Photograph by Kelly Grabianowski
Have you ever witnessed a woman ‘enter’ herself in the silent, expressive language of flowing breath and quiet movement? No music, eyes closed, senses open, body and heart feeling into her deeper rhythms, hips softening into an effortless sway, arms painting in the air with a strange passion?
Like mountain weather, sunshine and rain will be changing right onto her face, first a smoothness, a softness, then a lightening will come down through her core, a wordless rage will come stomping the ground through her feet, until peace follows again. Ancestors will be remembered like shadows on her face. A sudden sensuousness will surface that she herself had long forgotten, it will surge all the way to her skin, it will take over…
This I have witnessed again and again, that there is little difference between mountain and woman: Like a mountain, your body, the body of woman, has its deep mystery and ancient intelligence, carved into the geology of your curves and crevices, your inner waters and your outer slopes… Knowing your own body is like knowing a mountain: One needs to walk its paths, to get lost in its forests, to suffer its storms, to sit in the deep silence of its cave, to move to the sudden motions of its winds.
Just within moments, like a mountain, a woman who is listening to herself through her body will have entered her deeper life, the life invisible to the naked eye of day-to-day life. Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it the deepest soul psyche of women, “the place where mind and instincts mingle, where a woman’s deep life funds her mundane life….”
So to enter your deeper life– to explore it, tackle it, rediscover it, wake it up– is to know your mountain. It is to know your own mystery.
Do you know your mountain? Do you, like me, long to know her deeper?
I ask you, and I already know– that this knowledge, this pilgrimage to one's own mountain, is a deep longing for each woman. I also know that women taking the pilgrimage together is a mystery in its own right, a potency that can only happen when we are together. And all the more so- if we are together in the embrace of the mountain herself...
This is how I first began visioning for the BODY OF MOUNTAIN, BODY OF WOMAN Journey. I know for some of you Mount Shasta, the Sacred Mountain, is quite far, and some of you are on different continents. But I hope that this September, or one year in the future, you will be able to join us in taking a pilgrimage to one of the most powerful places on Earth. (Please visit the webpage for the Shasta journey to read more about why Mt. Shasta is considered to be a land of magnificent power and significance)
Yes, we invite you.... To a pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain, a journey of remembrance and worship of the Wild Mother through your own forms. A deep in-the-body communion with the feminine mysteries by inhabiting your own wild nature and tuning into to the body-to-body guidance of the mountain, its waters, animals, meadows and crisp skies.
Learn more and join us, Sept 21-24, 2017, or next year:
