Category: Relationality

A FEMINIST TAOIST VOICE PART 1: MY DIALOGUE WITH ELISA FON, ACUPUNCTURIST, TAOIST, FEMINIST AND FRIEND by Sara Frykenberg

“So it all kind of depends… even in men compared to men, and women compared to women, you would have to have a counterpart to judge something as yin or yang—you are never statically just yin or just yang…”

Elisa Fon is a student of acupuncture, graduating this semester from Yo San University in Santa Monica, CA.  She also studies reiki, energy healing, meditation and yoga.  Elisa and I have known each other for most of our lives as friends, as one another’s support and as chosen family.  Over the last few years, however, we have more consciously fostered an intentional aspect of our intimacy: a challenge to each other to live more authentically, to walk counter-abusively and to live towards physical, spiritual and emotional empowerment.  One privilege of this relationship has been the opportunity to create a language together in order to speak across our differences and share our respective passions: feminist theo/alogies (mine) and Chinese medicine/ healing arts (Elisa’s).

Searching for a way to better understand and teach feminist Taoism, I reached out to Elisa for dialogue and language, which gave birth to the following interview about the relationship of one feminist to Taoism, or a Taoist to feminism. Continue reading “A FEMINIST TAOIST VOICE PART 1: MY DIALOGUE WITH ELISA FON, ACUPUNCTURIST, TAOIST, FEMINIST AND FRIEND by Sara Frykenberg”

On Cooking and Eating by Ivy Helman

In patriarchal heterosexist societies women do most if not all of the cooking for their families.  Women are also usually assigned the tasks of cleaning, raising children, tending the family garden, gathering water and anything else that is considered part and parcel of caring for the family.  These feminine tasks are often devalued compared to the activities men spend their time doing.  I wholeheartedly support the reevaluation of the significance of these tasks and the movement toward shared responsibility for family life among heterosexual couples, however that is not what I want to discuss today.

I want to explore the religious and spiritual significance of the food cooked by our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and female friends, especially those dishes we would consider to be comfort food.  Every person, every family has their own idea of what meals are comfort foods.  Bubbe’s matzah ball soup on Shabbat maybe?  Aunt Betsy’s Easter ham?  Mom’s turkey, gravy and oyster stuffing on Thanksgiving?  Your sister’s famous mac and cheese?    Continue reading “On Cooking and Eating by Ivy Helman”

CELEBRATING THE BEGINNING OF THE AQUARIAN AGE by Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D.

Looking back, it’s interesting to think of myself as a young woman learning in a time of transition from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age.  According to Yogi Bhajan, the man known for brining Kundalini Yoga to the West, 11/11/91 marked the beginning of the last part of the Piscean age and on 11/11/11 the Age of Aquarius officially began.  So, welcome all to the Age of Aquarius!  This change of course, entails a significant paradigm shift that is supposed to affect our attitudes, consciousness and all of our relationships.  The beginning of the Aquarian age, like the end of the Mayan calendar and other overlapping prophesies of change, tends to inspire our apocalyptic imagination.  We may anticipate a breaking of our world.  I tend to imagine the pressure of the Aquarian transition like an event horizon of a black hole: a movement through extreme gravity that feels crushing and inescapable.  However, recently I’ve been struck by how the seeds of this new age, have been blossoming in my own experience and in the world around me.

According to my Kundalini teachers, the attitude of the Piscean age can be summed up as, “I believe.”  The attitude of the Aquarian Age is, “I know.”

As a child I desperately wanted to believe enough.  My evangelical Christian upbringing taught me that all I needed to do was believe that as God, Jesus Christ died for me and saved me from my sins.  If I did this, then I could go to heaven with my family.  Plus, Jesus would take me with him when he came back—that is, I wouldn’t have to go to hell or suffer the trials and tribulations of the apocalypse… this last part really stuck with me.

I thought I believed.  I wanted to believe.  I did “all the right things,” to somehow prove or provoke the kind of unquestioning belief I thought was necessary to be a “real” Christian.  But, the fact of the matter was I doubted.  As a little child (and I’ll admit, into my teens) I was sometimes struck with a sudden and horrifying fear that my family had been raptured and Jesus had left me behind.  I would literally panic until I found someone; but I’d also hide this fear because I didn’t want anyone to think that I didn’t believe enough.

I now know this extreme fear of god and His (sic) wrath was a part of my abusive relationship to what I thought was god.  I also know that our doubts can lead us towards renewed life.  I know that it is not my beliefs that make me valuable: wholeness is inherent in our connection to “a larger creative existence.”  We express this wholeness and our value, “with each committed action.”[i] Continue reading “CELEBRATING THE BEGINNING OF THE AQUARIAN AGE by Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D.”

Conversation on Leadership Continues…By Xochitl Alvizo

In a recent post on leadership I proposed that facilitating open dialogue is a central aspect of leadership. That if we are to move into new horizons – that is, feminist horizons of mutual communal empowerment and liberation – we must be willing to both risk and dialogue, and a leader is one who helps facilitate those practices.

Dialogue and the practice of making room for one another’s voices and contributions do not come easily to us however. Humans have a tendency to stifle and squelch one another especially if we sense that our privileges and comforts, our truths and our convictions, are being challenged or threatened. And so the breakdown in dialogue can result in the literal prevention of change and possibility – the possibility and actuality of entering into a more divine reality and way of relating. A leader then must be someone who can recognize and be aware of change-stifling powers, be willing to name and resist them, and help facilitate the creation of a literal time/place space for open participation and dialogue. This new open space has the potential and literally becomes the womb from which something new may be birthed…it is a fluid, messy, mysterious place, and not one necessarily easy to exists within, but absolutely necessary if seek to contribute toward a more just and beautiful existence. Open dialogue is a necessary part of helping create this new womb space where differences (of perspective, voices, people) can come together to interact and spark with one another in order to morph and change and thus birth something new together. Continue reading “Conversation on Leadership Continues…By Xochitl Alvizo”

In the Web of Life — No Exceptions By Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ is a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, women’s spirituality, and the Goddess movement.  She teaches in the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS and through Ariadne Institute offers Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

Does God love me more than She loves my doggies? Does She love animals more than She loves trees and flowers? Does She love trees and flowers more than She loved the first cells that formed in the waters of our planet? Did She not also love the atoms and particles of atoms that coalesced to form the earth?

In her books Sacred Gaia and Gaia’s Gift Anne Primavesi questions the notion that the dialogue between God and the world began with “our entry onto the scene.”  Primavesi argues that “human exceptionalism,” the view that the world exists for us, and that we are an “exception” to the world, has been and is the predominant Christian view.  In the stories of Adam and Noah, God gives dominion over the creatures of the earth to man.  Theologians asserted that of all the creatures that inhabit the earth, only man is in the image of God, and the image of God in man is found in his rational intelligence, which is shared with no other creature.  Because he is in the image of God, man will escape death, which is the lot of every other living thing.  Rather than challenging human exceptionalism, modern science furthered it, asserting that “matter” was “dead,” and that therefore it was right and just for man to subdue “nature” through technology and to harness it for his needs.   Continue reading “In the Web of Life — No Exceptions By Carol P. Christ”

ADI SHAKTI! : A MEDITATION ON A MANTRA BY Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D.

Aaadee shaktee, namo, namo: I bow to the primal power (which is female and divine).

My Kundalini yoga teacher training required that each student complete a 30 minute daily meditation for forty days straight at some point during our course.  Great!  No problem.  After all, I signed up for teacher training partially because I believed in the physical-spiritual-mental healing powers of meditation.  I chose the Adi Shakti meditation specifically, so I might better understand and embrace myself as a woman and creative being.  My own self-definition of womanhood had been very wounded in my past, so I aimed to embrace this fantastic opportunity.

Aadee shaktee, namo namo—I will bow to the primal female power that I have within me!  I was excited!  I was even eager to do this meditation; but somewhere along the way I discovered that I had underestimated how painful this process would be.  I underestimated my scars and I ultimately found this meditative experience somewhat excruciating.

Aadee Shaktee, namo, namo: I am humbled by her power.

Sarab shaktee, namo, namo: I bow to the all Encompassing Power and Energy.

My initial meditations were fun, exciting and led me to contemplate my sister’s pregnancy.  I enjoyed the mantra and the physical movements the meditation involved.  Very quickly, however, the movement itself became increasingly uncomfortable.  I was sore.  I joked in my journal, “no wonder the mantra engages female creative power; it really targets the abdomen and hips.”  I expected this, as many meditative postures are not exactly “comfortable.”  My response was normal. Continue reading “ADI SHAKTI! : A MEDITATION ON A MANTRA BY Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D.”

In my defense against an abusive God… what I forget and what I am learning By Sara Frykenberg

I spent a great deal of my life believing that the smaller and smaller I made myself, the bigger God would be in my life and the more power He (sic) would have to do the good things He had planned.  If I could just get out of the way… If I could resist my humanness… If I could be “alive to Him and dead to me,” as one of the songs we sang in my college church group reminded me.  I stopped believing this when I felt I had become so small and lost so much of myself that I couldn’t bear it anymore.

I don’t know how to explain it otherwise, but I had a physically violent reaction to any more of myself disappearing.  I yelled and snapped at people like a wounded animal; and when I reached out to members of my Bible study for help, I remember one woman suggesting that maybe demons were involved in some way.  I’m not sure if she thought I was being possessed or attacked, but I remember feeling like she hadn’t heard me at all.

I didn’t understand… excuse me, couldn’t understand why the God I was always taught to believe in, the God who was in control of everything and the God who purposefully made things the way they were, would plan for all the suffering and loss I saw around me—for the loss I was experiencing.  A man who is my ally and my spirit friend listened to me explain this feeling.  He then looked up at me and asked, “You think that God is abusive, don’t you?”  And I replied, “I guess I do.” Continue reading “In my defense against an abusive God… what I forget and what I am learning By Sara Frykenberg”

Charlene Spretnak’s “Relational Reality”: An Illuminating Read By Gina Messina-Dysert

I have long been interested in the work of women’s spirituality movement’s founding mother Charlene Spretnak; thus when her newest book, Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness that are Transforming the Modern World, was released I was anxious to read it.  To no surprise, I found it a brilliant, stimulating, and vital work.

In Relational Reality, Spretnak explains that we have “missed the way the world works” as a result of our cultural tendencies.  “The failure to notice that reality is inherently dynamic and interrelated at all levels – including substance and functioning – has caused a vast range of suffering” (1). Spretnak offers “snapshots” of the various crises we face within education and parenting, health and healthcare, community design and architecture, and the economy with purpose;  to name the suffering and hardship endured within the world and demonstrate that these crises are the result of anti-relational thinking.  She states these problems cannot be corrected until they are acknowledged; “Only then can we grasp the significance of the relational breakthroughs and solutions that are emerging” (20). Continue reading “Charlene Spretnak’s “Relational Reality”: An Illuminating Read By Gina Messina-Dysert”

Field-Dependent or Field-Astute? By Charlene Spretnak

Charlene Spretnak is one of the Founding Mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement. She is the author of eight books, including most recently Relational Reality. She is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com. 

Field-Dependent or Field-Astute?

While listening to an NPR station a few months ago, I heard a man – apparently a marketing whiz – say, “Teenage girls are a field-dependent market for us.” Hmmmm. There it is again, the long arm of Herman Witkin’s influence decades after his famous experiment in the psychology of visual perception in 1954, which found that male subjects tend strongly to focus on a foreground figure, while female subjects tend strongly to perceive figure and ground as a gestalt, or holistic totality. (These results have been replicated thousands of times since then, including cross-culturally.) However, following the experimental findings themselves, then came the patriarchal spin. Witkin assigned the positive, admirable label “field-independent” to men and the less admirable “field-dependent” to women. He and other psychologists extrapolated from his findings that women’s cognitive style is “conforming,” “child-like,” and “global,” being similar, as Witkin added in 1962, to the [supposedly] undifferentiated thought processes found in “primitive” cultures. He added that women’s “field-dependence” renders us unable to maintain a “sense of separate identity,” unlike “field-independent males,” whose cognitive style was seen as “analytical” and “self-reliant.” In more recent decades female psychologists have suggested that women’s cognitive style might well be re-labeled “field-sensitive.” But is that really sufficient? After all, it carries the connotation of women’s being supposedly “over-sensitive.”

Why does this matter now? Because the ground is shifting fast under the old view of reality as an aggregate of discrete entities (foreground figures, as Witkin would say), which may or may not relate to one another.  On the contrary, numerous discoveries in recent years indicate that the entire physical world, including humans, is far more dynamically interrelated – in both structure and functioning – than had been imagined (except by indigenous cultures and Eastern philosophy). Even as someone who’s been tracking the Relational Shift for decades, I was amazed by many of the recent discoveries – as well as the fact that this shift is now decidedly mainstream. Continue reading “Field-Dependent or Field-Astute? By Charlene Spretnak”