Meet Presenters in Our Arts and Culture Hall:
Lauren Raine, Yoli Maya Yeh and Umā Dinsmore-Tuli
We are excited to offer Arts and Culture Hall “booths” where some of our great presenters will share their work through videos and links, and maybe even in face-to-face conversations with you! There are also booths for academic programs and other resources. You may access these booths any time from April 3 to April 18m, by signing in after you register and selecting the Culture Hall at the top menu. Sign up at the booth to receive news about their work, see their videos, leave messages, and meet other attendees at the “table” at each booth. Two of these feature work by:
Lauren Raine (Earthspeak) and Yoli Maya Yeh and Umā Dinsmore-Tuli (Yoga Nidra Network)
Lauren Raine: “Earth-speak: Envisioning a Conversant World”
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.
Lauren Raine MFA is a cross-disciplinary artist best known for her Masks of the Goddess collection. She was resident artist at Henry Luce Center for the Arts & Religion, an Aldon B. Dow Fellow, and Resident Artist for Cherry Hill Seminary. Her work can be seen at: www.laurenraine.com.
Yoli Maya Yeh and Umā Dinsmore-Tuli: “Please, Humans – Get Some Sleep!” Listening to Yoga Nidrā Shakti Devī – Goddess of Rest
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.
Yoli Maya Yeh is a Yoga & Shiatsu Therapist & Educator in Comparative Religions & Global Studies, working at intersections of Indigenous Preservation, Healing Arts & Social Justice through her experiential education-based Decolonization Toolkit. Raised in her family’s Native American spiritual teachings, she spent 12 years of young adulthood studying language, yoga, tantra, healing arts & meditation in India.
Umā Dinsmore-Tuli and Yoli Maya Yeh are collaborative educators from the Yoga Nidra Network, a radical post-lineage organisation training yoga nidrā facilitators to make yoga nidrā freely accessible to all humans in their mother tongue. Umā is a yoga therapist and writer whose books include Yoni Shakti, Nidrā Śakti, and Yoga Nidrā Made Easy.
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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