Mother of Time, the missing link

"Grand Mother", Clay, 2" x  3" x  2",  Shaktima Brien

     The missing link of our dysfunctional society lays into the forgotten, original Mother archetype, the eternal feminine.

Wisdom used to be transmitted from generations to generations of women through songs, tales, work and confidences. Many were lost, but many linger in our genes and DNA today.

The reintegration of the feminine consciousness is unfolding, as women and men are developing both sides of the brain.

Accelerating spontaneous creativity, and accessing knowledge of all times via Internet, give everybody a better perspective of who we are and our dormant potential.

Filling the dots with information that have been missing for thousand years, there is no secret to hold back or place to hide anymore.

We don't have to fear what we don't know, as we are shedding light on everything.

Human consciousness is now living in an eternal renewable space, where all in-betweens and under worlds are linked, and rendered accessible.

In the light of prehistoric remembrances, we are becoming aware of our supernatural gifts and use it. Divinity is within, as opposed to divinity without that was acting as parent or father figure to keep us as puer aeternae, eternal children.

We don't have to count on a savior to redeem us from sins. We are rising ourselves to supreme intelligence, enlightenment, acknowledging our individual responsibilities, conscious of the repercussion of our acts on the whole.

Each individual is important, as each petal of a flower to be complete. Look at the lotus as a universal pattern.

We are discovering raw, earthy, spiritual, sexual, and psychic energy to heal ourselves, and save the planet NATURALLY.

Sharing Knowledge, acrylic on canvas
24" x 72" -  Shaktima Brien

E C O F E M I N I S M
the nature of women

by Shaktima   

In 1987, I went to an Ecofeminism conference at USC. I was curious to hear other women’s experiences: how they lived, made a living, felt about themselves, the world, their participation in it, their work, responsibilities, relationships and visions of the future.  Most of all, I was concerned with the extinction of the animals, AIDS, war, hunger and poverty. If tow to I wanted to see how they integrate spiritual consciousness into their daily life. If two to three species are disappearing every day, how can we think that humanity will survive? 

     I read about the "celebration of girlieness" in "A Look at the New Feminism” in the January 18, 2001 issue of the Desert Post WEEKLY.  Being “girlie” may be cute at twenty years old, but when Elizabeth Taylor pouts like a doll at seventy-five years old, it looks infantile, if not ridiculous.

     Women have a responsibility to educate their peers, younger generations, elders, children and men in the cycles of Nature: the yearly seasons as well as the seasons of life. This is Nature’s basic ecology. Living things – humans and animals - are not separated from Nature but dependant on it for survival. We rather live in the earth rather than on it. We ARE Nature. We cannot live without her.

     Our tendency toward self-destruction comes from ignoring that we are organisms living in a larger body than our individual ones. The idea of having lots of toys is fun when you are young, but eventually we realize that we have to put a lot of hours to afford this pair of boots or pants designed to make us feel better. And for what? To be approved by a clan? Should we care if we are not accepted for whom we really are, but only for the façade we erect?

     As Theresa Heredia puts it on the Ecofeminism – UCS Internet site, “It may be time to re-evaluate the meaning of the American dream”… whether they “are homeless or own an expensive house, (they) are struggling alike to survive... in both scenarios, the people lead lives filled with fear and stress."

     The return of Goddess consciousness is just that: putting things in perspective according to their degree of importance. It means respect of the subtle, the fragile equilibrium of happiness, the feminine aspect of Nature, the human body cycles, the power to conserve rather than reproduce or consume.

     Here I am, some thirteen years after the Conference, surfing the ‘Net in search of ecofeminism pages. This leads me to the USC site once again, where Gloria Orenstein and her students give their views on earth fertility, conscious participation, reproductive technology, effects of wars, saving trees, etc. Human beings can choose to do good or to do wrong. We can choose to restore original eco-balance for survival and maintenance of all.

     My grand-mother taught me long ago how intentions affect the environment and the future; how our actions nurture or destroy the world, restore or compromise its balance. This understanding made me more aware that the planet was dependent on me, you – us – to keep its fragile ecological balance.

     If life would be a big “Survivor” show, who would you let go of at first and who would you create alliances with for the survival of the tribe? Which products would you vote out that compromise human health?

     Start with the products we feed babies that are loaded with sugar, yeast and starch. Talk about ignorance! But is it ignorance or irresponsibility? Who knows? One think I do know is that we cannot afford to ignore that these foods set us on a sugar addiction, an emotional and mental roller-coaster.

     The earth is a living body in which we take physical nourishment, spiritual sustenance, emotional fulfillment, warmth, cold, and energy.

     To refine your perceptions, fast and meditate for a day once in a while. Spend some time with Nature. As for myself, I recently joined a spiritual woman named Vijali in Malibu to help create a Medicine Wheel. She uses her art served as a public ritual for social transformation. We danced all night to the spirit of the drums, our hearts pulsating in unison.

     "Draw me a picture! Show me an image! Give me Paradise!" scream thirsty souls in search of inspiration.

     “If I cannot feel Heaven, give me at least a sample of it!" I subliminally hear through movies, commercials, TV and magazines. "Give me illusions - even artificial ones - but keep the dream alive" shout our hearts. Having lost touch with the soil, we are starving for meaning (the real thing). We are good at playing "make believe" - from Disneyland to Monopoly. Everybody finds ways to sell you smiles and happiness in exchange for your dollars. Spend, buy, consume! Fake for reality! "Knowledge is a commodity," says artist Jamie Hardt, who sculpts the Great Mother Earth in sacred rocks and boulders all over the world.

     Food is not real anymore. Carrots and tomatoes don't taste like real carrots and tomatoes. You just have to take a trip to France or Italy to remember. Our crops are boosted with artificial chemicals like our inflated heads are with artificial values.

     We dream of being rich, but in reality, most of us will simply live simply all our life. There is enough for everyone, if we don’t take more than what we need. What is this obsession we have with possessions and accumulations? We feed ourselves with images      that equate happiness with money, so we try to look happy, showing off our acquisitions, pretending. It looks funny, if not pathetic, when observed from a distance. At different periods of our life, we sometimes act like we are above the situation. The reality is that we may be hiding the truth, living above our means, on credit, feeling like clowns, a clones and fools.

     There is a current idea that pushes us to acquire "the most and as soon as possible" to retire afterwards. The abominable truth is that by age 65, one doesn't know how to live and what to do anymore. Zest for life disappears, when you feel like a looser. If the experience and wisdom you have accumulated in a lifetime is not transmitted to younger generations, like becomes stale.

     Life is a fleeting gift, - a learning and a growing process that may be forgotten as soon as the first paid job comes along. Beware of getting caught up in the wheel of fortune, because when questioning disappears, so do the dreams we cherished as children. 

     To grow into responsible individuals, couples, families and communities, each and every one’s creativity must be supported, encouraged and nurtured, so that we can live on the model of the Medicine Wheel and deep ecology.

     Continuous education for all results in a healthy productive beehive.

     As each of us unfolds his or her blueprint, so flourishes an abundance of skills, products and information that are beneficial to the whole of humanity. Imagine a world that doesn't engender cancer.

     Why are we still producing or consuming health-threatening foods or beverages? Are there no other choices? There are. Some companies are already coming up with Colas that boost your immune system, rather than degenerate your cells. What a difference it will make when we will be able to brush elbows with people who feel good about themselves, rather than feeling helpless, depressed and wasted! People are the most precious raw resource energy we have.

     I believe that each and every one of us holds in his and her heart a vision of love and light for all human beings. I believe this why we are here: to learn what the Mother has to say.

  DESERT POST WEEKLY - January 2001

‘The Goddess Journey’ by Mona M. de Crinis

        She waits in a small studio in Desert Hot Springs. The interviewer is running late, but she remains calm, unaffected, preparing herbal tea for her tardy guest. When the journalist gets there, she smiles, waving away the apologies that spit out of her visitor’s mouth like so many useless watermelon seeds. Her serenity envelopes the room, a room alive with her paintings and the works of some of her peers. Her peaceful, intuitive presence reaches out to the interviewer, stroking a psyche in sore need of a rejuvenating hug of calm. Her guest breathes in deeply and lets out a sigh upon which travels the burden and stress of life in this new millennium.

The artist, Shaktima, however, seems to take the 21^st century in stride. It is as though, she has learned how to harness her boundless energy, allowing it to burst forth in creative explosions rather than exasperation. The work found in her studio is wild, untamed, inspired, and delightfully raw, kind of like the emotions that fuel her desire to create.

“My art comes from the need to engage in a metaphorical journey into greater awareness,” she asserts.

“All the emotions of fear, anger, guilt and love have to be expressed. In the beginning, painting was a form of catharsis, which led to questioning and meditation. I needed to realize the essence and life force energy that inhabit human beings.”

Shaktima is an artist, writer and teacher who developed “The Goddess Journey,” a body of work consisting of 33 paintings, as an adventure into the feminine essence (intuition, psyche, soul and everlasting renewal). Her paintings are acrylic on canvas, single panels and triptychs. “With triptychs,” she adds, I create sacred spaces which sometimes include altars. Many of the images and symbols used are designed to reveal the subtle realms of consciousness, when body, mind and spirit reunite.”

Shaktima a.k.a. Brien was born in Montreal, Canada. She graduated from the University of Quebec with a degree in communications. Although she possesses no formal education in art, Shaktima chose to follow her heard regardless: “I am a shaman-artist. I channel the spirit for the people to see what is beyond what we see with our physical eyes. I decided to follow my dream or the light at the end of the tunnel, and that led me to California, where I started to paint on floors and walls my encounters with the Unknown, what society ignores – the Essence – and that led me to the discovery and revelations of the great Goddess, the great forgotten Cosmic Mother.”

From Gaea to the Black Madonna to the Mary, the Godmother, Shaktima finds in Goddess dreams, visions and images – reflections of the Feminine spirit, soul, psyche and sexuality.

Striving to free herself, and break through the fears and taboos of current society, Shaktima’s desire is “to reclaim her natural power, role and responsibility as matriarch.”

“Breaking through means to realize myself totally : body, mind, spirit, sex and psyche; to know and experience everything you want to; to develop your sexuality, your spirituality; to not get married (if you don’t want to), not have children, travel alone, be an artist, a writer… whatever,” she says. “If you know what you are doing, you are repeating yourself.”

Her work is broad and holistic. With a deep interest in spiritual nature, Shaktima’s Goddess is negative space or a container (matrix) offering continuous transformation in order to achieve ecological, global and individual balance.

“When I refer to Goddess as negative space, I’m referring to what we don’t see, the dark, what we are afraid of. The unknown is only frightening when we travel without light.”

Through her work, she hopes to emphasize the importance of restoring the spirit, the sexual and the consciousness that, she believes is at the heart of all we do.

“My paintings come from revelations. They are images that surge from different states of awareness; harmony, order and balance within and without. Painting, for me, is channeling.”

The Process

        Although an intuitive artist, Shaktima admits she enjoys certain rituals when she paints.

“To keep balance and sanity in my life, I close my door to the world, put the phone away and unwind by doing nothing. This is what I call “reaching the void to receive inspiration (information).”

“I usually put on some music to tune into alpha-theta waves and go through the moods of the hour – joy, confusion or sadness. It is important to feel where I am at. As the state of the soul surfaces, I go with the flow and let it be…

“I may suddenly feel the need to play with yellows, so I sort out all the yellow hues I have and pour them onto the canvas according to an inner rhythm that takes over my being; it is a pleasurable dance. Red! Yes, I add some red for its sensuality as my pulse increases. A feverish trance takes over my will. No more mind, only vibrations.

“As I walk around and on the canvas, I play with colors and shapes. New spaces and moods that don’t necessarily belong to me, but to the unconscious collective, go through me.

“And I take breaks. Lots of breaks!”

“Basically I feel good when I paint. This is how I celebrate life.”

“Goddess Art demands the conscious participation of the viewer to reveal its meaning. If you look at cave art, you may only see a buffalo, but if you become the buffalo, you become the shaman, the celebrant. There is nobody between you and the experience of being a buffalo. You know the intimate nature of what you observe when you become one with it.”

There is far too much attention paid to art as pure decoration, Shaktima believes. “You need to engage in the experience of the meaning, not look at it and say ‘Oh! I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it.’

“Shaman and Goddess art are spiritual experiences. The vision transforms you,” she says, adding that her art is like a journey in which she discovers all that society told her didn't exist. “I could only intuit that it really existed.”

Is there hope for Creativity?

        “It is not a matter of hope anymore,” Shaktima responds passionately. “Art and creativity are flourishing in the Coachella Valley, on the Internet, and on networks like MTV and HBO.

“After participating in the Arts and You Symposium in La Quinta a few weeks ago, I realized that what I had always dreamed of is happening here and now. The valley’s visionaries, artists, government, CEO’s, business, art and educational organizations are finally meeting to share their programs, projects and ideas for the development and the future [of art].

“It is happening right before our very eyes.”

For more information about Shaktima’s art

Conscious art work by Shaktima 

My continuous work theme is the awakening of human consciousness.

I am mainly interested in exploring the consciousness at this moment of time, when humanity is entering the stage of “global brain” or “universal consciousness.”

I choose to work in California because it is where the most advanced researches are made in art, science, spirit, ecology and technology. Artists, scientists, ecologists, teachers, searchers and visionaries from all over the world are meeting here to develop projects that bring about new dimensions and paradigms for a better future.

Immersed in this creative laboratory, where inspiration and realization feed each other at light speed, new languages take shape.

Lawrens S. Harris, a Canadian painter, said, “All that exist is inextricably inter-dependent in the great cosmic movement of becoming. Art is a vessel to travel at the center of this powerful electric light, creative vital energy of which human being is made of: the power to choose and to create a better reality.”

Life, death and the soul are intimately linked in my art and writing.

For the survival of the species, it is of the highest importance to free the creativity inside each human being. This will not only save us from our own destruction, but accelerate our blossoming into God+dess-like beings.

Looking forward to rally humanity in radical  changes, I come to the conclusion that it is through art and writing, images and words and storytelling that we can best transmit wisdom.

Desert Post Weekly – Thursday, November 23, 2000

HER STORY 
In the intervening years since the world began, the Goddess (archetype) has been pushed aside for a male dominated society

Barbie, Cinderella, boxy business women and pre-fab Marilyns led me to search for women's real nature before organized religions, entertainment, governments and corporations set us up to fit the parts. 

I had heard of matriarchal ways preceding patriarchal ruling, when women owned land and lived in harmony with Nature. Fertility cycles, medicinal plants and foods and animal wisdom were all important then in maintaining a sound self-sustaining eco-system for the tribe.

SEARCHING FOR GODDESS

The word Goddess appeared for the first time through the course of my Greco-Latin studies. Hera, Venus, Diana and Artemis were all mentioned, but only in relation to men's needs. Their importance regarding a healthy psychological balance for women and the world eluded me then,  because I didn't know who I was and what I was doing myself. 

It was later, in Marija Gimbutas' book "The language of the Goddess" that I discovered even more ancient evidence of Goddess as Creatora and Cosmic Mother. 

The feminine spiritual heritage, Goddess temples, statuettes and rituals, were eliminated by ambitious conquerors who didn't have any dream but to rule the world and reign over it. That is why they promoted a God above us. 

In what were called Holy Wars and Crusades, Goddess culture (women, freedom and nature) were systematically rejected to be replaced by organized religions to better shape and tame the conquered. 

To insure the implementation of the new order, Goddess celebrations, gatherings, initiations and educations into women and nature mysteries became the holidays, masses and sacraments we know today.

CHANGING THE WORLD

Known around the world as Gaea, Amaterasu, Kuan Yin or a thousand of other names, Goddess reflected the multi-dimensional facets of life. 

With the beginning of modern civilization, She became He, a supreme God who reigned by fear, demanded total adoration and manifested an obvious displeasure of women, nature and the animals. 

As intimacy with the body was forbidden, so were the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge prohibited to "fallen creatures born in sin". 

That was the beginning of the New Roman world order. Through world evangelization, new subjects became blind devotees separated from their inner power and their Self. 

Manipulated into letting the first religious and political institutions dictate their lives, people lost their individual grasp, destiny, freedom and independence.

GODDESS RETURNS

Before the past 6,000 years of domination, there was only symbiosis with the great Mother, the Eternal Feminine, from Sumeria to the Americas, passing by Mesopotamia, India, China, Tibet, Japan and the South Pacific. 

"We all come from the Goddess,

And to her we shall return,

Like a drop of rain,

Flowing to the ocean..."

       "On Wings of Song." 

The triune Goddess of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, whose images, statues and sacred objects have recently been rediscovered, reflects the cycles of life, death and rebirth (resurrection), in the same terms that Jesus talked about. Yes, we are eternal beings. 

What was initially a Mother, Spirit and Son trinity was turned into a Father, Spirit and Son trinity. Where the two sexes were honored and represented, only one was left to be obeyed. 

The calendar, which had always been composed of 13 months, according to women's moons or cycles of fertility (menses), was squared off into 12 months, which had the disastrous effect to dis-aligned earth and its inhabitants with the wheel of time, consequently making us fall from our natural axis. 

This severed connection with the "original clock" has made us dysfunctional, unwise and sick. Consequences are felt through ecological breakdown, chaos, overpopulation, violence, rape, mental illness, emotional disarray and spiritual dryness.  

Loosing touch with the Mother matrix, we have lost touch with our natural instinct for preservation. Living in harmony with Nature is the secret of Peace and Abundance. 

No wonder, Goddess rituals were celebrated in tune with the seasons. 

They had the natural power to attune people's soul to Nature's spirit. 

No more seed were sown than needed. The same for human reproduction; no more children were conceived than the community could handle - no more, no less, no waste. 

The Pithy of Delphi once said to Pythagoras, the first recognized mathematician of our civilization that "reason leaves out the organic, the intuitive and the natural". Indeed! Reason has led us to ignore our Primal Source of Life. 

Plants, animals, sex and dreams are essential to Health, Harmony, Magic, Transcendence, Higher Intelligence, Ecstasy, Meditation, Mediation for two, Union with All and Spiritual Revelation. 

In their book "Amor and Psyche" Erich Newman and Ralph Manheim say that with the development of the Western civilization "feminine existence is almost entirely determined by the masculine world of consciousness and its values". 

It is all changing now!

Bibliography:
Gimbutas, Marija, "The Language of the Goddess", Harper & Row, 
Publishers, San Francisco, 1989;
Newman, Erich and Manheim, Ralph, "Amor and psyche: The Psychic 
Development of the Feminine", Princeton University Press, New 
Jersey, 1990;
Gass, Robert, "From the Goddess, On Wings of Song," Spring Hill 
Music,  Boulder, Colorado, 1989.
                                                  

Desert Weekly, July 6, 2000

GODDESSES

Sex Goddesses, Goddesses of the Kitchen, Divas we see on TV or those who publish books, all are expressing themselves, making a living with their passion. Bravo! We need their inspiration. There are for all tastes. I embrace women who call themselves Goddesses in the bedroom and at the office.

As the Mother Goddess archetype is missing in modern Eastern and Western civilizations, the invisibility, absence and ignorance of Shekkinah, Sophia, Gaia have enormous repercussions in how women and men perceive women and nature.

The feminine spiritual heritage is buried under 6,000 years of male views of the world. What do we know of the Trinity Goddess? What do we know of the lost feminine spiritual heritage?

My work is in the tradition of "The Language of the Goddess" by Marija Gimbutas, archeologist and UCLA professora.

More visions are needed from women and men, -- who have or are developing their feminine side, -- in education, art, spirituality, politics, entertainment and world leadership.

Awaken your Goddess...