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Not long ago I had the whole-body urge to locate an artist whose profile I'd read years ago in a magazine that's regional to Asheville and Western North Carolina — WNC Woman. The magazine, founded by Julie Parker, had featured my Honoring Your Belly article in its first issue. It's been a strong force for women's writing, art and entrepreneurship ever since.

But I no longer remembered the woman's name. I did remember that Julie had described her as painting from her hara — the Japanese word for both belly and the source energy concentrated within the body's center.

Searching on [wncwoman + hara], I found Julie's interview with Joyce Metayer. The April 2004 profile begins:

Joyce Metayer stands in front of and facing her work, feet planted firmly and powerfully on the earth, hands on her hara, as she explains how she births her work — how her inner vision emerges into three dimensions. Literally three dimensions, for these pieces are intricately-constructed canvases of mind-boggling complexity. She explains how she projects her sketch for a piece onto the wall to determine its appropriate size, then moves forward and back until the size is just so — until she literally feels it in her hara. This visceral connection to her work is so strong it seems almost visible ... a cord from womb to work, as it were. 

I surprised Joyce with a phone call and had the pleasure of speaking with her. Our conversation included this exchange:

LS: How did you develop this process?

JM: I didn't. It found me.

LS: How do the images arrive? How do they enter your awareness?

JM: I see the image as a holograph, a shape in three dimensions. Then the color plan comes to me as a bodily sensation.

With Joyce's permission, here are three images of her work. For titles and larger versions of these images, plus additional images and more information on each piece, click here.

It's been three — and thirty — years in the making.

Now the dream's coming true: The Woman's Belly Book has just been published in its French edition by Le Courrier du Livre.

I'm going to France this summer to share the good news — we hold the power to promote creation within our body's center, within our bellies.

The book's French title means "become friends with your belly" or more simply, "befriend your belly." The subtitle refers to the practice of belly-energizing movement and breath: "5 minutes a day to connect with your source of energy."

If you've read The Woman's Belly Book, you know how the Source Energy concentrated within our body's center connects with the Sacred Feminine as she dwells within us. And with the presence of Mary Magdalene as she brings the Sacred Feminine into life and into form.

In addition to leading a workshop at Centre Tao in Paris, I'll be visiting bookstores and libraries to present readings. What's more, I'll be visiting sites that share the energy of Mary Magdalene.

And so the adventure continues!

As the new edition has emerged, I've delighted in learning how English expressions translate into French. For example, the English words for "trust your gut" become "avoir du cœur au ventre" in French. That's literally "have heart in your belly." Trust your gut, love your belly.

In upcoming posts I'll say more about the "belly magic" threading through my dream, my intention, of sharing this work with women worldwide. I'll give you the introduction I wrote (in English) for this new French edition. And I'll post notes of my journey through France this summer.

For now, if you or your friends read French, or are French, here's something for you: Anne Delmas, the splendid woman who translated The Woman's Belly Book, provides a fine description of the book's French incarnation here.

I met herbalist Lindsay Wilson when she presented “Restoring Digestive Health,” a day-long workshop at the Organic Growers School’s Harvest Conference near Asheville, NC.

(Photo of Lindsay Wilson courtesy of Luisa Porter, Catfish Alley Magazine)

Her name was already familiar to me. Since publishing The Woman's Belly Book, I continue to delve into the body center's role in every dimension of our well-being. When I was looking into the connection between soil depletion and our ability to replenish the gut bacteria so important to our physical and mental health, I found Lindsay's helpful blog post titled Eat Dirt.

Along with a gastroenterologist and a naturopath, Lindsay figures in Give thanks for beneficial gut bacteria and feed them well, my recently published article in Asheville's weekly newspaper, the Mountain Xpress. "Our gut is a garden," she says, and you can read her suggestions for cultivating that garden here and here.

Now settled in Mississippi, Lindsay lived north of Asheville for several years. I was curious about her connection to Western North Carolina and asked her: What influence has your time in this region made upon the ways you understand and address digestive health?

Her answer details a deepening relationship with the natural world:

I moved to Spring Creek, just outside of Hot Springs, in the Winter of 2009-10. I became the Retreat Manager at a 30-year-old silent, contemplate retreat center called Southern Dharma. While working there, I continued to deepen my interest and awareness around digestive health.

As the retreat manager, I took all of the basic enrollment information from retreat participants. One of the questions asked about food sensitivities or intolerances they had. I was really surprised by all of the various digestive issues people had and that further solidified my interest in digestive health.

After my time there, I worked on a farm near Max Patch for a year or so. I grew a good bit of my food and foraged for greens, berries, and mushrooms as well. Even though I had always had a garden, working with the soil and the land on this scale was eye-opening. I began to have quite a few insights into the nature of our digestive complaints and our disconnection with the basics of life. I began to see that soil work...was indeed...soul work.

Living in the mountains was simply mesmerizing. I charted and took note of what was in season and how that particular food or herb was relevant to health of the body at that time of year. I named certain seasonal phenomena and observed nature because there was no distractions and only time. For example, I started to call the fruiting season the "berry wave," which was a steadily ripening flow of berries from mulberries in the early season to autumn olives in the very end of the season.

Basically, with the stark beauty of the Pisgah Forest, I began to see the impeccable timing of it all. Jessica Prentice's book Full Moon Feast was in my possession and I read it for the third time while living there. Her book was about certain indigenous and traditional cultures that had named the thirteen cycles of the moon.

These names were also connected with seasonal phenomena of a particular bioregion, something I began to call Seasonal Intelligence. I even taught two on-line courses on this, using the framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine and their five seasons and related organ systems. The participants and I met on the phone each season so that I could present a basic framework of how to use food and herbs in a seasonal context.

Living in the mountains was a real boon to my understanding of natural cycles and my place in it all.  I am forever grateful for the experience!

Thanks to Maureen Corrigan and her excellent So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, there's another upsurge of interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

I've been seeing images of the novel's original cover on tote bags and t-shirts. In fact, I’d just finished an immersion — reading So We Read On and then The Great Gatsby — when I was browsing in the regional authors section at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC. Glancing down at the table there, I see a scrap of paperboard with the cover pictured here, complete with a cryptic "95 R" jotted on the back.

As bellyqueen, and in The Woman's Belly Book, I champion our body's center as the energetic sourcepoint of our courage, confidence, intuition — and creativity. Fitzgerald's words about writing Gatsby add his own evidence. After completing the novel, he recalled:

I'd dragged the great Gatsby out of the pit of my stomach....

After thoroughly considering the manuscript, Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, sent the author a long letter. He wrote:

And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space,…you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer — my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.

That's the body's center — the sourcepoint of our creative energy, our connection to transpersonal power.

Rape culture.

No, it's not a pretty phrase. But it's a fitting name for a set of institutions and ideas that steal away women's pro-creative power through physical violence, social shaming, and economic exploitation. 

In The Woman's Belly Book, I say pro-creative power is our body-centered power to promote creation — through childbirth, yes, and through life-affirming ways of being in every dimension.

Creating a cultural paradigm beyond rape is what Kim Duckett's about. How does she do it?

"I take women to Hel and back," she says.

Her vehicle for visiting goddess Hel is reviewing — and rewriting — the ancient Greek myth of Persephone’s descent.

"Stories lead to the heart of healing," my recent article in the Mountain Xpress, Asheville’s weekly newspaper, features Kim and her work. 

For whatever reason, the newspaper has shied away from relating the horrific aspects of the conventional myth to current events in the culture at large. I invite you to read the article here and add your comments online. Tell us: How is revising the myth of Persephone important for you, your family? 

Here's some background:

Kim Duckett, a.k.a. Woman Who Follows Her Heart, is an ordained Priestess and a shamanic ritualist rooted in the mountains of western North Carolina.

Holding a doctorate in Transpersonal and Spiritual Psychology with a focus on Feminist Theory, she’s taught women’s studies in college and university settings for thirty years. She also co-founded the rape crisis center, now known as Our Voice, that’s been serving the region’s women and men for more than forty years.

The Wheel of the Year as an Earth-Based Spiritual Psychology for Women names Kim’s forthcoming book. Those words also name the teaching she offers to women as she travels throughout the nation.

Kim describes her teaching this way in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies:

The Wheel of the Year as an earth-based psychology for women is inherently feminist and also based in transpersonal psychologies. Women explore the turning points, or holydays of the Wheel, on both spiritual and psychological levels through a wide range of modalities that engage body, mind, emotion, and spirit.

The Wheel of the Year focuses the first year of Kim's Sacred Mystery School, a three-year curriculum in women’s spirituality. With the arrival of the autumn equinox, she invites women taking part in Mystery School to update and personalize the myth of Persephone.

Kim knows, as famed mythologist Joseph Campbell did, that myths validate and preserve a culture’s social and moral order. She knows, as Campbell did, that myths must change to keep pace with changing times. “Myths are teaching stories,” she says. “So it’s important to ask: What are they teaching?”

She begins by presenting women with the conventional version of the myth: Hades snatches maiden Persephone, rapes her, and imprisons her in his underworld realm. 

Does this scenario sound familiar? So many of us have similar stories.

Finally breaking through to national awareness with New York magazine's July cover story, scores of women have alleged that comedian Bill Cosby did Hades over decades, holding young women captive in an “underworld realm” of drug-induced loss of consciousness. They’ve alleged that agents of various cultural institutions aided and protected Cosby, keeping his actions secret, allowing him to continue.

Drawing on Charlene Spretnak’s research, reported in Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, Kim inspires women to recognize alternatives to the Greek myth as it’s usually told, including versions pre-dating the ones validating rape culture.

In a circle of mutual support, expressing themselves through dance, poetry, and drama, women create their own versions of the myth. In these, Persephone chooses to descend. 

Each woman acknowledges, as Persephone does, her need to deepen. She chooses to move inward, to re-member and re-collect herself, to be with her inner wisdom. In the deep, dark, womb-like realm of goddess Hel she finds a place for rest and replenishment. She meets not Hades but Hecate, the wise woman within.

And then she emerges, refreshed. She embodies greater clarity, more vitality, and a renewed sense of purpose. She returns with a mythic guide to her own well-being. 

What’s more: Women rewriting the myth of Persephone as woman-affirming stories of descent and return build the foundations for a generative, peaceable culture of life.

How do you rewrite the myth of Persephone? I invite you to add your own story, your own comments, here.

More info:

Kim Duckett
A Year and A Day Sacred Mystery School for Women
followheartkd@gmail.com

Charlene Spretnak

Lost Goddesses of Early Greece

Your body's center, sheltered within your belly, is the one-point through which you address your body as a whole. It's a principle of physics: A motive force applied to your body's center moves your entire form.

As I write in The Woman's Belly Book:

What happens to the center happens to the whole.... When your belly center leads you into action, your whole body moves easily, gracefully, almost effortlessly. The whole of you moves as one.

Your body's center is also your center of being, the one-point where the matter and energy of who you are converge. It's the one-point from which your physical and emotional expressions emerge.

The best actors enact this truth. They entirely embody a character, bringing the physicality and emotionality of a particular — however fictional — person  to life. They deepen into their body's center and bring forth an individual. They don't give us an impression; they give us a genuine experience of another human being.

Tom Hanks is not my favorite actor, although I think he did a splendid job as Chuck Noland, the stranded FedEx exec in "Cast Away."

Whatever my opinion, he does know acting.

In fact, he revealed acting to be a body-centered practice when he said this (at 1 minute, 2 seconds) after receiving the Kennedy Center honors in 2014:

"I hope the look on my face was reflecting the honor and pleasure I had inside my belly."

You know how action movies usually include some kind of chase? Usually it's one car chasing another through tight alleys or the turns of a parking garage. Depending on the period, the chase might launch itself on foot, on horseback, or through interstellar space by starship.

One of my yet-to-be-finished screenplays lays out a skateboard-and-bicycle chase.

Yesterday, my spiritual journey (and my career as Belly Queen) took on the flavor of an action film: Driving my red Honda Element, I chased a white Ford Explorer through the streets of Asheville.

I was on my way home when I noticed, and deciphered, the license plate on this vehicle in front of me. I so wanted to get a picture of it. One hand on the wheel, one hand rummaging in my purse for my smart phone, I more or less kept my eyes on the road. The Explorer kept pulling ahead and out of camera range. I passed the turn off that would have taken me home and kept going, praying the traffic light at the top of the hill would be red.

The light was red, but the Explorer was turning right on the green arrow. I followed, hoping the next traffic light would be red. It was. I whipped out my camera and clicked just as the light turned green and the Explorer veered left onto the interstate. I followed, not sure that the snapshot I'd taken through my windshield had captured the plate.

Once on the interstate, the Explorer pulled out of sight. I took the next exit and went home.

Checking the photo on my phone, there it was: IMGR8FLL

Thank you, synchronicity. Thank you, bestower of grace. Thank you, personalized alert system that messages me however it can.

Yes, gratitude. Yes, I'm grateful.

I'm currently in love with Barbara Fredrickson's book Positivity (Random House, 2009). Gratitude is one of ten positive emotions she champions. Along with joy, hope, interest, pride, serenity, amusement, awe, inspiration and love, the felt sense of gratitude leads to human flourishing — feeling "more alive, creative, and resilient" as she says.

The key to flourishing is embodying these positive emotions three times more frequently than negative emotions, which she identifies as various shades of anger, fear, contempt, and shame.

What do positive and negative emotions have to do with belly wisdom? How do positive emotions such as gratitude relate to deepening breath and awareness into our body's center and energizing our hara?

My friend and Integral Bodywork originator Everett Ogawa says that, for him, lowering the breath into his body's center leads him into a bigger circle of understanding. He recognizes how life is so much larger than any human can comprehend. In the presence of such enormity he's thankful for whatever may be the span of his life, his tiny place in the great scheme of things. And he's moved by compassion to devote his time to helping others. Deepening his breath, gratitude becomes a whole-being experience, a felt sense of the precious gift that is the body, that is life itself.

Witness Everett's expression not only of gratitude but also of awe, inspiration, interest, serenity, and hope.

These and the other positive emotions that Fredrickson names are forces of attraction, connection, and bonding, linking us with others and with our essential selves.

In contrast, her roster of negative emotions are forces of separation, distancing us from others and from our essential selves. (James Joyce describes one of his characters: "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.")

My hunch: If we need to get all bioscience about it (and I'm not sure we do), the negative, separating emotions follow from the cranial brain's capacity for analytical thinking — a.k.a. sequential sorting and ranking and judging. The positive, unifying emotions follow from the gut brain's capacity for simultaneous synthesizing and encompassing.

With all of psychology's current fascination with neuroscience, the goings-on between the cranial brain and the rest of the body, I'm waiting for the day when these investigations expand to include the gut brain, the enteric nervous system.

[Be forewarned, this paragraph gets technical.] Cranial brain and gut brain communicate with each other through the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve also connects cranial brain and heart. Current fascination with neuroscience includes detailing the vagus nerve's role in, for example, heart health and social engagement. Fredrickson's research suggests that positive emotions increase a person's perception of social connection, which in turn increases vagal tone, an indicator of physical health.

Energetically, emotions such as joy, serenity, and love reflect a state of being in which a person's life force (prana, chi, ki) is flowing fully and freely. Emotions such as anger and fear reflect a situation in which life energy is stuck and unbalanced — too much in one place, not enough in another.

Deepening awareness into the belly, energizing the body's center with movement and breath, activates the hara as our central powerhouse. Our body's center serves us as a dynamo, generously pulsing vitality through our whole body and being.

With our hara-powered life force flowing fully and freely, we're susceptible to feeling all kinds of positive emotions. Chances are that we and our lives will flourish.

For that, for the dynamo of life energy centered in our bellies, I'm grateful.