Spiritual Roots

inspirational women

Many women have experienced a direct or personal experience of the sacred or the Divine through their creative expressions, through childbirth and nursing, through lovemaking, and through meditation. They do not need an intermediary such as a priest or other religious person. Many women mystics have drawn into their inner world, where they received guidance about themselves and the world around them. The few who shared their written messages were so clear and so powerful that the world heard them, and they are remembered yet today. In some parts of the world, there are still active women shamans practicing their ancient art of healing. Here are some of them . . . for inspiration.

women mystics

Hildegard of Bingen is also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages.

A married saint with 8 children, she wrote The Book of Margery Kempe. Her personal pilgrimages were caused by conflicts with her husband when she no longer wanted to have sex with him because she had devoted herself to God. She understood it was her duty to sleep with him, saying he could have her body but her soul had been given to Jesus. Kempe and her Book are significant because they express the tension in late medieval England between institutional orthodoxy and increasingly public modes of religious dissent, especially by women.

Juliana of Norwich wrote the first work in the English language which we can be sure was authored by a woman. For this fact alone she is remarkable, but she was also one of the most sophisticated and unusual theologians of her era.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl who was divinely guided to led the French army to a momentous victory at the Battle of Orleans that stopped England from conquering France during the Hundred Years War. She was captured a year afterward, deemed a heretic for her divine visions, and then as burned at the stake. She became the greatest national heroine of her time, and is credited for awakening French national consciousness.

St. Teresa of Ávila was the first of only four women to have been named doctor of the church. As a Carmeline nun, she practiced great self-denial and austerities, and abstained from worldly comforts and pleasures for religious reasons. Her Carmelite reforms shaped Roman Catholic contemplative life, and her writings on the Christian soul’s journey to God are considered masterpieces.

Helena Roerich was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, the Living Ethics teaching. Many spiritual people consider her teachings to be the highest ever recorded.

She said, “The woman’s path was a path of self-sacrifice, through heroism and incessant Giving . .. and must TEMPER HER HEART FROM UNREASONABLE GIVING.

women healers

Molfarkas

Molfarkas are women shamans who live in small villages in the Carpathian Mountains of West Ukraine. In Russian, The Russian word “Molfar” is most closely translated as “enchanted, magical object.” They can enter the magical energy of earth and its consciousness without the need for shamanic drugs, ecstatic dances or costumes. Their ability to enter this state of consciousness comes from having served Mother Earth for many, many lifetimes. They are able to cross the shamanic veils and enter the realm of natural forces in both waking and dreaming time. In the traditions of Her-Story, their expanded consciousness belonged to the realm of Spirit.

I met Ukrainian Molfarka Larissa, to the left, in 2018 through a friend. She did her healing work when not at her day job. I had several sessions with her during two years I was working intensively in Ukraine. She also was in the group of women I visited ancient sacred sites with. I felt a very deep soul connection with Larissa, and we communicated without words because we couldn’t speak each other’s language.

Udaganki

Udaganka are women shamanesses from Siberia, Mongolia, and the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. Their name was derived from the Altaic Mother Goddess of the Hearth, Etügen and the Mongolian Etügen Eke, ‘Mother Earth.’

Udaganki, who are still active in this area, serve as conductors between the Universe and the people, and can be “invisible” and “erase memory. They hear information from the past, present and future. They see and feel events, situations, gender, feelings, emotions, scenarios, limiting beliefs, blocks, illnesses. They can heal and see auras, and influence the weather, people, events. They can also change destinies, generic programs, situations, and scenarios. They remember their past lives; present life in the womb, infancy, childhood; and can fly, move objects.