Sacred Shapes: The Geometry of Women

(This is my beautiful pregnant subject Ewa as Kupula, Polish Goddess of medicinal plants...photo by me.)

I am offering pregnancy, mother and baby and multi-generational family portraits for our May is Mother's Month show...all photo sessions will have one photo chosen to be on display for the show May 19th. Celebrate your pregnancy with a portrait of you and your baby or honor your grandparent/s with a family portrait!



Sacred Shapes: The Geometry of Women
@ Danton Studio: Center for Art Making and Well Being
May 2013
Friday May 3rd reception 7pm – Images of Women, Children and Families
May 10th, 11th, 17th, & 18th birth panel/circle, workshops and classes
Sunday May 19th 4-7pm reception of all artwork from classes & ‘award’ ceremony for mentors

*Celebrate Motherhood, Families, and Mentors with Art Classes all Through May*

"Sacred Shapes: The Geometry of Women”
A month celebrating mothers, families and mentors with classes and workshops. The show highlights the empowerment of a sacred birth and the initiation of motherhood. The show celebrates the men and women who have inspired us as mentors, teachers and adoptive parents. It chronicles with portraits for pregnant, new moms and families offered to the public. Sacred Shapes creates an environment to tell stories, from the Flowering Shapes of Motherhood tree, to the Shrine of Mentors. From pregnancy portraits to the Your Body is Your Temple hanging mobiles. Sacred Shapes seeks to show the perfection of organic femininity and how we fit into the cycles of life. The Geometry of Women shows women’s relationships to their families and their communities, as well as woman in relationship to self.

Friday May 3rd
Reception –Images of women, children and families – with signup sheets for upcoming classes

Friday May 10th
Women’s Night Out – It Takes a Village Women’s Circle - teas & tonics - Birth Panel – doula and midwife panel discussion on birth and women’s health, acupuncture for women's health, Rory Eames on pregnancy and women’s health, Katrina’s bellydancing for female health, Colleen Magnus and Paige Riley discuss facilitating the needs of modern teens, raising the children of the village, bullying, and issues facing teens, Pandora Peoples discusses female health from a mind-body perspective. Teachers discuss their upcoming classes.

Saturday May 11th
Your Body is your Temple - Belly/Torso Casting – 10am to 2pm
with deer Sullivan and Paige Riley –
Clay Temple Building with Alexis Katchmar – 10am to 2pm

Writing on Birth – 5 to 8pm
Class taught by Nicola Burnell

Friday May 17th
Baby Yoga with Caroline McClutcheon - 9 to 10am
It Takes a Village - Mentorship Shrine – Thank You to A Mentor Art

Saturday May 18th
Flowering Motherhood – Birth and Rebirth Stories in the form of giant flowers – 10am to 2pm
With Susan Danton and Pandora Peoples

Sunday May 19th
Reception for Student Work and Awards Ceremony 4-7pm
Music from Dinah Mellin


Neato Installations include:
1. Images of Mothers, Children and Families
- accepting submissions, selected works

2.Pregnancy, Mother & Child, & Multigenerational Photo Portraits
– portrait services offered by Pandora Peoples

3. Mentorship Shrine – Plaster of Paris Boat with Wood Collage Shields
– for teachers, mentors, aunts, grandmothers, non-mother mothers
- teacher Cindy Sauers?, plus stories of mentorship relationship. We will take a photo of the shield, to include with the writing, contained within the boat. There will be a nice photo op during the ceremony.

4. Flowering Shapes of Motherhood Tree - Bouquet of Flowers –
Birth and Rebirth Stories – stories of flowering motherhood - flower birth stories workshop taught by Susan Danton & Pandora Peoples
Flowering tree will be mounted in papier mache "vase"

5. Your Body is Your Temple
- Belly Casts with teacher deer Sullivan with Paige Riley
- Clay Temples with teacher Alexis Katchmar…self-hardening clay

6. Spring Nest – Bring the Kids, help create our installation.

Got My Mary Poppins On

What a terrific day at library art class. My pal and I co-teach library for our children's kindergarten class which consists of a meditation, reading a story, and an involved art project. We switch off reading & guided meditation. It's such a pleasure teaching children finally, because when I was eighteen I read books on teaching writing to beginning readers and wrote elaborate integrated curricula in my journals. My syllabus for each class designation, incorporated bits of history, language arts, science, math and art, which were broken up in units, and daily agendas with classroom and homework assignments. My inner Anne of Avonlea/Miss Honey from Matilda/English Governess is quite pleased. Miss Jenny and I have created quite a lovely curriculum, which is being used by other classes. I could go on and on, but I've got to work now.

Time Traveling Memoir Bouquet

The change of the seasons today has me all backwards and forwards and inside out. Part frisky bunny, singing daffodil, hopping robin, crying baby hawk in a nest, and purring mother lioness. I'm not quite sure what decade it is, but I am using solid colors, so this must be modern art and I am painting with paw prints and talons from the taxidermist laboratory of my inner sanctuary.

There are the familiar earmarks of eras that better suited my sensibilities: kaleidoscopes, unicycles, monocles, cigar boxes filled with wax, and brass stamps, rings with family crests. My porcelain cameo doesn't come in any color but pink. The Indian men in the woods want their stories to be told, and everywhere someone is digging up a fortune in sentimental value. It's so beautiful, and more than I can take in the confines of my whale bone bodice. Heavy gasping only brings me further to ecstasy. There's an apothecary study with human teeth, and Latin names I don't recognize, and there are 101 recipes for dyspepsia.

Tinctures and liniments in brown glass shine and jump into your hands on an as needed basis. Medicine is the life of the party, because this is the 1880s, and electricity is sparse. Everything is more alive in the dark. Smelling salts are just out of reach, but it's clear I have drama written all over the hat perched on my head. Lady doctors aren't supposed to wear veils, even slight veils. It's too cloying and high tea is impractical these days and served too late in the day.

I have vertigo because the galactic heart is just so vast these days and sometimes the ball of neuroses that gets passed from court to court feels like a medicine ball. I will not fall to my seaside death, again, because my angina will keep me from running with my eyes closed like a fool, and this time around I remember where I kept my key and which desk drawer it goes to in which house. This time name calling and labels won't fool me. I know all about the pharaohs and all about the hell hounds and that kaleidoscope is just to f-ing fly...not to meditate with it like I'm at a Buddhist train station on a cosmic highway, mesmerized by a giant hour glass, watching the sands of time.

I've traded quills for printing presses, which is quite a relief, because I bite my feathers and my mouth turns black with ink. Somewhere in this dream, the Lullaby of Birdland plays. I am here for containment, doctoring, documentation and like a guardian angel I aim to remind people who they are. Now, proceed. Carry on. Just do your thing. You're awesome.

Poetry carries me on wings of a dove and for a moment I want to be pregnant yesterday. I want our old friends with the long beards in the dusty studies to feel at home among the living, which is a gift I only need give myself amid my nineteenth century delirious daybeds, leather armchairs and bubbling beakers, as our friends quietly chuckle and loudly shuffle an invisible deck of cards. Who writes poetry anymore, anyway?

My Interviews Today for IWD

WOMR's International Women's Day

The programming starts at midnight and I'll be bringing us up to the midnight hour in approximately 24 hours. Join me from 10pm to midnight EST streaming live at http://womr.org 4 interviews: 5 gorgeous chicas inside and out.

10pm EST Moksha Sommer of HuDost

10:30pm EST Certified Professional Midwife Paige Eastman Dickinson and certified doula Ruby Corrigan Anastasia

11pm EST Live music with Hana Kahn

11:30pm EST Live discussion with director of Women's Avenue for Empowering Voices Paige Riley

Sisterhood is powerful. Goddess Bless!

Listen live streaming at http://womr.org, or if you are on Cape Cod turn the dial to 92.1 WOMR Provincetown or 91.3 WFMR Orleans

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, has long been my favorite film of all time. Jimmy Stewart is my favorite muse actually, right after Archangel Michael and the Mother Mary. And Mr. Smith must be other people's favorite icon of justice too, because somehow we thought long and hard enough about bringing some justice and defeating the nefarious Orwellian powers to collectively inspire an ophthalmologist (Rand Paul) to open a portal of light to help return sanity and truth to the planet (when he gave his speech on the Senate floor in an active filibuster yesterday). In what amounts to a "cease and desist letter" from Asia, the North Koreans have issued a declaration of war on the US. This sobering reaction to the out-of-control world policing that has escalated from financial and corporate bullying (of primarily second and third world countries) and worldwide gross environmental subterfuge to the all out medieval and draconian in-your-face domination and abuse of all human rights in mechanized and systematic industrial warfare (or war-fare like global industry) everywhere that can only be the work of disassociated callous masochists. Or perhaps greed is the motivator, and denial and compartmentalization is the modus operandi.

But who can explain empires? Who can explain the mass genocide (read: torture and slaughter of babies, women and men) upon the Native Americans. Why is it so taboo to mention the truth? Because one percent of them survived, and now some of us like to use sage to smudge our haunted Victorian houses? Because we want to focus on our pretty nail polish and Tivo-ing our favorite crime shows featuring dismembered bodies and rape victims. Oh? Okay, I'll just swallow it. Shove my "feminist commentary" (read: humanist) back where it came from and continue to be subjected to low levels of degradation, high levels of weather modification, passive-aggressive threats, and humiliation in my collective name, because the smell of new cars is worth the money it takes to keep me in a bubble, and my culture has taught me to worship death and violence instead of the earth and making peace and the intoxicating vibrations of love.

13 hours of bravery. 13. The number of menstrual cycles in a year. The number of astrological sun signs, when you include the forgotten constellation Asclepius...representing the keeper of the ancient Egyptian wisdom. Little is known about the wisdom of ancient Egypt, comprised of the left eye mysteries and the right eye mysteries. A lot was done to suppress both schools of thought, available to the chosen few. The caduceus, the staff with two entwined serpents, which is the symbol for AMA, draws from the iconography associated with Asclepius, his serpent rod, or asklepios. The forgotten school of thought came from the goddess culture was anti-hierarchical and pro-global peace. 13. The number of the sacred feminine. The number women's moon cycles in a year. The number of truth.

Midnight to Midnight

This Friday March 8th, 92.1 WOMR and 91.3 WFMR are presenting 24 hours of programs about women. We had our last committee meeting about it today. We have discussions, comedy, interviews and live music. Our guests include Maryam Durani, Afghan journalist and provincial council member of Kandahar broadcaster and manager of Mirman Radio of Kandahar, Helena Kennedy from the House of Lords, musicians from Brazil to Belarus, a Pulitzer-prize winning composer, Indian author Indira Ganesan, and so much more. I have four interviews from 10pm to midnight: Moksha Sommer from HuDost joins me from 10pm with some of her tunes; birth consultant and doula Ruby Corrigan Anastasio and certified professional midwife Paige Eastman Dickinson talk about childbirth; Hana Kahn joins us with her lovely live music, and Paige Reilly director of Women's Avenue for empowering Voices takes us to midnight with stories about visiting Morocco and working with Mama Africa Organization in Uganda.

Babies in the Air?

I may make a premeditated irrational decision based on my biological clock and my spiritual needs, not based on guilt I am supposed to have for having an only child. I have met plenty of happy adults who grew up without brothers or sisters. I have a lovely array of friends with joyous 'only children'. There is a huge debate between those who adamantly suggest that parents of single children are traumatizing their young ones beyond repair by depriving them the company of siblings. Within that set are those that champion "spacing" and those that insist that children cannot be born too close in age for a myriad of reasons too long to list here. On the other side of the coin, are the un/hipster sometimes 'unschooling' parents who think one child is a sufficient effort in procreation because afterall life is a bit messy globally and perhaps we should be as concerned with the lungs of the planet (read: rainforest), the environmental impact of Tar Sands (which has 82 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil), human trafficking, the NDAA, drone warfare, gun violence, and adopting the children already living who need homes.

On the other hand, it's always something, right? Every generation in every century on every continent has contended with some adversity personally, locally, globally...philosophically.

Babies are people who bring wisdom from the spiritual world, help us remember who were are, and who bring wisdom to help us grow, and help make our communities evolve. Many children who are being born at this time on the planet are very special. I think they have very special abilities to heal, guide, and nurture. I think many have little fear, lots of optimism, and great adaptability. It's part of our soul's evolution to grow together as families. Children teach us about ourselves, our parents and our grandparents. We learn by teaching, and at its best parenting turns you into a more conscientious person with a wider worldview, and more compassion towards others. It's a very special relationship.

My spirit children on the other side just keep showing up, telling me that they are ready to be born. I don't know how many years I can placate them with promises of a future with us. They have been extremely patient. But when someone needs to be born NOW, you only have a certain window to play with, especially if you have your eye on astrological influences.

Update:
The votes are in. The oracles and the wise crones have been consulted. The divination has been rendered. All things considered, the babymakers are cooling their jets for another two seasons, when the winds and migratory fowl will be conjured once more. I'm checking in with the Goddess, Zeus, Saturn, Archangel Michael, the Buddha, Jesus and any other helpful spiritual presence who may have any input Mid-October for a reconvene. And perhaps next year at this time will be the magical portal opening.

It's odd to live in a country where homebirth is a luxury. It's over five thousand dollars in addition to health insurance, because health insurance doesn't cover it. After being born at home myself which has the significant affect of making it feel like the place you belong birthing, and after giving birth at home, I can't imagine anything else. Besides the expense, I have two big events coming up in May and August, and I'm in school. My herb show is probably starting at the beginning of April and I am making inventory for local retail businesses. My website needs some additions. It's good to tie up loose ends before delving into the unknowable, and pregnancy is a time of many variables. My last pregnancy was a relatively even-keeled and joyous time with lots of exercise and no complications, but it's nice to have more flexibility in your schedule in undertaking such a huge life change, if possible.

Balsy, Antiquated and Earthy Education

My herbal college is the oldest in North America. The antiquated language of the text speaks to my soul. Reading these texts is like talking to old friends. Now I am quite sure one of my angels was an early physician, and another is good at translating the Victorian lingo. The herbal usage here on the east coast versus the herbal training I received with First Nation/Native Americans and indigenous South Americans on the west coast is vastly different. More syrups, tinctures, and snuffs here, more plant spirit medicine, liniments, and ceremony there. The school likes to dispel myths about herbal usage that have arisen out of historical misunderstandings and political flareups between doctors. It's the best of both worlds. I like being able to talk to my snuff.

"Snuff for Offensive Catarrh"
28 grams of powdered goldenseal root
70 grams of powdered bayberry root


Sift through a fine sieve. Use several times as ordinary snuff."

I have yet to use this remedy. I am not recommending this herbal remedy as a treatment to cure or prevent any illness.

The Atrium of My Dreams

Today, I had some serious ancestral DNA activation taking place between alabaster Knights from the Crusade era and dark wooden choir chairs from the 15th century. Did you know that marble sculptures and Medieval paintings of breastfeeding Madonnas exist? Based on the collection from the Isabella Stewart Gardner estate, you'd think it was the normal position for the blessed Saint and her holy son. I had seen hundreds of paintings of the Virgin with child, but never had I seen her nipples. Not once before today. And we think we're so open-minded in our culture with our prude puritan values and the suppression of feminine power and organic maternal identity.

The giant room with the enormous marble fireplace, whose mantel could easily mount a basket ball hoop for the average 19th century Bostonian, was a time machine for me. The textiles, satin cushioned wood chairs, dark wood lattices, hand-carved apothecary cabinets with keyholes, and candelabras that hold a dozen beeswax flames. In the center of this room was my dinner table, the same length as the one is my house.

Some kids day dream of Christmas, I've always day dreamed of the Norman Invasion, battles between the Anglo Saxons and the Normans, and between the Knights of the Templer and the Vikings. I fantasized of coughing up blood in a drafty castle. The sound of spindles during months of consumption in darkened rooms adjacent to long corridors and a mezzanine. Museums have always made me feel at home with paintings of sickly hemophiliacs with ugly grimaces and frightened heirs and women marred by still births. Those are my people. Seeing those pained expressions, and all of the ornate iron crosses... it's like coming home.



Today it dawned on me, that perhaps somewhere in my genetic makeup lurks a desire for tile floors and second story views of an atrium. My great grandfather was from a Polish noble family. His father owned a vast estate and lived in...you guessed it, a castle-like compound. When his great estate was laid siege to, he defended his land by sword in the ensuing battle. Apparently, it was a huge blow, not only to his appendage, but also to his ego, because he was known as an excellent swordsman. As the story goes, he went from benevolent and gregarious to embittered and temperamental, before gambling much of his fortune away. Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian empire, in what in now Poland, was a very unstable area politically.

###

Interestingly, Wikipedia says of Women's Rights in relation to the Norman Invasion:

Women had some rights before the Norman Conquest that were not present in England by circa 1100. The Germanic practice of the Fore-mother was brought by the Anglo-Saxons. Women would begin to lose some rights after the Danish invasion of the early 11th century, in particular, through King Cnut's revision of laws. Women may have lost the right to consent to marriage, for example, widows lost the right to remarry. The Norman Conquest gradually influenced the legal position of women in England. The Norman kings distinguished between aristocrats and commoners, and a woman's place in her life-cycle, in general, brought some changes in opportunities. Widows could remarry (even if they could not always consent to whom they were remarried) and, in general, control property in ways that married women and maidens could not. The greatest rights were generally available to women having access to land.[

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Energy Medicine and Meditation

One of the reasons yoga and meditation have become so popular is that both practices support mindfulness. Mindful attention begets awareness. Awareness brings your attention to your feelings and makes you open to experiencing energy. Deep breathing brings health to the body. Openness is energizing. Life is a constant communication of energy. When we become open we experience Universal love and energy moving through our bodies. Yoga and meditation consciously move energy through our vital organs, circulating the blood so it can purify the organs and purge them of damaged cells. We are constantly healing and regenerating. We are growing like flowering trees. Our veins and arteries are like rivers moving debris. Our intestines are the same. This wonderful fluctuating nature of ours makes healing from damaged intestinal villi (as in the case of Celiac) and healing from cancer possible.

A dedicated meditation practice makes one aware of the chakras, or energy centers in the body. The energy anatomy, medical intuitive Carolyn Myss refers to in her work, is at the core of Traditional Ayurvedic Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine. In Ayurveda, energy lines are called nadis. In Chinese Medicine, these are called meridians which are the path through which Qi flows. What's entertaining and enlightening, is that there are energy memories and messages from your body that exist within the energy centers of your body. In fact, the energy field, or aura, which surrounds us is filled with information. Reading your body's messages when you are in a deeply relaxed but aware state, can tell you a lot about how your body is reacting to your thoughts and beliefs, your emotions and how you treat your body.

Energy healing begins with meditation. The altered mental states attained by Reiki practitioners is a kind of walking meditation. In my own meditation practice that I began a decade ago, I started by chanting. I was never a turn your mind off sort of a person. The idea of having a blank mind seemed an impossible proposition. The chanting helped me focus my energy. I began by using colors, visualizing the chakra colors, and chanting each chakra seed sound towards my energy centers. I highly recommend this for anyone who wants to practice meditation, but hasn't found a method that works for them. After I practiced the seed mantras, I began doing the second half of the Gayatri mantra which focuses on the chakras. I became aware of how each chakra was within me. I also became aware of how each chakra corresponded to an aspect of the human experience. I saw the chakras as realms of consciousness: the sexual consciousness, the creation consciousness, the will power consciousness, the heart consciousness, the communication consciousness, the place where souls connect consciousness, and the universal wisdom/god consciousness. The chakras are like miniature living universes within.

Is it any wonder many people experience telepathy and premonitions on a regular basis. Yes. We do. This is evidenced by best friends and partners who finish each others sentences, lovers who lucid dream about one another, and even less intimately, when friends and family know when each other is about to call, or know when they are simultaneously thinking about each other. Is it such a stretch that collectively we are sharing or merging consciousness? Something to ponder.

Root Causes of Low Energy and ADHD Treatment

The more healthy our diets, the more energy we have. Many of my clients express to me that they are worried about losing energy. Ironically, worry itself is one of the biggest energy drainers. Containment of vital energy is tantamount to good health, but some people guard their energy to the point of blocking activities and behavior which renews energy. For example, people who have had their boundaries crossed too many times, can have energetic holes from trespassers. When these places are left open and unhealed with a person's energy field, energy can leak from these places, making them feel tired, dispassionate, sleepless, or mentally or physically fatigued.

Low energy can also be the result of adrenal fatigue (often stress induced), or less often hyperthyroid conditions. In cases of hyperactivity, ADHD, housewife apathy and depression, and restlessness, ephedrine has been given. The idea is that is 'calms' people down. The truth is it completely short circuits an over-stimulated nervous system. Not too wise in the long term. For example, one client of mine was incorrectly diagnosed with manic depression, because of 'mania' and sadness she experienced as a young teen. This was caused by an overactive thyroid. It wasn't until her thyroid short-circuited from the over production of thyroid hormones, became depressed and the production of hormones diminished resulting in weight gain, that her doctors (many doctors later) finally figured out what was happening with her body.

If someone has attention deficient, trouble concentrating, or experiences symptoms of bipolar disorder, tonify their nervous system with nutritive herbs. Lemon balm, peppermint, and lobelia, calm the nerves. When people are worried, stressed or anxious, often coffee tires them out after an initial burst of nervous energy. However, in nervy people, it takes away the anxiety, giving them energy!! If someone has trouble concentrating they should eat fish oil with essential fatty acids, omega 3s and 6s, as well as brain-stimulating foods and herbs. Nutritive foods such as alfalfa, nettles, asparagus, artichokes, kale, collard greens and cruciferous vegetables are in order. Also, folks with ADD benefit from a diet rich in onions and potatoes. Also, clear liver heat and toxicity, with a milk thistle, reishi, or dandelion root supplement.

Another underlying cause of low energy is being mentally, emotionally or physically guarded to the point of restricting self-expression or intimacy with safe loved ones. If an individual's energy exchanges are habitually blocked, awareness to new energy is numbed. In these cases, the vital force can stagnate and cause problems commonly seen in the arteries, veins, blood vessels, thyroid or if prolonged and chronic this is seen in the brain, such as blood clots and dementia.

Low energy is a symptom in many conditions I see in my practice. Sometimes one of the root causes is a fear of the powerful force of their energy in an area of their lives. They may fear the exertion of their will power, the expression of sexual energy, or communicating something to a partner or family member. They may have a conscious desire to reign in their own creative powers and vital forces, which limits their renewed energy. Our culture has a predominating belief which perpetuates the idea that highly functioning people compartmentalize the many aspects of themselves. Some compartmentalization is imperative. We can't all go around worrying about where all of our food and clothes come from. We're not the same people on dates we are at work. However, some people justify their own repression of healthy feelings, by compartmentalizing aspects of themselves. compartmentalization makes people behave in unaware, fragmented, non-empathetic, and narcissistic ways. But I digress a bit. Self-repression can happen when people repress their talkative, creative, passionate or sexual nature. This blocks the healthy exchange of energy, which can cause low energy and related depression.

In Western Medicine, diagnosis often doesn't happen until symptoms have reached a 'fever pitch', until the body is 'dysfunctional'. One of the problems endemic to Western medicine, is that in the case of many diseases, tests determine illness based on numbers. Doctors don't often concern themselves about a condition that is brewing and aren't taught to identify them. Holistic practitioners can see imbalances that may show up five or ten years down the line as disease if unaddressed. Doctor are not taught to look at the overall picture, the mouth, tongue, eyes, urine, pulse type, gums, and at all of the other clues which indicate how your body is running. This is essentially, because most people have imbalances and Western Medicine is not focused on the medicinal properties of herbs and foods, exercise and lifestyle. This is true preventative medicine. Most Western doctors have considerable emotional distance from their patients. They are taught that professionals don't connect emotionally to their patients. True healing has love and light behind it, and employs intuition. Of course, boundaries are important for a healer-patient relationship. All effective healers must be professional. If your primary care provider doesn't give you a good feeling, they are not effective healers. They may facilitate your own healing ability, by making you aware of ways you can take care of yourself.