Katy on Wellbeing

Women on the Edge of Evolution

(Lovely photo by Patia Stephens)

In my last post, I said that there are many pioneering women out exploring the edge of what it means to live most fully as a person and as a woman.  What it means to live your best life individually, and also as an active, evolving member of society.  Spiritual leaders, film-makers, writers, musicians, teachers, social activists, psychologists, scientists, business women.

A great way to hear and be inspired by many of them is through a terrific free tele-seminar series called "Women on the Edge of Evolution: Awakening to the power to co-create our lives and shape our collective future".  This series is produced by transformational coaches and visionaries Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit. Interested people can listen and participate on the live calls, or download recordings afterward.  Here are the talks currently available in the archives:

• Awakening the New Feminine Power - with Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas
  
• Fearless Love: Living lives of searing authenticity and audacious courage - with singer / song-writer Melissa Etheridge
  
• Answering the Call: Life is talking.  Are you listening? - with Reverend / teacher / speaker August Gold
• Celebrating the Differences in Our World: Creating a thriving global community - with speaker / author / life coach Peggy O'Neill
• Shining the Spotlight on Your Mission - with publicist / marketer Arielle Ford
• Igniting a Consciousness of Change: How to be the solution - with spiritual activist / peace-builder Eisha Mason
  
• Turning the Tide: Restoring the feminine and reclaiming our whole selves - with Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons
  
• Creativity and Co-Creativity: What women can contribute to our evolution - with mind-body integration teacher Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks
• It's Not the End of the World: Developing resilience in times of change - with integral health pioneer Dr. Joan Borysenko
• Creative Activism: How to realize your highest vision for yourself and our world - with Creative Visions Foundation founder Kathy Eldon
• Let it Shine: Activating your feminine radiance - with interfaith minister / life coach Devaa Haley Mitchell
• Doing Well While Doing Good: The power of social entrepreneurship in action - with Spryte Loriano
• Unleashing Your Passionate Creative Spirit Upon the World - with Music and Arts Director of the Agape International Spiritual Center Rickie Byers Beckwith
  
• Creating a New World: Meshworking evolutionary intelligences for the human hive - with Integral Institute founding member Dr. Marilyn Hamilton
  
• The SHIFT: A movie being made by a movement - with film-maker Rochelle Marmorstein
  
• Creating Heaven on Earth: Leading our communities toward greater levels of happiness, health and wholeness - with spiritual leader Rev. Dr. Kathy Hearn
  
• Sister Giant: Rousing the sleeping giant of American womanhood - with spiritual teacher / author Marianne Williamson
• Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World - with clinical research scientist / medical anthropologist / writer / President & CEO for the Institute of Noetic Sciences Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz
• Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the women, save the world - with Jungian analyst / author Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen
  
• Having Enough of Life - with voluntary simplicity pioneer Vicki Robin
• Women Leading Change: A new perspective on ourselves and our world - with CEO of the Center for Human Emergence in the Middle East Elza Maalouf
  
• Opening to the Fierce Feminine: Tuning in to archetypes of feminine strength - with yoga teacher / Yoga Journal columnist Sally Kempton
• Caring for Ourselves While Caring for the World - with yoga master and iEvolve core founder Sofia Diaz
  
• Living Deeply in a Rapidly Changing World - with Association for Global New Thought co-founder Mary Manin Morrissey
• The Feminine Co-Creator: The evolutionary woman as the next step for our species - with furturist / social innovator / conscious evolution pioneer Barbara Marx Hubbard
  
• The Next Women's Liberation - with EnlightenNext magazine senior editor Dr. Elizabeth Debold
• Embracing and Evolving the Feminine: Engaging the gender paradox - with Zen priest / integral spirituality teacher Diane Musho Hamilton
  
• The New Woman and The New World - with scholar / philosopher / human potential pioneer Dr. Jean Houston
• The Power of Our Collective Intention to Create a New World - with The Field author Lynne McTaggart

I wanted to give the complete list here to illustrate the richness of the offering.  Obviously, some topics will appeal more than others.  And the list, while impressive, is not exhaustive.  I'd love to hear as well from Oprah, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena).  And some business leaders and political figures.  Perhaps in Round 2 ......  But overall, this is an excellent resource for evolutionary-minded women.  There's something useful here for everyone. 

If you're interested in this whole "evolutionary" thing, but could do without the feminine lens, there is another series you may want to check out.  It's called Awakening the Impulse to Evolve.  I have not started listening to the recordings yet, so I cannot give as wholehearted a recommendation as I do to the Women on the Edge ones.  But some of the topics look intriguing.  Here are a few:

• The Evolution of Spirit: God, enlightenment and the path ahead - with integral philosopher Ken Wilbur
  
• Lessons from Evolution: Learning to walk in the rhythm of life - with biologist / futurist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris
  
• A Moral Imperative to Transform - with EnlightenNext founder  / evolutionary enlightenment teacher Andrew Cohen
  
• Learning to Live in a Living Universe - with futurist / voluntary simplicity leader Duane Elgin
  
• Reinventing the World: Creating a new cosmology - with cosmologist Brian Swimme

In summary: three cheers for Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit, and hurray for the iPod!!  Should I worry that there is smoke curling out of mine ..... ?

Dead Sea Scrolls and the Imagination

Indulging my "shoulda been an archaeologist" fantasy, I took my mom to a lecture the other night about the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit soon to open at the Royal Ontario Museum.  Intelligent, funny talk by Julian Siggers, VP, ROM Programs and Content Development.  It lit me up with enthusiasm to see the two installations, which promise to be excellent.  As well as displaying seventeen different scrolls (including such blockbusters as the first recorded books of Genesis and the Psalms), the exhibition will include other artifacts from near by locations which help place the scrolls in their human, historical and political context.  There will also be a series of fourteen lectures by a host of scroll-related experts, covering everything from Conservation and Preservation to the Historical Problem of the Essenes.  I figure that if something interests you, then go to town and explore it from all angles.  So I'm a fan of the way the ROM is approaching this, and offer thanks and congratulations to Dr. Siggers as the project leader.

The talk also reminded me of the amazing story of the Scrolls themselves, and their awesome hold on our collective imagination.  They are considered to be "one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time".  From the ROM literature, they:

• Were written between 250 BCE and 68 CE, and spent 2,000 years hidden in remote desert caves above the Dead Sea.
• Were discovered when a herder boy threw rocks into one of the caves while looking for a stray goat, and heard the sound of breaking pottery.
• Were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near Khirbet Qumran, a monastic Essene community which has also been excavated since the first scroll discovery.  The translation of the Scrolls was not finished until the 1980s, and was an extraordinary work of scholarship.
• Are some of the earliest records of biblical patriarchs and prophets known to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam including all of the old testament books except the Book of Esther, as well as apocryphal manuscripts, hymns, prayers, rules and beliefs of a religious community, and other writings.

Perhaps even more interesting than what is already known are the mysteries that still surround the Scrolls.  Who wrote them, and where?  How did they come to be hidden in the Qumran caves?  Is there any significance to the fact that they were hidden around the time of Christ?

So why am I writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls in a blog about wellbeing?  When I left home last week for a long weekend in Bermuda, my apartment and my days seemed fizzy with life, ideas, possibilities.  When I returned home on Monday night, everything seemed dead, empty, cluttered.  I felt utterly detached from the life that had seemed colorful and bright less than a week earlier.  The thoughts, the people, the stuff, the plans.  In the immortal words of Talking Heads:

"And you may ask yourself / What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself / Am I right? ...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself / My god!...what have I done?"

I realized that I needed to "reanimate" my life, to pick up the connections again, and breathe life back into them.  One important way to do that was through my imagination.  So this week I've been thinking a lot about the role that imagination plays in our wellbeing -- how it helps provide the thread of meaning and interest in our lives.  And I've been looking out for things that spark my imagination, and the connections they help to animate.  The Dead Sea Scrolls bring me a thrill of awe and mystery, keen interest in the scholarship and logistical challenges, and an imaginative connection with my still-new city of Toronto and the ROM.  And somehow they have helped to connect me back into my own life.

What about you?  What kindles your imagination?  Why is it important?