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So many of the leadership problems that I see in the Pagan community come down to issues of our personal identity. There are leadership techniques for building healthy communities, models for understanding group dynamics, and tools to mediate conflicts. But the truth is…all of that stuff is a house built on a faulty foundation if we don’t also do our personal work.

To do that work, we have to understand identity.

And we also have to admit that all of us need to do this work. Unfortunately, the way identity functions can make it hard to change our own bad behaviors, and ego is pretty good at denial. When a group blows up you’ll often hear, “It’s just too much ego.” They’re sort of right, but it’s a little more complicated.

It seems that Pantheacon gives me writer’s block. My first year it took me three weeks to write about the convention. My second year I eventually gave up and wrote about something else instead. After this, my third Pantheacon, I spent two weeks waiting, typing and deleting, and then waiting again.

Dear Friends,

Effective immediately, please stop telling me to delegate.

Thanks so much.

I was reading comments about how Deepak Chopra and the male host of a show dominated over Riane Eisler in an interview, and it brought up these thoughts I'll share as food for thought.

First, I wish I'd seen the interview.  I love Riane and owe her so much!  She's one of my first mentors, having written The Chalice and the Blade andThe Partnership Way, which drew me to this path and I've never left.  I learned about partnership and perpetuate that idea often because of her early teachings. My book launch party on Saturday has a theme of "celebrating partnership" and it's a shame the interview went the way it was described. 

Myself,  I've have worked in several industries where I have had to supervise men.  I'll mention two.  The first was when I was a Convention Coordinator for a large hotel chain in New Orleans.  I actually was responsible for making sure a hotel with more than 10,000 sq ft of meeting space was turned over 3-4 times a day 7 days a week.  Our "crew" was a dozen African American men.  Me, a white woman, received more respect and enjoyed a team camaraderie with these men - more so than the white men in the administrative office.  In fact the other supervisors couldn't understand their loyalty and our team work.  They didn't get it was mutual respect, cooperation, partnership.  Maybe I instinctively treated these African American men better than the white men they usually answered to here in the South and treated them like people.  We developed a sense of pride in our work together and a team spirit.  With the white men you had to hold your ground, stand up to them or some, not all, were more likely to steamroll you, overlook you, demean you.  However, what was the most frustrating was the superior and entitled attitudes of the management (women and men) brought in from Colorado.  They treated all the local management as if we were all stupid - both men and women, even though we had experience running convention hotels and not small boutique hotels like they had previously run.  The Food and Beverage Manager - an older woman - treated me worse than any man in the hotel.  All these years later I still shudder at the emotion - the tears - that woman provoked in me!

In California I manage property where I have to supervise a lot of white men and men of other cultures as well, a few of which would probably rather have me barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and despise having to take orders from a woman.  I find again you have to stand up, hold your own, speak up.  The rules of etiquette I learned in the South when I was growing up - be nice, don't make waves, defer, conform, well, they just don't get the job done.  Sure I sometimes get called a bitch or a ball buster behind my back.  Once to my face a Telephone Company employee screwing up on the job told me I needed "a good  f--k" and maybe then I would shut up - translation: not tell him to do a better job.  (Interestingly the phone company send out a representative to make a personal apology to me.)  

Of course I get tired of the struggle.  Always having to be assertive to be able to do your job effectively - because the buck stops with me.  Some men still lack awareness of sexism and white male privilege - because its their normal and they benefit from it.  My boss even had to be schooled.  But again, here in CA, unlike in the South, I've experienced just as many women dominators as any men in my life - their methods are just a little more insidious.  So while I certainly am aware of male privilege, patriarchy, domination - let's not kid ourselves that men are the only ones doing it.  Both genders participate.  Women have learned well from their male oppressors and engage in what I call patriarchy in a skirt.  If I had to tally it up, I've had to endure more bad women than men. 

I've read how feminist, Phyllis Chesler, (Woman's Inhumanity to Woman) got a lot of heat for bringing this up - I have her in my upcoming anthology, Voices of the Sacred Feminine: Conversation to ReShape Our World, and I've interviewed her on my radio show, Voices of the Sacred Feminine Radio on Blog Talk.  I sincerely hope I don't get flack for saying this.  I won't engage if it happens.  I've got too much to do.   But we have to face the elephant in the living room if we women are going to lead the charge to change the world.  We have to figure out how to stop being jealous, petty, competitive and put our collective energy into dissolving the patriarchy.  We need to put our personal slights aside and stand in solidarity and partnership.  We have empower one another - be that lobster climbing out of the pot that turns around and helps the others out rather than be the one pulling the escapee back down into the boiling water.  And women have to take the mantle of leadership and be assertive and not expect it to be handed to us. 

Yes, the answer is partnership.  It's mutual respect.  It's fairness.  It's justice.  It's not competition, sexism, classism  or racism.   Among women and men.  We have to try to empower one another as women and not have a scarcity attitude there's only so many pieces of pie so we keep fighting for the scraps among ourselves.  I know I'm probably being politically incorrect here, but seems important to say.  My Sekhmet heart demands it.

Love to you all,
Karen Tate      

“Peace and Blessings!”

If you’ve had a phone consultation with the Queen Mother Imakhu, you’re sure to recognize the trademark greeting, along with the joyful cackle. This time, I wasn't following my usual "Call The Queen Mother!" routine which usually involves bringing her a dream for interpretation or seeking guidance in untangling a leadership knot. This time, I was seeking to make her the subject of a blog post, hoping to speak about the nuts and bolts of Priestesshood.

My friend Peter Dybing has posted this blog, "Killing the Big Name Pagans," at Pagan in Paradise.  I tend to get more inspired when writing something responsive to the ideas of others, which often means I just post a long response.  When I do that, my thoughts don't make it beyond that feedback form.  So today I've decided to post my full response here:

I agree with the opinions expressed in earlier feedback at Pagan in Paradise by Thorn, Peg and Elizabeth. Here are few factoids that inform my opinion:

I join the chorus of voices reporting on the general wonderfulness of the 9th Annual Claremont Pagan Studies Conference.¹  I found the overall quality of presentations exceptionally high, as they were the last time I attended two years ago.

I arrived Friday night after a long solo drive from the SF Bay Area to Los Angeles, through rain and the hairy Grapevine Canyon through the Tehachapi Mountains, stressed and with intense pain between my shoulders.  Cranky, in other words.  Soon Lauren cheered me up.

Saturday morning's first session consisted of four speakers.  Joseph Nichter, an Iraq war veteran, spoke of using Tarot in healing PTSD.  I loved his ideas about what he calls "peripheral exploration," wherein the querent draws a single card, places it on a larger sheet of paper, and draws a scene that embeds the image in the card in a larger picture.