Women in Spiritual Leadership

What if women were acknowledged spiritual leaders within our religious institutions and our society?

This compelling question is at the root of the work of the multifaith Women's Spirituality Celebration's volunteer planning team. This group met here in my new cohousing home community Creekside Commons in Courtenay on Vancouver Island last weekend for a visioning retreat.

Our intention 'to gather together nourishing ourselves in our relationships to each other and to our Celebration as we co-create our vision for the future of our Celebration and our organizing group' manifested through sound, movement, art making, deep listening, guided visualization and engaging in discourse of inquiry with the women of my home community.

Our time together was inspired by the first public viewing of 'Womb Entering' a dvd presentation of the co-creative journey of fourteen current and former team members who joined with Phd candidate Barbara Bickel www.barbarabickel.ca as co-researchers for her dissertion work. This inquiry journey facilitated the creative expression of spirit through women who in most cases had no prior exposure to the creative arts. The expression came through individual and co-created art pieces and performance ritual art.

In our visioning work last weekend we followed spirit whom we named the divine feminine for our working once again into the freedom of creative expression through art pieces and movement. An empowering experience allowing each unique expression to manifest into the oneness of co-created womenspirit leadership work. Then because we live in a world where we communicate primarily through words we dug for the language to express the essential qualities and values of our work.

- a value we have is total dependence on the sacred; we have no guarantees about how things will turn out; we are so anchored, we have a strength that all of us hold to make this happen

- relational autonomy - I'm thinking about autonomy which is honouring and respecting the individual's autonomous expression of self and spirit, and the way we do it is in relationahip to everyone else's autonomous self and spirit, and in those expressions is created the new expresson of spirit

- when we go back to 'why is this significant in our world today', it's because we live in a world of many conflicts based on religion; there's a piece about one person's religion being wrong or evil. We need to be able to come together, to be able to get over those hurdles. I've stepped over huge hurdles since I became part of this. When I self-identified as a witch, I realized that I would have to deal with a lot of persecution from people who practice more rigid faith traditions. This women's spirituality team has supported me to move through so much of that fear

- relational, experiential, and I want to say "inspirited", which might be a word I made up. It's a mixture between "inspired" and "spirited" and the way it all works for me in the spiral is that the movement of the spiral and core is that each round provides an opportunity to have an experience that relates to the experience when you passed that point further down on the spiral. The "inspirited" piece is abut divine motion, being connected and how we are embodied in spirit and inspired by the divine, we are also held by the earth which gives us inspiration from our roots

- inclusive, natural and spontaneous; relates to the spiral because of the shape and form, it is very natural; to be spontaneous is to be divinely directed; our art is inclusive

- entwining, yielding and creating. I see many spirals coming together, all thee coils where the energy is gathering. From the yielding and motion and respect comes the creation.