Spell Breaking: Remembered Ways of Being

By Ministry of Maat, Inc

The collection Spell Breaking offers intimate glimpses of life-transforming openings in the lives of nineteen women. Though they come from varying cultures, ages, and walks of life, they are united in their drive toward a sense of freedom and well-being. Featuring writings by Ximena Alarcón, Lisa Barnard Kelly, Sangeeta Laura Biagi, Sadee Brathwait

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ministry of Maat, Inc
• Release date: Oct 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781889471297

Book preview

Other Books by Ione

Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color

Random House e-Book

www.randomhouse.com/book/85390/pride-of-family-by-carole-ione

Nile Night: Remembered Texts from the Deep

Deep Listening Publications

Listening in Dreams and This is a Dream

Ministry of Maåt Publications

Piramida Negra: Selected Poems 1973-1991

Live Letters Press

The Night Train to Aswan

Neteru Editions

The Coffee Table Lover

The Country Press

Dedication

For the worldwide community of women.

To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.

Dogen

Ione’s Spell Breaking: Remembered Ways of Being is exactly that!!! Ione is a spell breaker. She leads us into deeper realities to help us realize our true nature. Through the stories of many women, Ione reminds all of us of our awesome ancient mystery potential. In this way, she breaks age-old social spells that have inhibited us, and thereby creates new communities. We loved reading the inspiring stories of freedom.

Amy and Arny Mindell

Process Work Institute

Portland, Oregon

"Identify a moment in your life when you were able to break a spell and experience the expression of your soul’s being. These stories are breathtaking.

Ione’s circle is a context for women to dissolve constraints in the river of compassionate listening and creativity, and this book is radiant with this Love.

I have known the experience myself, standing with Ione to witness the architectural songs of Saqqara, where she shone the affirmation of self-knowledge, from the strands of one’s DNA to the strands of one’s verse."

Anne Bourne

Composer

Toronto, Canada

Preface

Spell (n): 1: a. STORY, TALE b. a spoken word or set of words believed to have magic power: CHARM, INCANTATION c. a state of enchantment 2: a strong, compelling influence or attraction (Merriam-Webster Unabridged)

Complex (n): a. an association of related things often in intricate combination b. a system of repressed or suppressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality (Merriam Webster Unabridged)

Over the course of thirty years of working intensely with women, with the goal of evolving deep support systems for community building, I have come to recognize the flow of ancient currents moving beneath the surface of our healing processes. Following the dreams and myths of women and men in private sessions and in ongoing groups, I have noticed how often we are in the thrall of spells, mesmerized by the stories and beliefs that have become an integral part of our psyches.

While respecting modern psychological constructs, I have come to realize that there are alternative ways of understanding how women come to terms with multiple problems and disabilities: how we gradually emerge from our distractions and depressions, and how we have sudden major breakthroughs. I call my way Spell Breaking.

The word complex, well-worn as it is, continues to be a part of our vocabularies: and indeed, our modern day spells consist of complex layers or threads of internalized stories, accompanied by layers of strong feelings, which are linked to various crucial events in our lives. These layers can become tangled and compressed until a kind of nexus is created – a knot that is held in place in the psyche of the patient, waiting to be unraveled – through psychotherapy or other interventions, or simply over the course of life itself.

To be under a spell is quite a bit like being in the proverbial stuck place. This situation has a history – sources known or unknown to the woman who finds herself there. These sources have an energetic force, which, when activated, is capable of stirring up an irresistible torrent of feelings and impulses. The resultant situation is as potent and mysterious as any cast by priestesses, witches, warlocks, shamans, and healers through the ages. Clearly, we emulate the ancient systems of the Egyptians, Greeks, Druids, Celts, and many African cultures when we get all knotted up in our difficulties.

In the process of spell-breaking we are undoing the tangled webs that bind us, causing us to repeat old patterns over and over again. The patterns of these spells keep us trapped in places where low self-esteem reigns. Unhealthy, often abusive relationships of all kinds take hold; addictions, eating disorders, and creative blocks thrive. During the course of the work, we sometimes find that these spells – in addition to having more obvious recent childhood origins –reference very old family situations, often going back centuries. Even so, the strengths inherent in women and our ancestors can emerge and flower as the knots are undone. The collection Spell Breaking offers intimate glimpses of such life-transforming openings in the lives of eighteen women. Though they come from varying cultures, ages, and walks of life, they are united in their drive toward a sense of freedom and well-being.

Ione

Kingston, NY

February, 2013

Acknowledgments

I want to express gratitude here to so many friends, colleagues and students of life for their support in shepherding this anthology to publication.

Inspiration has come to me through the years from both observing and participating in the abundance of courage and beauty radiating out from the Women's Mysteries community. I am dedicated to deeply personal writing, not only as a means of self-transformation, but as a way of opening to the universal. Toward this end I am grateful for our Memory, Secrets and Immortality circles in Brooklyn, Hudson Valley, NY, Atlantic Beach, Long Island, and Paris, not to mention those circles that occur in our dreams and so many other valuable time/space locations.

I particularly want to thank Andrea Gale Goodman for her continued loving support and dedication. Lisa Barnard Kelley's bright energies have sustained throughout and Rachel Koenig has embodied the steady, welcoming balance of Maåt.

I received early organizational and editorial assistance from my assistant Kellie Northrup as well as from the linguistically gifted Sangeeta Laura Biagi. Kate Hanselman contributed copy editing expertise and Lawton Hall brought his fine skills to the project, putting all the pieces together and creating a beautiful layout design.

My son, graphic designer and comic artist Nico Bovoso, brought his special magic to the cover design of the book.

I would not have been able to bring this collection to fruition without the deep wellsprings of encouragement and loving kindness offered by my spouse and creative partner, Pauline Oliveros.

Lastly, I am pleased to report that many spells, long overdue for breaking, met their demise during the preparation of this work!

So be it!

Ione

Kingston, NY

August, 27, 2013

Introduction

Ione

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Make a circle. The words are clear, and so is my grandmother’s voice. Her familiar face appears to me only briefly. Her voice, her words, linger far beyond the mystery of the dream.

* * *

The women in Spell Breaking: An Anthology of Women’s Mysteries are part of an extended international community. Most have attended retreats, teachings, and creative circles hosted by the Ministry of Maåt. All are in solidarity with the principles of the Ministry.

The Ministry of Maåt, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit international spiritual and educational organization nurturing the ideal of a harmonious and balanced world community through the support of women's holistic well-being.

The Ministry’s thirty-three Ministers/ Priestesses reside in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Italy. Each has a mandate to create her own heart expression of a Healing Ministry in the world, continuing a path of personal healing and radiating that healing out to those around her. The styles of the essays, poems, texts, and graphics in these pages mirror the amazing diversity of their authors.

Origins of the Ministry of Maåt:

The Ministry, now in its sixteenth year, grew out of teachings begun in 1987 when I launched a program entitled: Women’s Mysteries; A One-Year Training Program in the Intuitive and Healing Arts.

The Women’s Movement had peaked a decade before. I had surfed up on that big wave in the seventies and come through it standing on firm ground. During those exhilarating days of revolution, I wrote for numerous publications, including the early Ms. magazine. It was there that I first coined the term Foremothers in print (Discovering my Foremothers, 1974, by Carole Bovoso). This article, inspired by the women in my family, previewed the themes of my subsequent memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, By Carole Ione (currently a Random House e-book).

A bona fide maverick, I had pioneered having three babies at a time when women were just beginning to experiment with having none. My career-driven women friends were somewhat taken aback by the fact that I, a woman-identified woman had married a young Italian-American man and was the mother of three boys. The Civil Rights movement had had crucial meaning in my life, and now I was moved by women in a way that was deeper than my brown skin.

By the 1980s, I was making a precarious living as a freelance journalist, and also doing residencies as a professional poet in the New York State and City school systems. Following up on my abiding interest in dreams and journals, my Chambers Street loft became a prime location for ongoing Dream Circles and Journal and Notebook Workshops, all of which were designed to stir deep places of creativity in the participants.

In 1985 and ‘86, I traveled to the magical land of Egypt on assignment for several publications. There was an initial trip with a photographer, and the following year I traveled on my own. Each visit brought new internal and external revelations. In Aswan, where the river Nile sometimes flows purple, the brown-skinned Nubian people greeted me as a long-lost sister. But you are my sister. I recognize you!

And I recognized them as well. Somehow, I had been found and I found myself.

At the ancient necropolis of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara – after being mesmerized by the sounds of the desert in my inner ear – I arrived at an archeological dig at the precise moment an ancient block of stone, a graceful harpist inscribed on its side, was being raised into the air before my eyes. It was being viewed for the first time in 3500 years.

See! exclaimed the Director of Antiquities. He was smiling broadly as though he was making a present of it to me. And, of course, in an important sense, he was.

Profoundly inspired by these journeys, I found that my experiences defied adequate description in print. Even photographs were nothing compared to being there, touching sand and stone and smelling the perfumed land. I really wanted to share this part of it with my students.

I had a vision: At the end of a full year of being together, I would take a group to the sacred temples and tombs. We would float on the ancient river Nile together and I would share the wonder of what I had experienced.

Eventually, using my dreams and intuition as my guides, I launched Women’s Mysteries: For women who want to go deeper. In the promotional materials I wrote that we were women creating community with each other. I loved the term community in particular. We were, I wrote, reclaiming our inherent wisdom.

Though training programs of length are quite common now, a year-long program was an exciting and slightly daring concept for the time. Meditation Forms, Dream Awareness, Mythology and Astrology, Oracular Forms, Sound Mysteries, Ritual and Ceremony, Integration of Dark and Light, and Women’s Studies were all components of our investigations.

Even so, I believed that what I was offering to women was simply a way of underlining ideas and achievements already in place, rather than breaking new ground. After all, we were supposed to have been liberated by then. Weren’t we? We women were surer of ourselves, making headway in the corporate world, getting more assistance from our spouses at home. A lot of things really had changed – or so I thought. I was in for a surprise.

Every week, the women came to my loft in Lower Manhattan. Twelve of us in all arrived from very different locations in the city. Ranging in age from eighteen to forty-five, most did not know each other at the beginning. A few were shy and others were quite outspoken. Some were married, some long divorced, some straight, some gay. American and Australian, of African descent and of European descent – all, as it turned out, were hungry for something that they couldn’t yet name.

I’d bring them up in the old elevator, or, when it was not working, which was often the case, they’d climb up the five flights without complaint. They sat on my well-worn cushions in a circle. We laughed and cried and sometimes we screamed in rage. It was good not having any close neighbors. My kids, at the back of the loft, were used to our hooting and hollering and could actually sleep through our once-weekly gatherings. We made field trips to the country where we howled at the moon. We told our dreams. We were, we told ourselves, descending.

Yes, we were descending into a deep pit like Innana, the beleaguered heroine of the ancient Sumerian poem. Enki, the God of Wisdom, had blessed her. The blessing included the concepts of Truth! Descent into the underworld! Ascent from the underworld!

We were ugly, angry, jealous, grieving. We thought and spoke the unacceptable, and we were, at long last, not nice. Without travelling on planes, trains, or buses, we had our own kind of spaceships – we were inhabiting the other side of the moon: the dark side. There, we could behave as we liked – unseen and un-judged by spouses, friends, lovers, mothers, or fathers.

In her ancient story, Innana hears the moans of her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld and, bedecked with her special jewels, travels down, down, down, losing her garments and gems along the way. Upon her arrival she must spend a period of time hung up on a meat hook before eventually being allowed to ascend, emerging as a shining Queen of Heaven and Earth – a whole and resplendent being.

We could certainly relate to Innana’s plight. We all knew what it felt like to be down there in the depths. We reminded ourselves with knowing looks when some thorny issue came up, Yes, it’s the ‘meat hook’!

Yet, it was what happened to Innana next that intrigued us even more – the mystery in the dark at the bottom of the pit that allows Innana not only to survive, but to emerge in triumph.

Our circles were, it turned out, our own place of alchemical transformation. I would also label our process spell breaking, for we too would emerge, having broken old spells