Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: holistic health, mystery school, red tent temple movement, stress management, women's health, women's mystery school, women's spirituality
What’s a Mystery School? Opeyemi57@gmail.com
An on line way for us to continue our Red Tent nourishment, all month long!
We are Awake and Aware. Sometimes, that feels overwhelming. We are women, adventuring through shadow work into light consciousness, and sometimes the psychic contractions feel excruciating.
That story, OLD STORY… that story is OVER.
I am here, as a spiritual midwife. A Channel to the Muse; to Spirit. It is my pleasure to invite you into a new paradigms, where we are willing to be delightfully surprised by how easy this can all be. Our plan for these next nine months is to birth YOU.
That will mean different things to different women, and different tools will be useful to different women, and different life experience will be had, by different women.
We begin with the root chakra. There is shadow work, here. We live in a culture in which we find ourselves, daily, Fighting for Our Lives. Here is where I invite you to do the first month of work.
Look at your attitudes, beliefs, and feelings towards life, security, and home.
Here are some links, to whet your appetite, feed you, inspire you, and (maybe) frighten you into excitement:
About what it means to be human, and alive:
Old Outer Limits episode, titled “The Feasibility Experiement” and/or
NEW series Outer Limites episode titled, “Music of the Spheres”
Watch the history channel’s “Life After People”
(it’s 94 minutes long, and available within the W. Mass library system)
About Security:
See “Capitalism, a Love Story” this month. If you haven’t seen any
Michael Moore movies, try “Sicko” or “Bowling for Columbine” as well.
(contact me, individually for psychological support around watching
these movies; there are “follow up” inspirational lesson plans!)
About home:
Contact me for unique “lesson plans” based on your personal story…
Women in this program of ethnic Jewish descent and/or embracing
Judaism as a religious tradition, please contact me! There is specific archetypal work here for you in creating “new neural nets”, especially around CANCER
Call me at 413-336-1291 school runs as a GIFT ECONOMY, no charge
Here we are again, at that MOST AMERICAN of all our holidays—Superbowl Sunday.
I have a personal axe to grind with this day, as I am a Capricorn, with a January 17th birthday. I suffered quietly from that common indignity of December/ January babies, receiving combination Christmas/birthday presents as a child. But it was Superbowl Sunday that I came to loathe. My father’s already limited emotional presence would withdraw over the month of January, getting displaced deeper and deeper into a television set.
Deeply scarred by the silliness of being jealous of a football game, all of my life I have chosen men who were not avid sports fans. But Superbowl Sunday day has gotten bigger and bigger over the past twenty years, becoming more and more difficult to ignore. When the New England patriots played in 2002, I’ll admit to a magical bonding moment with my then thirteen-year-old son. We were at a hotel for a weekend conference, and I kept the hotel room for an extra night, as a treat to him (we have no television at home). I caught up on blessed sleep while he watched the game, and I told him to wake me up, “if anything interesting happened”. So I got to see that amazing field goal of Adam Vinatieri’s that won the team the game.
It was a miracle we needed as a country, “post 9/11” with the New England Patriots taking the full hit of our national dreams for a victory…Somewhere… ANYWHERE.
Now, six years later, the nation’s former Cinderella team is behaving like a bunch of thugs. I am not surprised. With so much money involved, why shouldn’t they be doing everything within their power to win? That is the American Way, isn’t it?
And if you can’t win legally, WIN ANYWAY. That is what I have learned, watching the Bush administration and corporate consolidation of power both before and since 9/11.
This Sunday, millions of Americans will stuff themselves with junk food (better than Thanksgiving), work themselves into alcoholic frenzy (better than New Year’s Eve), bet on the game and on the Biggest and Brightest Commercials (better than casino gambling and the Academy Awards, combined), and beat up their women.
Superbowl Sunday is the day when more women get battered than any other day of the year.
I am drawn to a gentler, kinder community venture this Sunday in the form of a concert in honor of Black History month at Southern Vermont College, in Bennington (see www.svc.edu).
Next rant: “Super Tuesday”
Happy New Year to everyone. It feels right to launch my blog at Ceremony Heals with a story of ceremony, used to dance a community through fears and anxieties.
The video on my website featured a still photo of myself and my family, in front of a beautiful model of the Earth. This Earth globe was the culmination of a special weekend retreat, and was designed and executed by a community of thirty-two people, ages three to seventy two!
Back in the fall of 1999, people were becoming very worried about a potential computer crisis that became known as “Y2K”. In the fall of 1999, no one could really say whether or not the theory that all our computers would crash at midnight December 31, 1999 was valid. In retrospect, it is easy to downplay our concerns. But at the time, our fears were real; and we weren’t seeing much on the news or in the media to allay our anxieties.
I had participated for years in a women’s support group. We six decided that we wanted to offer our spouses, our children, and our families something constructive to do with all the anxiety we were experiencing. We called this our “dreaming a world” project.
We reserved a lovely bed and breakfast in Plainfield Mass over Thanksgiving weekend, and invited our loved ones to join us in creating a three dimensional prayer for our world. The globe in the photo is the result of that weekend.
The youngest member of our group requested that special white sparkles be placed over the South pole area. My brother carefully pasted flowers all over the area of the Ukraine poisoned by Chernobel’s radioactive fallout. Other children present glued food stickers all over Africa. In between prepping the PT ball (covered with canvas) and painting and waiting for the globe to dry enough to add the sparkles and the stickers, we drummed together, sang together, played games together, and had a fine old time making ourselves a huge thanksgiving feast.
Inspired by our weekend retreat, we decided to meet whatever might come at one minute past midnight on New Year’s Eve head on. Most of us—fueled by our weekend retreat in November—decided that attending First Night Boston that year was as good a place to be as any if the grid came crashing down around us!
We reserved a couple of rooms in a downtown hotel, just in case we couldn’t get back to our suburban homes easily. We even asked for rooms on one of the first seven floors, in case elevators didn’t work after midnight.
The completed globe was hung over the stage in an auditorium as part of First Night Boston 1999.
And then we partied, like it was 1999. Which it was!
And we survived to tell the tale!
Our Dream for the World currently hangs at the Emerson Umbrella in Concord, Mass (see www.emersonumbrella.org) .
