Friday March 28, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ
Shipibo Plant Dietas – Learning through Internal Relations with Plant Spirits
This presentation will share mythical and practical ecopsychological fieldwork of plant dietas and the liminal space where spiritual connections manifest. The Shipibo sacred plant dieta is an agreement with a plant spirit to develop a spiritual connection. As the dieta progresses, this connection strengthens, transforming into a profound bond, an alliance between the dieter and the plant spirit. Through this sentient friendship of the dieta process, practitioners gain insight, healing, and knowledge, building a relationship with the plant spirit that enhances their path in traditional plant medicine. Participants will have a preliminary understanding of the transcendental overlap of human and plant species in this ancient tradition.
Dawn Johnson Harvey is a PhD student in East-West Ecopsychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also holds a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and provides trauma-informed narrative therapy. Her dissertation explores the decolonization of the self in community groups through ethnoautobiography, a process of reawakening ancestral values and reconnection to the integral earth community.
Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.
Member only link to livestream conference keynote and plenary panel.
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In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient is beloved teacher, activist and artist Yeye Luisah Teish. Our letter to her reads as follows:
The award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary leadership as a Founding Mother of Feminist Spirituality, Cultural History and Political Awareness. We honor you for your work as an Iyanifa, Mother of Wisdom, and Oshun chief in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition, as a “spiritual activist”, a term coined by you, an author of a ground-breaking book and numerous articles, essays and poems, a priestess, a ritualist, a keynote speaker, a teacher, and a spiritual advisor on a global scale. We also recognize your current work founding the Jambalaya School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center a gathering, healing, learning sanctuary in the California Bay area which seeks to focus on access to rare indigenous knowledge, healing, spiritual preparation, and land stewardship.Your groundbreaking book, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Bookof Personal Charms and Practical Rituals, now a classic in Women’s Spirituality, has served as an essential spiritual blueprint for reclaiming faith, power, and knowing as the ancestors accessed it. In 1985, when you wrote Jambalaya, traditional African Spirituality was illegal, African religions had been outlawed for hundreds of years, and indigenous technologies like drumming and ancestral veneration were considered dangerous by the powers that be. Yet you knew these practices have always been the necessary lifeblood, not only as mechanisms of survival vis-a-vis colonialism, but as a means to overturn oppression.Traditionally passed down orally, you took a great risk in writing down and publishing these teachings in Jambalaya. While Jambalaya focuses on the African Diaspora, and centers on nourishing and sustaining Black women, it also invites people of all races to access their own ancestral lineages and spiritual magic. Jambalaya, in the forty years since it has been published, has become, as one author put it, “a kind of sacred text or portal for generations of cultural workers, spiritual practitioners, teachers, and organizers.”
Yeye Luisah Teish the storyteller
We honor you also for your current engagement in founding and creating the Jambalaya School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center which seeks to spread the values of skilled spiritual activism, environmental restoration, community healing, a global ethos of social justice, and the decolonizing and reclaiming of indigenous wisdom. Your vision for this school is vast, and includes among other innovations: creating a haven for poets artists, musicians, and ritualists where they can collaborate and interact with their audiences; green spaces on campus for the growing of food as well as healing herbs and medicines based on ancestral recipes; a residence for visiting teachers and elders thus providing students with global connectivity; a digital archive of ancestral teachings; a curriculum dedicated to teaching the theory, practice, and application of ancestral techniques across various lineages; and an Ancient Mysteries Department dedicated to the deepening of creative practice, performance, and positioning into Spiritual Activism.’
The Black Oshun by Luisah Teish
The Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality is given to exceptioinal leaders, as a life-time achievement award. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler, 2010, Charlene Spretnak, 2012, Jean Shinoda Bolen, 2014, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum and Elinor Gadon, 2016, Kathy Jones, 2018, Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn, 2020, and Hallie Iglehart Austen, 2023.
Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time and thank you for your activism and your literary, healing, and cultural leadership. We are looking forward to presenting your award to you in person at the 2025 ASWM Conference.
Friday, March 28, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ
“Storyteller with Eight Children,” Helen Cordero
New Storytelling: Rethinking Film, Social Media, and Exploitive Technologies
How do mythic women arise in the storytelling of popular culture? Can stories in modern media capture ancient or indigenous knowledge accurately? Can we restructure our relationships with social media and make use of technologies in the service of a sentient earth? These are questions posed by our panelists.
Who You Callin’ Wicked?: Tending Elphaba, Champion of the Sentient Earth, April Heaslip
Resurrecting Stories of Care, Reciprocity, and Interconnection: Decolonial and Indigenous Dialogues on Technology, Monica Mody
Restorying Richness: Transforming Scarcity and Creating Abundance Through Narrative Storytelling, Aven Whitehorne
The Bear in the Machine, Susan Wright
April Heaslip,PhD, earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology (Pacifica Graduate Institute), an MA in Social Ecology (Goddard College), and a BA in Psychology & Women’s Studies (West Chester University) after studying at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil. Her forthcoming book is Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture & Nature. She teaches Interdisciplinary Studies & Popular Culture with Southern New Hampshire University.
Monica Mody, PhD, teaches and writes at the intersections of liminal knowing/language, earth-based wisdom, and decolonial frameworks of wholeness. She is an Assistant Professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s M.A./Ph.D. Mythological Studies Program and is also affiliated with the CIIS Women’s Spirituality Department and Southwestern College’s Visionary Practice and Regenerative Practice PhD Program. She is the author of Wild Fin (Weavers Press), Bright Parallel (Copper Coin), and Kala Pani (1913 Press).
Aven Lumi Whitehorne (they/them) is a writer and a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies and at Viridis Graduate Institute. Their graduate work focuses on using narrative storytelling to create and sustain cultural change in this time of climate chaos.
Susan Wright has an MA in Theology from Bexley Hall Episcopal Seminary. She is currently in her third year of doctoral studies in the DJA program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She serves on the board of the Colloquium of Violence & Religion, the academic association deviated to the work of René Girard. Her research focuses on the depth psychological sources of systemic misogyny.
Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.
Friday, March 28, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ
Tablet II of Epic of Gilgamesh
Scholarly and oracular discussions with the living Goddess of the Epic of Gilgamesh
The epic of Gilgamesh, in various versions, is one of the oldest examples of world literature, consisting of five Sumerian poems about the semi-divine King of Uruk. Presenters on this panel will discuss the roles and influences of goddesses and priestesses in this story of heroic conquest.
The rejection of the Goddess: How totalitarian agriculture leads to the slaying of the Bull of Heaven, Crystal Woodling
Chasing the Queen of Heaven and her sacred bull to the Netherworld: Tracing the formation of an underworld in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Adriana Hetram
“You’re so Vain”—the petty portrayal of Inanna in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Amy Solara-Mackey
Union with the Goddess: an examination of the pivotal role of Shamhat in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Jessie McKnight
Crystal (formerly Hoffman) Woodling is a scholar, poet, herbalist, translator, and ritual facilitator. She has performed and presented her scholarship on women’s spirituality and the avant-garde at national conferences such as the AWP and ATHE. She co-runs the School of Heaven and Earth and leads the oracular poetry group Sibyl’s Cave. She taught poetry in the land of Humbaba at AUB, where she co-founded Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Arts Review.
Adriana Hetram is an independent scholar who completed her PhD at Queen’s University, Canada, with a specialization in Modernism, Women’s Writing, and Poetics. Her thesis focused on the mature work of Modernist poet H.D. (1886-1961) and evolved a phenomenologically-focused syncretic poetics to look at works conceived in a postwar milieu so haunted by apocalyptically-inflected states of being that a new symbolic dimension of understanding was necessary to open up space for life, consciousness, and coherence to enter once again.
Amy Solara-Mackey has been actively involved in the goddess spirituality community for over a decade, as a participant, priestess and initiator. As a mother of 3 sons much of her work with women revolves around embodying the divine feminine, birth as a rite of passage, sacred sexuality and relationships, and creative feminine expression. An astrologer, tarot reader, yogini and ceremonialist, she is working on her first Goddess Oracle deck and book.
Jessie McKnight is a mother, herbalist, poet, and astrologer. She has a degree in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her knowledge and love for the natural world then led her to pursue her passion for herbal medicine, where the plants themselves have been her greatest teachers. She currently serves her community as an herbalist, astrologer, and an educator at Pacific Valley School. She teaches both academics and dance, always with the hope of passing the flame of curiosity, wonder, and stewardship to the next generation.
Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.
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