Women’s Power – Page 4 – Feminism and Religion

Activate your Body to Navigate Overwhelm

We live in a time of radical change, in a steam cooker of accelerated alchemy. No wonder most of us struggle with chronic overwhelm.

Beliefs, habits, thought patterns and organisational structures don’t change overnight, and we need ways to boost our resilience in the long arc of paradigm shifts. How can we look after ourselves during this personal and collective dance of change?

In this post I reflect on the connection between movement and health, breathing, and the role of our nervous system. I propose 5 simple steps to minimise and transform overwhelm when it happens.

On the changing role of the Goddess

Goddess Prominence & Nature Participation through time

Today I reflect on the presence or absence of the goddess in religion and society, and how we view humanity and participate in nature as a result.

This post is inspired by “The Myth of the Goddess. Evolution of an Image” by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, and especially by its final chapter “The Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God: the Reunion of Nature and Spirit.” This dance of integration of apparent opposites is essential to my work.

Invisible Connections: The Hidden Web of Women Writers, part 2 by Theresa C. Dintino

You can read part 1 here.

The erasure of this web is to make women feel alone and disconnected. Maybe it would make them want to give up.

Angela Davis and Toni Morrison

This may sound extreme but imagine this scenario: You are a young woman starting out and you are told that the path you wish to follow is one of pain, loneliness and lacks any kind of support or network with other women that came before you. There are plenty of men but you are left out of that network.

Why would you want to do it? Because in your soul of souls you are a writer, or an artist or a scientist . . . So you decide to do it anyway. But instead of expecting support and connection you have already decided, based on what you have been told, that there won’t be any and so you start to not expect it.

This Saturday March for Love, March for Healing, March for Strength by Caryn MacGrandle

Marches and Rallies will be held all over the United States this Saturday January 20^th to mark the upcoming 51^st anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. WomensMarch.Com

But what is happening in our world right now is Bigger than Roe.

It is not about Life, it is about Control.

I voted for Trump in 2016. There. I said it. My entire family was Republican. My husband at the time was Republican. I spent many years on an Airforce base where I saw firsthand that things the government run are full of red tape and inefficiency.

A Recipe for Dancing Your Soul Home

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.

Label or Be Labelled Part 3: Toward Embodied Presence

In Part 1 of this series on labelling, I highlighted the difference between naming and labelling, and the search for a personal label as ‘participation ticket’ for life.

In Part 2 on professional and spiritual identity, I looked at what we can learn from the autoethnographic practice of disclosing various selves in research situations. I also discussed the effects of Christianity on the suppression of pagan traditions in northwestern Europe, and nature-based spirituality as part of our generic spiritual DNA.

Today I share a few final reflections including what groups celebrate their differences with ‘prides and games’, and which ones remain invisible? What are the effects of woke ideology on fear of expression and loss of voices, and an invitation for embodied presence as one characteristic of our shared humanity.

Label or Be Labelled Part 2: Professional and spiritual identity

This post continues from Part 1, where I situated this essay as a reflection on Xochitl Alvizo’s article Human, Just Human. There, I questioned the difference between the power of naming versus the pressure to label. I then described my search for a personal identifier as ‘participation ticket’ to life. This feels important nowadays to join the conversation and not be dismissed by default. However, I wondered whether looking for things that set us apart emphasises otherness rather than shared humanity.

Today, I question what can we learn from autoethnography about the many selves we bring to different professional situations and how they might hide more than they reveal. I also describe the challenges of naming nature-based practices in a geographical area where 2000 years of Christianity forced our pagan traditions underground.

Archives from the FAR Founders: Feminist Gutter Punk Freedom by Xochitl Alvizo

This was originally posted on October 3, 2017. My brother has since died, not so long ago on June 12, 2023. But I keep needing this lessons, his wisdom. I recently (about two weeks ago) broke my foot and life is different without the mobility I am used to. So this archive post is a good word for me in yet another moment of life’s struggles.

My brother is, in this own words, an “old school street, squatter, gutter punk.” Indeed, he lives outside the system. He is an anarchist atheist and has lived many nights of his life on the streets – by choice. He has a quick and easy smile and makes friends effortlessly. Recently, while stuck in Seattle during an extended layover on his way back to Europe, where he’s been living the last few years, he passed the time making new friends and exploring the immediate area –

– he even found a sign greeting him by name (he goes by Lou).

Why We Need to Bring Back God as a Woman, part 1 by Caryn MacGrandle

26,000 years ago, life was precarious and dangerous. And so the human race revered the Mother. Mother Earth, who provided food amidst scarcity, protection from the dangers of the wild and healthy babies who grew to adulthood.

The Goddess.

In her many forms.

Some of these Goddesses.

Venus of Willendorf. The artifact known as the Venus of Willendorf dates to between 24,000–22,000 B.C.E., making it one of the oldest and most famous surviving works of art.

Curiosity by Beth Bartlett

In my last post I mentioned the tale of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. Zeus’s punishment of eternal torture was not enough to avenge the offense.[i] In addition, Zeus punished the entire human race by sending the first woman, Pandora. Pandora is a woman of “all gifts,” one of which is the curiosity that drives Pandora to open the forbidden jar, unleashing evils and miseries into the world. Woman as punishment, as the bringer of evil and misery — these themes have shaped the western view of women for millennia.