In Fia’s Footprints: A Return to the North

As part of her Waterfall of Wisdom Tour 2019, Fia Forsstrom is guesting Northern Light Yoga Sunday July 7th at 20.00. In this interview, she writes about her return to the north and reuniting her ancestral lands with the vibrations of her soul-stirring voice.

In December 2014 the ‘Action and Research Centre’ of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce) published a report of a two-year conversation about why spirituality needed to play a greater role in the public realm.

The report argues that “the spiritual injunction is principally an experiential one, namely to know oneself as fully as possible. For many, that means beginning to see beyond the ego and recognise being part of a totality, or at least something bigger than oneself” (Rowson, 2014).

Referring to the epidemic of loneliness associated with big city living, the report muses: “We are all surrounded by strangers who could so easily be friends, but we appear to lack cultural permission not merely to ‘connect’ — the opium of cyberspace — but to deeply empathise and care” (p.7).

Trying to heal causes instead of symptoms, the report calls for “the spiritual to play a greater role in the public realm, because it highlights the importance of personal and social and political transformation” (p.8). It asks the important question: “How can we best speak of the spiritual in a way that helps us understand how best to live?”

Reflecting on Martin Luther King’s insight that “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic” and his observation that “it is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time” (see also Kahane, 2010), the report calls for the spiritual practice of tapping “into the deep source of our own power and love” and embarking “on a lifelong challenge to bring them together in practice” (Rowson, 2014: 59).

The RSA project reviewed how deeper questioning into the nature of love creates a sense of belonging. Inquiry into death helps us live a deeper life. Questioning the nature of our ‘self’ catalyses personal transformation; and exploring the nature of the soul gives our life meaning and informs our creative expression (p.78).

The final report suggests a need to revitalize spirituality in order to more deeply address the challenges of the 21st century. Deep questioning into the nature of the soul will inevitably lead us to rediscover the soul of nature. Richard Tarnas writes in Cosmos and Psyche:

Not only our personal lives but the very nature of the universe may demand of us now a new capacity for self-transcendence, both intellectual and moral, so that we may experience a new dimension of beauty and intelligence in the world — not a projection of our desire for beauty and intellectual mastery, but an encounter with the actual unpredictably unfolding beauty and intelligence of the whole […] the open encounter with the potential reality of an anima mundi makes possible its actual discernment. In this view, only by opening ourselves to being changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand will we be able to understand at all. — Richard Tarnas (2007: 487)

Questions that invite us to explore the relationships between the intimate and the ultimate also help us to understand who we are and to find our place in the wider community of life and within a living and transforming cosmos.

By living these questions together, the process of collective meaning-making in the face of uncertainty can itself become our guide and inform our appropriate participation.

Bill Plotkin describes soul as our ‘ultimate place’. “David Whyte speaks of the soul as ‘the largest conversation a person is capable of having with the world’. Here ‘conversation’ is the poet’s way of saying relationship. […] the largest relationship a person can have with the world is the same as his ‘ultimate place’” (2008: 36–37).

To find our ultimate place in the world, we have to enter into a deeper conversation with each other, with nature and with the cosmos. We have to explore: how do we belong? Where are we? Who are we? What are we here to do? In living into these questions more deeply we might live into the answer to the question: why we are worth sustaining?

Bill Plotkin offers his seminal book Nature and the Human Soul as a “contribution to the global effort to create a viable human-Earth partnership” and bases his exploration on three premises: i) “a more mature human society requires more mature human individuals”, ii) “nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation”, and iii) “every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood.” He adds: “True adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience — in a mystical affiliation with nature, experienced as a sacred calling — that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities.”

Plotkin lays out a model for individual human development that offers “a narrative of how we might grow whole, one life stage at a time, by embracing nature and soul as our wisest and most trustworthy guides” and “a strategy for cultural transformation, a way of progressing from our current egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition-based, class-stratified, violence-prone and unsustainable).”

Bill Plotkin explores why being truly human is only possible in relationship with the natural world and how our soul and the soul of nature as our larger being are not separate but co-arise. “All places and all things and all roles speak to us, if only we have the ears to listen. Likewise, your soul, your ultimate place, evokes something from you, wants something from you, speaks to you, sometimes in a quiet voice, sometimes in a roar” (2008: 39). He speaks of “living the questions of soul” in reference to Rilke’s letter to a young poet, cited at the start of this book. [This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

In this letter, Rilke encourages the young poet to spend time in nature paying attention to the little things “that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring”; and his advice for finding one’s true work in the world is “to go into yourself and test the depths in which your life takes rise” (in Plotkin, 2008: 280). The encouragement to seek solitude and insight in nature and the advice to go within are mutually reinforcing. In John Muir’s words:

I only went for a walk and finally concluded to stay out til sundown, for going out, I found was really going in. — John Muir

Ecology and spirituality are two sides of the same coin — understanding and making sense of our own interbeing with the world, and our interdependence. You can enter into an embodied experience of wholeness and meaning through the door of the natural world or through spiritual practice. In fact, the two are ultimately not separate but they are pathways to the same oneness of existence in and through relationships. A oneness we experience most of the time from the limited perspective created by the ‘illusion of separation’.

If we want to reconstitute this oneness — the whole whose conscious reflections we are — we need to do so through the way we create meaning together and through the narrative we tell about our interbeing.

Making time for solitude in wild nature helps us to have the largest conversation we are capable of having with the world. Communion with wild nature helps us embody our ultimate place and act wisely in recognition of our kinship with all life.

Parker J. Palmer (2004) reminds us that “to understand true self — which knows who we are in our inwardness and who we are in the larger world — we need both the interior intimacy that comes with solitude and the otherness that comes from community” (p.54).

Palmer calls the soul “that life giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness” and continues “when we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world — in the family, in the neighbourhood, in the workplace, and in political life” (p.2).

Deep listening can help us catch sight of the soul: listening to our inner voice, listening to our community, listening to wild nature, listening for wholeness. Without listening for wholeness, truth and beauty we will not find the answer to why we are worth sustaining — the key to regeneration.

Up North, in the wilderness, I sense the wholeness “hidden in all things” [Thomas Merton]. It is in the taste of the wild berries, the scent of sun-baked pine, the sight of the Northern Lights, the sound of water lapping the shore, signs of bedrock integrity that is eternal and beyond doubt. And when I return to a human world that is transient and riddled with disbelief, I have new eyes for the wholeness hidden in me and my kind and a new heart for loving even our imperfections. — Parker Palmer (2004: 5)

The article was originally published on Medium, and the text is an excerpt of a subchapter from Wahl’s Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Daniel Christian Wahl is a glocal educator, activist and consultant, generalized in whole systems design and transformative innovation for regenenerative cultures. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’. The text is based on reflections from the Ashoka ‘Global Change Leaders’ gathering to promote transformative innovation in education.

Daniel is also the driving force behind Gaia Education - Design for Sustainability, an online programme offering students whole systems design skills, analytical abilities and practical tools to support the redesign of the human presence on Earth, one local community and bioregion at a time.

What does it mean to be a ‘Weaver’? - Daniel Christian Wahl

A weaver is someone who knows how to bridge between the different silos and sectors of society. S/he has mastered the art of connecting people and organizations who were previously unconnected and often even unaware of each others role along the complex value chain of education. This value chain is much more like a deeply interconnected ecosystem than a linear chain from kindergarten to schools, apprenticeships, universities or occupational training facilities and onto employment or entrepreneurship.

There was a lot of talk in Lyon at the ‘Global Change Leaders’ gathering on transforming education about the role of the ‘weaver’ in supporting the emergence of learning ecosystems. There was agreement that whole systems prototypes would have to demonstrate just what complexity a learning ecosystem could grow to and how weaving diverse stakeholders in education — which, let’s face it, all of society and civilization have a stake in — would enable everyone to learn how to “live for the greater good”. There was also much agreement that such prototypes would best be (bio-)regionally focussed and elegantly adapted to the uniqueness of local culture and ecosystems.

I have spent the last two decades weaving relationships, shared meaning, and collaborative agendas between experimental ecovillages communities and universities, sustainability training centres and the private sector, local authorities and UN bodies like UNITAR and UNESCO, non-formal education and formal eduaction, civil society organizations, grass-roots activists and the UN sustainable development process, between science and design, biomimetic innovation and whole systems design … .

With degrees from two different science departments and a school of art and design — I make my living by weaving content, meaning and capacity to catalyze transformative innovation and creating educational experiences that improve people’s capacity for whole systems design and regenerative development. Actually so much of this work as been unpaid that it might be misleading to say ‘I make a living’, much more than that, it is my calling.

In Gaia Education we call the person trying to integrate the content of the 4 dimensions of the curriculum into an interconnected whole systems understanding of sustainability the weaver. By always challenging our students to apply what they have learned in the design of a real project, in a real place for real people (even if they only work on a detailed plan for the interventions), we invite them to weave their own understanding into a whole systems design. The role of the weaver is part of each EDE course run by one of Gaia Education’s 80 partners around the world.

In asking myself what kind of work does a weaver do? I realized that so many of the organizations I have worked with are networks involved in one of the three dimensions described by Joanna Macy as part of the Great Turning from ‘industrial growth societies’ to ‘life-sustaining societies’. These are: i)holding actions that aim to stop further damage, ii) building new systems and prototypes, and iii) ‘seeing with new eyes’ (shifting the way we think through whole systems design and transformative education).

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy explains three dimensions of the Great Turning - from industrial growth societies to life-sustaining societies: slowing down, creation of sustainable structures, and a shift in consciousness.

To give you a flavour of my own trajectory as a weaver between institutions and organizations. I have worked with and/or for the International Futures Forum, the Global Ecovillage Network, the State of the World Forum, Bioneers, the World Future Council, UK Foresight, the World Resource Institute, the Dubai Futures Foundation, Gaia Education with it’s global network of over 80 partner institutions in 50 countries and partnerships with UNESCO and UNITAR, Transition Town initiatives in different countries, permaculture networks in different countries, WWF Scotland, 350.org, the ‘Common Earth’ (Regenerative Development to Reverse Climate Change) initiative of the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Cloudburst Foundation, an EU Learning Partnership in Creative Sustainability, Forum for the Future, LEAD International, the European Council Network and Youth in Action, various universities and design schools, as well as, the local ‘technological innovation in tourism’ business cluster on Mallorca (Balears.t). So much for my credentials for having sought out working environments with high ‘weaving potential’.

Some reflections on what it means to be a weaver

Allow me to sense into and share my thoughts on what might be part of the palette of a weaver, useful tools, skills, experiences that ground a person into becoming or being a weaver.

Being a weaver is less a profession and more of a ‘Berufung’ — the German word for profession is ‘Beruf’ — the root is ‘Berufung’, which means one’s calling.

Are you feeling called to be a weaver of health and wholeness in this fractured and divided world of ours?

A weaver speaks the language of different disciplines and silos of knowledge well enought and understands enough about each of them in order to effectively broker conversations across these different fields.

A weaver is skilful in finding the right entry points and hooks to weave meaningful connections that can be easily appreciated from either side of the intellectual or institutional divides s/he is spanning.

Speaking different languages can help a weaver in translating between the different cultural and intellectual bubbles created by, for example anglophone, francophone, germanic or hispanic cultures.

Much weaving is needed in today’s world to nurture an alliance for a common humanity and a common Earth between China, India, Africa, Latin America and countries of waning cultural dominance in Europe and the US.

A weaver needs to be able to emphasize with the needs and perspectives of all those s/he is trying to connect into collaborative exchange and co-creative action.

More than that, weaving requires to nurture a field of empathy that involves and attracts ever more diverse collaborators — galvanized by mutual understanding, growing trust, and shared meaning and vision.

If there is such a thing as ‘deep-weaving’, it refers to reconnecting our story-lines and song-lines to our deeper human ancestry — and beyond that — to our individual and collective authority as conscious reflections of life’s 3.8 billion years of evolutionary wisdom.

Weaving even deeper into our past, we find our place in the cosmic story of the universe of 14 billion years. Yes, we are made from star-dust. The gold atoms in your parents’ wedding band were forged in the immense pressure and heat of a dying star!

Deep-time weaving also reconnects the generations alive today with their own care and responsibility for yet unborn generations who will inherit the Earth in whatever state we are leaving her.

Deep-weaving is about reminding people that the Iroquois Confederation of Tribes with their wise practice of taking important decisions ‘on behalf of the 7th yet unborn generation’ may have been far less ‘primitive people’ than our industrial growth societies have turned out to be.

How will we ever be able to chart the long-term arch of human cultural evolution, if we do not make it our regular practice to make wise and humble choices on behalf of future generations yet unborn?

How can we become weavers of whole systems health from individuals to families, communities, ecosystems and the biosphere, if we do not speak on behalf of rivers, forests, and wilderness for who’s rights we have to stand tall?

Weaving a deeper long-term commitment across the political spectrum on issues that affect the health and future of humanity and the community of life as a whole, is a crucial leverage point in planetary and ecosystems regeneration.

We need to weave lasting alliances — wisdom councils — that up-hold such policies and regulations which need to stand above the party-political positioning of short-term election cycles.

Weavers are called to step onto a path of apprenticeship that in itself models and embodies life-long-learning. Being a weaver is not a label one can take on lightly. Nor is it a codified practice that can be transmitted in a quick workshop.

Weaving is an expression of life’s immune response to the converging planetary crises.

By consciously (re)connecting diverse participants in life’s evolutionary quest, weavers nurture synergy, symbiosis and reciprocal relationships that improve the health of the whole. Weaving is salutogenic — health-generating — culture design.

Weaving is both audacious in it’s guiding vision of humanity’s ability to co-create a thriving world that works for all and leaves nobody behind, and humble in its embrace of not-knowing and commitment to constant learning.

The most effective weavers are those who manage to facilitated meaningful connections between people and help them co-create a common project and collective positive impact in ways that make all involved take such ownership of the project that everyone comes to believe it was their own idea.

The effective weaver engages in social and cultural acupuncture in ways that the role of the weaver can become almost invisible, yet deeply effective. At their most skillful weavers catalyse systemic, place-based, long-term projects without the need to be permanently involved with each initiative themselves.

Weavers enable learning ecosystems to rediscover their ability to learn and help themselves. This includes seeking advise from and informing the greater whole that contains them.

Weaving requires the ability to constantly link local needs and opportunities to their regional, national and global context. Weaving is about aiming to create mutually beneficial synergies between different scales.

Just like health can emerge as a scale-linking emergent property of complex adaptive systems, weaving as a vector of health has to be scale-linking by design.

Some of the collective weaving done by 250 Global Change Leaders in education during the recent event organized by Ashoka in partnership with Global Education Futures and many other partners.

Weaving is the ancient art of recognizing health and wholeness as the primary state, and overcoming the blockages of seemingly broken connections.

Weavers are healers of the unbroken whole — connecting people and place in elegant tapestries of shared meaning and visions of a world that works for all.

… the weaving continues!

… Mi vida ha sido tejer. Y mientras tejo canto la dicha y la desventura de los hombres. Canto el nacimiento de las cosas: del agua, de las piedras, del fuego que en su crepitar me acompaña haciéndome coro. Canto para no olvidar el porqué de las cosas. …

— Juan Diego Tamayo — De la tejedora

…My life has been one of weaving. And as I weave, I sing of the happiness and misfortunes of men. I sing of the birth of things: of water, of stones, of fire, which in its crackling accompanies me in song. I sing not to forget the whys and wherefores of things. …

— Juan Diego Tamayo — The Weaver

I also take the liberty to add a quote to Daniel's article - on the importance of women weavers in the global change-making community.

"Women are spinners and weavers; we are the ones who spin the threads and weave them into meaning and pattern. Like silkworms, we create those threads out of our own substance, pulling the strong, fine fibres out of our own hearts and wombs. It’s time to make some new threads; time to strengthen the frayed wild edges of our own being and then weave ourselves back into the fabric of our culture. Once we knew the patterns for weaving the world; we can piece them together again. Women can heal the Wasteland. We can remake the world. This is whatwomen do. This is our work."

— Sharon Blackie, 'If Women Rose Rooted'

Art: Amanda Sage

How Yoga Changed My Life: A Journey Into The Soul of Nature - Danielle Prohom Olson

I’ve long been a disciple of yoga. But a few years ago a Tarot card reading told me what I’d come to suspect – that working with nature was my soul work now. Arriving to this place took years, because as yoga slowly returned me to my body,., I began to discover another place within myself. One that was vast but comforting, sometimes dark, sometimes light, but always peaceful and steadying.

As I learned how to more easily ground in this inner space, I began to sense and feel things that could not be put into words, but held my attention, wanting to be named. This I noticed happened most often in nature. Walking outdoors amongst the woodlands and hills, my body would respond, breathing would slow and deepen, my spirits would lift, and a kind of bubbly sweet sensation would burble in my tummy and rise to my chest. This tingly suffused feeling I realized — was happiness!

I decided to cultivate this ‘good energy’ like prana or qi, and began to breathe mindfully fanning the flame. Then like Alice I would feel myself grow taller and lighter, my senses sharpening. I saw the tiny puddles of sun illuminating the incandescent ferns on the forest floor, the tumbling whirling activity of insects and bees, I could hear in sharp relief the songs of the birds, and the sounds of the wind as it rippled through leaves. And all this beauty filled me further, leading at moments to a kind of ecstasy.

Yoga’s gift was to bring me to this place. Learning to “see” with the eyes of my body, awakened my senses — I began to feel once again. And what I felt in nature was love, a deep reverence for the life that shone in every drop of dew, every blade of grass, and every creature. This was a revelatory experience. An epiphany of a spiritual truth that rung true to my bones. Because my body knew, without a shadow of doubt, I was in the presence of the sacred.

The holiness of nature was a vital spiritual truth for our ancestors – but Descartes’s division of spirit from matter spelled the final death knell of the old religions. The earth, trees, waters and animals were no longer living embodiments of the divine, but mechanistic processes empty of soul. And it is thus that nature became separate from us, existing outside our house walls and city streets, a resource to be used for the extraction of minerals, the building of houses and cities, capital and wealth.

Today we live in artificial environments shielded from the weather, the seasons, the cycles of the moon, the rise and fall of tides. Cut off from our bodies experience of nature, the desecration of old growth forests, the appropriation of indigenous lands and national parks for industry, the chemical poisoning of our fields and the genetic manipulation of foods, the death of bees and extinction of species, continues unabated. Clearly, we’ve forgotten another ancient truth – we are all one. Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.

I’ve spent much time pondering why so many of us – me included – can go on with our days as usual when we know the forests are falling all around us. Because if we truly loved nature, with all our heart and soul – would this continue to happen? Reconnecting with nature is an important tenet of “deep ecology”—the idea it will take more than environmental laws to achieve true sustainability.

Before ecological healing can occur, we need to re-establish our personal connection with the earth. And so I see my new path. To awaken to the old ways and wisdom of nature, to practice and teach a yoga that reawakens us to the rhythms of the earth, to the divine embodied in nature – and all of us. This is the age-old practice of bhakti, an offering of love, devotion and protection, a promise to honour the spirit of the land.

I see my work with plants, herbalism and wildcrafting as a methodology for coming into conscious alignment with the numinous cycles of growth, death and regeneration that drive all life on this planet. The ‘force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ flows through all of us. Awakening to this union with the essential nature of reality – ananda, or divine bliss – gives me the spiritual backbone I need to stand strong.

In my last card reading, my work with yoga was shown in a card filled with a large blazing fire and women dancing and leaping. This card I was told, was one of culmination, of joy and celebration. Then the reader drew another card showing a dark cave in a forest grove surrounded by wild animals. A large “shining skull” illuminated the scene. But she said, your true soul work lies somewhere deep in the mysteries of nature. And this time I’m listening.

Danielle Prohom Olson is a renowned yoga teacher and therapist, local herbalist and wild food educator. Her articles on Body Divine Yoga are widely read, and she now runs the The Yoga Apothecary, combining herbalism, ancestral food, wildcrafting and living in healing harmony with mother nature. Danielle is also the co-founder of Gather Victoria where as a wild food educator she is teaching local residents how to sustainably harvest, cook and preserve the many nourishing foods and medicinal herbs that grow in their neighbourhoods, city streets and backyards. 'How Yoga Changed My Life: A Journey Into The Soul of Nature' is the second article in a series from Danielle. Also read 'The Reclamation of the Yogini'.

The Reclamation of the Yogini - Danielle Prohom Olson

“The identification of the human woman with the Universal Goddess is most explicit in tantric theology- yet the very existence of female masters, lineage holders and tantric adepts, although referred to repeatedly by tantric texts, is still doubted by some… Here there is no quarter given to feminist spiritual yearnings, or for women mystics to seek to follow the liberating footsteps of the ancient yogini who dared to think themselves divine.” - Rita DasGupta Sherma

Eleventh-century yogini sculpture from Uttar Pradesh, India

There’s no question that the role of women in yoga has been obscured by centuries of patriarchal control. But why is it, as scholars comb through historical texts to learn more about the “authentic” roots of yoga, there is so little on the real flesh and blood women who practiced and taught yoga for hundreds, if not thousands of years?

I find this frustrating because, despite the many references to yoginis as revered adepts, “initiators” and “transmitters of doctrine” in ancient Tantric texts, contemporary yoga “history” tells us almost nothing about who they were, what they believed, or what they practiced?

As a female yoga practitioner, I want to know more about these yoginis before patriarchy demonized them as witches, harlots and the bearers of disease. And it seems to me, that women’s bodies and their functions remain just as troublesome to us today as they were for ascetic sages.

This neglect of the yogini certainly isn’t due to a lack of material. Author and academic Giti Thadani documents the neglect of historical evidence of the yogini in contemporary India. In her book Mobius Trip: Digressions from India’s Highways she tells of her discoveries of hundreds of yogini statues and Tantric texts with references to their practices “hidden in vaults in museums and universities”. Thadani travels to the sacred sites and temples of yoginis and finds them forgotten, in disrepair, or revamped in honor of male gods. And she cites many examples of written texts where the feminine of the original Sanskrit has been translated as masculine.

Loriliai Biernacki, in Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra, presents Tantric texts written in Sanskrit from the 15th to 18th century in which women appear not only as objects of reverence but as esteemed teachers and gurus. In Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism, Miranda Shaw’s research focuses on Tantric manuscripts of female authorship, and she points out these women did not see themselves as “helpful attendees in the male enlightenment process, but as religious aspirants in their own right.” The presence of the “beautiful, passionate and untamed” Vajrayogini in Tantric iconography and literature demonstrated that women could attain Buddhahood in her present lifetime, in her present female body.

And going back further, deep into prehistory, feminist author and historian Vicki Noble‘s research into the “blood roots” of yoga led her to conclude that yoginis were the “power-holders” and inheritors of an ancient, shamanic female-centred yoga practice. One that was widespread across Egypt, Crete, India to Asia, dating as early as 7000 BCE. In this these ancient shamanic cultures, women’s bodies contained life-giving energies which brought fertility, growth, longevity, material and spiritual well-being.

Noble believes that varied poses shown in early cross-cultural sculptures, seals and figurines depict women in body postures startlingly similar to yoga asana. Many show women seated with eyes closed, legs crossed over one another or standing feet together with arms raised. Some wear waist necklaces and beaded hip-belt over their pubic area, resembling later images of Indian Yoginis or Tibetan Dakinis.

Noble acknowledges such figures predate the formal codification of yoga in India by many thousands of years, but she believes they depict states that lead to “progressively deeper levels of awareness and functioning until, finally, ordinary consciousness is transcended in the bliss of ecstasy.”

Her assertions that early shamanic priestesses were the first to raise Kundalini Shakti by channelling their biological powers, their life-giving sexuality, their power to bleed and give birth through ecstatic rituals of trance, dance and body posture, are far from embraced. Deeply problematic to modern feminism, they are largely ignored by the yoga community.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is. And it seems what is in dispute is not whether these yoginis and these teachings actually existed. The issue at stake is that Noble’s interpretations of this female-centred yoga are essentialist – meaning that by celebrating the biological power of the female body, they glorify the idea of gendered difference – an idea equality feminism has been working to eradicate for decades.

Another example is Dinsmore Tuli’s book Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra. Exploring the role of women’s bodies in the early development of yoga, she invites women to reconnect to their “cunt power” through the practice of yoga that “honours and respects femininity, womb cycles and the deep cyclical wisdom of women’s bodies”.

This emphasis on women’s biology, the idea that women’s bodies are more deeply connected to the cycles of nature, threatens to reinforce old patriarchal notions that reduce women to just their biology (i.e. having a womb means one is lesser than, less smart, less rational, less civilized, less divine etc. than men). And today in our pursuit of the new idea of gender neutrality, gender essentialism has grown even more contentious. Women who wore “pussy hats” during recent Women’s Marches held across the world, were criticised for excluding those women who did not possess pussies.

Divine Mother, Alampur Museum, Hyberbad State, 8th century.

But essentialist or not, it is most likely these yoginis saw their bodies linked to the cycles of nature and a great mother goddess. According to author Laura Amazzone “Many of these goddesses have elemental energies, others contain certain powers of the natural world, and still, others emulate the powers of the female body and sexual and reproductive cycles as well as stages within a woman’s life.”

In fact, there is plenty of textual evidence supporting contentions that the yogini saw her her inherent biological powers of birth, menstruation and sexuality, as the very source of her siddhis (yogic or occult powers). As Shakti incarnate, her physiological functions and fluids were envisioned as the material manifestation of the power of the Goddess. “The shakti’s yoni is analogized to the ‘great yoni” (matrix of the universe) and her menstrual blood is a sacred substance”… “the substance causing the granting of any desire.”

It was these kinds of ideas, according to Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor in their book The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of The Earth, that became deeply threatening to the rising powers of patriarchy. They saw the body, and especially women’s bodies, not as holy, but as evil and defiled. Violating the strict class and caste structures of the ascetic Brahmanic priesthood, the yogini’s practices became dangerous “transgressions” and they were forbidden to publicly practice or teach.

And according to Sjoo and Mor, the Brahmanic priesthood not only wanted the yogini gone – they wanted her yogic powers for themselves. And in the original act of cultural appropriation, to paraphrase Noble, what was once an embodied ritual practice and ecstatic encounter with the divine feminine, became a new ascetic knowledge reserved for a male spiritual elite – and it changed the nature of what we call yoga forever.

Whether you accept these interpretations or not, it’s hard to deny that the yogini or a female tradition of yoga once existed. So by limiting our search for the historical roots of yoga within “acceptable” narratives – are we perpetuating the misogynic ideologies that sought to erase the yogini in the first place? It may well be that the yogini and her practices raise many uncomfortable questions – but does that justify overlooking her role in the development of yoga history?

I understand that we don’t want our essential being defined by our biology alone, but the yoginis saw their bodies as sources of power. After all, we practice a yoga that is hardly gender neutral, it has been historically shaped by men, for men.

So isn’t practising a yoga from which women’s bodies (and vaginas) have been censored, also oppressive to those possessing them? Our reproductive cycles shape nearly aspect of our biological function. Does practising a yoga that acknowledges women’s bodies have different cycles, functions and abilities than men, really threaten to return us to the dark days when women were discriminated against on the basis of biology?

Today we live in a time when depicting female biological functions like giving birth, breastfeeding and menstruation will get you banned from Facebook. Isn’t it high time to reclaim our biological powers and demand respect? As the great female Buddha, Vajrayogini puts it the Candamaharosana Tantra “Wherever in the world a female body is seen, That should be recognised as my holy body”.

By reclaiming the legacy of the yogini, a yoga in which the female body was divine and it’s biological processes celebrated and harnessed for healing, ecstasy, compassion, freedom and illumination, I believe we can learn something about the true meaning of “body positivity” today.

Article republished with permission from the author - read original article here.

Danielle Prohom Olson is a renowned yoga teacher and therapist, local herbalist and wild food educator. Her articles on Body Divine Yoga are widely read, and she now runs the The Yoga Apothecary, combining herbalism, ancestral food, wildcrafting and living in “healing harmony” with mother nature. Danielle is also the co-founder of Gather Victoria where as wild food educator she is teaching local residents how to sustainably harvest, cook and preserve the many nourishing foods and medicinal herbs that grow in their neighbourhoods, city streets and backyards. 'The Reclamation of the Yogini' is the first article in a series from Danielle.