ANTHOLOGIES with CONTRIBUTIONS
by VAJRA MA
(from earliest to most recent)
 “Woman
Mysteries of the Ancient Future Sisterhood,” in
Daughters of the Goddess:
Studies in Healing, Identity and Empowerment, Wendy Griffin, ed. Alta
Mira, 2000.
|
|
 “Sekhmet
Power,” and “Banquet” (poem) in The Heart of the Sun: An Anthology in
Exaltation of Sekhmet, Anne Key and Candace Kant, eds. iUniverse, 2011. |
|
“The Natural Spiritual Authority of Woman” in Voices of the Sacred Feminine:
Conversations to Re-Shape our World, Karen Tate, ed. Changemakers Books,
2014.
|
|
"The Body is My Bible” in Stepping Into Ourselves: An Anthology of Writings
on Priestesses, Anne Key and Candace Kant, eds. Goddess Ink, Ltd. 2014. |
|
 “The
Tantric Dance of Feminine Power in the Fourth Wave of Feminism,” in Foremothers
of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries, Miriam
Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble, eds. Teneo Press, 2015. |
|
 “The
Universe is Her Form” in Female
Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics'
War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights, Ruth Barrett, ed.
|
|
| “Beauty, Fat and Yoga” in Yoga and Body
Image, vol, 2, Melanie Klein, ed. (to be released 2017) |
|
|
|
TESTIMONIALS
|
"I
have taken countless workshops, teachers and trainings, but the Tantric
Dance with Vajra Ma is the deepest, most powerful work I have ever experienced.
It goes past all the other therapies--it takes you directly into yourself.
It is the most quickly transformative and pure work I have ever seen.
I'd love for my mother, my grandmother and all the women in my life to
have this."
Gimel
Everett, film producer
"The
beauty, power and deliciousness of your dance at the Rafael and Kutira
concert last week is still with me. You embodied Creation Herself
for me. Thank you for the dance. Thank you for you."
Cheryl
Medicine Song, psychotherapist and singer/songwriter
"I'm
very excited with these revelations (among a multitude) that have been
coming up through the dance for me - and already they are impacting
my acting and my writing in a way that no class ever has. And best of all,
they come from within the divine. I look
forward
to more wisdom, and am grateful for receiving all of this."
"You
pass on such valuable information both verbally and on a subtle energetic
level. I honestly had no idea what I had signed up for and on a cognitive
level, I still don't know. It was so wonderful to just be in my body
and follow your direction. I don't have a
conscious
description of what specifically I am talking about, but on a deep level,
I feel this is the truth and I am grateful for it."
Georgia
Farber, teacher
"Vajra's
teaching is transformative, wise and deeply reverent. I am still
moved in countless ways by the lingering energy of this powerful workshop."
Cheryl
Medicine Song, therapist and singer/songwriter
.
. after a one-day Tantric Dance workshop:
"I
have never been so artistically creative in my life. I was up until
3 am painting in a medium I was not familiar with. The watercolors
literally taught me how to use them! The next night I had an extraordinary
four hour kundalini experience with my lover."
Melinda
Vaughan, movement instructor
"Vajra's
Tantric Dance is on a par with Yoga and Tai Chi. It is the woman's
way of moving meditation."
Callie
Wight, therapist
"I
was so impressed with how quickly I cleared blocked Shakti energy through
the Tantric Dance of Feminine Power that I invited Vajra to teach a workshop
at Shambhala."
Tara
Marcus, body therapist and Tantra teacher, owner of Shambhala Valley Ranch.
"Studying
the Tantric Dance of Feminine power with Vajra has unlocked ancient body
memory and wakened my deepest feminine power! This sacred dance brought
Tantra into an expanded, magnetic dimension for me."
Dawn
Cartwright, founder Chandra Bindu Institute
"This
is deep powerful work that is the bedrock of the soul! The Dance has uncovered
parts of myself that were buried so deeply they were almost non-esistent."
Chere
Rae
"In
the infomercial industry we have a phrase we use when the testimonials
are extraordinary. We say 'and it raised my mother from the dead.'
These are the kind of testimonials I hear from women doing the Tantric
Dance, like it 'raised their mother from the dead.' Having studied
with you, now, I know what they mean. Thank you so much for this
work."
Gabriella
D., infomercial producer
"The
Tantric Dance is the most life-changing thing I have done besides giving
birth to my son."
J.T.,
writer
|
MORE
HIDDEN
STREAM
TESTIMONIALS
 |
"This woman still awes me with her capacity
to put into language an orientation that is not bound to any one tradition.
It's the tradition of humanity and woman as the carrier of life. All my
students should have this book."
Nita Rubio, yogini, master teacher
of The Tantric Dance of Feminine Power
|
|
 |
Required reading for Temple priestesses.
Virtually a "compact bible" for women.
Ava Park, founder of The GODDESS
TEMPLE of Orange County
and The Queen Teachings
|
|
 |
This may be the biggest little book on the
planet today.
Wolfgang Nebmaier, author,
editor, naturopath
|
|
 |
The size of the book is perfect. A sacred
text to be sure. I consider this book a reference, a guide, an inspiration,
an authoritative text.
Lori Richards, psychotherapist,
educator
|
|
 |
As soon as I opened it I couldn't put it
down. So much knowledge and wisdom compacted in this small book. Every
word so potent, every paragraph filled with information, nothing wasted.
I had many splashes of goosebumps through out the book…I wish that this
message flows out into the world like the living stream of wisdom that
it is.
Larise Kia, artist
|
|
|
SAMPLES
from A HIDDEN
STREAM
| Hidden just beneath the surface of our
experience there flows a living stream, untainted by the poisons of fear,
ignorance and greed. Though deliberately erased from view for the few millennia
called history, this stream cannot really be eradicated because it is the
source of everything, often also named the animating force of the cosmos.
To those who let themselves feel it, this hidden stream is a visceral reality.
And to those who shed the blinders of materialistic indoctrination it is
visible in everything. The tantrics of yogic science call it “spanda”.
In the ancient Indian tradition of the Divine Mother, it is called “Shakti”
the Feminine Power. It is the oldest spiritual lineage on Earth, humanity’s
more than 200,000 years of universal reverence for the source of life:
The Great Cosmic Mother.
~~~
I was 35 years old before the idea of a Mother
creator was introduced to me, a concept which seemed strange to me at first,
but once I was over the inertia of my conditioning, it made much more sense
than its reversal. And once given the clues, by Mary Daly and many other
feminist authors, to decipher the reversal which had demonized the Great
Mother, I proceeded to reverse the reversal in my own consciousness. I
opened Pandora’s Box! True to the Great Reversal this box was not filled
with curses, dangers and evils, as in the patriarchal distortion of Pandora’s
original story, but with the rich and varied gifts of a loving mother creator.
Pandora literally means “giver of all gifts”. It was filled with a legacy
of Woman’s Natural Spiritual Authority.
"WOMAN’S WHAT?"
If that is what you are thinking, then as I did
- along with a majority of the human race -, you did not know that Woman
once had spiritual authority in the world, let alone that we came by it
“naturally”. |
| ...Like most average Westerners, I grew up
in a world where partaking of the power of the vines, trees and fruit was
as suspect as the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The ancient
symbols of the Great Mother’s serpentine life force rising through the
human body, especially the female body, the Tree of Life, had been reversed
into symbols of evil.
In reality we do not experience a split between
the physical and the spiritual. Neither reality nor human experience provide
for such a dichotomy. In fact, from Woman’s motherhood and from the nature
of the female body comes a cascade of inseparable emotional, physical,
mental and spiritual dynamics that unfold naturally and spherically. This
is the basis of Woman’s natural spiritual authority. ...
I had been walking the path of Goddess spirituality
for nearly twenty years before this particular string of words came to
my mind: “woman's natural spiritual authority”. Though women’s spiritual
authority is a re-claiming that is central to the Goddess feminist women’s
spirituality movement, I had never seen this exact string of words before.
It came to me as I was preparing a lecture for a community which had become
vitally important to me, The Goddess Temple of Orange County, founded by
Ava Park. Years before I had encountered feminist author Vicki Noble’s
term “female spiritual authority” and probably tucked it away in a corner
of my mind. But the word “natural” in the context of spiritual authority
catalyzed a cascade of connections and realizations that reverberated in
my body and has continued to multiply and expand even as I write this book... |
| ...We will look at what Natural Spiritual
Authority is, how it differs from the imposed and enforced dogmas and doctrines
of the patriarchal paradigm. Because what grows naturally from Woman's
natural spiritual authority is love, protection, nurturance and guidance
of the life she has created, not only for her physical children, but for
all life.
We will see the relationship between natural
authority and responsibility. When we look at reality, the world around
us, we see that what authors life has authority in relation to that life
and this authority is inseparable from responsibility. Authority in relation
to, not force or might over. We will see how relationship is the determining
factor in natural authority.
We will investigate how the dynamics of Woman’s
body and psyche unfold naturally into a comprehensive and therefore spiritual
authority. Fundamental aspects of this are:
-
The womb’s power to create physical life, to
be conduit of descendants, children, the channel for the future.
-
The womb as spiritual creator by being a dreaming
and visioning organ. During menses, Woman's perception naturally extends
beyond the apparent boundaries of time and space as defined -- or confined
-- by our rudimentary five senses.
-
This makes the womb a conduit for the Ancients,
the Ancestors, and channel of cosmic knowledge. The womb maintains what
I call the Ancient Future Sisterhood.
-
With its spherical, holistic, and sensate awareness,
Woman’s body in its totality is a sophisticated and supremely subtle, exquisitely
nuanced calibrator of reality, of the sexual-spiritual continuum, of ecstatic
spirituality. This also makes women shamans, healers, midwives and doctors.
A Chukchee proverb from Siberia spells it out: "Woman is by nature a shaman".
|
| True authority is grounded in humility. Humus,
the root word of humility, refers to the ground itself, to the soil, often
also called dirt. Without dirt to hold the roots, there is no source, and
we all wither and die. There can be no authority without creating, that
is, no authority without authorship, and there can be no creating that
is not rooted in Source...
A life-giving source authors life naturally.
Authority thus is an inherent part of life. There would be no life without
it. After all, authority it is not at all an artificial, abstract imposition
on the freedom of others. Authority is where life comes from.
The best pattern for authority in nature is
its fundamental manifestation in mother and offspring. It is not imposed
and it never really ends but expands into being an integral part of the
experience of life. Mothers lead their baby, cub, kid, foal or calf through
the early, formative processes of life. For good reason, one of the oldest
epiphanies of the Goddess is the lioness. She is an incomparable mother,
protector and provider.
The lioness who creates her cubs is supremely
responsible to them. She protects, guides, warns and sets limits. And these
limits, warnings, and guidelines are not arbitrary or artificial, or abstract
concepts, separated from reality but inextricably linked to it. She provides
food, guards against predators and knows when to hide or run for safety.
The mother exercises the authority over her offspring not in an ego fest
of domination, but on their behalf, in service to them, in natural interrelationship
with them. The babies know this and their response to her authority is
the very thing that enables them to survive and mature into adulthood.
The same is true for a woman and her child
and her responsibility to care for that child. This is natural, and there
is nothing as natural as this. Of herself, no mother would relinquish or
neglect her child, let alone let it be whisked away to undergo any number
of unnecessary, alienating and traumatizing procedures. Naturally, a mother
nurtures, protects, teaches. As such, woman has authority over that child,
a natural authority born of her responsibility for the life of that child...
|
|
|
