. My brain may not have known her story, but my body understood the feeling.

The Body Felt It Too

That is also why I kept noticing how physical the whole experience felt. This was not just an idea we talked about. It was in the room. It was in the tears, the hugs, the nodding, the tissues, the laughter that came right after crying, and the way women seemed to soften once they realized they did not have to hold it all together.

That is part of why it landed so deeply for me. In my journey, my own body had been communicating long before I fully understood what it was trying to tell me, which is part of what happened with my medical malfunction. So when the conversation turned toward cortisol, oxytocin, stress, safety, and the importance of listening to the body, I was not hearing it as theory. I was totally relating to it because I experienced all of it in real time.

Complete strangers hugged each other, and not just quick, polite, pat-the-back hugs. These were long-hold hugs, the kind where two people pause long enough to actually feel the exchange. The connection was in our bodies. It was in the way women leaned in, wiped their eyes, reached for tissues, laughed through tears, and softened in places they may not have even realized were clenched.

And let’s be honest, most of us were probably well aware we were not crying pretty. Conference lighting, puffy eyes, mascara, tissues, runny noses, the whole situation. But we cried anyway. As women who are so often aware of how we look, how we sound, how much space we take up, and whether we are making anyone uncomfortable, allowing emotion to show in a room full of people can feel like its own kind of surrender.

I have attended plenty of professional conferences throughout my career where crying in the room would not have been seen as connection or release. It could have quietly changed how people saw you, questioned your leadership, or influenced whether they thought you were ready for the next opportunity. This room felt different because emotion did not cost us credibility. It deepened the connection.

What the Tears Revealed

Maybe some of the crying was grief. Maybe it was anxiety. Maybe it was recognition. Maybe some of it was the nervous system finally exhaling after years of holding everything together. Maybe the tears were not the interruption. Maybe they were the release. And maybe that is part of why shared crying can feel so powerful. It reminds us that pain, hope, fear, exhaustion, healing, and longing are not always as separate as we think.

The science behind shared emotion helped me understand part of what I witnessed, but what stayed with me was the experience itself. I had come to the conference with the word energy, wanting to feel whatever came up. I left reflecting on courage, release, connection, the invisible weight so many women carry, and the next steps on my own journey. I also left with a deeper appreciation for what can happen when women gather in an environment built on authenticity, compassion, and the willingness to be real.

In The Awakened Body, I write about how I learned to connect with my body differently, listen more deeply, and stop treating health like something that only happens through food, exercise, or willpower. This weekend reminded me that awakening can also happen in rooms where women feel safe enough to be honest, even if that honesty arrives as tears before it becomes words.

And that is definitely part of “Living Like a Girl” too: not shrinking, not apologizing for feeling, and not pretending we are fine. Finding our power. Finding ourselves. Feeling what rises. Releasing what is ready. Connecting with women who understand without needing every detail. Believing in ourselves. And allowing the armor to come off.