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Medicine Women Lodge
Kristena West M.A
MEDICINE WOMEN LODGE
ACCESS TO OUR CREATIVE COMMUNITY
BECOME A MEDICINE WOMEN LODGE MEMBER!
Hi friends! I'm so happy to offer you a creative membership to our Sacred Arts School.
Also, exclusive monthly issues of the MEDICINE WOMAN JOURNAL
Dear Medicine Women
This Medicine Women Lodge represents a life-time of research, experience and teaching in the ancient practices of creating sacred arts, shamanic and western mystery traditions, to bring the basic foundational practices to build a stronger relationship of self to the world. The Tungus term "Shaman" means To Know or to See with a Strong Eye or See with the Heart. These ways of perception have been almost lost, but we can develop many techniques from different traditions to "Know the World" as a means of perception.
This foundational program teaches basic safe techniques to support personal growth and build a strong emotional feminine core, this will support spiritual and soul work.
Foundational Practices are taught within the Five Lodges of Perception.
• Air Dream Lodge learning to work and journal our dreams - Will
• Earth Body Lodge taking care of body & tools of self-reflection - Thinking
• Dolphin Lodge Emotional Lodge -Feeling
• Fire Lodge of the Heart - Revelation
• Aether-Space-Void Lodge - Being
These sacred arts mentorship is a rare opportunity to be with a teacher who has trained with shamans over 30 years, and brings a life-time of research in western mystery traditions and received her M.A. in cross-cultural sacred iconography. This training is calling to souls who feel that there is more to the creation of art and wish to deepen their skills and learn techniques of knowing. Learning to create art in a sacred manner with intent.
Kristena brings a life-time of study, training and respect for these sacred traditions and allows the student to go at their own pace and holds the container for personal growth.
We will remember the sacred rhythms of the earth; the cycles of nature and the forgotten traditions of Women's Medicine Ways. This Alchemy Lodge training is safe and reliable, containing lawful methods passed down by authentic shamans and spiritual traditions that Kristena has personally studied and put to the test in her own journey.
I bring a life-time of indigenous and cross-cultural tools, techniques, exercises and art lessons that will deepen your practice and support strengthening skills of ways of knowing and sacred seeing.
Transformation occurs when the soul enters a journey into their biography, the trials, troubles and adventures.
sacred arts alchemy training
Air: Owl Dream Medicine
Earth Bear Physical Medicine
Water Dolphin Emotional Medicine
Fire Lion Heart Medicine
Space or Void Medicine
Cross-Cultural Sacred Traditions
Air: Owl Dream Medicine
The Dream Lodge
Ways of Seeing
Learning sacred arts includes waking up to ways of seeing. How we do not really look things. We scan with a unfocused eye, and are kept too busy in our daily life.
Sacred Arts is not only art-making, it's an entire way of life. When we take up creativity in a "sacred" manner it changes our focus, enhances our contemplation skills and we learn to hone our intent as we create. Through the lessons, we develop rigor and discipline learning how to create a chalice within; to center and enter the silence.
We engage in different ways of "seeing" we re-learn how to really look at the world, nature and the other; this wakes us up to the numinous.
Dream Practice as an entry into Sacred Art
Learning the skills of dream work is one of the many tools for gaining gifts, information and yes, even training in sacred arts.
Dreams are one way many people are given direct training in sacred arts. They are shown how to design, make and empower ritual art objects. When one is given a dream art image, shown what materials to use and how to empower it, they become sacred artisans. These kinds of tools, masks, or ceremonial art will carry the power of the spirits and it’s maker.
When I decided I was going to start a business making spirit dolls, I was trained for years on all the aspects of doll making and empowerment. I was shown how to make armatures, bodies, wig, costumes and rituals to empower the doll-every night in my dreams.
I have an artist friend who receives fully detailed shamanic art projects. He sees these just before he actually awakens--they come as visions. He then finds and creates exactly what he saw in the vision. He has pictures, costumes, ritual regalia all over his studio. The interesting thing is, he knows nothing about shamanism!
But he will do what he is given in dreams. One full figure he made covered in leaves stands in his studio--when he finished this piece-his dog started howling at it. That is spirit filled art!
I receive art or ritual tools to make for myself, others, or to use in my healing practice. If the spirits give you a dream ceremonial art piece, my advice is to make it and use it. If you do so, you show respect and gratitude to the spirit world and your willingness to work in co-creation with them.
Learning dream work and building a cohesive dream body is essential for crossing the thresholds and bring back spiritual tools and information.
Bear Medicine Ways of Relating
The Body Lodge
Curing the Soma
One could say Bear is the Great Dreamer too. These animals are chosen to represent the directions, and they are found cross-cultural. But for the Medicine Lodge we use them in a general way. Bear is one half of the year on the earth and the other half of the year under the earth; this is two-earth medicine.
Bear medicine is both taking care of the physical and the unconscious. For women we acknowledge our place in the world and take care of our daily life of being in the world and also personal development of our soul-spirit selves.
When we experience issues at work, in our families and close relationships, we can deny or submerge our feelings in our body, because we have to just get on with life and our many tasks. When we begin to slow down and breath, take time to just be, walk in nature or sit at our art table we can make a "sacred" time-out to do some creative writing or art to express what arises in our body. Expressive arts can make a big difference in soothing our anxiety, sadness or low-self esteem.
When we develop a habit of "soothing" our body-soul-heart connection as a daily or weekly artistic practice, we find that it eases our mind, smooths out life's wrinkles and develops an inner strengthening that builds a firm foundation.
I have many "Medicine Stories" of healing of to share in our Bear Lodge circle.
Water: EmotionalMedicine
The Emotional Lodge
Balancing the Opposites
If we think about it, we could say the whole world is driven by the feelings of every human being, couldn't we? Feelings are the driver behind all our triggers, decisions, reactions, musings, wishes, longings and drives.
A Medicine Woman must have an understanding of her own feelings, and unravel the knots of her unconscious resistance, fears and self-doubts that may have developed into patterns that limit her life. And through conscious decisions, she lays new more creative pathways to her life path.
This is the secret key of transformation.
In the Dolphin Lodge we will be delving into our biography using creative writing and artistic practice to explore, expand and discover our deeper story.
If you have some struggle, go through it. Grow through it. Don’t let it stop or hinder your outflow of creative juices.
Creation is a birth process, and part of that process is the tension or struggle to release the sacred art you feel within your soul. Let it flow through your body and mind.
Allow the power and potency of pure, raw creativity to lay new pathways within your soul being.
~Kristena West M.A.
Fire: Lion Heart Medicine
the Heart Lodge
Igniting Creativity
Doing our art lessons, life-story creative writing, personal development and researching and using sacred techniques of the shamanic journey, meditations and dream journaling, we can over time, gradually sweep clean the inner chambers of our hearts. It is in this sacred silence that the World Soul the Animus Mundi can speak to us. Perhaps it's only a whisper at first, and that is okay we allow what is, and this begins our conversations within the Heart-Lodge.
Developing this connection is the Medicine Woman Way, it does take time as we have to clear away the debris of our lives, and this is our inner-work will give us strength, purpose and reveal right-livelihood gifts that lead us into our future.
Each of the Medicine Women Lodge practices, artistic lessons, research, life-story expand our world view, open us to the paths of the ancestors and also lead us into the future in raised awareness of our lives and natural world.