MATERNAL THINKING: Gifts, Mothers’ Bodies, and Earth
We are putting the finishing touches on Volume 4 of our Proceedings anthologies, and we anticipate the launch in June of this year. For now, we are offering a special pre-publication discount, and discounts on Volumes 1 – 3, for anyone who attends the symposium.
The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology is dedicated to presenting the stories and values of cultures that honor our mother the earth and life-giving relationships of reciprocity and gift giving among all who dwell here. Our Proceedings Volume 4 draws on “maternal thinking”, a feminist perspective that reflects on mothering as a model for and a model of caring relations that involve gift giving and reciprocity. This expansive conception of mothering is not limited to biological mothers. Several contributions by indigenous women share stories honoring care-giving practices taught to humans by other than humans, including the earth, elemental forces of nature, and various animals and other living creatures. Other chapters bring new understandings of mothering relations in myths and goddess stories from Europe as well as Kurdish culture, ancient Jewish writings, and Buddhism. Maternal thinking enriches our understanding of the past and feeds a vision of the future in which all life is respected and preserved.
MATERNAL THINKING V4 Table of Contents
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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. 
Cristina’s video explores the intimate connection between the most prevalent
“When the Goddess calls, she’s fierce, and real. And you better pick up the phone. The goddess who wants you is the one who finds you, and sometimes she arrives with more questions than answers. The goddess who found me was Austeja, bee goddess of Lithuania. And she didn’t make it easy. In fact, she swarmed me with bees, repeatedly, until I wrote a novel about her.
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