My transformational teachers of 2013

It may be a little early in the year to write this. But what the hell. I'm buzzing about who I'm working with this year and so I wanted to share it with you like, NOW!!!!

It seems to have become a sort of tradition for me to scout out my teachers and then organise my learning for the year ahead. (To see last year's teachers see here... and then come right back here so you can meet my line up for this year!)

I think of it as my very own University of Life where I get to choose my professors and my topics. Topics I never learnt about at school, that set my world on fire, from women around the world who I wouldn't otherwise get to meet. All glory and thanks to the wonders of the Interweb, guardian of women's sanity!

I usually have one module for creativity, one for business/ money, a couple for spirit and one for teaching/ facilitation. But often they tick a couple of boxes. Basically I make sure that I up-skill each of my work life areas each year. Taking on new ideas, soaking in the wisdom and experience and general juju of mentors I admire.  So if you're looking for inspiration, new mentors and general wonder, look no further!

As an aside, there are always two big demons to fight: the "no-time" and "no money" demons. Being a mama of three with a low income, I know both, intimately, but I also know that when I live magically, fully and creatively, every area of my life is enhanced. This is a totally worthwhile investment in me as a woman and a creative entrepreneur. I don't take on courses that require me to show up at certain times. Nor ones which cost over the £150 bracket. What I am after is nuggets of transformational wonder and delight offered by women who walk their talk.

All the time I am learning I also have my business and teacher's hat on watching for useful tips and tricks, teaching material I can re-use, their marketing strategy and furthermore making great networks with fellow alumni of my sort of people who may well become customers, and networking with the leaders themselves scouting out opportunities to collaborate. I wait for special offers and discounts and become an affiliate as well for extra cha-ching. So really it doesn't cost me too much. And it makes me way happy, knowing that I can tap into some wonderful wisdom at any moment, from home, without trying to get out in the evenings.

So this years faculty in my University of Life are:

 Shiloh Sophia. I am taking her course, The Red Key, at the Cosmic Cowgirls University (yeeha!). They have very kindly offered me a generous scholarship to extend my studies in creativity, the divine feminine, painting and women's creative process with her for the rest of the year. You'll see her influence in my more recent paintings and many more to come.

Do take some time to listen to her powerful talk on the Red Thread . The winter session of Marked by the Muse has just begun: packed full of poetry, painting and creative connection. It's powerful stuff and I'm loving it. (Check out what she says about women and business here!)


Megan Auman. My business modules this year are Megan's Business by Design and Marketing for Makers to help me up my game in term of reaching new customers and shaping my exciting new offerings. She's a jeweler and metal worker by trade with a great way of talking about business to creative types. I've been signed up to her mailing list for the past year (this and reading someone's blog is a really good way to get a sense of someone's work for free before committing a penny). She had an incredible deal, of 70% off these two courses until Jan 6th - |I bought them together for $80 (normal price $269).



Leonie Dawson - OK, sometimes I worry I go on about how great she is and you all just tune out, like la-la here's Lucy's fan-girl-crush again. Truth is I'm an affiliate because this woman rocks my world. (And this is the only affiliate link here!) And so I've been really excited to see on Facebook how many regular readers of Dreaming Aloud have taken my advice and either joined the circle or bought her Business and Life planners and are now totally in love with her too! She rocks!!!

 If you want transformation fast, that's deep, but also fun, caring and sparkly, then Leonie's your woman. Go right now and buy a planner, it's less that £6. That's no risk at all. Plan your 2013. Start making your dreams come true! Oh, and did I tell you she's writing the forward for The Rainbow Way? Wahooooo!

Mary Beth Bonfiglio. She's a recently new discovery, thanks to my superbly well connected friend Erin Darcy. I want to write like this woman. And so I've signed up to do her writing course, Own The Edge. It's magic! I love her coinages: wordgasm anyone? Do check out her blog and prepare to be blown away by words! (I have a contribution from her in The Rainbow Way too, yippee!!!)


Beth Wallace. A fellow woman's circle leader and Irish based, hurray! 
A kindred spirit a few steps ahead on the spiral path. She teaches tantra, Jade egg practice and so much more (seeher site for details). We are already talking possible collaborations and I'm looking forward to attending more of her events, like her next Full Moon Circle in April and her Bliss event in West Cork in July.

And then my wish list - faculty opportunities waiting to be filled!

Mara Friedman. Divine feminine artist based in the US, whose work touches women to the core. Not sure how I'm going to get to work with her but am learning from her art. I sell her cards at fairs, and each of my Happy Womb Gift sets comes with one of them.

ALisa Starkweather - I am hoping to connect more with this amazing wise woman, founder of the Red Tent Movement in 2013 and perhaps meet in person.

I'm looking for a really strong mandala tutor on line course, artist or book. I've been sniffing around for over a year now and not come up with anything. And also a dance practice of some sort, I'd love some sacred feminine dance, tribal bellydancing to be precise! Preferably local. Any suggestions appreciated!

And for those of you who were inspired to see my painting blooming into life last year, Flora Bowley's Bloom True course, the one that started it all off, is running again in February.

I have my own exciting courses, on line and in person brewing in 2013. So maybe I'll get to be one of your transformational teachers of 2013 online or in person. I'm so excited!

Who are your transformational teachers for 2013?

Singing over the bones

The Day of the Dead is fast approaching. So are the Days of All Saints and All Souls. Around a large proportion of the world, the houses and shops are decorated with skulls and skeletons, ghosts and ghouls.  These are the days where the living welcome the dead into their lives. When we remember.

As I went to sleep a voice in my head said "Bones, bones. You have to sift over the bones, before you can walk fully over the Rainbow Bridge."

http://pinterest.com/dreamingaloudnt/singing-over-the-bones/

This was not the same voice that says, "I want a tub of chocolate ice cream." So I listened.

And as synchronicity has it, today's activity, for the art course I am following online at the moment, was, you guessed it - bones...

I don't like bones, they spook me. They speak of death and emptiness, they scare me. But yet they call... "don't forget us, come, come and pay your respects to your ancestors, to your past selves. For those who have the courage to look, to sift the bones and the sand through their fingers, to hold the possibility of death  in their living hands. They will find the possibility of richer life, of wisdom, of healing."

"Call your soul back from every place that you have left portions of it." Hiro Boga 

And so I find myself looking back, sifting through the bones, so that I might mourn and release what has past, so that I might fully embrace my present: the person I have become. I find myself paying my respects to my ancestors, my lineage of teachers and mentors, friends and family.

This is not emotional. At least at first. More a seeing and a naming. And yet I find as my list grows each of these selves still has a tug on my heart, a feeling of maybe, what if. When seen so starkly they represent the death of possibility. But they show where the river took a different course, because the rains fell heavier, or less that year.

If things we different, who would I be?

The child of happily married parents who fitted in, sounded right and knew she belonged.
A woman who travelled to hippy communities and founded her own
A woman with a PhD 
A mother of four children 
A carefree spirit, unencumbered by family or spouse
A well-known cookery writer with her own TV show... I practiced it in the playground for years!
An anxious, depressed wreck, hospitalised and heavily medicated
A perfect mother and domestic goddess.

At some point I, and fate, decided that these were not to be the roads I was to travel. Part of me thinks it might be like the film Sliding Doors where all these past selves actually exist, perhaps in tandem, perhaps in other dimensions. I might, without knowing it walk past another self as I walk down the street. How great that sounds.

And so, this year, I draw flowers on the skeletons, to show from the midst of death, from the jaws of the past, springs new life, new colour, new growth. There are flowers and rainbows where death once held sway with bleached bones and dry desert. The rains fall down. The river runs. I walk over the Rainbow Bridge.

Come join me. Do you have the courage to sift through the bones of your past, to see the selves you might have been, to sit and drink tea with them, and then let them go and paint flowers on their faces?

http://pinterest.com/dreamingaloudnt/singing-over-the-bones/

La Loba (Wolf Woman), the old one, the One Who Knows, is within us. She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women, the ancient and vital Wild Woman. She describes her home as that place in time where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolf meet —the place where her mind and her instincts mingle, where a woman's deep life funds her mundane life. It is the point where the I and the Thou kiss, the place where women run with the wolves. 

The Creation Mother is always the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both; to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live.
You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and the scorch marks of fear. 

But it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld. She is both the finder and the incubator of the bones. 

People do meditation to find psychic alignment. That's why people do psychotherapy and analysis. That's why people analyze their dreams and make art. That is why many read Tarot cards, cast I Ching, dance, drum, make theater, pry out the poem, and fire up the prayer. That's why we do all the things we do. It is the work of gathering all the bones together. Then we must sit at the fire and think about which song we will use to sing over the bones, which creation hymn, which re-creation hymn. And the truths we tell will make the song. 

There are some good questions to ask till one decides on the song, one's true song:
What has happened to my soul-voice?What are the buried bones of my life?In what condition is my relationship to the instinctual Self?When was the last time I ran free?How do I make life come alive again?Where has La Loba gone to? 

Go back and stand under that one red flower and walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the old weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you can find. It is the only work we have to do.

From Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

And the leaves fall down

The falling leaves drift by my window

The falling leaves of red and gold

Eva Cassidy

I am tired. Bone tired. Dead tired.

I feel about 150. On a good day. 

Dark moon, plus chesty cough, plus an end of a lot of demanding commitments find me dropping leaves as the season requires, lightening my load, hibernating. Early to bed. Resting all day. Doing minimum in the house, or with the kids, or friends.

I need to curl up in a ball under a blanket of dried leaves, at the roots of an old oak tree and feel myself held completely. To be rested, warm and quiet. The warmth of the earth like a cocoon.

I find myself digging down, deeper, deeper as the nights get longer, I find myself turning in. And in deepening I need to let go that which no longer serves, that which once was me, but no longer fits. 

I walk the spiral path, deeper, round and round it goes. I revisit states of being, passions, ideas. I have been here before, and yet I was not the me I now am. I have more perspective on the insight they offer. I collect their gems of wisdom like ripe apples, carrying them with me in my skirt. I see the spiders web, Indira's net, glistening with autumn dew. I smell the change of the seasons. The death that makes way for new life. The excesses of summer falling down to be subsumed into the earth once more.

I have given all I have, all I can. I am drained. 

And now I will rest. And nurture myself. And receive.

Falling, falling, but safe....

Where are you at, right now?