Our thanks to Samaqani Cocahq-(Natalie Sappier) for sharing her artwork with us for our 2023 Conference, “Waters of Life – Mythos, Divinity, Beings and Ecology.” Our focus is on connections and relationships among people, animals, and the powerful elements necessary for life. Natalie’s painting “Salmon River” (2022) beautifully captures the vitality of living waters and the intention and spirit of our program.
Natalie is a Wolastoqey Indigenous multidisciplinary storyteller from Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick, Canada. For her, creating visual art awakened her connection with land and her Wolastoqey knowing and being.
Her community and Ancestral landscapes (New Brunswick) are her teachers and are home to where she navigates stories and creativity. She realized early in her painting career that she was not painting just for herself-she was also painting for her people.
Natalie dedicates much of her time creating stories in her Fredericton Studio and carries a passion in the advocacy of Arts, Culture, Two Spirited Sacredness and Indigenous Youth Mentorship. She believes Wellness and Art strand together and Indigenous stories carry the medicine of spirit and voice that protects our Mother Earth.
See the multi-talented artist’s website here as it develops. In addition to her paintings and murals, Natalie has a passion for sharing stories and engaging with people through sharing of public works and workshops; read more about her work here and learn about her play “Finding Wolastok Voice.”
In 2018 I attended the Gatekeepers Conference on sacred sites & pilgrimage and made a personal pilgrimage to Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, and other sites. EARTHSPEAK explores a mythic, historical, poetic and subjective response to these geomantically potent sites, in particular Silbury Hill, the largest prehistoric monument in Europe, with research that suggests it was at one time a representation of the body of the Earth Mother. EARTHSPEAK also suggests that Geomantic reciprocity occurs as human beings bring intentionality to a particular place, making it a holy or sacred place. Numinous communion with “spirit of place” can become increasingly active as it accrues mythic power in the memory of the people, and in the land. Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to bring about altered states of consciousness, especially if people come prepared within the liminal state of pilgrimage. 
Yoga Nidrā Śakti is a South Asian Goddess of sleep, rest, and liminal spaces between dreaming and waking. A key figure in The Greatness of the Goddess (Devī Mahātmyam, c600BC), her Sanskrit name literally means ‘power of sleep’. She features in many images and indigenous story rituals, all describing her power to send every being (including gods) to sleep; she restores right relationship to cyclical rhythms of rest that hold life in balance. Wherever she appears, Nidrā Śakti counters transgressions of those who refuse to sleep, returning all beings to right relationship with natural cycles. Yoganidrā is also a state of yogic rest that supports healing for out-of-balance human experiences such as insomnia, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sadly, the presence of Nidrā Śakti has been marginalised and eradicated from commercial and traditional yoga schools profiting from methods of the popular practice bearing her name: yoga nidrā. Through stories and exquisite images, we explore the liminality of Nidrā Śakti as goddess of thresholds between sleep and dream. 
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