Part 1: Finding Spirit Through the Body

There is a kind of harm that happens when we interpret knowledge without first taking a critical lens on the positionality of ourself. The harm serves to reify social constructs around race, gender, class, sexuality and also constitutes the problem. In short, without examining ourselves, we have the potential to not just produce incorrect knowledge, but to create the teleological argument for why our non inclusive perspective is correct. Throughout this writing I intend to first examine my own paradigm of bias and then explore how feminists, artists, scholars, and healers around the globe have sought out ways to better understand and even share their connections with spirit and ancestors as acts of resistance to oppressive ideological and ontological frames. Acknowledging how Western constructs have been formed through a culture of religious patriarchy and domination, I’m curious how we can re-envision what has been written to incorporate a feminist and indigenous spiritual lens – one that acknowledges the relationship between spirit and body and resists the current Western and patriarchal paradigm.

Reflecting on my own frames, I have at times caught myself in a trap of oversimplification. My intention is usually to try and understand the complexity around me, but the impact of simplification results in silencing and ignoring the multitude of experiences that exist in the world. As a way of making sense of things that don't make sense, I diminish individual experiences of the body and replace them with simplified stories of spiritual and collective oneness resulting in the exclusion of marginalized voices and my own experience.

Western ontological paradigms of race and gender at times capture my attention and with them I uphold human hierarchies. These hierarchies not only mute the diversity of expressions through an attempt at categorizing the experiences of people around me, but they place hierarchical values on human life – as if one was worth more than another. I used to believe that the knowledge from a black or brown body was less important than the knowledge from a white body, that the knowledge from a woman’s body was less important than knowledge from a man’s body, and that there is no body of the ancestor; therefore, my ancestors have no knowledge. As a result, universalizing, and by extension minimizing the body, I manufactured inequality while simultaneously diminishing my ability to locate that inequality.

As a scholar wanting to apply a decolonial feminist methodology to the study of religion I am working to be more mindful of the tendency to apply the reductionist type of thinking often found in Western feminist scholarly discourse. Sara Salem writes about a “feminist blindness” that Western women do by universalizing the experiences of religious Islamic women into a simplistic and reductionist understanding.[1] Expanding the discourse on agency, autonomy, and choice, she defines a type of confining ontology where choice equals emancipation and where Western feminists believe that Islamic religious women do not have choice and therefore cannot be feminists.

Suhaiymah shares how a Western feminist approach tends to simplify Muslim women as being trapped. In the mind of the Western feminist, women who wear a burqa are understood as not having freedom and therefore must not be feminists.[2] She writes how conflating choice with freedom removes the ability to inquire about the Muslim women who have a deepened relationship with their religion and choose to wear a burqa. Suhaiymah and Salem both expand the trappings of a Western feminist framework which seeks to reduce and simplify rather than expand and complexify.

Coming to terms with the limitation of Western paradigms, I began to make space for a wider array of diversity of human expression which comes as a result of the experiences we have because of our bodies. Making space means I could hear all the stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, gynophobia and religious oppression and expression which are most often understood through our lived experiences inside the body. Coming to terms with Western thinking, I began to challenge the framework of dualism – more specifically a dualism between spirit and matter, mind and body. Mind-body dualism is where the mind is understood as fundamentally distinct from body.[3] On the one hand, attention to the body brings awareness to our lived experiences. On the other hand, attention to the mind brings awareness to our souls, the deities we venerate, and our ancestors.

Christine Atkinson writes how mind-body dualism began in Christianity somewhere between the second and fourth centuries C.E.[4] She writes how body and soul in early Christian life was perceived as distinct, with spiritual reality being valued above the material body.[5] For early Christians, the spiritual world was the world that was worth paying attention to. “St. Augustine remembered that ‘by reading these books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal.’”[6] Inside St. Augustine’s statement is the belief that the body is not only separate from the soul but it also, “detracted from goodness and wisdom and closeness to God.”[7] Within this early Christian understanding men were associated with spirit while women were associated with the body. Thus, men who sacrificed physical comfort were able to transcend their body and become closer to God; whereas, women in the eyes of Christian men, were associated with physical desire and childbirth which was regarded as evidence of being more physically embodied and therefore farther from God. Atkinson writes how the lack of care for the body led to the devaluation of women’s bodies and experiences within early Christianity.

Professor and researcher Sylvia Marcos writes how women’s indigenous spirituality welcomes duality (note to reader: not dualism) as a way of moving beyond mutually exclusive sides.[8] While Christian theology centers around the concept of transcending the body as a way of reaching the spirit, indigenous spirituality recognizes that life and body are sacred, and spirituality is born from this understanding.[9] In this way, body and spirit are both interrelated and complementary.

Paths of Resistance

Many spiritual seekers on their journey write about finding paths of resistance when challenging Western paradigms built around Christianity and feminism. They often do so with the support and encouragement of spirit guides and ancestors. Much of their work is about finding themselves in what doesn’t exist in research, writing, or documented history. For example, feminist cultural historian and California Institute of Integral Studies professor emerita Lucia Birnbaum writes about accessing places of resistance while confronting canonical writings in Christianity by discovering the Black Madonna’s of Europe.[10] Birnbaum’s act of resistance makes me think about my own acts of resistance. I’m curious about using a feminist decolonial methodology to engage in discovery with spirit – the aspect not contained in the body. I’m curious about the way people engage with their ancestors as an essential part of living in the present and to creating a better future.

Professor of Women’s Studies, Theology, and Ministry, Jeanette Rodriguez writes about the magical and connective power of Our Lady of Guadalupe.[11] Rodriguez weaves together the creation stories of both the Nahuatl, the Indigenous peoples of Mexico,[12] and the Spanish cultures in Mexican Christianity to tell a story of how the Aztecs adopted Catholicism through a process of “fusional syncretism.”[13] While Our Lady of Guadalupe represents the Virgin Mary to the Spanish Catholics, for the Nahuatl she is “Tlecuauhtlacupeuh (she who comes flying from the region of light like an eagle of fire.”[14]

What struck me in her discourse is the magic behind the painting – more specifically, the hidden microscopic images of what are known as ink blots. Guadalupan studies have led scholars to write about the microscopic images as more than just ink blots.[15] When examined with a microscope, researchers have found the image of a human bust, “the image of a cross-legged, bare-chested Indian holding hands in prayer,” and the “indistinct form of a black woman.”[16] “For those who believe, the explanation is simple. The image of Guadalupe was made supernaturally.”[17] There's also the curiosity of her paint and the steadfastness of her color. “Despite the coarseness of the fabric and the 450 years since the image first appeared, it has remained as brilliant as ever and is an object of veneration.”[18] What I’m curious about is the magic of it all. Strict attention to the material world would presuppose this kind of inquiry to be irrelevant. On the other hand, welcoming the inquiry means there is more to possibly be discovered outside the material realm – with the spirits around us and with our ancestors.

As an act of resistance against the normative pressures of patriarchy, artists have welcomed a feminist examination of the spiritual realms. Judy Chicago asks, "how will you refuse to let the academy separate the dead from the living and then yourself declare allegiance to life?"[19] Extrapolating from this inquiry, I then question how can we let the academy speak of religion and declare allegiance to the materiality of science, anthropology, and history while denying spirit and spirituality– in other words, what about the magic of it all?

In search of a way to re-interpret knowledge outside the norms of Christianity and Western paradigms, Professor of Divinity Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes that we have limited written narrative about women.[20] From this perspective she says, “the goal isn’t about trying to find new information but to reimagine how we interpret our existing sources of information – namely our bodies and spirit.”[21]

So how does one talk about the magic of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a setting where historians and theologians have either ignored or disposed of the oral traditions of women who practice magic and replace them with the materiality of the written word – words written predominantly by men, for men and about men? Fiorenza says we must use our “historical imagination.”[22]

Universalizing the Body

We live in a world where the distance between one another is contracting, while at the same time, the complexity between one another is increasing. Put another way, as bodies get closer to each other, we only have more to learn. The beauty of our world is that our unity will make sense once we welcome the diversity of our experiences. Tucked inside Western paradigms of thinking is a tendency to universalize and therefore minimize the experiences of those outside of Christian, and androcentric categories. To contrast, Buddhist practitioner Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes, “We have mistaken our sameness for being human. Our sameness stems from the fact that we share the same life-force as a flower or a bee. But we are nonetheless inherently different in form. When we speak of our embodiment – we speak of all of us, not just ‘those people’ over there.”[23] Manuel is reminding us to honor our diversity because it is a sign of our oneness.

Sandra A. Wawrytko, professor in Asian and Pacific studies writes how the Buddhist philosophy of non-dualism has had the unintentional impact of contributing to gynophobia.[24] Buddhist philosophy, in theory, intends to not privilege that which is stereotypically masculine or feminine. Wawrytko writes how Buddhist epistemology aims to free the human from material bias and confines of ontological constructs, yet when it comes to gender, Buddhist practitioners of non-dualism have ended up reifying women and women’s experiences as less valuable than men.[25] Instead of transcending gender, Buddhist philosophers “transcend the confines of feminist theory, while contributing to its ends.”[26] Wawrytko’s story is important because she is saying that if we ignore experiences of the body only to venerate the spiritual and esoteric experiences, we may miss out on understanding the physical and therefore lived experience of being a Buddhist and female – an aspect which informs her daily spiritual and esoteric life.

Manuel writes, “we cannot experience life without a body, and we live our lives with the categorical names given to our bodies.”[27] In contrast to Western androcentric and feminist paradigms, both Manual and Wawrytko are reminding us that we cannot rid ourselves of the body, nor can we rid ourselves of lived experiences by reducing them into simplistic constructs. Silencing the body, silences our individual experiences. One may seek to silence the human body in exchange for the voice of spirit. However, the moment we silence the body is the moment we lose our capacity to locate bodily oppression. The way we experience the world through our body is also how we connect with spirit and with our ancestors. Focusing on the body allows us to write about the experience of our humanness.

In contrast, centering the body to the exclusion of what is spiritual and bodiless also has its limitations. For example, centering how the physical world is categorized and ordered in terms of race, gender, class, economic powers, and cognitive structures can lead to silencing the voices of our ancestors. Malidoma Somé writes that the ancestors paradoxically “embody the guidelines for successful living – all that is most valuable about life.”[28] Somé begs the question, what knowledge is missed by being unwilling to join the spiritual with the material?[29]

Healing the Ancestors

Teacher and author Luisah Teish explains that if you want to commune with an ancestor, you can. You just need to follow the ritual process and invoke the ancestor you would like to join you. She reminds her readers to not bring the ones who are especially bad. But also, do not leave out the ones who you are just pissed off at. They may have a lesson for you in the end.[30]

I am pissed off at my ancestors. My ancestors were perpetrators of crime, harm, and death. Teish’s nudge to remember to include the ancestors who we are angry with, speaks to a need to connect at a time when our divided world must face each other and embrace the conflicts and divisions within. Inside of conflict and division also lies a story of loss of healing and wholeness. Examining conflict as an unconscious search for healing can bring our ancestors together to help us heal at a deeper level. Rilke writes in his poem, “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight,

take your well-disciplined strengths

and stretch them between two

opposing poles. Because inside human beings

is where God learns.[31]

I never imagined God as someone who learned. Yet Rilke opens the possibility for spirit to learn from the conflicts of embodied humans. Conflict is immanent because we repeatedly identify ourselves in the contours of something or someone other than ourselves. And as Rilke suggests, perhaps God/dess is engaging in conflict and learning with us. In this way, we are called upon to heal, not just to those who are embodied, but also to those who are in spirit with us.

Somé believes that someone like me, a person with a Western mindset, could be restless due in part to not having a relationship with my ancestors. He writes “When a person from my culture looks at the descendants of the Westerners who invaded their culture, they see a people who are ashamed of their ancestors because they were killers and marauders masquerading as artisans of progress.”[32] The Dagara believe it is the responsibility of the living to heal the ancestors.[33] From his perspective, it is no surprise Westerners are sick and struggling, by not healing our ancestors, our sickness is haunting us.

Learning from Ancestors

Authors and activists around the globe have been searching for ways to better understand and even share with others their lived experiences of religion alongside their relationship with spirits and ancestors. A diversity of authors, scholars and activists write from their perspectives. Mohawk scholar Dan Roronhiakewen Longboat writes about the imagination as an actual place. It is not the exclusive domain of the human consciousness, it is “the interplay of human and more-than-human consciousness.”[34] Birnbaum writes, “We need to recover the poetic wisdom of our ancestors and sometimes this information is cognitive, sometimes it is left in the body, and I would add through our ancestors.”[35]

Scholar of feminist, queer and Chicana cultural theory, Gloria Anzaldúa, in search of justice and healing writes about the Path of Conocimiento as a way of spiritual knowledge making. Her exploration talks about a pathway to understanding the borders between reality and magical intuition.[36] Jewish feminist poet and essayist, Aurora Levins Morales writes about night flying which “requires a willingness to leave familiar ground and see what is meant to be hidden, a willingness to be transformed.”[37] Author and California Institute of Integral Studies professor, Monica Mody speaks of the irrational liminal space as a space where the nonphysical world gets translated into this world.[38] The feminist scholar Stacy Alaimo writes about the ‘contact-zone’ where human meets more-than-human.[39] Martha Nelson takes Alaimo’s work a step further and writes that not only is the “contact zone” a place where human meets more-than-human, but it’s also a pathway to engendering “empathy and kinship and a lived environmental ethic”.[40] While ancestors have passed on, Nelson’s communication with them is not only ongoing but it informs how she engages with and cares for the world today.

What aligns Nelson, Alaimo, Mody, Anzaldúa, Birnbaum, and Longboat is their common desire for inquiry with their ancestors. These scholars are searching for an “in-between” space – a space where the human and non-human are seeking liberation from a trapped history. They are seeking a means to step beyond traditional and materially academic methods of knowing and being.

Dr. Mody asks, “what about liminal spaces as a way of healing? How do we get justice if our ancestors are still in a place of pain because their stories haven't been told yet? And how do we tell their stories when we have no analytic information?”[41] The manifestation of these questions drove her to use poetry and creative writing alongside the rational and logical as a means of combining the mystical and the material into her work.

California Institute of Integral Studies Alumni, Dr. Inhui Lee, wrote her dissertation on shamans who are working to heal her Korean ancestors, the so-called ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese War. These women were given to the Japanese soldiers to be raped with the idea that the violent interaction would provide relief to the soldiers who were exhausted from fighting in the War. While many of the women are no longer alive today, their children and children’s children are alive. How do they make sense of their mothers and grandmothers experience – an experience which informs who they are and how they live in the world today? Lee reminds me that embodied work is inherently spiritual and many times our research takes us outside of the human material world and into that of the spiritual realm.

Conclusion

Unbinding the Western androcentric and Christian mindset from the scholarship of religion leaves a lot of feminist information waiting to be recovered and uncovered. Scholars trapped in a Western paradigm either dismiss spirituality as irrelevant because it is not material or attempt to interrogate spirituality with a methodology of study that is closed to ancestors and spirit guides as a source of knowledge. In this way arguments around mind-body dualism usually end up wrapped in a teleological argument which presupposes the dominance of materiality and subjugates the spirit. Considered folklore or mythology or not written and therefore not worthwhile, spiritual conversations with ancestors are ignored because they are not measurable or quantifiable. This argument has only served to deny or diminish the connection with spirit which so many are talking and writing about today.

Through this paper, I’m hoping that I’ve shown how feminists, artists, scholars, and healers around the globe have nonetheless been searching for ways to better understand and even share their connection with spirit and ancestors. As acts of resistance, they have sought to re-envision what has been written to incorporate a feminist and indigenous spiritual lens – one that acknowledges the relationship between spirit and body.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Sara Salem, “Feminist Critique and Islamic Feminism: The Question of Intersectionality,” Accessed December 9, 2021 http://postcolonialist.com/civil-discourse/feminist-critique-and-islamic-feminism-the-question-of-intersectionality/. [2] Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, “Why Are We Obsessed with Muslim Women?” Last modified February 1, 2017 https://thebrownhijabi.com/2017/02/01/why-are-we-obsessed-with-muslim-women/ . [3] Sylvia Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women's Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 25 no. 2 (2009): 25-45. [4] Clarissa W. Atkinson, The oldest vocation: Christian motherhood in the Middle Ages. (Cornell University Press, 1991), 70 [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid. [7] Ibid., 71 [8] Sylvia Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women's Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 25 no. 2 (2009): 41 [9] Ibid., 45 [10] Lucia C. Birnbaum, Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. (Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 124. [11] Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment Among Mexican-American Women (1st ed., University of Texas Press, 1994) 16-46. [12] Ibid., 36-44 [13] Ibid., 44-6 [14] Ibid., 46 [15] Ibid., 16-9 [16] Ibid., 27 [17] Ibid., 19 [18] Ibid. [19] Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant De Bretteville, and San Francisco Museum of Art. The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage. (Anchor Booksed. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979) [20] Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. (Harper Collins:New York, 1989) 35 [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid. [23] Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2015) 40 [24]Ann Pang-White. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender. (Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016) 307-29 [25] Ibid., 308-15 [26] Ibid., 308 [27] Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2015) 41 [28] Malidoma Patrice Somé. Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. (New York: Penguin, 1995) 10 [29] Ibid., 9 [30] Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988), 99-100 [31] Rainer Maria Rilke. Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Robert Bly. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981) [32] Malidoma Patrice Somé. Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. (New York: Penguin, 1995) 10 [33] Ibid. [34] Joanne Barker. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 255 [35] Lucia C. Birnbaum, Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. (Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 124. [36] Gloria Anzaldúa. Light in the Dark = Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 17 [37] Aurora Levins Morales. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2019) 94 [38] Monica Mody, Zoom call with class, October, 24, 2021. [39] Joanne Barker. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 232 [40] Ibid., 233 [41] Monica Mody, Zoom call with class, October, 24, 2021. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light in the Dark = Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015. 2. Atkinson Clarissa, W. The oldest vocation: Christian motherhood in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1991. 3. Barker, Joanne. Critically Sovereign : Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 4. Birnbaum, Lucia, C. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2001. 5. Chicago, Judy, Sheila Levrant De Bretteville, and San Francisco Museum of Art. The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage. Anchor Booksed. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979. 6. Hall, David. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1997 7. Manuel, Zenju Earthlyn. The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. Boston: Wisdom Publications. 2015 8. Manzoor-Khan, Suhaiymah, “Why Are We Obsessed with Muslim Women?” Accessed December 9, 2021. https://thebrownhijabi.com/2017/02/01/why-are-we-obsessed-with-muslim-women/ . 9. Marcos Sylvia. “Mesoamerican Women's Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 25, no. 2, 25-45. 10. Morales, Aurora Levins. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. North Carolina Duke University Press, 2019. 11. Pang White, Ann A. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender, Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. 12. Plaskow, J., & Christ, Carol. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. Harper Collins: New York, 1989. 13. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Robert Bly. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. 14. Rodriguez, Jeanette. “Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment Among Mexican-American Women” (1st ed.). University of Texas Press (1994) 16-46. 15. Sara Salem, “Feminist Critique and Islamic Feminism: The Question of intersectionality,” Academic Journal (Vol.1 No.1, 2013), accessed December 9, 2021, http://postcolonialist.com/civil-discourse/feminist-critique-and-islamic-feminism-the-question-of-intersectionality/ . 16. Somé, Malidoma Patrice. Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. New York: Penguin, 1995. 17. Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988.