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Walking as a WiseWoman by Anyaa T McAndrew
There is a Karen Taylor-Good song that we use in the Shamanic Priestess Process™ called Use Me Up, that goes like this: “ When I meet my maker and my time on earth is done, when I stand before Her (word change mine) looking back on where I’ve come, I can only pray that with Her grace and love, She will say,” I used you up”. Use me up, let me give everything I am, pour out my heart and soul according to your plan. Use me up, let there be nothing of me left, no chance to love untaken, not one regret.”
As we move into the 2nd half or even the last 3rd or 4th of our lives, seasoned women of consciousness, what I am calling The Shamanic WiseWoman, know that time is now precious to give our remaining gifts to the world, to “use up” our time here fulfilling our purpose, telling our stories and leaving our own unique legacy. Our spice and seasoning comes from years of hard knocks, tough lessons, and dark nights of the soul, and as equally from the joyful celebrations, pleasures and adventures of our lives.
We are intended to honor the gifts we have already given, and the thresholds already crossed, so that we can gain the energy to renew ourselves again and again. In the holy spaces we can create together as sacred women, we can rise from the ashes of old wounds and old ways, and consecrate our lives toward new ways of offering ourselves in service to our world which can so greatly benefit from our wisdom.
I am thoroughly enjoying walking as a WiseWoman these days, but that was not so until recently. I have been an eternal youth most of my life, choosing not to have children and instead focus on my sacred work and my “freedom” to be eccentric and forge new trails. I have been discovering new facets of myself as I embrace my wisdom and care less about self-image, accomplishment and achievement. Through all the twists and turns of my life, I have indeed cultivated the mother energy within me. Now she is becoming the grandmother! I am also discovering a new kind of spiritual sensitivity, a profound connection to the animal kingdom, and a deepening connection to my own inner mate.
These revelations were not available to me in younger versions of self. I am able to be more present-centered, less distracted by the glamours of the world, as I drop into the last cycles of my life. I no longer have goals, because I want to follow more of what inspires me and less of what drives me. Because I encounter it more often, I am drawn to explore the mysteries of death these days, and I look forward to doing this with a strong circle of strong women.
Are you eager to engage your own inner WiseWoman? Do you savor the experience of a women’s circle? Are you willing to ceremonially integrate your life lessons so far? Are you ready to concentrate your life force on your sacred soul purpose, even as you move toward befriending the death mysteries?
We (Mary Manera, me, and Jacoba Groenwegen) completed our first session October 19th-23th at Isis Cove Community NC, as the Smoky Mountains were on fire with autumn color. For those who could not make the October session, we will repeat this first session in Cincinatti Feb 23-26th, 2017. Then we will form a committed circle to go forward to the Cincinnati in late April and complete in late June. An application process ensures you are resonate with where we are going, and you will be a huge part of the evolution of the Shamanic WiseWoman Process™.
Visit this page for more detail:
https://goddessontheloose.com/shamanic-wisewoman-process-path-of-the-sacred-feminine-elder/
McAndrew, MA, LPC, NCC is an Ordained High Priestess, and a congregational leader of Full Moon Sanctuary. She is dedicated to the path of the Divine Feminine, facilitating women’s awakening and empowerment for the past 40 years. She is the creatrix of the Shamanic Priestess Process, the Shamanic Magdalane Mysteries and retreats, workshops and processes for women. For more, visit www.goddessontheloose.com
Honoring the Ancient Stone Circles
A Final Call to Join Us at Avebury/Stonehenge and Crop Circles in England, August 5-12, 2015
by Daniel Giamario
The collaborative team of Daniel Giamario, co-founder of the Shamanic Astrology Mystery School and the creator of the Shamanic Astrology Paradigm, and Anyaa McAndrew, of Full Moon Sanctuary, will facilitate another adventure celebrating the Renaissance of the Sacred Feminine. Following their successful journey to Scotland and the Callanish Stones last year (with Nita Gage), Anyaa and Daniel are now exploring Stonehenge, the Avebury Stone Rings and Rows, Silbury Hill, and the West Kennet Long Barrow.
Our group will be held at a country estate hotel near Swindon England, located quite near to Avebury and Stonehenge. At the time of this writing, the event is only weeks away and there is still room for you to join us! Register for the event here! Any additional participants will be able to have their own private room at no extra cost. Also, three meals a day are included in the price.
Some reasons to consider joining us:
Continue reading “Honoring the Ancient Stone Circles”
Magic, Mystery and Sorrow in the Yucatan
I am thrilled to offer you a few fascinating perspectives on our recent Yucatan Journey, facilitated by my husband Gary Stamper, myself and Carolyn Baker….I don’t have the time to write at the moment, and both authors Jo Ann Heydron and Carolyn Baker have said it all:
Guadalupe In The Laundry Room: A Yucatan Epiphany 
By Carolyn Baker from Speaking Truth To Power
Knowing that each of us has our own experience of our amazing journey to Yucatan and that each of us makes sense of it differently, I would like to offer my perspective in the light not only of our journey, but our re-entry as well. Some of us have had strange if not bizarre re-entries. Many of us have returned feeling ungrounded and off-center, and this may be more than the result of jet lag. Perhaps something more profound happened to us in Yucatan than we yet understand.
My own experience with traveling to sacred sites and entering the territory of indigenous ruins is that they are anything but dead and inert. In fact, they are very much alive, and the spirits of the ancestors living there have never left. If we are open to their presence and their power, we may actually receive the wisdom we came there to discover, and perhaps even more instruction than we bargained for. If we’re serious about this “evolution thing,” it seems that it behooves us to be very curious about what happened to us in Yucatan and what might continue to happen. As middle class Anglo citizens of industrial civilization, all of us, including myself, would love to hold hands and dance around the many sacred sites of the world feeling bathed in light and love, but what if the spirits inhabiting those places have another agenda? What if they really want to teach us that suffering and light are not separate, just as none of us is separate from each other or from the earth? What if they need, to some extent, to kick our butts to make their point? I’ve personally had my butt kicked a number of times during and after visits to sacred places, and when I stay open to the possibility that that is precisely what is happening, the upheaval feels less bothersome.
Some of us got sick on the journey. Some of us had weird re-entries to our homes or perhaps became ill after the journey or just felt peculiarly ungrounded. Might this be part of what some call “a fiercely unwanted growth experience”? Our journey began with a psychic surgery performed by Israel. He knew what each of us needed in order to cleanse our psyches and open to the mysteries of Mayan tradition. Could he have been a messenger of greater forces wanting us to break down in order to break through?
Along the way in rural Yucatan we witnessed extreme poverty and heart breaking suffering of animals. The rational mind wants to separate this from the heart warming community we witnessed among the people and their devotion to the sacred. They are poor economically but rich in many other ways, yet those many other ways do not erase the excruciating reality of their suffering. We were immersed in opposites—poverty/richness; kindness/animal neglect; Mayan/Hispanic; indigenous/Catholic. One of the most difficult skills for any human being, but I believe the most crucial, is the capacity to hold the tension of opposites.
This was emblazoned on my mind on Saturday night when I walked into the disaster that was my room at Dos Playos and found a small lake beside my bed. Immediately next to my room was the laundry room where women apparently worked all hours of the day and night to provide clean towels for the hotel. In order to wipe up the mess on my floor, I wandered into the laundry room where many of these women were toiling, and at the entrance was a very large image of the Virgin of Guadalupe framed with flowers, and embellishing the image on the altar below was a cluster of burning candles. Clearly, Lupe’s presence was invaluable to these women who probably earn less money than we can imagine. Once again, the suffering alongside the sacred. After receiving my towels for wiping up the mess, I stood for a moment in the corridor of the laundry room, my eyes alternating from Lupe to the women and back to Lupe. For a moment, I got it: The suffering and the sacred are always inextricably connected.
As I write this missive today, I feel weird and ungrounded. Last night I came home to eight inches of snow and was locked out of my house. I spent the night with a neighbor who keeps her house icebox cold. Other than the two hours’ sleep I managed to get, I did little but compare the warmth I had just come from with the chill I had entered. I don’t know what other weirdness I’m going to encounter in the days ahead. But I know one thing: When Israel placed a warm crystal on my forehead and then on my heart, the ancestors expected me to pay attention, and they still do.
From Jo Ann Hedron at Talking to Strangers: An Introvert Hits the Streets
I promised myself that when I came back to this blog, I’d write about books and writing and nothing more. Whoops.
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| Israel May |
My husband and I just returned from Mexico, where we and fifteen others met at the Cancun airport and traveled west by bus to the colonial city of Izamal. We spent a week there driving out to visit Mayan ruins and learning from a Mayan shaman. Gary Stamper, Anyaa McAndrew, and Carolyn Baker–all people I hope to know for the rest of my life–planned the trip. I don’t think any of them would object to my saying that the shaman we spent the week with, a quiet, modest man named Israel May, was our teacher and leader. With Israel we visited Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and Quintana Roo states of Northern Mexico–Chichen Itza first, then Ake, Tulum, and the Temple of Ixchel.
From 1800 BC to 1500 AD, the Maya thrived in stages in Central America, primarily in areas that now lie in Mexico and Guatemala. As you probably know, they developed written language, higher mathematics and astronomy, as well as skills that allowed them, without benefit of pack animals or metal tools, to build communities both beautiful and functional, and feed their people. A powerful mystical tradition also grew up.
Why the Maya “disappeared” is a topic of some interest to people in the collapsing cultures of the global North. We know that Mayan cities from the classic period (about 250 AD to 900) were deserted long before Spanish soldiers and priests began their invasions in the 1500s. There is no consensus as to precisely why these communities failed. Some guesses are that a long drought stressed the primary crop, corn, that too many rich demanded service from too few poor, that forests were overcut to clear land for farming and to fuel preparation of the limestone plaster used to ornament buildings.
From the jungles of the south, the Maya moved north. Although the north was dryer, they could tap into water tables at shallow depths. In magnificent cities like Chichen Itza and Tulum, the Maya maintained a culture remarkably uniform through the centuries until the Spanish tried their best to wipe it and them out.
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| Chichen Itza, Pyramid of Kukulcan, “The Castle” |
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| Ake, roof of marketplace missing. Although Ake is Early Classic, older than Chichen Itza, it is not yet completely unearthed. |
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| Tulum, El Castillo |
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| Temple of the Goddess Ixchel, Isla Mujeres The Mayan people, however, have not disappeared. We saw them, small in body, forthright in gaze, everywhere we went. Israel learned his shamanic skills from his grandmother and now educates northerners in ancient ways, doing as much good as he can for visitors who have trouble benefitting from what they don’t understand. |
Las Vegas: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly
By Gary Stamper & Anyaa McAndrew
Wow, we just returned from five days in Las Vegas, and we are reflecting today on why we went, what the highlights were, including the hotels, the food, and the entertainment…in other words, the good, the bad and the ugly of Las Vegas and our trip.
First, why would we go to Las Vegas in the first place? After all…We consider ourselves “conscious” and “spiritual,” and, let’s face it: Vegas represents everything that is wrong with our materialistic culture, the epitome of over-the-top decadence. Continue reading “Las Vegas: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly”