This morning I read an article about a woman who ‘forgot’ to light one of the candles on the Menorah or what I would call the ‘Tree of Life’ for the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah which takes place over a period of eight nights beginning in December. I was struck by her concern because she had forgotten one of the ‘rules’ and missed a night. Twice over a period of years…
While reading her reflection I noted that she seemed to get close to the underlying meaning behind the lighting of candles (present in every extant tradition) at the darkest time of year – she believed that she was bringing light into the literal darkness of night and kindling the divine spark within herself.
Two and a half years ago, our beloved friend and mentor Carol P. Christ passed to the realm of the ancestors. It’s been wonderful to read her archive posts every week as well as so many posts remembering and referencing her brilliant work. The FAR community was so important to her: as Carol herself pointed out, she not only offered her own posts each Monday, she also read and responded to every post, every day. I also cherish the daily connection to our FAR ‘family’, and find profound comfort for the loss of such a tremendous presence through this daily connection with others who knew her and miss her as as I do.
When you hear the word ‘soul’, what is your first association?
Soul is a complex and much-debated word, that often brings up strong feelings. Without going into religious or philosophical discourse, it is often associated with the breath, and with that mysterious spark of life force that animates the body. I discussed soul in a previous post Untangling the Triad of Life Force, Spirit and Soul. Today I write about soul as a fluid concept, an essence that can get dispersed and also retrieved, and propose a light self-retrieval through dance as remedy that you can do by yourself.
I attended a beautiful women’s circle to celebrate my dear friend Gloria’s birthday recently. Each woman was invited to bring a sharing for Gloria – a poem, reflection, oracle card, song or dance – whatever felt right. Each sharing that day was not only a gift to Gloria, but to each of us.
I had met Gloria during the period of my life when I had written a play titled, “Dancers of the Dawn,” with a cast of seven women of different ages, shapes, sizes and colors. The play featured original music, drummers, myth, history, dance, even comedy for a sumptuous experience of the sacred feminine emerging in modern women. Gloria was a part of the women’s sacred circles that we co-created during that time – circles that continued for a decade and still retain heart-connections today.
In Part 1 of this post, published yesterday, I described the first steps of my personal journey of soul recovery, including my first encounter with Green Snake, in statues, dreams and hypnotherapy. Those experiences led to choosing to tattoo Green Snake on my left arm. Read more about finding my Medicine and embracing my Golden Shadow as I stepped into an ancient lineage of Snake Healers.
Sometimes we encounter really sweet, or funny gems on the road of individuation… Let’s start with one like that!
Sweet Intermezzo (6 years ago…)
In the film The Matrix, Neo receives a message to “follow the White Rabbit.” Just before I met my partner, he encountered a live Green Snake slithering across a forest trail in Thailand, followed by a Neo-like dream to “follow the Green Snake.”
This post describes some of the steps on my personal journey of soul recovery across many, many years. It can be traced back to when I was 3 or 4 years old. Each header reflects a significant moment towards finding my Medicine and embracing my Golden Shadow of stepping into an ancient lineage of Snake Healers.
Although many of the steps created an immediate shift in my consciousness, this kind of individuation usually doesn’t happen overnight. I’m sharing it to honour the unfolding trails across time, and to encourage people to surrender to their journey, while letting go of a specific outcome. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.
The spiritual life need not be divorced from the physical. It is with our hands that we make magic It is with our breaths that we offer prayers. It is with our eyes that we see beauty. It is with our hearts that we know love. It is with our ears that we hear birdsong and ballads. It is with these bodies that we reach out to touch the holy every day.
This morning, I watched the baby woodpeckers. Still nestled safe within their tree they stab wildly at their brave parents who cautiously poke snacks into the trunk and then dive away again, narrowly evading the enthusiasm of their progeny. I peek at the baby phoebes too, heads nearly full-feathered, no more room for a parent in the nest against the wall of our house. They peer back at me, black eyes solemn, while the hummingbirds dodge and weave and battle it out between branches. I hear the thin and persistent cry of a broad-winged hawk from somewhere in the oaks just outside my vision. Summer is settling into the woods, though spring seems just barely to have arrived. The woods are becoming heavy and green and closing to exploration as the bugs and brambles stake their claim and exact their blood prices for entry. The blackberries are in bloom, wild and riotous, their white flowers open gratefully to both rain and sun. The wild raspberries have already begun to set their fruits, hard knobs of green clustered hopefully on each cane. The mulberries were brave enough to try again after frost crisped their efforts to black, now re-leafed, small green flowers and starts of berries once more emerge to hang with delicate promise next to their ruined brethren. As I finish writing my poem and offer my prayers, I look up to see a bald eagle making great wide circles above the house. The sky is clear and blue and the air is sweet and fresh and full of promise. I sit, as I do, in this cocoon of green, my heart wide, my mind soothed, and my soul replenished by the magic of place and all it manages to hold and teach each day.
On Winter Solstice, I hosted a Return of the Sun event at the local healing arts center where I do my Circles. We had offerings and presentations all night long. It was the first time I have ever done anything that large or public, so it was a stretch for me.
At the end of the night, a friend said, ‘Oh my, I needed this. Let’s do it once a month.’
And I thought, ‘yea, right.’
And then I thought, ‘Yea. Right.’
I’ve already started thinking about ways we could do it better and things we could change.
I feel a bit like when I first started hosting Circles nine years ago. I’m tired and judging whether or not it was worth the stress and effort.
But this time around I know it’s worth the stress and effort.
How ‘at one’ are you with your body, and what reasons might there be if your body-sense got separate(d) from your soul-sense?
This piece starts with the difference between feminine and masculine spirituality, and introduces a few reasons why living in a physical body isn’t always easy.
It then invites a shift to the beloved body and how we can start to re-instate our body as a sacred place and love it from within.
A Modern Pilgrimage to the Isle of Lewis & Harris, Part 2
In the previous post of October 14th, I introduced my recent pilgrimage to meet the Goddess, honour the physical and psychological changes that have happened inside me recently. I described the different mountain ranges that resembles the bodies of sleeping women, and an ancient well dedicated to the Celtic goddess Brighde.
If I was traveling over the body of the goddess, the Callanish Standing Stones would be her navel. It seems as if energy is flowing out from there to all edges of the island. The shape of the site resembles a Celtic cross. Unusual is that the site consists of one large, central standing stone, surrounded by 13 stones, and with stone avenues to the cardinal directions. With its solar alignment, paraphrasing Jill Smith, the configuration looks like a cosmic dancer who juggles the sun from east to west. The “arms” are aligned exactly with the sunrise and sunset at this time of year.
Model of the Standing Stones as seen from above, in Callanish Visitor Centre
Callanish 1, the main stone circle, is connected to 11 other sites across the island, some circles, some solitary standing stones. Together they are called the Callanish Complex. I visited Callanish 1 many times that week, and I was lucky to spend the Autumn Equinox there.
I’ve never come across stones that were so alive and expressive. Light would bounce off differently at different times of the day, accentuating irregularities, dulling, or sharpening edges, emphasising different aspects. I saw lion and wolf heads, young maidens, hooded wanders, gargoyle and dragon-like creatures, dolphins and even a Horned Dancer… Most importantly, it felt like in each of the stone circles in the area (Callanish 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8), there was at least one stone resembling a woman’s body, and I came to think of them as the Grandmother Guardians. They had a real living presence, that became even stronger as the day-visitors disappeared.
Usually there were 2-5 people there, sometimes I found myself alone. The sunset of the Equinox, however, drew many more people. There were about twenty tourists, who were taking snapshots of this magnificent light show, leaning, or pushing against the stones, talking, and giggling. Several professional photographers tried to capture a magical moment. And there were 5-7 fellow pilgrims, whom, like me, would stay long into the night. Everyone was so focused on the sunset, was I the only one who noted the rainbow in the east?
The below images were literally taken a minute apart – rainbow to the east, sunset and silhouettes to the west.
Rainbow during the Sunset at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 22, 2022Sunset at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 22, 2022
Eventually the tourists and photographers disappeared, and the rest of us gathered at the heart of the circle, in the remains of an ancient burial mound. With African and shamanic drums, a whistle, a singing bowl, an old man tapping his walking stick to the bottom of his tin mug, and some rattles, we improvised a rhythmic invocation to the spirits of the stones. With the rain becoming heavier, I soon found myself alone with the stones. Now I could finally sing, dance, weave between the stones without disrupting anyone, lean into the stones, close my eyes, and pray.
I felt very aware of the ‘balance’ in the year, the point of equally long days and nights. I asked for guidance on balance in my own life: between work and leisure, between doing and resting, between the first and second half of my life, between gathering wood for the fire and sharing it, between birth and death, and how I can better look after my body and energy living with an invisible auto-immune condition in these fast and demanding times.
After the rain departed, the clouds tore open, revealing the clearest and most brilliant night sky I’ve ever seen. The silhouettes of the stones reaching up into the night was truly magnificent. Moving, weaving, pausing, I made my way clockwise around all the 13 stones in the circle. I stood at either side of the stones, outer and inner, and took my place in between them, as if I was a moving stone myself. I reflected on centre and circumference, on axis, on direction, on the wheel of life, turning, turning, turning, turning… and felt connected to similar circles across Europe lighting up in the darkness, as a radiant hub of energy-places.
Photo Collage: Impression of Night Sky, by Eline Kieft October 1, 2022
After having completed my weaving of the circle, by which time I had enjoyed half of my ginger tea for a warm kick, I decided to return to our cottage – also an act of balance. Having a cold already, I did not quite have the proper gear to stay out in the windy and rainy night. My lovely bed was calling! On my way home I saw three deer next to the road. I stopped the car and could be with them for several moments before they wandered off.
I had been so attuned to the rhythms that I woke up well before the alarm. I laid in the comfortable darkness, until it was time to return to the stones to witness the sunrise. My mom came along this time. Again, there were several photographers ready for ‘the moment’ (no tourists at this hour!). I just HAD to dance, and chose my spot at the far western end, out of line of any cameras. A dance of ground, earth, mountain, honouring the mother and my mother, weaving the light, the turn of seasons, changing, praying, calling, giving thanks, celebrating, welcoming, and letting go. Strong, soft, vibrant, still…
Both Images of Sunrise at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 23, 2022
Standing against the central menhir, looking east, we finished the last of the ginger tea. So special to be able to share this together. Mother and daughter in a circle of ancient Grandmother Guardians, witnessing the sun rise on a new day. Sacred land, ongoing cycles of time, and a modern-ancient pilgrimage…
It will take many moons to fully digest and integrate the richness of this journey, but I already know this precious experience seeped deep into my bones.
May the magic of the land touch you too, wherever you are.
Mother and Daughter – this photo was in fact taken at another moment, against another stone, mid-afternoon on 22nd…
I’d love to invite you for my series of Embodied Spirituality Masterclasses that are going to start today, 21st October! Have a look if you’re interested in reconnecting body and spirit, re-anointing the body as sacred, nature as a temple, contemporary ceremony and much more… You can still join until Christmas, so don’t worry if you can’t make the first session live, it will be available in replay!
Jill Smith is a deep well of goddess lore on Lewis:
Mother of the Isles (2003)
The Callanish Dance (2000)
Bio
Eline Kieft danced from a young age, including rigorous classical and contemporary training to become a professional dancer. She then studied anthropology, deepening her fascination with worldwide similarities between indigenous traditions regarding intangible aspects of reality and other ways of knowing, including embodied epistemologies and shamanic techniques.
She completed her PhD in dance anthropology at Roehampton University, trained in depth with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Eline worked at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University for five years, where she created a Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers, and pioneered soulful academic pedagogy. Her recent book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body was well received as a unique blend of theory and practice and a medicine for our times.
She is now a full-time change-maker and facilitates deep transformation through coaching and courses both online and in person. Her approach The Way of the Wild Soul offers a set of embodied, creative, and spiritual tools to re-connect with inner strength and navigate life’s challenges with confidence.
Feminism and Religion 