Category: Conferences & Symposia

by Dr. Miranda Shaw, keynote presenter

What an amazing organization and conference series ASWM has created.  I experienced the weekend by presenting as well as attending panels and performances.

My talk began with an exploration of how Buddhist women in Nepal embody Vasundhara, earth mother and goddess of abundance and wisdom.  I showed slides of rituals that invoke their identity with the golden goddess.  I could see that both the words and images were going deep.  The women present were also enchanted by the Kumari tradition, in which young girls embody the female Buddha Vajrayogini.  Talk about a receptive audience!  Beyond receptive—hungering and thirsting for knowledge of goddesses and women’s religion.

My mother Merry Norris spoke and showed slides in the next panel.  She not only showed her own mandala and goddess paintings, but those of her students, many of whom had never picked up a paintbrush before, commenting on the healing and transformations that were associated with various artworks, as women went through a particular challenge or life transition.

The images are so obviously empowered and empowering.  Many archetypal goddess images come through, even when women have had no direct exposure, and that was apparent in the slides.  One of her central themes was a difference she sees between ‘recovery’ and ‘transformation.’

The discussion afterward was great: how do we draw on goddess imagery and stories to transform our consciousness and lives.  One woman raised a concern about a tendency she sees—not in the speakers but more broadly in our culture—for women/feminists to turn the spiritual growth process into a kind of self-help therapy.  Entirely focused on self-improvement, this becomes another, albeit subtler, form of disempowerment, of never being good enough, never ‘arriving.’

The next panel I attended was on creativity, where Leesa Sklovar-Filgate talked about her work that combines psychotherapy, music therapy, and working with the Cetacean Society to find and save ‘lone’ whales that have become separated from their pods.  Continue reading “The City of Sisterly Love: A report from the Philadelphia Symposium”

by Joan Cichon, ASWM Board member

I first read Professor Miranda Shaw’s Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism ten years ago, and I still remember how impressed I was with the depth of her scholarship and insights.  Therefore, it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to her presentation “Living Goddesses: Embodying the Divine in Buddhist Nepal” at ASWM’s East Symposium.

For her keynote address, Dr. Shaw began by briefly telling us about how she became interested in women in Buddhism.  One important factor was the representations of the yoginis she saw:  as she looked into their eyes, and observed the ferocious intensity, she knew that there was an important part that had been left out of the story of the evolution of Buddhism.  Thus she researched and wrote Passionate Enlightenment.

Her presentation at the symposium centered on the Vasudhara festival in Nepal.  Vasudhara, a female bodhisattva of wealth, prosperity and abundance, is extremely popular among the Newari Buddhists of Katmandu.   Continue reading “Nepal’s “Living Goddesses” come to life in Miranda Shaw’s Keynote”

The Green Goddess, Our first biennial multi-day conference, was held April 23 to 25, 2010, at Kirkridge Retreat Center, Bangor, PA.

Keynote speakers included Max Dashu of Suppressed Histories with a tour de force presentation on female icons, Cristina Eisenberg (a wolf biologist who is actively engaged in ecological restoration that supports sustainability of wildlife communities and of the human spirit), Dr. Ann Filemyr on healing from the nature/culture divide, and Cristina Biaggi on the Great Goddess as a green goddess, through the lens of art and history.

Margot Adler was honored with our first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality, and the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Goddess Studies went to Dawn Work-Makinne, Ph.D.

Lydia Ruyle’s inspiring goddess banners graced the meeting space, and she will offered an art workshop. Our film series premiered “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican,” about the ordination of Catholic women priests, and featured ethnologist Sabine Jell-Bahlson’s film on Mammywata.

Topics included lady of the beasts, publishing goddess scholarship, spiritual geometry and the goddess, archaeomythology, the divine feminine as vortex, finding your sacred language, the wheel of the year as spiritual psychology, frog mysteries, and much more.

Poet Annie Finch gave a masked reading; novelist Elizabeth Cunningham read from her Maeve novels; storyteller Diane Wolkstein presented The Monkey King; and singer Ruth Barrett gave a “concert for Gaia.”

The 2010 conference took place at the beautiful Kirkridge Retreat Center, atop the Pocono mountain ridges near the Delaware Water Gap.  Kirkridge is located about 90 minutes from both New York City and Philadelphia.