Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World

Through the act of giving birth, we open physically and psychically more than it would seem possible.

Shamans learn practices and techniques of sacred work not because we are special or set apart from the rest but because we are called to carry a little more than our own load. Shamans do their own job in the community—farming, mothering, making art, whatever—and they do shamanic healing work as well.

ancient times menopausal women were the wise grandmothers of the tribe, their wise blood stored in the body like the wisdom stored in their psyches. In our culture women wear out, lose their value, are treated like throwaways.

where one of the ancient caves has carved into the rock on either side of the entry the figure of a woman “reclining” (fig. 35). Archaeology discusses this symbology in terms of feminine indolence, whereas certainly the images were sacred and represented a state of trance, dreaming, or giving birth which must have taken place in the interior of the

In most religious thinking the body is equated with the earth and women.

We can’t take care of ourselves without a stock of processed food in our backpacks and we can’t navigate without compasses and maps. This makes us feel like victims who can’t survive, and we project this horrendous image onto ancient cultures.

Scientific people find it hard to imagine our ancestors as happy and healthy because, being so cut off from Nature and the animal in us, we actually do suffer and struggle against the elements when we are so unfortunate as to find ourselves encountering them directly. When we get lost in the woods we don’t know what to do, we have no idea what to e

The person who is ill needs to generate enough will or force to throw off the invading force and return to a state of balance

Native American mythology emphasizes the “trickster” nature of the universal forces.