Talk at the Schamanentage 2020: Red Tent Movement, women solidarity and networking.
SCHAMANENTAGE 2020
Samuel-Hahnemann-Schule 13th & 14th June 2020:
"Camino rojo del corazón"The Red Tent Movement and the “soft revolution”. Women solidarity and networking. Social responsibility for a new world.
I started this work to make peace inside myself. Peace between the feminine &
masculine inside
myself. To make peace with the angry me. To make peace with the memories in me.
Peace is important if we want to have peace in the world.
"Camino rojo del corazón" is for me the way to follow. It comes from the Lakota that call Red Road
(camino rojo) to a
spiritual way of life and the importance of blood as an heritage of the ancestral peoples. I see this red
too as our sacred menstrual blood.
To tell you about the RedTent Movement it is important to before starting by
going deeper in HIStory.
I mention now some words from known thinkers about being a woman: Hypocrates explained that the woman was naturally sick from her female constitution, and her menstruation had
the character of regular natural bloodletting, which saved her from the consequences of her suffering. Aristotle explained that the woman is the “colder” and therefore "a case of stunted development". She did not
get past the menstrual blood stage and could not produce semen. She is therefore a "lacking being"
without "natural warmth of life".
"So the woman is a kind of incapable man. Because being a woman means a certain weakness because something is unable to ripen semen from the last stage of nutrition. This stage is blood."
Pitagoras
According to Pitagoras, women only have a need for "emptying" and menstruation is just an excretion
of excess. PliniusPliny then writes clearly in his natural history that the blood is "poison" and, among other things,
darkens the mirror. This theory then leads to all the works on the "evil eye" of menstruating people
up to the time of the witch craze. The blood is "filthy, no poison on earth like, more harmful and
more severe."
Through a scientific work of two doctors the myth is born that“Menotoxin” (menstruations poison). This myth survived until the 20th century.
Thomas Aquin,
the decisive teacher of the purity of the Church in the time of Francis of Assissi, faithfully follows
Aristotle and teaches that “the woman is necessary, but only as an assistant to the man”. He goes on
with:"With regard to the individual nature, the woman is something deficient and case of random
appearance in itself , because the active force found in the male seed aims to produce something
completely similar to the male sex.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The 18th century discovered menstruation as a civilization damage that, according to JJRosseau, was the result of an overly lavish lifestyle, mainly due to the lack of physical work on the part of women.
In the 19th century the clinical
picture of menstruation is treated psychiatrically. The doctor Petrus Andrea
Mattthiolus (1500-1577) puts forward the thesis that menstrual blood provokes
insanity. The witches with their evil eyes would infect the men with the
so-called love diseases by means of the poisonous blood in their poisonous
potions or take their potency from them with the same poisonous potions.
The persecution of witches with their
blood and their sexuality is delegated to psychiatry, in their men's hands.
Witchcraft becomes sickness, menstruation becomes craziness and psychosis.
Sigmund Freud
Last but not least comes Freud in the end of the 19th century and the psychosis theory turns into neurosis theory.
Freud follows directly from Aristotle and Thomas Aquin and develops his psychological theory of penis envy of women as the basic pillar of femininity. The woman is a deficient being. The menarche appears and the girl experiences menstruation as the bloody evidence of her penis loss. The bleeding is a curse associated with penis envy, castration anxiety, female masochism. The "periodic insanity" is "psychic epilepsy", "psychic degeneration", is "psychosis menstrualis".
In: Schwarzmond Tabu, Jutta Vos
You could be asking yourself: why coming up with this now? It is past, it is over….
in my opinion we have to go deep in order to clean the female collective wound, we have to go deep in order to clean this past that is still saved in our cells.
We all come from here. Our western civilization still has this great thinkers as the base of knowledge.
The question is always the same: WHO IS PRODUCING KNOWLEDGE IN OUR WORLD?
It is urgent to interrupt this pattern.
It is urgent that women become the subject and not the object anymore.
It is urgent to change the producers of knowledge.
The time has come for women to tell the story:
not HIStory but HERstory.
The Red Tent Movement is part of the so-called present spiritual feminism and has the main aim of finding all the feminine archetyps and to cross them with the roles women have in our present society. Supported by a new language, by new words, we can act as Change Agents to start changing the established patriarchal structures. Crossing this movement with other social movements, social, racial and ecological and work in cooperation is most needed.
It’s important to acknowledge, before going further, the importance of the 3 waves of femininism of the past:
1st Wave: woman’s suffrage movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst for political equality and civil rights, the right to vote!
2nd wave: 60s & 70s for equal pay, reproductive freedom (pill) & payed mother leave;
USA war on Vietnam & psychedelics supported this fight for women’s rights!
In 1963 the book from Betty Friedman “Feminine Mystique” and the report from JFK on unequality and gender boost this wave!
ECOfemininism appears also in this time and is the branch of Femininism that connects the women to nature & links them for both being repressed from the patriarchal structures; a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections and the merits of intuition and collaboration as well as the Goddess Movement: in North America, Western Europe, New Zealand & Australia.
To all these women that came before us I bow and thank for all the rights we have now and have for granted.
3rd Wave
The Goddess Comeback is now. It is the spiritual feminism (spiritual ecofeminism: branch of the ecofeminism) we are living now and is also seen as the 3rd wave of femininism. Here included is the RedTent Movement.
(the 3rd Wave femininisme was also coined by Anita Hill in 1991 concerning sexual harassment)
An important diference between the past femininism and the present one is that man are not seen as enemies anymore, but are welcome to join us in this love peace work.
What’s a Red Tent?
It’s a meeting of women usually on the new moon (the beginning of the lunar month) to support each other and to celebrate being a woman. The empowerment of women as well as breaking up with established tabus are of sheer importance.
The idea for this movement originates form a book from Anita Diamant called Red Tent. In this book events are related from the book Genesis where Dinah, daughter of Jacob goes as a child to a Red Tent. A place where women go to bleed and to give birth.
In 2006 Karen Brody within her project BOLD organizes a first Red Tent in America where women meet to talk about their stories by giving birth. Time goes by and the need for these meetings rises till they arrive in Europe in 2009 in France. A new women’s culture is born in which women meet and support each other.
The movement spreads around the world and it’s a call to all the ones who imagine a world based on cooperation instead of competition and in which all women are heard, honored and respected.
I opened my Red Tent Moon Tribe by the end of 2016 and since then never stopped giving all my hope and love to all the women that cross my way.
The Red Tent is a place:
- to celebrate being a woman;
-
- to connect and to network: cooperation and co-creation
- for storytelling: women telling her stories and the story (HERstory);
-
to become aware of the cycle in us, that
we are cyclical beings and not linear as the society demands from us. To relate
with the moon cycle (moon shamanism); we are a circle, not a square!
- to honor our blood, welcome it and give it a special place, to make possible to live it’s magic and potential. To change the words dirty blood to sacred blood.
Nah Kin writes in her book La Diosa Vivente:
"During the menstruation comes the ability of a woman to express her medicine. The subtle qualities of the female essence are very clear. During this monthly bleeding this force reaches its peak and is distributed like concentric waves in your environment."
Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining from the Diné (Navajo) Nation says:
“-I will dream for you in my moon time (menstruation) mother Earth”.
Pat McCabe tells about women being requested to dream and bring visions in their moon time for the whole community/village (in: Gaia Sadhana, Awakening Women Institute)
All this is a process to RE Member who we really are and it’s a very big journey into our woman-becoming-process.
Vicki Noble in her book Shakti Woman, writes about it:
“What does seem necessary is for each of us women to pull her focus back inside herself and to begin actively and intelligently to create the world we want. (…) For a woman actually to repossess herself and to center there is a monumental task, taking years of difficult, painstaking work. This is the work I call female shamanism, a gradual mastery of oneself, and a healing or recovery from the chronic dis-ease of our time. Once a woman has done the work of re-membering herself, she is much more able to change the world effectively.”
And Sabine Lichtenfels in her book Weiche Macht writes about the importance of stepping out of the victim role:
“Women will always step out of the victim role more resolutely. By their nature, women are not
victims, but producers of their reality. Women have biological and natural authority. So let's start
rebuilding that age-old feminine power that gave birth to cultures. As a woman I am not a victim,
not an object. We are no longer there to tolerate the existing structures, but to change them.
Everywhere in the world, the idea of soft power should be taken up and carried on.” And she goes
on with the concept of a soft power: “Soft power is the power to overcome resistance through heart
strength and to overcome difficulties through lightness.”
Finally I see a Red Tent as a germ cell, as the basis for the restoration of communities, the
emergence of a new collective consciousness: so that we can develop our dreams, our visions
and for the development of new information.
This new information will a make possible a Soft Revolution. For that, women have to step into
the social responsibility. Sabine Lichtenfels calls it soft, because we don’t want to step into the
already existent structures.
This requires the following movements:
from I to WE,
from being as one to togetherness
from separation to connection
from the old capitalist paradigm taker of life to
new community paradigm giver of life
from global to regional
from woman in the family to woman in the community
from a high mind as a professional quality to a big heart as the professional quality
social professions as second range professions to social professions as central to community cohesion
I would like to finish with an invitation from Sabine Lichtenfels:
“A new female power is not directed against men and not against our love for men, but it resolutely
leaves those male structures that have contributed to the worldwide annihilation of life and love.
It is now up to us women to resume the political and sexual responsibility that has been absent for
so long. We invite all committed men to join our peace work.”
I opened my Red Tent Moon Tribe by the end of 2016 and since then never stopped giving all my hope, energy and love to all the women that crossed my way.
I call my work Moon Shamanism, crossing shamanism with the sacred feminine to support the healing of the female collective wound (FB pages: Red Tent Moon Tribe & Xamanismo da Lua/moonshamanism).
AHO. Blessed be the women’s circle.
In gratitude.
Maria
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