Sacred Space – Feminism and Religion

Shamanism in the MRI Scanner by Eline Kieft

Medical tests are an inevitable part of modern life. One experience that tends to heighten anxiety is an MRI scan. The claustrophobic tube, the pounding mechanical noise and the requirement to remain perfectly still for extended periods can create intense sensory overload.

At some point I became aware of the similarities with a shamanic journey, and found a way to transform this ordeal into a ritual of connection and support. With mindful presence and inner attunement, you can imagine the tube as a tunnel to the archetypal realms. The rhythmic, mechanical hum replaces the drumbeat. Spirit becomes a companion alongside modern technology.

I hope you’ll never need it, but should you be scheduling an MRI scan, this is an invitation to meet it with a sacred intention. You might connect with a power guide, receive unexpected insights, or simply meditate on a sense of peace while your body is being scanned. Participate, actively, in something that can feel “done to you” and turn it into a soulful inquiry into your inner world while the medical staff do their thing…

Goddess Architectures: How Cultures Shape Sacred Feminine Power

In this essay, I address a gap in goddess spirituality, between a rhetoric of celebrating the body, and lack of truly embodied practice. I reflect on the archetypal language commonly used in goddess spirituality, tracing its roots in Greek mythology and depth psychology while questioning its cultural limits.

By introducing the notion of “goddess architectures”, I explore how ecological, social and cosmological contexts shape symbolic structures, and how sacred feminine power can be named, distributed, embodied or obscured across cultures. Finally, I propose movement as a way back to lived experience beyond symbolic and linguistic frameworks.

Goddess Spirituality into the Lived Body

Over the past thirty years of researching and practising goddess spirituality, I noticed a persistent discrepancy. While this field speaks about honouring the body as sacred, in practice it often feels like rhetorical lip service. The language of embodiment is present, but remains disconnected from the body on many levels.

Moving through the Midlife Threshold

Goddess Qi Gong as a New Compass

There is a deep and insidious taboo around ageing that leaves so many of our experiences as women unspoken, as if the physical, emotional, hormonal and mental shifts of growing older should be suffered alone and hidden behind doors.

What if we can turn midlife into a positive initiation that we share together? Would it be possible to learn to read our body and psyche differently? Might practising conscious movement literally help us move through this phase? And what would happen if we re-orient ourselves towards the many faces of the Goddess?

A Taoist View of Intention (Yi)

Choosing How We Show Up with The Inner Compass of Mind, Eye and Heart

What does it mean, to set an intention? In this piece, I explore the Taoist concept of Yi, the integration of mind, eye and heart as a practice of coming into alignment with life.

This essay invites a nuanced relationship with intention, away from the modern hype around manifestation, and instead rooted in choice, care and conscious participation in life.

Klara Kulikova, Unsplash

A common concern around the word ‘intention’, especially in spiritual or self-help contexts, is its suggestion that thinking the right thoughts or holding the right mindset, will miraculously give you what you want.*) When it doesn’t, the implied message is that you somehow fell short: you weren’t positive enough, not aligned, or evolved enough for it to work. In short, the burden of failing is placed on you, without recognising the complexity of life. Rest assured, that’s not the kind of intention I’m writing about here.

Time Travel with Your Moving Body as Antenna by Eline Kieft

Explore how your body is always positioned in time and space, connected to the world around you, and even to the times that came before and the ones still to unfold. Use movement as a way to travel through time…

I’m passionate about movement as a way of knowing, and how we can calibrate our body* to perceive information from our interior world, and from the living, breathing world around us. Read how movement can become a conscious act of locating yourself in various conditions and unfolding layers of being.

Eline Kieft, 2025 by Andy Murray.

Healing Soul Loss Through Movement

We tend to imagine soul loss as something rare and dramatic, or reserved for those with deep trauma. But in shamanic paradigms across cultures, soul loss is a normal part of being human. The concept refers to moments when a vital piece of our essence disconnects, often as a survival mechanism. In psychology this is called dissociation. This can happen through shock, illness, relational rupture or subtle decisions we make to fit in, stay safe or succeed. A piece of us leaves in order to preserve the rest.

[Image credits: Detail from Anderson Debernardi’s painting “Iniciacion Shamanica”, seen at Exhibition Visions Chamaniques. Arts de l’Ayahuasca en Amazonie Péruvienne, ‎⁨Musée du Quai Branly, 2024. Photo by Eline Kieft.]

Dancing the Stories That Heal

After a near-death experience in 2019, I found myself immersed in myth and movement—sitting with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, dancing archetypes through Movement Medicine, and weaving stories like the Handless Maiden and the Red Shoes into my everyday life. This post shares some of the journey of how myths became embodied allies and an invitation for you too, to remember what lives in your bones.

Tapestry: *Le Grand Charniers* (1959) by Jean Lurçat, Musée Jean-Lurçat, Angers, photographed in 2024. Image © Eline Kieft.

Do You Hear Seal-Woman Calling?

It was beautiful to read Carol P. Christ recent ‘from the archives’ post “Mermaid, Goddess Of The Sea,” especially because I’m in the middle of organising my first live Story-Dance workshop since several years, to move through one of my favourite stories of the Selkie-Seal Woman!

Stories of seal-women drift across the sea from the windswept coasts of Scotland to the icy shores of the Arctic. In the Scottish and Irish Highlands, Seal-women are known as selkies—shapeshifters who live as seals in the ocean, and who, when they shed their skins, walk as women on land. These selkie women dance beneath the moonlight, their laughter echoing across the waves as they rejoin their sisters in joyful reunion with the earth.

Yoga for Witches: Should You Try This at Home?

In this post, I review Yoga for Witches by Sarah Robinson, a practical book that weaves together two ancient practices with surprising similarities, yoga from the East, and witchcraft as practiced in Northwestern Europe.

I start with what I loved, and how Robinson describes the similarities and differences between those two traditions. That weaves into some personal and deeper reflections on the theoretical background and yoga sequences. At the end you’ll find a specific recommendation so you’ll know if this is the book for you!

Overnight at a Neolithic Dolmen: A Womb Healing Ceremony by Eline Kieft

In preparation for my hysterectomy, I decided to spend a night in a dolmen at Samhain last year, to seek guidance and healing. I chose Dolmen de Bajouilière in Saint-Rémy-la-Varenne, in Northern France, a site I had discovered by chance the previous year on my local explorations.

This well-preserved structure, with its spacious square divided into two rooms, felt inviting and safe for an overnight ritual. Though I am accustomed to spending nights in neolithic monuments, mostly in the UK, I felt some hesitation, partly due to my intermediate French and unfamiliarity with the local spirits.

Nevertheless, I recognized this resistance as part of the ego’s fear of the unknown, and I gave myself permission to retreat if needed. If I would feel too vulnerable, it wouldn’t serve my body and spirit ahead of the surgery. Please join me on my overnight Samhain Ceremony full of deep imagery and transformation as I shed my womb three times…