I'll be presenting a dance session at the Wild Roots Herbal Gathering in a few weeks. I'd love to see you there!
The second annual Wild Roots Herbal Gathering ~ July 2 - 4 ~ Produced for women, by women. A retreat weekend with outdoor classes about herbal plant medicines and their practical applications, the wisdom of plants, healing our bodies with natural remedies, and reconnecting with the earth in sustainable ways. Held at de Uelenspieghel in Uffelte. Workshops will be offered in English and Dutch. All levels of plant lovers are welcome. More information about registration, weekend schedule, teachers and details on the event page. Link to the event page:
Goddess Archetypes and a Woman's Soul Journey
“Lilith is particularly important because her story tells us of the essential role that the suppression of female sexuality plays in the transition between egalitarian and hierarchical culture. She cannot remain in the patriarchal order if she is to maintain her sexual freedom and equality, and the patriarchy must demonize her for her assertiveness. In spite of adversity and exile, Lilith remains independent and wild.” - Hallie Iglehart Austen in her book The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine. All images on www.heartgoddess.net
How might our lives and our sense of purpose in this realm be different if every day we passed through a doorway that was carved in the shape of a Yoni? If we were visually reminded, as part of our daily routine, of where we came from, how we arrived here, and that the preciousness of the source of life is embodied within us? Imagine engaging in community rituals in which dance, story and adornment were regular reminders of the sacredness of relationship, self-love, and earned wisdom; or what it would be like to give birth on a lion throne, on a platform over the place where your ancestors were buried.
Thousands of years ago Goddess-revering civilizations flourished all over our beautiful planet. This fact has been well-documented, studied and written about by historians, archeologists, and authors. Goddess images, principles and values have been and continue to be celebrated in art, ceremony, and women’s gatherings around the world. Why, however, do images and stories of ancient Goddesses seem to exist so far outside of modern-day mainstream consciousness? Is it possible that this exclusion is a root cause of ever-increasing global destruction, turmoil, dis-ease, and crisis?
According to archeological data, Goddesses and Priestesses were held in high esteem in ancient cultures whose ruins turned up little-to-no evidence of weaponry and war culture, but instead revealed evidence of reverence for nature, beautiful and sophisticated art, refined architectural design, and egalitarian social structures. Goddesses are associated with values that hold the source of life as sacred, and that honor Nature as the ultimate Mother. Revering the story of a Goddess was (and is) practiced in order to encourage life-giving human behaviors such as creativity, nurturance, sensuality, growth and transformation, healing, courage, earth stewardship, access to higher states of consciousness, and the earning of wisdom through experience. Some Goddesses symbolized and celebrated the natural cycles of life, while others powerfully invoked the act of birthing and the mystery and wonderment of the creative force.
Is it possible that a return to these stories and values could be the balm and guidance that we need to not only nurture and inform our own lives, but to restore a sense of priority and integrity in our decisions around business, commerce, politics, ecology, health care, and relationships?
A relationship with the Goddess is a practice of remembering and embodying our lineage, the source of life, the sacredness of all beings, and our innate capability and responsibility to nurture, protect, and engage in life with well-informed courage and conviction.
Join us in the Red Tent this month as we explore how invoking the stories and lessons of ancient Goddesses and their civilizations can fortify us to take action in alignment with principles of ecology, diversity, and shared lineage. Inspired by the wisdom of our ancestors, we will create a more vibrant and harmonious world with confidence and conviction.
References:
The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, by Hallie Iglehart Austen. All images on www.heartgoddess.net
The Chalice and The Blade; Our History, Our future, by Riane Eisler
Uncoiling the Snake; Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women’s Lives, edited by Vicki Noble
As a primer for our conversation in the Red Tent, you may enjoy viewing this interview with author Hallie Iglehart Austen regarding her book The Heart of the Goddess on Starr Goode’s series The Goddess in Art, a cable series that originally aired in the 1980’s: https://youtu.be/kpU3obqUrhw
Logistics:
Date: Friday, June 11, 2021
Time: 7-10 p.m., CET
Location: Eindhoven City Center
Cost: Free/donations accepted
RSVP/Register: Email Jennifer
What to Bring: A photo, special piece of jewelry, poem, or figurine that represents your relationship to the Goddess
Update, and another opportunity:
Our in-person gathering Friday evening was divine! As our extended community has grown significantly over the past year, and as this topic was an incredibly deep, divine, and potent one - I am offering a second gathering this week via zoom to accommodate our friends from afar, as well as anyone in the local community that wasn't able to join us on Friday.
Date: Thursday, June 17, 2021
Time: 7-9:30 p.m., CET
Location: Eindhoven City Center
Cost: Free/donations accepted
RSVP/Register: Email Jennifer
What to Bring: A photo, special piece of jewelry, poem, or figurine that represents your relationship to the Goddess
I look forward to gathering with you under the New Moon this week,
Jennifer
Birth and Death; Creation and Destruction: Emerging Renewed
Once again we meet the pivot of the dark moon. What in you, in your life, is dying? What is emerging new? What in the world as we know it is dying? What is emerging renewed? What is scaring you? What is inspiring you? What is naturally being shed like an old skin, and what is spiraling in you that will animate this next phase in your mission as a human?
Paying attention to cycles and seasons can anchor us into the reliability and inevitability of birth and death, creation and destruction. One cannot exist without the other. In a way, being part of this wildly alive and oscillating matrix of living and dying can be reassuring, even exciting; on the other hand, it can be – and often is – terrifying. And painful. Being alive inherently implores a ritual process of letting go, as in the bleeding phase of the menstrual cycle, a snake shedding its skin, a tree releasing its leaves to ground-covering compost in the fall, or the death of a beloved elder. Coming to terms with the impermanence of everything and everyone around us can be painful; coming to terms with the impermanence of who we are (or, perhaps more accurately, who we think we are) can also be disorienting. Yet such transitions are inevitable.
Thus, the reassuring cliché “this too shall pass.”
While dark moons offer us a cyclical encounter with the process of death, new moons and the springtime usher in divinely inspired opportunities for re-birth and growth. Yes, divinely inspired.
When spring is in the air, the forces of nature are more easily harnessed and available for our growing momentum; for the growth of our gardens, our psyches, our life’s work – our healing. For our part, the wisdom and discipline is to notice, to drop in; to be keen listeners and observers, to feel it and to go for it – whatever “it” means for you. Each of us a tiny cell in the intricate web of everything, there are gazillions of other cells counting on us to do our unique and creative thing – to keep our shine on and to connect with the shine in all the other little cells; to do our part, keep our temple clean and healthy, and hold hands with the others in solidarity.
This body that we inhabit, this vessel – this temple - is ours to steward, heal, and experience life – and death – with and through. This body, sovereign and whole in its own right, infused with the mystery as well as the capacity for logic and free will, is beckoning for our love and attention on this day of the dark moon.
Dark moons are for letting go – even if for just an hour – into quietude and deep listening. Springtime is an invitation to embody the creatrix – with our imaginations, our hands, our inner knowing.
Kali, Hindu Goddess of Destruction and Rebirth
By you this universe is born, by you this world is created.
By you it is protected, O Devi. By you it is consumed at the end.
You who are eternally the form of the whole world,
at the time of creation you are the form of the creative force,
at the time of preservation you are the form of the protective power,
and at the time of dissolution of the world you are the form of the destructive power.
-Devi-Mahatmaya
What in you is dying? Is there something in you, in your life, that needs to be destroyed, or cast out?
Relieved now of decaying tissue, the weight of past experiences and thought patterns, what in you is shining forth, renewed and refortified?
Embody courage. The world is ready.
References:
The Heart of the Goddess; Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, by Hallie Iglehart Austen
Kali Rising; Foundational Principles of Tantra for a Transforming Planet, by Rudolph Ballentine
The Minoan Snake Goddess
I loved our gathering last night. Menstruation and all of the tenderness, vulnerability and watery emotion of womanhood is so fascinating to me - most essentially I think, for its value as our infinite source of holistic, benevolent, healing power.
I've been studying a bit about ancient Minoan culture and it's deity, who graced our altar last night; The Minoan Snake Goddess. Minoan culture (the ruins of which are still present on the Greek Island of Crete) is known for being an ancient society of true partnership with nature and among men and women. In Rhian Eisler's book, The Chalice and The Blade, Minoan Crete is identified as a civilization characterized by robust health and vitality, sophisticated art and social life, and overall conditions of peacefulness and ease for all of its citizens - which, from the archeological evidence, seems not to have had a hierarchical ruler or ruling class, or weapons of war. I find it profoundly interesting that such a culture would be represented with an image of a bare-breasted Goddess and snakes (belly to the earth!). Soft belly to the earth.....
Gratitude and appreciation to all who attended and shared!
Women's Day and Ecofeminism
“You’ve got to be small and different.”
— Dr. Vandana Shiva
In honor of Women’s Day, I signed up for a three-day advocacy course with Dr. Vandana Shiva on Ecofeminism, through her organization, Navdanya. Women from around the world dialed in to hear about Dr. Shiva’s most recent work, and to be encouraged and inspired to be confident protectors of land, soil, seeds, food, and human rights.
Read more about Navdanya here https://www.navdanya.org/site/ and here https://navdanyainternational.org/.
I have followed and admired Dr. Shiva’s work for decades. Her voice is a persistent, lucid, and fierce international presence in the realms of organic farming, world-wide agriculture policies and widespread corruption, colonization and technocratic interference with indigenous sovereignty and natural systems of resilience.
“The future will be what we seed.”
- Dr. Vandana Shiva
I am an inexhaustible activist by nature in the areas of women’s health, food as medicine, bodily sovereignty, medical freedom, and in my inconsolable desire to activate human potential. As an Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine practitioner I have been trained to seek, understand and address root causes of imbalance and dysfunction. This leads me to be keenly interested in ecological disruptions, women’s health (and therefore human health and well-being), the up-rooting of humanity through mass displacement and perpetual crisis (trauma), food and housing insecurity, and thus, necessarily, political and economic corruption and grassroots activism. Currently I am delving into issues of soil health and seed security by aligning with gardening experts and activists around the world, and by getting my hands into the soil to tend and discern the lessons held at the roots of life on this planet. All of these issues, of course, are one and the same in their implications for human and planetary health and vitality.
In a conversation about how to be effective in methods of stewardship and activism in the face of massive, extractive and manipulative global powers, Dr. Shiva tells us that “You’ve got to be small and different.” Top-down mechanistic power structures seek to impose uniformity, conformity, and monocultures of the mind – in exactly the same way that mechanistic, market-driven agriculture debases the soil by planting low-nutrient, genetically modified single-species crops for volume and profit. Dr. Shiva guides us instead to cultivate relationships in our local communities and with our natural environment, and to learn and practice indigenous regenerative agriculture methods that favor crop diversity, rich nutrition, and a reciprocal relationship between the land and all who inhabit it.
Through patents and intellectual property rights that now aggressively claim ownership of seeds – laying claim to life itself – corporate agribusinesses are increasingly seeking to bully, conquer, manipulate and master land, food, and the right to farm the land in India and around the world. Dr. Shiva teaches, writes and implores individuals - especially women - to disrupt this pattern by taking responsibility to study and engage directly with the living systems in our local environments in order to create ecosystems and communities based on co-evolution, partnership and relationship; driven by what women bring naturally – an appreciation and deep connection with the aliveness and vulnerability of our world, nurturing care, sensitivity, awareness, compassion and love.
How do we come together to effectively dismantle/disempower power structures that extract, manipulate, and seek to colonize and capitalize on every aspect of Nature’s bounty – seed to harvest, birth to death, from cellular structure to spirit and soul? After years of advocacy on various issues myself, I suspect the way to do this will have to do less with opposing or fighting anything or anyone, as this is exhausting and leads to more and more physical, emotional and psychic violence. I imagine that getting in the trenches; hands in dirt – heart-to-heart and shoulder-to-shoulder with our neighbors – will be the way to steward the Earth in a way that will make our ancestors smile and ensure abundant landscapes for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to inherit.
In conversation about the lessons she’s learned as an activist and food and soil protector, Dr. Shiva had this advice for us: (some comments are paraphrased)
· “Hold your ground.”
· “(Cultivate) resilience.”
· “Keep doing the right thing.”
· Don’t wait for external funding to start or motivate your actions. External funding means that you will be indebted to the wishes of those who financed your projects.
· Take action with commitment, conscience and courage.
· Walk lightly; be extremely sensitive. Let the universe take care of you. Give your bit; do your best, but do not expect an outcome.
· Life does not thrive with the imposition of top-down orders. Mechanical systems dissipate energy. Life thrives when it is tended with the love, compassion and nurturance of women.
Read Dr. Shiva’s book Oneness Versus The One Percent.
Watch the trailer for the soon-to-be-released documentary about her life, Seeds of Vandana Shiva:
“Monsanto’s worst nightmare...”
Read about the farmer’s protest happening in India now, and the history of agricultural policies and corporate take-overs that have harmed India’s small farmers for decades.
https://navdanyainternational.org/30-40-years-indian-farmers-protest/
Read recent reports published by Navdanya:
http://navdanya.org/site/eco-feminism/women-feed-the-world
https://www.navdanya.org/site/eco-feminism/the-earth-rising,-women-rising
Open Invitation to a Conversation About Beauty
What if Beauty were not about a woman’s body shape, skin-tautness, or camera-ready display of pseudo-confidence, but a portal?
What if the mundane – chores, random interactions, daily routines of “doing stuff” – were each a unique opportunity to activate a heightened state of awareness; wild aliveness; vivid, awe-inspiring Beauty.
What could shift if, instead of expending our precious energy in perpetual busy-ness and a constant stream of “stuff to do,” we instead pro-actively cultivated Beauty in each seemingly bland opportunity to engage with the world; with the wholeness of our bodies, with other beings, and with the aliveness that inhabits literally everything in our surroundings.
What if a true sense of Beauty is in our ability to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and sense with profound sensitivity and clarity?
During this free community conversation, we will explore where our perceptions and pursuits of beauty in modern times have been misguided and led us astray. We are inviting you to embark on a journey to reclaim Beauty as our inherent, glorious nature – that which is born of, shared, and infinitely regenerative, as a function of our relationship with Mother Nature Herself.
This free-of-charge gathering will be an introduction to our 8-session series that will train us to invoke the divine in every aspect of our lives. On this extended journey, you can expect to get to know yourself more intimately through Ayurvedic assessment of your constitutional nature, guidance on gentle, personalized seasonal detoxing, holistic nourishment, and potent and luxurious self-care practices.
Regardless of whether you decide to join us for the full 8-session experience of Beauty Rituals – you will not want to miss this eye-opening, celebratory invocation of infinite Beauty as our guiding principle for high-level wellness and deeply satisfying engagement with all that this human experience has to offer...
Please contact Jennifer or Jasmijn to register.
Date: Sunday, March 21, 2021.
Time: 5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. CET / 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. EST / 8 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. PST
Place: Zoom
Cost: Free
Conversations in the Red Tent: The Art of Seasonal Harvesting for Wisdom and Renewal
Harvesting lessons for wisdom cultivation, giving myself to darkness that fertilizes dreams, and sowing seeds of renewal is what the fall season implores for me.
This annual phenomenon of late life glory role models what it means to gracefully let go, how to allow and bear witness to the natural process of decay and death, and how nature deeply appreciates the wisdom and well-earned beauty of life that has aged. As the nights have become darker and farmers have been delivering ripe fruits and nourishing roots, the tenets of the ‘Honorable Harvest’ that I learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings during this past year (see below) are deeply inhabiting my dreams, and my yearnings for a renewed way of life. I am gently releasing parts of my emotional landscape that have served me, taught me - in some cases tore through me - to embark on more wholesome ways of relating to the earth, an organic sense of “home” and belonging, and ever more intelligent and authentic ways of relating to other humans as well as the other inhabitants of the planet.
According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a renowned professor of environmental and forest biology and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, as written in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, if the guidelines for an Honorable harvest were to be “made official” (generally they are not in traditionally oral cultures, but they are well understood and faithfully practiced), they might look something like this:
“Know the ways of the ones who take care of you so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”
Upon deep introspection, for me, living according to principles of the Honorable Harvest would begin with manners of self care, community and living with purpose that vigorously question and challenge the norms and currencies of civilized societies. In short, in a digital, chemicalized and commercially driven society, it is my experience that what feels like the honorable choice is usually not convenient, quick, or widely celebrated. Holistic choices are – perhaps necessarily - cumbersome, expensive, and made where no one is looking.
Trees majestically demonstrate the graceful art of letting go of what’s old, allowing its once lush flora to tumble on the cool, crisp breeze back to the earth; creating a thick, nourishing carpet for the forest floor and compost that will nourish and protect many roots and life forms in the immediate environment.
Our human processes of letting go according to seasons and cycles can and do turn up in fits of grief or other strong emotional discharge; the menstrual cycle; seasonal allergies or illnesses; or intuitively knowing that a change is imminent or necessary. The natural urge to let go can show up as personal, relational, community, or ecologic turmoil. The process of change and releasing what is old and stale can disrupt our equilibrium and therefore feel profoundly uncomfortable, so it is exactly at these moments when the deep nourishment of well-prepared, organic seasonal foods, meditation, gentle movement practices, and deep rest will be supportive and very likely transformative.
“I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity.” - RWK
I would like to invite our community into a conversation about what the notion of ‘The Honorable Harvest’ means for us city dwellers, and how we can be proactive stewards for earth and a wholesome humanity. How would the principles of The Honorable Harvest urge us to change our way of relating with food? Earth? Loved ones? Strangers? Community? Commerce? Our self care?
“It is an animate earth that we hear calling to us to feed the martens and kiss the rice. Wild leeks and wild ideas are in jeopardy. We have to transplant them both and nurture their return to the lands of their birth. We have to carry them across the wall, restoring the Honorable Harvest, bringing back the medicine.” - RWK
The winds of change are upon us. Let us breathe slowly and deeply and make the choices necessary to cultivate health, wisdom, and resilience.
Join our Red Tent Community for a forest walk and conversation this week:
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Time: 1 p.m. - 3 p.m.
Place: Eindhoven, contact host for location
Plan for rain or shine!
Water is life
“Fluid movement holds the power to dissolve the familiar and dilute social conditioning. No dismantling required: we simply allow fluid waves to spread through tissue and soften our old thought forms and outmoded patterns of behavior. By utilizing embryological and biomorphic motifs, the power inherent in water can be received as a pulse of renewal.”
- Liz Koch, Stalking Wild Psoas
The freshest, most vital and clear waters flow with ease and freedom.
Stagnant waters quickly turn cloudy and putrid.
“Stuckness” is painful. It prevents communication, allows sludge to accumulate, and inhibits healing. It dampens joy and confidence. Putrid accumulation, cloudiness, dullness, and dis-ease will result.
Our dance is like the impetus of a bubbling spring; the “Qi,” or life force energy, that ebulliently motivates the sinuous fluidity of crystal clear waters gracefully, purposefully, through the forest, over and between stones, twigs, and plant life, without hesitation. The entire forest benefits from its aliveness.
The rhythm of our breath, our presence, and meditative movement are amazing tools for getting profoundly honest with ourselves, and for shifting from “stuckness” into a realm where renewal is inevitable. A divine practice of gently coaxing, motivating, and invigorating vital fluids to penetrate our tissues, infusing our entire being with “aliveness;” keeping warm and bright the glow from within that feeds beauty and nourishment back to the world…
Water is life.
Dance is the motive force of our bubbling spring.
The best medicine is innate medicine – it is alive within us.
Join me for a sacred dance practice Friday evenings at 7 p.m.
Registration: Email redtent@heartwombandsoul.com
Location: Dansstudio Laetana, Hoogstraat 105A Unit 7 5615 PB Eindhoven
View details and share on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/427389718222627/
Cost: 15 Euro per session
Payment: Cash or bank transfer
Make payments here: NL50 ABNA 0467 4196 71
Account name: BD MOILES CJ
*Email me to inquire about scholarships, sliding-scale pricing and barters for goods or services - no one will be turned away for concerns about payment.
Conversations in the Red Tent: Staying Wild in the City
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
How do you keep that seed of WILD alive in you?
What happens when we lose our wild? Become too domesticated? When our feet forget the texture and sensation of soil, and our skin becomes sallow from the too-bright shine of fluorescent; our body stiff and tired, from hours upon hours molded into the shape of a chair?
Underneath the light of September’s Full Moon we will coax and illuminate the creative yearnings and instincts that keep our cells, tissues, organs, spirit and enthusiasm for this human experience alive and thriving.
Join us in a city park for an evening of Full Moon gazing. Space is limited. Registration is required. Please RSVP redtent@heartwombandsoul.com for details and location.
Logistics:
Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Time: 8 p.m. - 10:30 p.m.
Location: Outdoors, at an Eindhoven City Center park, location will be sent to confirmed participants.
Read more about the Red Tent here.
Magnetic Universe
Beauty is a potent and magnetic force in the universe that shamelessly beckons and delights our “irrational” sensibilities.
It’s a rush of aliveness. A universal truth. An indescribable sensation of wonder that lures our cellular awareness, titillating and imploring us to take notice. It implies both urgency and the deepest calm.
In response, our eyes widen, the heart swells, our breath penetrates us more fully. We immediately, thoughtlessly and wordlessly, recognize our own place along a mystical continuum of something unspeakably majestic – a sublime expansion of our minutely human perception and understanding of otherwise dull reality.
This often-fleeting sensation of transcendent spaciousness is pregnant with seeds of innate intelligence; clarity, vitality, harmony, integrity, and wholesome possibility.
Beauty is angels whispering poetically, a divine hint: “Psssst, over here…”