I trust, you trust, we all trust… at least as long as the lights are on! Light provides a definite sense of security and safety. With light, we see. To see is to know. And knowing gives us a sense of being in control and therefore secure. What we don’t notice is that our need of light, of security is addictive. It is never enough. “If you put more lights for safety, very often and very quickly people will say, Oh, we don’t see enough, it’s not working, people are still being attacked, and we have problems and so we should put more light. And we’re going to go up and up and up. There is no limit, because the vision gets accustomed to that and we need more.” Bogard, Paul. The End of Night And therefore all our efforts go into keeping the lights shining brighter and brighter and avoid the darkness… so that we can continue to trust! But is that trust? Are we not fooling ourselves? Learning to trust can only happen when facing the darkness, not by avoiding it! To learn to trust, we will have to switch off the lights and welcome the darkness. And what do we notice then? That our assumptions that light and security go together as do darkness and danger are false. In fact, a growing number of towns and villages in US and Europe that have been experimenting turning off some of their lights after midnight have seen crime drop up to 50 percent. Light offers illusory security, just like money and power do. As we thought more light would protect us from crime and rape and burglary, we also thought more money, more power would protect us from suffering… But as we have just seen in the case of light, these assumptions are erroneous. The problem is that such false beliefs cost us a lot in terms of pollution, depletion of resources, social injustice, violence… For example, artificial light at night is connected with increased rates of cancer. “An increasing number of studies over the past two decades have made a compelling case for a link between light at night and cancer, especially hormone-influenced cancers such as breast and prostate.” Bogard, Paul. Artificial light at night also means the disruption of nocturnal wildlife. “While most of us are inside and asleep, outside the night world is wide awake with matings, migrations, pollinations, and feeding— in short, the basic happenings that keep world biodiversity alive. Light pollution threatens this biodiversity by forcing sudden change on habits and patterns.” Bogard, Paul. In short, our deep feelings of insecurity about darkness (literally and metaphorically) are at the root cause of our environmental as well as spiritual crisis... Crippled by our fear of dark, of the unknown, of the unseen, we have become insane... ready to rape the earth to light up our world, ready to inflict any amount of suffering on others to protect ourselves and feel secure… Let’s trust the darkness. Of course, there will be fear … not the fear that incapacitates... the fear that enlivens… “With all our lights we push away our fear, and by pushing away our fear, we are a little less alive.” Bogard, Paul. © Muriel Anamika
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In our own lives too, we go through the myth of the Fall. We all do the same journey that begins in Paradise, in Utopia, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment. And then Fall into a world of pain, suffering where we are judged, where unfair discriminations are made, and illusions are shattered. It is the same journey for each of us, the Paradise followed by the Fall (loss of Paradise) and the desire to regain the Paradise. All starts in Paradise, in the darkness of the ocean womb where life is born. We are all creatures of the great mothering ocean. “The mystery of earthly life has its origins in water— in oceans. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all life-forms floated in the ancient sea of amniotic fluid, a womb-like environment — nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. It was here, out of the primordial ocean’s swirling tides that the first vertebrate made its way onto solid ground some 360 million years ago.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. And in the course of evolution, the ocean with its lunar-tidal rhythm was transferred into the individual female body to become the womb with its salty amniotic fluid and its menstrual cycle following the lunar-tidal rhythm. And there in the womb, we got our first experience of bliss. “The nine months you spent in your mother’s womb was the closest to heaven you have ever been in your current body.” Henry David Thoreau From the womb Paradise, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment, we Fall into a world of pain, suffering. Humanity literally fell out of the lap of Mother Nature when around 4000BC, in a strip (called Saharasia) that contains today’s most deserts including Sahara, Thar, Gobi, Arabia, the climate that was wet and warm began to dry to create today’s great deserts. With the Fall, humanity went through the Great Drying, a process of desertification. The landscape of the Fall is the desert where fallen out of the lap of the Mother, we become orphans left to fend for ourselves. To survive, the orphan goes through a phase of Ego development and becomes a warrior. In his book the Fall, Steve Taylor refers to the Fall as the Ego Explosion that brought dominator civilizations that are authoritarian, hierarchal, patriarchal (male dominated), and worshipping warrior gods. Not a coincidence that most desert cultures are dominated by the warrior archetype. In India, the dominant caste of the desert state of Rajasthan is the Rajput class or warrior class. The role of the warrior is to protect and slay the cause of suffering. But however strong is the warrior, he is not invincible. He also loses. “Deserts, accordingly, confront us with a vast horizontal edge, a horizon of emptiness into which we find ourselves absorbed and lost. The desert is intrinsically hostile to the ego, threatening to swallow it up in its endless expanse of nothingness.” Lane, Belden C "One initially enters the desert to be stripped of self, purged by its relentless deprivation of everything once considered important. Lane, Belden C.. And so, the desert is the place where we experience loss, and brokenness and go through the inconsolable human experience of death and grief. “We are brought to the bleached-bone terrain by the death of a loved one or another profound loss of some kind.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. Today, humanity is journeying through the desert… No doubt, we are suffering of global warming and desertification… “The light of modern consciousness burns brightly, but the Earth was never meant to be bare of trees, nor our souls fully exposed to the light of reason.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds To make sense of all the pain we feel, we go in search of the higher truth. The ascent up the mountain is a metaphor for our spiritual journey. “One ascends the mountain, seeking illumination from the greater perspective its height affords.” Lane, Belden C. Our need for transcendence draws us to climb mountains. Whether Chinese intellectuals, European monks, Indian Yogis, spiritual seekers have always been drawn to mountain landscapes. Some of the famous Taoist and Buddhist temples in China, Tibet, Ladakh are located on high mountains. The early monasteries in Europe were built on mountainous sites. Even today, Uttarakhand, the mountain state of India, is a spiritual centre where people from around the world come to learn yoga or get initiated on a spiritual path. “It cannot be simply accidental that Tibetan Buddhism emerges from high places, where the everlasting silence of the snows invites a kind of concentration, a loss of ego in the enormity of the mountains.” Maitland, Sara. Zen Buddhism put the wisdom of mountains at the heart of its practice. A T’ang Dynasty Chinese poet spoke of the mountain as ‘the perfect place to get free of your name’. “To understand Thatch-Hut Mountain is to take on the nature of the mountain, to live outside the human realm of words and concepts.” Hinton, David. The mountain is not a landscape where we settle down. After wandering among summits and ridgelines, we must come down. It is interesting to note that spiritual journeys have been described by some as entry into a moonlit desert night, then movement to a fog-covered mountain and, finally, into the impenetrable darkness of a thick forest. The experience of the desert, the mountain, and the forest symbolize the three stages of the spiritual life generally described as mourning, insight and wisdom. So down the mountain, we enter the dark forest. The forest is the darkest of the landscapes where the dense foliage blocks the sun from view. It is time to withdraw and enter the dark mysteries. “Making our home in the forest, we embrace complexity and uncertainty. We learn to live from our wits and instinct. We leave the well-marked roads, the signposts, the straight path, entering instead the place of natural geometry, spiraling trails, rippling roots, tangled branches. We are less certain. But we are more alive. We awaken to something deeper.” Thompson, Mary Reynolds. In the darkness of the forest, among ancient trees and thousand years of dead wood and almost extinct beings, we are encircled by wisdom. We reconnect with our roots, with our ancestors and become whole again. © Muriel Anamika A Paradise! That is what I came searching for in India… And my work took me to remote villages of rural India where I discovered fascinating ecological traditions and wisdom. Everywhere I went I documented vernacular architecture, traditional agricultural practices, handloom traditions, forest management traditions… I went to tribal villages where natural resources were held in common and distributed, making sure there was enough for everybody. I met craftsmen who produced their goods, not for sale, not for profit, but for whoever needed them. I visited tribal communities where castes or classes were absent, where nobody was allowed to make himself more important than everybody else. These last few remote tribal villages where gentle cultures, life-sustaining, and nurturing ways of life had survived were the remnants of the Paradise I had been searching for since my childhood… (a Paradise that was fast receding to become the hell I had escaped from with the same crass materialism and individualism!) And then in the course of my research, I discovered that peaceful egalitarian societies had also existed in Europe, in pre-patriarchal Europe. According to Marija Gimbutas, Old Europe was peaceful, egalitarian, matrifocal (woman-mother oriented) and worshipped many goddesses. The religion of “Old Europe” was dominated by an overwhelmingly feminine pantheon… Evidence shows that goddesses, women dominated societies were peaceful because concentrated on maintaining, rather than exploiting life. “Tens of thousands of years of human culture were shaped and sustained by communities of creative, sexually and psychically active women— women who were inventors, producers, scientists, physicians, lawgivers, visionary shamans, artists. Women who were also the Mothers— receivers and transmitters of terrestrial and cosmic energy… It was from this first inner circle of women— the campsite, the fire-site, the cave, the first hearth, the first circle of birth— that human society evolved.” Sjoo, Monica, The Great Cosmic Mother Old Europeans, like all indigenous people of the world lived in symbiosis with the land and revered nature. For example much of European mythology is based upon reverence of trees, especially the oak and superstitions such as touching wood reflected the belief that the guardian spirits present within the oak must be appeased. And so it became clear to me that we had all once lived in Paradise. In his book Lifting the Veil of Duality, Andreas Moritz tells us that before the Great Separation was the First Creation, the Original Creation. It is the Primal Matrix from which we all began. In Chinese philosophy, it is the Absence, the generative void, the enduring source of it all: “mother of all beneath heaven”. The First Creation was female: the physical/ emotional/ spiritual body of the mother. It is also the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean from which all life emerged. “This realm had no elements of duality in it, which made it impossible for us to perceive anything but oneness with everything and everyone. Since Oneness with the Supreme Source was our anchor, we had no fear and lived happily with our loved ones. In this simplicity of bliss, we could be the whole creation and all the beings participating in it, with no sense of separation.” Andreas Moritz As there is very little awareness of a separate self in the fused dynamic between infant and mother, in the Primal Matrix early humans were merged with Nature the way an infant child is merged with its mother… “what philosophers and psychologists have called a pre-personal, undifferentiated consciousness, that sleepy realm of awareness that has not yet awakened to the possibilities of an individuated self…” Judith Anodea. The First Creation also called the Age of Perfect Virtue is an actual historical period of time that covers the Paleolithic and Neolithic. That period is also referred to as humanity’s Golden Age, a time when there were no wars, no classes, no domination, no sexism. Yes, Rousseau’s theory of the Noble Savage holds. Anthropologists have been documenting again and again how primal people (present and past hunter-gatherer societies) lived in small egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic bands on a wide-open planet where the chances in a life time of meeting another band of Sapiens were rare. Think of it, why would have there been wars? Peace was the only option as survival wouldn’t have been possible had everyone not been involved in protecting and nurturing activities. But as Andreas Moritz writes, when we lived in the First Creation, in the Primal Matrix, we lacked one thing… We didn’t know who we are. “In the Age of Perfect Virtue they were upright and correct, without knowing that to be so was righteous; they loved one another, without knowing that to do so was benevolence… They didn’t rebel against want, didn’t grow proud in plenty. Being like this, he could commit an error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make it a show.” Chuang Tzu, 4th century BCE To evolve and know who we are, we needed to create the illusion of separation from our infinite self and enter the experience of duality. Maturation is a gradual separation from the mother, from the undifferentiated whole. “We needed to go through every kind of dualistic expression there could possibly be, such as love and hate, joy and sadness, fear and trust, right and wrong, good and bad, life and death, in order to learn about and undo the trauma (of separation) that has enabled us to know, through experience, who we are.” Andreas Moritz And that is how our world of Oneness gradually became a world of Duality, where opposites rule. This transition from oneness to duality brought our Fall from Paradise, an experience that traumatized us and caused the worst kind of suffering. The myth of the Fall from Paradise, Fall from Oneness, Fall from Innocence is a version of actual history… in fact, a rather recent phenomenon… According to Steve Taylor in his book The Fall, humanity’s Golden Age would have ended around 4000BC with waves of invasions following the Great Drying (when we literally fell from the lap of Mother Nature!). In a strip (called Saharasia) that contains today’s most deserts including Sahara, Thar, Gobi, Arabia, a climate that was wet and warm began to dry 6000 years ago to create today’s great deserts. This drought turned out to be a human tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions. The Great Drying with prolonged, repeated, widespread droughts occurred with increasing ferocity generation after generation. People experienced famine, displacement, war, destruction, exploitation, oppression and death with all the suffering that it implies. It is this trauma that brought duality. Hostile environmental conditions would have encouraged a sense of separation between human beings and nature. With the Great Drying, we stopped seeing Mother Earth as a kind mother who bestows on us (her children) her bountifulness; we stopped revering her as a Mother… We lost our primordial trust into the Divine, into the Universe, into Mother Earth… Nature came to be seen as an enemy to be conquered! Duality brought the Fall and with it dominator civilizations that are authoritarian, hierarchal, patriarchal (male dominated), with a high degree of fear, abuse and violence… The Great Mother Goddess came to be replaced by Warrior Gods… The Fall is an ongoing evolutionary process, and that is why unstoppable. Like a highly contagious virulent virus, it has contaminated the entire planet, first through invasions, conquests, colonization (following the Great Discoveries) and now globalization. Today, with globalization, the last the last few peace loving and egalitarian indigenous societies are being swept away. The noble goal behind the Fall has been progress, development, the ascent of civilization. And that is what has made the Fall inevitable! The Fall never really appeared as a Fall but as a Rise! “Thus mastering nature with technology, and mastering human nature with culture, we distinguish ourselves from the rest of life, establishing a separate human realm. Believing this to be a good thing, we think of this separation as an ascent in which we have risen above our animal origins. That is why we naturally refer to the millennia-long accumulation of culture and technology as “progress”. Charles Eisenstein. The Fall, designed as a trap in which we would all inevitably fall, has been necessary to awaken us… And as the last few indigenous people are falling, as on the other side, we see a rise in Unity Consciousness all over the world… In our own lives too, we go through the myth of the Fall. We do the same journey that begins in Paradise, in Utopia, a safe, secure, peaceful, loving environment. And then Fall into a world of pain, suffering where we are judged, where unfair discriminations are made, and illusions are shattered. It is the same journey for each of us, the Paradise followed by the Fall (loss of Paradise) and the desire to regain the Paradise. “Whether gods or humankind, the rhythm of Paradise lost and Paradise regained speaks of our continual attempt to realize the ideal in the actual, the “fall” of inevitable failure, and the renewed effort to try again— an effort that does, most of the time, bring some improvement, if not actual Paradise, in our lives.” Carol S. Pearson This is why the Paradise is both the beginning and the end of the journey; with in between, the Fall that equips us with more wisdom and knowing; with more awareness about who we are… © Muriel Anamika To know more about SoulScape Journeys, click here. “Light and shadow are forever paired, the yin and yang of describing form. Without light, shadow is a meaningless void; without shadow, light is only a bright glare.” Price, Maggie. Painting Sunlight and Shadow with Pastels. As a painter, I know too well the importance of shadow. It enhances the painting by giving it depth. This understanding about how shadow and light serves each other well and co-exist all the time might be the reason that has led me to ponder over the inner shadow, repressed instinctual energies that inhabit our subconscious minds and program us to negative/ violent behavior patterns. Is our shadow side innate? Have we always had to repress aspects of ourselves? For example, sexuality, the most potent of all human drives after survival, has been strongly repressed with the emergence of early state civilizations (4000 BC). Primal people (our hunter-gatherer ancestors) tolerated premarital sexual freedom, and had an easy-going attitude regarding extramarital relationships… With civilizations, adultery, particularly by women came to be severely punished (stoned to death). Sex before marriage came to be severely censured, punishable by death for sullying the family’s honor… In primal societies that had few taboos about sexuality, rape, sexual abuse, perversions, and pedophilia were rare. Various studies have shown that societies characterized by permissive sexual behaviours had a low level of physical violence while societies which punished pre and extramarital affairs (sexual freedom) were the most violent. So there we are… repression of instinctual energies is at the origin of our shadow side. And no, it has not always been like that! In the Age of Ancient Darkness, there was Oneness. And when there was Oneness, humans had no shadow side. The Age of Ancient Darkness (Stone Age – Palaeolithic) that lasted well over 95 percent of our time on the planet is believed to have been humanity’s Golden Age. Steve Taylor in his book The Fall writes: “There would have been an ancient time when human beings lived in harmony with each other and with nature, when life was much easier and more pleasant and when there was no war, and no selfishness or fear.” Daniel Quinn also agrees that primal people, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have lived perfectly well for thousands of years without agriculture or civilization. In the Age of Ancient Darkness, also called the First Creation or the Age of Perfect Virtue, humans felt no sense of separateness from the cosmos, from nature, from each other… There was no duality. Nothing was judged as good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly… People could be their natural self without fear of judgment. Expressions of instinctual energies were neither repressed nor denied.
In short, when humans lived in darkness, they didn’t have a shadow side. Shadows are tricks of the light and don’t exist in darkness. Shadows are created by the light. Our shadow side emerged with the beginning of the Great Civilizations that revered Sun Gods. While primal people had always worshiped dark goddesses in the gloom of the forest, civilizations born in the arid plains of Central Asia venerated the light of the Sun. With light appeared duality/ separation. To see is to divide. And therefore, with duality appeared judgment: right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly… And with judgment appeared repression/ denial of what in us had been pronounced negative. “It appears that the source of violence and evil is ungoverned human nature, but that is a delusion. The source is the opposite: human nature denied.” Eisenstein, Ascent of Civilization Our nature-denied is at the origin of our shadow side. And as the blazing lights of civilization floodlit the world, the shadow within the human heart and soul grew unfathomable. What had been tolerated in the Age of Ancient Darkness was now severely punished. “The greater the repression, the louder our shadow has to yell to be heard and the greater its chance to become demonic.” A. Judith But however demonic the shadow can become, it has had an evolutionary purpose. When humans lived in the non-dual world of the Ancient Darkness, there would have been peace but it would have been a great status-quo… a world so perfect that it left very little scope for something to ever happen... Human evolution precipitated when the light/shadow entered, when the dynamic dance of opposing values appeared. It is this dance that is pushing us to evolve. Celebrating light is also about getting intimate with our inner shadow. The shadow is real and it’s not going to go away. When we continually judge it and push it away, we can never be whole… our conflicts will never get resolved… true forgiveness will never be possible… © Muriel Kakani When life pins us down mercilessly, having to face grave injustice, terrible losses, illnesses… and we experience the unpleasant and downward journey into darkness, we shudder. We feel rage, fury, sorrow, fear, pain and despair. Why me? What crime did I do? Why this punishment? Oh yes, few of us tumble into darkness without protest! “In the Underworld, you don't relinquish your attachments. They are pried from your dead, cold hands, destroyed before your very eyes, amputated without anesthesia.” A. Judith We just can't make sense of all the pain we feel... It is then important to recognize that the journey to the Underworld has a reason and blessed are those who make it. Treasures are found, not in the broad daylight but in the depth of the dark Underworld! Moving through darkness is therefore an initiation into power. “When we face our shadow, we are initiated into our deepest powers. We may be afraid of these parts; these howling, undernourished, repressed, and rage-filled aspects of ourselves that demand to be heard, but which we cannot bear to face. Perhaps we are comfortable in our denial or deadened enough to simply tread water, keeping our head up, looking toward the brilliant sky and sun without realizing the murky water is damaging to our being and needs to be made clear.” Koda, Katalin. Fire of the Goddess. Listen to the story of Inanna, the Summerian Goddess who decided to make this dreadful journey to the Underworld and after three days was reborn anew. The Descent of Inanna (c. 1900-1600 BCE) chronicles the great goddess and Queen of Heaven Inanna’s journey from heaven to the underworld to visit her recently widowed sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. Inanna is dressed in her finest attire and wears the crown of heaven on her head, beads around her neck, her breastplate, golden ring and carries her scepter, the rod of power. Just before she enters the underworld, she gives Ninsubur instructions on how to come to her aid should she fails to return when expected. Upon her arrival at the gates of the underworld Inanna knocks loudly and demands entrance. Neti, the chief gatekeeper, delivers the news to Ereshkigal that Inanna is at the gates. The Queen of the Dead does not seem pleased to hear the news. She tells Neti to bolt the seven gates of the Underworld against Inanna and then let her in, one gate at a time, requiring her to remove one of her royal garments at each gate. Neti does as he is commanded and, gate by gate, Inanna is stripped of her crown, beads, ring, sceptre, even her clothing. Inanna enters the throne room of Ereshkigal “naked and bowed low”, and is hung up on a nail, corpse-like, by Ereshkigal. After three days and three nights waiting for her mistress, Ninshubur follows the commands Inanna gave her, goes to Inanna’s father-god Enki for help, and receives two androgynous demons to aid her in returning Inanna to the earth… The journey to the Underworld involves terrible losses… being stripped down… and it undeniably implies suffering, agony. There are seven gates and therefore seven kinds of losses to endure. The seven gates remind of the seven veils in the Biblical story 'The Dance of the Seven Veils'. The seven veils represent the seven layers of illusion that fall away during the descent into the darkness of the Underworld. The seven gates also remind of the seven chakras and the seven corresponding identities (social identity, ego identity…) that imprison us in roles, in patterns all through our lives. The seven gates are also symbols of the seven Medicine Wheels found in the Native American tradition. And there also we find the concept of loss. The Grandmother explains… “Each time we step around the wheel and rebirth through the east, we leave a little behind. As you get closer to the seven, there is more to leave behind. The first losses are nothing compared to the last losses. At this stage you will feel you are being stripped of everything, including and particularly, your identity." Crossingham, Lesley. Ocean of Stars Stripped down of our various identities, attachments… what some call the breakdown of the ego… is the most essential aspect of our descent into the Underworld. It is the necessary breakdown that precedes breakthrough. "The breaking down of the personality, therefore, is regarded as inevitable and essential in magical growth. What remains are the individual archetypes, resonating in harmonic pattern attuned to the Life Source." R. J. Stewart Archetypes are universal psychological patterns that have been with us since the dawn of time. They reside as instinctual energies within the unconscious. When we repress these energies because less likeable, loveable, or spiritual, they express themselves in their negative forms (shadow sides). Shame is what keeps the shadow archetypes caged in the dark and unconscious realm. Although we might refuse to see the shadow archetypes in our lives, others may see them clearly as the unacknowledged shadow is projected onto others in the form of judgments, criticism. If we suppress our emotions, we will have little tolerance for those who are strongly expressive. If we live in denial of pain, we might judge tears as a demonstration of self-pity. It makes us feel very uneasy to be around someone expressing our shadow energies. “As we shine the light of consciousness upon them (archetypes), recognizing that they are within us, they awaken to enrich our lives. If they are already active but in shadow form, consciousness can turn the beastly side of the archetype into the royal, prospering prince or princess it could be.” Pearson, Carol. Awakening the Heroes Within That is when the archetype becomes an inner guide with a lesson to be learned and a gift or treasure to enrich our lives. Journeying to the Underworld, going into darkness is not a curse, a punishment (for bad karma) but rather a chance to reclaim the shadow/the rejected self and become whole again. This process dissolves judgment and brings greater acceptance of self and others. It is the gift of empathy. And in a world disintegrating from conflicts, it is an important gift… the most important may be… We can learn to accept others only when we fully accept ourselves, our darker side first of all. © Muriel Anamika Forest Womb, an Art Exhibition of Forest Sceneries in Soft Pastels by Muriel Kakani.
The exhibition will open on Saturday, 10th of September at 11 am at Pagdandi Chai Cafe. For the inauguration, we will have a circle facilitated by artist, Muriel Kakani and storyteller, Dola Dasgupta. Our circle will revolve around the forest womb archetype and the power of the sacred feminine. The seed and life force, as well as the spirit of life, the forest, and the earth— and the womb of the Earth and the womb of women where life is nourished— are not separate. All comprise the sacred feminine. ~Ingerman, Sandra Following a post on the Forest Womb, I received a beautiful mail from a lady I haven't met. She shared with me her experience of the forest womb. With her permission, I am quoting these words from her mail.
“There was a war on and I was a young orphan child caught in the midst of the cross fire....I climbed into the tree's innermost sacred place and hid there..as if in my mother's womb..... Subsequently in this life time I lost my mother when I was a toddler.....again due to my father's numerous transfers....I was always in the midst of forests......and huge tracts of wooded lands as I grew....Whenever I needed love...security...happiness...I would sit with or clamber into the branches of a tree...” The loss of the mother and taking refuge in the forest… has been a recurrent theme in my own life… Following a traumatic birth due to a painkiller administered to my mother at the time of delivery, I was separated from my mother at birth and… As a child, I many times experienced a void within myself… the deep pain of emptiness… So strange, but in childhood, most of my friends have been orphans who had been adopted. Though I was not an orphan, the mother of one of my school friends even once offered to adopt me! “Separation from the mother after birth is a deplorable medical custom that is fundamentally traumatic to the infant. It is no wonder that a culture practicing such a custom leaves people so out of touch with their ground... disconnected… Anodea Judith, Eastern Body, Western Mind Loss of the mother is experienced as a loss of safety, security, and comfort… “If a girl loses her mother, she may live in fantasy, conscious or unconscious, of restoring the original unbroken uruboric connection, the hope of complete unity with the mother.” Duerk, Judith; Circle of Stones: Woman's Journey to Herself. And the life-long search of the daughter for the lost mother takes her to the forest. The Forest Soulscape enfolds in a kind of maternal support... dark, protected, lush… it is the perfect incubator. Tribal people have always revered the forest as a mother. The forest, like a mother, is all-giving and nurturing. She fosters life, and keeps life protected. The Forest People speak of their world as a world that gives them everything they want. It is their world, and in return for their affection and trust, it supplies them with all their needs… It is a good world.. Jagannath, a Khond adivasi friend from Reyagada, Orissa, once narrated his experience of the forest, the all-giving mother… “I remember one summer… I would have been 5-6 years old… nothing was left to eat in the village… every grain of the last harvest had been consumed… the grain stores were empty… I remember then accompanying my parents to the forest… For a full season, we subsisted solely on forest produce… jungle fruits, tubers, greens, seeds, jungle millets, mushrooms… What is strange,” added Jagannath after a moment of hesitation, “is that when nothing is left in the fields, the harvest of forest produce is most bountiful… It is as if the forest wanted to make sure that we never go hungry… That is why we respect the forest as our mother and make sure no harm is done to her.” The loss of the mother is not just a personal experience but also a collective experience. Long ago, before the patriarchal period, in many places on earth, the Great Mother Goddess who gives birth to all creation out of the darkness of her womb was worshiped. With patriarchy, humanity has been orphaned by the death of the Great Mother. With the Mother Goddess erased from our collective awareness, our earth has seen waves of deforestation and desertification… women have been oppressed… The day humanity reconnects to the Divine Power of the Feminine, the oppression of women will cease, the raping of Mother Earth will end, and the forests will once again blanket our beautiful earth. © Muriel Anamika In the Art Circle, Echoes from the Forest Womb, we reconnect with the Womb, with the mothering source within ourselves. We had our first Art Circle at Shikshantar (Udaipur). Across the world women everywhere are rediscovering painting, colouring as a way to unwind and reconnect with the free-flowing creativity we experienced as children. Same happened here at Shikshantar. Not only big girls but big guys too! Painting is a form of open eyed meditation. It is soothing and calming. But is that all there is to landscape painting? Nature and earth speak to us through our dreams and deep longings. The power and intelligence of the Earth is within us, always accessible. Painting is one way of accessing that intelligence. As we painted the Forest Womb, we reconnected to the womb, our first experience of unconditional love. I most love this painting by Kaushik. The forest enfolds. It gives a feeling of being cradled in the forest womb. Like the fetus in the womb lives in a state of perfect contentment, when we lived in the forest, we also lived in a state of bliss! Painting the Forest Womb is reconnecting to that experience of bliss. |
Muriel facilitates Reconnection Circles in which through guided meditation, stories, rituals, art therapy exercises, we explore the healing qualities of nature, the forest, ocean, desert and mountain archetypes.
Read more... Soulscape Journeys. Using archetypes, images, metaphors of the natural world (landscapes, trees, animal totems, moon cycles, seasons…) as well as myths and stories from indigenous cultures around the world, we discover the Sacred Circle of Life and how our soul journeys are so amazingly embedded into it. Read More... .
Explore the Forest Soulscape... Reconnecting with the Forest is regaining our lost Oneness with the whole creation… Read More...
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