Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World

As esoteric teacher Alice Bailey points out, what we call thinking is nothing but regurgitated programming in our brain-consciousness.

One of the joyous reclaimings that accompanies our re-membering is that we get over the insidious fear of the Death Goddess and realize she is only the other face of the Mother.

Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade,

I know for myself, in my body-mind, about the signs and omens. They speak to me and I listen. We dialogue. I am relieved not to be alone in the universe.

It’s jarring, like coming up too quickly on an elevator, getting what deep-sea divers call the bends.

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.

But shamans around the world see with direct, penetrating sight and learn things through direct, tactile experience.

Reclaiming the right to birth in our own instinctual way is a shamanic act of courage that has unfortunately become as remote to us as our ability to fly through the night in the form of an owl or heal the sick with the power of the drum. It wouldn’t hurt if we began to think of our birthing and child rearing as central parts of our shamanic work—a

The Mapuche women shamans who live in Chile at the very southern tip of the Southern Hemisphere still practice their ancient lunar rites of healing.