Great Neck life and wellness coach aims to empower young girls through workshops

Janelle Clausen
Melody Pourmoradi, as seen above, has made it her mission to empower girls to take on the world.
Melody Pourmoradi, as seen above, has made it her mission to empower girls to take on the world. (Photo courtesy of Melody Pourmoradi)

Life and wellness coach Melody Pourmoradi wants to bring more girl power out from within and into the world.

“It’s the fear that holds us all back,” Pourmoradi said in an interview. “We’re not born as fearful beings, but I think what happens is that through unfortunate conditioning, there’s a fear that picks up.”

Pourmoradi’s new workshops, the GiRLiFE Empowerment Series, aim to stop that conditioning in its tracks – right around adolescence. Pourmoradi described the program as feeding girls with positive thoughts, healthy foods and a sense of their inner power.

“When they go through their challenges, and when they go through the ups and downs, they feel supported and they feel support through themselves,” Pourmoradi said.

Technically, the program began around the end of 2013 when Pourmoradi started running local workshops in Great Neck. But, after seeing some success, she decided to turn this into a digital series that anyone could access and bring to their community just under a year ago.

“By putting it onto a digital platform, I gave access to women all over the world,” Pourmoradi said, noting that they have program facilitators on three different continents.

One of the workshops focuses on gratitude. The girls would come in to the sound of power music, see an illustration of what another young girl is working through, and then answer what they themselves are grateful for that day.

From there, like in the other workshops, they go on to do an empowering class, Pourmoradi said. They gather together for circle time and read off a list of sentences where girls describe them as “empowered” or “coward.”

“We talk about how gratitude has the power to change literally every moment,” Pourmoradi said.

In this particular workshop, they also create a keepsake jar to bring home where they write one thing they’re grateful for each day and put it inside. It ends with talks about nutrition and creating their own juice using food from a vegetable bar.

Pourmoradi said that because of this, girls will keep these “principles active” and “stay accountable to the things they learned.”

Pourmoradi also noted she sees her program as unique, as it teaches girls to rely on their own inner strength. She said building up resilience, strength and confidence in young women – who bring these workshops to their communities – and children, is pivotal.

“As a young girl, we don’t know that we have these superpowers,” Pourmoradi said.

Ultimately, Pourmoradi said she sees this program as both sparking a girl’s empowerment movement and as part of one.

“I definitely think that it always would have been relevant,” Pourmoradi said. “But I do believe there is more support for a program like this than 5 years ago, 10 years ago [or] 15 years ago, because girl’s empowerment is on the rise.”

“This program was birthed from what I wish existed as a young girl,” Pourmoradi added.

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