“Divinity and Life in Nondual Consciousness: Revisioning Our Relations With More-than-Human Worlds“
Panel: Dethroning Human Hubris
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge
Monica Mody, PhD, MFA, is a cross-genre poet, theorist, and educator working at the intersections of earth-based wisdom, transdisciplinary borderlands thinking, and decolonial frameworks of wholeness. She is the author of the poetry collections Wild Fin (Weavers Press, 2024) and Bright Parallel (Copper Coin, 2023) and the cross-genre Kala Pani (1913 Press, 2013). Academic publications include chapters in edited volumes (Mysticism and the Margins; The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature); peer-reviewed articles (The Transformative Power of Art Journal; Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis), as well as hybrid essays in cross-disciplinary research journals (Tarka Journal). She has presented widely at international and US-based conferences, including at the Parliament of World Religions, Pacifica’s Journey Week Conferences, the Center for Black and Indigenous Praxis (California Institute of Integral Studies), the American Academy of Religion-WR, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conferences, as well as the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology conferences and symposia. Her poems have appeared in periodicals including Poetry International, Indian Quarterly, Almost Island, Boston Review, and Wasafiri as well as in several anthologies. She is the recipient of awards including the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology (conferred by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology), the Sparks Prize Fellowship (Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa), and the TOTO Award for Creative Writing. Mody is Program Chair and Assistant Professor of Mythological Studies at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Learn more on Monica’s website.
| Abstract: “Divinity and Life in Nondual Consciousness: Revisioning Our Relations With More-than-Human Worlds”
This presentation builds on frameworks of reality that reveal a relational nondual orientation speaking to a structure of presence where divinity and life course and manifest through non-human worlds. These nondual worldviews can create counternarratives and counterknowledges to patriarchal and colonial metaphysics rooted in a self/other binary, which re-enacts and exonerates disenfranchisement, oppression, and violence registering in both human and more-than-human worlds. I discuss these frameworks and notions of divinity and life in contemplation of the mysteries and teachings encoded by therianthropic yoginis, epistemologies of shakti in gynocentric threads of tantric philosophy, and animistic systems. Through a critical and remythologized engagement, I propose a shift in consciousness that can contribute to expanding precolonial and decolonial genealogies of care, especially as regards our relations with more-than-human worlds. |