All Photos by Marie Cartier
Continue reading “Photo Report from the Woman’s March, Los Angeles by Marie Cartier”
Photo Report from the Woman’s March, Los Angeles by Marie Cartier
Category: Women’s Voices
Viśākhā: Surrogate Mother of Buddhism by Oxana Poberejnaia
Viśākhā is often called the greatest female lay follower of the Buddha. She prompted the Buddha to give numerous teachings. She also donated generously to the Sangha (monastic order). Her crowning contribution was building a monastery called Migāramātupāsāda.
She is said to either die as a “stream-enterer” (a person who will definitely become enlightened, no matter how many life times it will take). Another account about her afterlife says that she would live for eons in happiness in one of the divine realms before achieving the final Liberation there and then.
Viśākhā appears in numerous Suttas of Theravadin Canon. From the modern feminist point of view, the content of these discourses reinforces patriarchal gender stereotypes. In particular, Viśākhā is portrayed as a caring Mother for her relatives, Bhikkhus (Buddhist monks and nuns), and other people.
Continue reading “Viśākhā: Surrogate Mother of Buddhism by Oxana Poberejnaia”
It Takes a Village: Responding to the Needs of Rosemary Radford Ruether by Cynthia Garrity-Bond
As many of you may already know, on August 24, 2016, feminist theologian and scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether suffered a significant stroke. There has been some speculation from those who know or have known Rosemary about her current condition. Here is the short of it. While Rosemary has made progress, her doctors and therefore Medicare feel it is insufficient to warrant continued physical and speech therapies. Those who interact with Rosemary on a daily or weekly basis disagree with this medical prognosis. The stroke damaged the part of Rosemary’s brain that allows for communication, therefore she, at this time, is not able to speak. That said, Rosemary recognizes individuals, is able to respond to some commands and engage in therapeutic exercises. The more attention and care she receives the greater her capacity grows for a more meaningful life that includes a level of agency.
The first year of a stroke demands ongoing therapies in order to truly assess a clear diagnosis. To what degree Rosemary will recover from her stroke is uncertain, but at the minimum ongoing therapies will prove beneficial towards her overall quality of life. Unfortunately, Rosemary does not have secondary health insurance that will cover the cost of these badly needed therapies. For example, one month of Physical Therapy at 3x/week and Speech Therapy 2x/week amounts to $3,289.00. Put another way, 15 minutes of physical or speech therapy costs $41.00. To be effective, Rosemary should have, at the minimum, five hours of combined therapy per week. Continue reading “It Takes a Village: Responding to the Needs of Rosemary Radford Ruether by Cynthia Garrity-Bond”
The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women by Vibha Shetiya
Although “the” Ramayana is a fluid narrative, scholarship has traditionally recognized the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana as the most authoritative of Ramayanas. But recent studies have brought to light the hundreds of regional stories of Rama and Sita which are more popular with the masses. These would include Krittibasa’s Ramayana in Bengal, Kamban’s Tamil Iramavataram in South India, notably in the state of Tamil Nadu, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitamanas among the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India, and so on. But even here, a pattern seems to emerge; all the above-mentioned authors are male. Within this scenario, a rather unique text stands out, and that is Chandravati’s sixteenth century Bengali Ramayana, for its author was a woman. Even more fascinating is the double-toned nature of the narrative – through Chandravati’s own voice and through the voice of its tragic heroine, Sita.
Chandravati (ca.1550-1600) was born in a village in eastern Bengal, today in Bangladesh. It is impossible to ignore the tragedy of her own life which perhaps played a role in her re-fashioning a well-loved epic; her Ramayana is built on a recurring theme that defines women’s lives – the theme of sorrow. Born the daughter of a poor fisherman, legend has it that on the eve of her wedding, her fiancé ditched her for another woman. A devastated Chandravati vows to never marry, instead becoming a devotee of Shiva, and at the urging of her father, takes to re-writing the Ramayana. But rather than simply recount the traditional tale, Chandravati, through the Ramayana – that symbol of Hindu patriarchy – turns the story into one lamenting the pitiful lives of women by centering it on Sita. That it is a story by a woman and for women is evident in the fact that Chandravati addresses her narrative with the vocative, “Suno Sakhijana!” or “Listen, my girlfriends!” rather than to members of the court as was the traditional salutation for stories involving mythological characters. Continue reading “The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women by Vibha Shetiya”
Earth’s Mystery School by Molly Remer
“Earth is a mystery school complete with initiations and discoveries that you only experience by 
living with your feelings, touching the earth, and embracing the fullness of your humanity.”
–Queen Guenivere
On Samhain morning, I wake early and mist is rising out of the forest and dancing through the field and out of the trees. I have a moment of sheer awe to see it…the veil was literally thin.
Over the weekend, I visit the nearby river to connect in personal ceremony in appreciation before the park closes for the year and also symbolically to those at Standing Rock. This river eventually meets the Missouri River. I run my hands through the water. I anoint my brow, neck, and hands. I whisper my prayers into the ripples. I sing: “I am water. I am water…I am flowing like the water, like the water I am flowing, like the water.”
I am hurrying outside to get some work done. I feel tight and hurried with the length of my to-do list and my superhuman plans for the day. The bright red flame of a bloom on my pineapple sage plant catches my eye and then…the perfection of a bright yellow butterfly alighting on one slender stamen. My breath catches and I stop in wonder. I smell the flower and it smells of pineapple, just as the leaves do. I can hardly believe this treasure and the tightness melts into nothing. The rest of the day is full of joy.
I am once again healed by flowers.
About twenty feet outside my house, there is a small building with a little porch and a peaked roof. Inside, there is red carpet and a purple wall, goddess tapestries draped from floor to ceiling, and goddess sculptures in abundance. 
In this building I write, work, create, and hold small rituals with a circle of friends. I call it my Tiny Temple and it is the proverbial, “room of one’s own” described by Virginia Woolf in 1929. Having a dedicated work and ceremony space in the midst of a home-based life, which includes a home business shared with my husband, and four homeschooled children, has changed my life profoundly. In the tiny temple, I feel most wholly myself: connected, powerful, free, authentic, and completely alive.
One morning, as I walk to the temple, this beautiful rose makes me drop to my knees with delight. Yes. This right here. This is a beautiful moment. As I kneel beside the rose, the Body Prayer song* wells out of me until I have tears in my eyes.
“We may need to be cured by flowers.
We may need to strip naked and let the petals fall on our shoulders, down our bellies, against our thighs. We may need to lie naked in fields of wildflowers. We may need to walk naked through beauty. We may need to walk naked through color. We may need to walk naked through scent. We may need to walk naked through sex and death. We may need to feel beauty on our skin. We may need to walk the pollen path, among the flowers that are everywhere.
We can still smell our grandmother’s garden. Our grandmother is still alive.”
–Sharman Apt Russell, in Sisters of the Earth
I create personal ritual almost every day in my tiny temple, sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, sometimes tearful, sometimes joyful, sometimes hurried, sometimes leisurely, sometimes distracted, sometimes astonished at the wonder of it all. The week of my rose worship experience, I smudge the temple with sage I grew in the flowerboxes by my front porch. I ring my bell 13 times. I sing “I Am Fire.” I lay out cards and tiny goddesses and create a mandala out of fallen leaves. I leave an offering of flowers from the herbs and let rose petals drop from my fingers. Ritual captivates all the senses…in this sacred space, I invoke my own senses of smell, touch, sight, sound, and wonder and the result is magic.
“Through ceremony we learn how to give back. When we sing, we give energy through our voice; when we drum, we allow the earth’s heartbeat to join with our own; when we dance, we bring the energy of earth and sky together in our bodies and give it out; when we pray, we give energy through our hearts; when we look upon our relations, we give blessings through our eyes. When we put all these activities together, we have a ceremony, one of the most powerful forms of gift-giving we humans possess.”
–Sun Bear and Wabun Wind
May we each be healed by flowers, time to ourselves to sit on the earth and sing, and the simple, every day beauties and miracles that surround us each day.
Notes:
- Several years ago I wrote a poem called Body Prayer, which is included in the Girl God’s Mother Earth book as well as in my own Earthprayer poetry collection. I was so touched when a Goddess Magic Circle sister, Angelique, shared a chant she created from the last stanza this poem. I started waking up in the mornings singing it, or sitting by flowers and singing it, and it delights me. It also brings my mind back to self-care, an ever-present issue it feels like for women. Here is a recording of my small study group singing it in the Tiny Temple.
- Related past post about earth-centered spirituality: Stoneflower
- Brigid’s Grove is offering a Worldwide Solstice Circle event online this year. Companion resources, journal prompts, a detailed free ritual packet as well as a collection of digital gifts will also be available in our new Creative Spirit Circle companion classroom. You are cordially invited to join us!
Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Brigid’s Grove.
First Time But *Definitely* Not the Last by Vibha Shetiya
Like many others, I too have been thinking of this election the past month or so. A lot has been said about the repercussions a Trump presidency will have on immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community, non-Whites…the list is endless. But in this post, I would like to talk about personal matters, and what it meant for a first-time voter like me to vote in the US elections. I have been living in the United States for over seventeen years, but only recently – in April this year – did I apply for citizenship.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t know much about Hillary Clinton or American politics. But the good thing that has come out of this cycle is that it has made me want to learn more about governance, elected representatives and what they are doing (or not) for the people they claim to represent. It has made me want to learn about why people hate Hillary so much. I don’t understand the refrain, “She’s a liar”; why she has been singled out for so much hatred when clearly the opposition isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue.
Despite being relatively apolitical prior to this election season, however, there was one thing I was really excited about – the fact that, for the first time in American history, a woman was running for president as a candidate of a major party, that too with a good chance of winning. Now, of course, being from India I was cautious about what this could actually mean for the ordinary American woman. After all, did Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s rise to power necessarily create a dent in the patriarchal nature of Indian culture and society? Continue reading “First Time But *Definitely* Not the Last by Vibha Shetiya”
Sex, Death and the Gods (Part II) by Vibha Shetiya
This continues my reflections on the Devidasis in Part 1.
The overall picture that emerged from the documentary “Sex, Death and the Gods” was that, in its current form, there were many layers to the Devadasi system. For one, the most heartbreaking of all, there were the helpless, underage girls protesting such an existence, pleading that they would rather be in school, instead of being trapped in what was essentially a form of sexual slavery. But then we also see the older Devadasis, women who had been dedicated as children themselves.
Within this latter bracket, there were two groups.Those that viewed the practice as evil, and those that saw it as empowering – they earned their own income and they didn’t have a man or mother-in-law to lord over them; in short, they were in-charge of their own households. To them, married life was akin to a life of servitude, sex was something they enjoyed, and they may have shared a more or less equal relationship with the men who were their customers, men who enjoyed their company and preferred being with a Devadasi rather than with spouses they never chose or couldn’t get along with. In the words of one Devadasi – “I am the boss.” Continue reading “Sex, Death and the Gods (Part II) by Vibha Shetiya”
Hard Work without Getting Anywhere by Elisabeth Schilling
When my students read about the Buddhist concepts of non-resistance, non-attachment, and living in the present, one of the first protests I end up addressing is how these ideas seem to negate progress, goal-setting, or success. What my students don’t yet see is how clinging to a particular end can hinder creativity and the pleasure of the journey to a degree that sometimes compromises success.
For instance, when writers create for academic purposes, they/we can feel desperate to finish a project. We can feel overwhelmed by the need for perfectionism or by the fear of failure. Perhaps even the hard work it takes layered with the uncertainty of really getting anywhere is what stirs feelings of resistance. Writing seems to transmit the energy frequencies of the writer, and what I do not want is for any reader of mine to feel that kind of struggle. Instead, I hope for narratives with at least some level of warmth, compassion, and generosity.
Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, zen spiritual practitioner and author, says that we know we have done something well when we have been nourished by the experience of the doing. Wow. I love this. Yet how forgetful I can be when getting to that sticky spot in my own writing, when I could pause to take a deep breath or walk around the neighborhood or do whatever it might take to refresh and reset my mind. Continue reading “Hard Work without Getting Anywhere by Elisabeth Schilling”
Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 2 by Molly Remer
This is a continuation of Molly’s piece from Wednesday, 10 August 2016. You can read Part 1 here.
After explaining that the homebirth of her second son was her, “first initiation into the Goddess…even though at that time I didn’t consciously know of Her,” Monica Sjoo writing in an anthology of priestess essays called Voices of the 
Goddess, explains:
The Birthing Woman is the original shaman. She brings the ancestral spirit being into this realm while risking her life doing so. No wonder that the most ancient temples were the sacred birth places and that the priestesses of the Mother were also midwives, healers, astrologers and guides to the souls of the dying. Women bridge the borderline realms between life and death and in the past have therefore always been the oracles, sibyls, mediums and wise women…
…the power of original creation thinking is connected to the power of mothering. Motherhood is ritually powerful and of great spiritual and occult competence because bearing, like bleeding, is a transformative magical act. It is the power of ritual magic, the power of thought or mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as well as to social organizations, cultures and transformations of all kinds… (page unknown).
I have been a childbirth educator since 2006 and I have given birth five times. Each birth brought me the gift of a profound sense of my own inherent worth and value. It was the shamanic journey through the death-birth of my tiny third child, however, that ushered in a new sense of my own spirituality and that involved a profound almost near-death experience for me. After passing through this intense, initiatory crisis, the direction and focus of my life and work changed and deepened. Shortly after the death-birth of my third son, I wrote: Continue reading “Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 2 by Molly Remer”
Women’s Ritual Dances: Secret Language of the Goddess by Laura Shannon
My life’s work with traditional women’s circle dances of Eastern Europe and the Near East has been a natural interweaving of feminism, activism and Goddess spirituality. I would like to share how I came to discover these dances and their potential as tools for healing and transformation.
Circles of women dancing with joined hands appear in rock art, pottery shards, vases and frescoes going back thousands of years1, showing that ritual dance was a primary means of women’s worship. I believe that existing women’s circle dance traditions of the Balkans are direct descendants of these rituals. In their expression of values of partnership, sustainability, and peace, they are living links to the matrifocal Goddess culture of Old Europe as articulated by Marija Gimbutas.2
Incorporating symbols of the Goddess in her many guises, these women’s ritual dances are deeply spiritual. They are feminist in the way they provide women with a place of power, not ‘power-over’ but ‘power-from-within.’3 They are an activist practice because the qualities they embody – connection, inclusiveness, balance, empathy, and mutuality – are the principles of a Partnership society, as proposed by Riane Eisler;4 or in Carol Lee Flinders’ term, a society of Belonging.5 Each dance circle is an opportunity to practice being in community in a respectful and cooperative way, which can offer a profound source of healing.6
How did I come to these women’s dances? As a child I was convinced of certain truths: that nature is holy, that God is also female, and that instead of hurting one another, people should celebrate together with music and dance. These longings led me to the rich folk dance traditions of the American melting pot, women’s Middle Eastern Dance circles, and the women’s spirituality network. Around the same time, in the early 1980s, I encountered the meditative communal dance practice known as Sacred Dance. Together with my university training in Intercultural Studies and Dance Movement Therapy, these different streams helped shape the path of my life. Continue reading “Women’s Ritual Dances: Secret Language of the Goddess by Laura Shannon”
Feminism and Religion 