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.
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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. Apart from painting the forest, I have been travelling to the forest… Here is the account of a trip made to Niyamgiri in Orissa.
I have one wish… to accompany the tribal women in one of their roots/ tubers harvesting expeditions in the forest. Somehow there is something in that experience of journeying to the forest to dig out roots that deeply fascinates me!! May be it is the unique opportunity of performing an act our ancestors did for million years, an act that takes us back to the beginning of times when we were hunter-gatherers . The women of the village agree. But before leaving, one of them asks me if I want to wear a dhotiya (half sari) like her. She is puzzled… how will I be entering the forest in my city dress? With a pleading smile, I ask her to spare me from that!! I follow the women walking in line towards the forest. They are carrying digging rods and baskets. After a while, they stop in a grove. There, in the maze of impenetrable dry deciduous vegetation, the women have spotted a vine that indicates the presence of edible roots. They sit down and start digging. I can’t follow them; branches are snapping in my face and thorny brambles are entangling me. From a distance, I watch. I won’t dig today! Panting under the hot April sun, I am reminded of the fact that I am an urban creature, brought up in captivity and as much inadapted to survive in the wild as a zoo animal! I am also reminded that over the past few thousand years, and more particularly over the past century, we have lost touch with OUR ROOTS… Development, industrialization, urbanization are processes that have uprooted us… And incidentally, our consumption of wild roots has also drastically reduced!! “For all the intellectual and technological progress we have made, we have lost a vital connection for our souls. We have lost our roots and the knowledge of our unbreakable relationship to the earth upon which we all live.” Kathy Jones Without our roots, without this connection, we are separated from nature, separated from our biological source. “By losing touch with our ground (with our roots) we have lost the sense of our intricate connection with all life. Ignoring our ground, it is no wonder that we face a health care crisis and an ecological destruction.” Anodea Judith Once the baskets are filled, the pits are refilled with mud and shoots of the tubers are planted. This practice ensures that the tuber crop will continue to grow for years together in the same area. Back in the village, the tubers are washed and then simply boiled for a meal. Wow!! As I grub into the roots, I am suddenly wondering whether destiny has brought me here with a purpose… healing Muladhara, the Root Chakra. As Anodea Judith explains in her book Chakras, Wheels of Life, in today’s urban world, few are the people who are naturally rooted. Our healing therefore starts by balancing our Root Chakra. “To ignore this Chakra or its earthy element is to threaten our very survival, both personally and collectively… Chakras, however, must be balanced. While the stability of grounding is a necessary state to achieve, undue attachment to this security can be detrimental. It is seen as a detriment to the growth of consciousness and one that makes material existence a trap. Once again, it is only undue attachment to this security that becomes a trap, not the basic satisfaction of this need.” Our true roots go so much deeper than this funny misnomer. We are deeply connected to these nutrient-dense tubers. For me right now, they symbolize a grounded diet for a balanced Root Chakra! ‘I really need that,’ I tell myself as I tug into a big hairy wild uncultivated root… It doesn’t taste great, a bit bland but it makes me feel good… For the first time in life, I am getting to eat something uncontaminated by toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides… and guaranteed non GM!! And being of Vata constitution, I have been told roots are particularly good for me!! |
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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