(Nine Sister Networks E-interview) Leslene della-Madre’s Winged Women Return by Mary Saracino

[Editor’s Note: Return to Mago E-Magazine (RTME) introduces Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism previously known as Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality. If you are interested in interviewing or being interviewed for this project, please see here.]

Leslene della-madre photo from Leslene’s personal collection.

Mary Saracino: I met Leslene della-Madre in 2004 when we were part of the Dark Mother Study tour of Sardegna, led by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum. I know Leslene to be a compassionate feminist who has a deep understanding of the Sacred Female. Her commitment to the Divine She and to empowering women is inspiring. She is a mother, grandmother, shamanic feminist practitioner, feminist philosopher, and teacher of a feminist shamanic path, author, independent researcher, poet, artist, singer, ritualist, death midwife and Earth lover, and the founder of Winged Women Return, based in Sebastopol, CA. Her website is: www.leslenedellamadre.com.

Mary: Why and when did you launch Winged Women Return?

Leslene: I was inspired to create Winged Women Return nearly 40 years ago for women to come together to find healing as well as to learn about women’s culture that has been nearly erased by patriarchal “culture.” I had attended some retreats and weekend events studying shamanism that ignited my own need for a female-based spiritual practice in women’s mysteries. I studied with various teachers of shamanism and First Nations spirituality  (with permission) and was initiated as a pipe carrier in the tradition of medicine woman Evelyn Eaton, Grandmother Mahad’yuni. I pursued teachings in Buddhism with female teachers, looking for the Sacred Female presence and was initiated into a sacred female path of a Tibetan goddess protectress of women and children by a living dakini/goddess in Kathmandu. I could see a huge need for women-only space that would feel safe for women to gather, to learn from each other in collaborative ways, to do ritual together, celebrate seasonal changes and honor sacred passages in our lives. Women’s spirituality was blossoming and I was inspired to find non-patriarchal ways of healing for women. Synchronistically, my new neighbor at the time was a first editor of Marija Gimbutas’ book, Language of the Goddess, and we became good friends. I learned a lot from her and felt that the Goddess had moved in next door for a reason! It is a center based in feminist shamanism, helping women to reconnect with the magic of Nature and ancestral wisdom.

Mary: What is the mission/vision of Winged Women Return?

Leslene: The mission and vision are the same—to shed patriarchal conditioning and to find sisterhood in healing, learning and re-membering together. I feel it’s important to expand into as many areas as possible to reclaim women’s wisdom by finding ways to create women’s community where we share our talents and skills with each other. Putting vision into action, I’ve been committed to learning and teaching women’s history not only to women who come to gather in circle, but also in community outreach by going into elementary and high schools with slideshows about early women-centered cultures so that children can hear that before there were wars, people lived peacefully. I’ve also created community gatherings for women around seasonal cycles, like a Spiral Dance for the community and weekend retreats on goddess spirituality, and have provided end-of-life death midwifing services.

Mary:  What services or programs does Winged Women Return offer, and who do you serve? Your website indicates that you offer shamanic based healing: soul retrieval, extraction, depossession, mandala medicine wheel work, life passage rituals from birth to death, death midwifing. Can you say a bit more about each of these and how they are associated with feminist activist spirituality?

Leslene: I offer a wide range of healing modalities that serve mostly women and girls, but I also work with couples that have included men and same sex. Included in my services I offer what I call a “shamanic psychological approach,” “inquiry,” oracle consultation, and some energy body work, instruction in the shamanic journey technique for trauma healing as well as helping people access spiritual realms that all people have the capacity to experience. Soul retrieval is a cross-cultural shamanic process that restores lost parts of someone’s soul which “left” the person during some type of traumatic experience. I have developed  a specific practice of Soul Retrieval of the Female Soul because women have been traumatized by patriarchy for millennia. Women’s more recent lineages are wounded and oppressed and this practice restores wholeness to a woman’s motherline. Extraction is a shamanic method of removing harmful energies in a person’s energy field that might be causing illness and or mental confusion. Depossession is similar in that it is also a process of removing unwanted “entities” from a person’s energy field, often related to addiction and trauma. The mandala medicine wheel work, which I also call “The Four Shields Empowerment”, is a committed process in which the woman is taught the shamanic journey technique and works with a teacher and power animal in the “unseen” realms. The focus is on personal archimages (archetypes) —the word is from Mary Daly— that correspond to one of each of the four directions of the medicine wheel resulting in the experience of wholeness and sovereignty. This practice offers an alternative to therapy and engages the client in her own discovery from within. I have used it in working with trauma. Honoring life passages with ritual is a way to honor the sacredness of them. I have attended home births, including my own, and now in my later years I attend another kind of birth—the dying process. I like to say that one can learn to midwife oneself in one’s own death and see birth and death as the revolving door of life. As a death doula, I help the dying and their families. I also have created menarche rituals for girls, and crone rituals for women becoming elders.

For many years I offered women’s sweat lodge work (the lodge was blessed by elders in the circle of Evelyn Eaton) to embody healing through cleansing with the elements, praying and sharing sacred space with other women and connecting with ancestral remembrance held in our DNA.

Mary: How do you see Winged Women Return contributing to the cause of feminist activist spirituality directly or indirectly?

Leslene: All my work impacts feminist activist spirituality because it is grounded in the Sacred Female ways of wisdom as those ways have come to me. I teach what I’ve learned and I have written books on it to help women preserve Her wisdom ways, often by honoring ancestors that have gone before. Creating rituals is an active practice in feminist spirituality. I am also outspoken about issues relating to women and girls in social and political circles. I focus my work on speaking out about patriarchy and all of its attendant dysfunction and educate, however I can.

Having a center for women to gather in groups and in community to find sisterhood and to find healing directly contributes to the cause of feminist activist spirituality. Helping women to learn about their patriarchal conditioning and internalized misogyny is a bit like having an “underground railroad” for women to escape the patriarchal traps that have become normalized in the experience of many women. Learning about the truth of who women really are and our place in the cosmos is crucial to changing the current male dominant paradigm that enslaved many of our mothers and grandmothers. Freeing ourselves from male violence that has been on the planet for about 6000 years and understanding the history of that oppression allows women to tell a new story to upcoming genHERnations. Encouraging women to face their own internalized misogyny in order to claim their sovereignty is an important step in practicing active feminist spirituality. Attending conferences as both a participant and a speaker has been a way to share my perspectives and views on feminist activist spirituality.

Mary: How would you like the Nine Sister Networks to support and connect to your organization?

Leslene: I think whatever ways Nine Sister Networks creates to weave a web with other like-minded women to connect all of us will be the best way they can help my organization. If that is through referrals for healing work, or recommended reading, or suggestions for speakers/teachers, I would like to be considered for these avenues.

Mary: What are the titles of your books, and how are they in related to Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality?

Leslene: My book titles are: Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother; Trauma-informed Care: Addressing Cultural Sensitivity of the Women Veterans With Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Related to Military Sexual Trauma in the Veterans Administration and in Civilian Health Care Systems (contributing co-editor); She Who Spins the Coils of Creation: Sacred Female Cosmology in the Electric PlasMA Universe.

In my research, I have learned how some female-centered cultures from the past lived in harmony with Nature and seemed to accept the cycle of life as a sacred passage, honoring birth, life, and death. In patriarchal culture, death is laden with fear and many people refuse to think about death while alive. There are spiritual teachings that encourage us to walk with death in our daily life so that we will not be surprised by it when it comes. Activist feminist spirituality can be about changing narratives that do not support life. Learning about death from a feminist spiritual viewpoint changes the patriarchal notion of death and the dualistic scary notions of heaven and hell. Trauma-informed care from a feminist perspective can be life-changing for women who have endured sexual assault in the military. My contribution to this book that I co-edited is a chapter on healing through feminist shamanic practices. The approach is to help women see that their self-worth is not compromised by the sexual assault they endured at the hands of men. It is abominable that men rape women who enlist. But in a rapacious patriarchal culture, they have permission to do so. Through Earth-based focus on healing, women can reclaim their sovereignty. My book on cosmology is a journey into patriarchal science and myth that shows how male dominance in these fields has skewed our understanding of the female cosmos. With concerted effort, I show on both macro and micro levels how male bias has shaped what is taught in science as fact when it is not so. I feel this book uncovers the layers of misinformation that have inherent misogyny in them that we are not supposed to notice. And many don’t. I offer a female cosmology that opposes the big bang and show how the universe/matriverse is electric and not gravity-driven. An electric universe is a connected universe by love in action, which is female at its core.

Mary:  Is there anything else you would like to add before we close?

Leslene: I am grateful for this chance to share. I actually want to see Women’s Studies Departments reinstated in colleges and universities so that the girls growing into womanhood coming after us have a chance to learn about patriarchy, their own conditioning, and have an opportunity to step out of the dominant model. They need to know about the foremothers of women’s spirituality, goddess cultures, and all the feminist writers from anthropology and archeology, history, mythology, cosmology and cultural history as well as the poets and artists—most of whom have been sidelined in colleges due to the eradication of Women’s Studies. This erasure is grievous.

I also want to see a new cosmology taught to children and up and coming science enthusiasts that is based on a connected universe, replacing the archaic view of mechanistic theory in western science. As a cousin of Einstein, I almost feel it is my “duty” to speak about this, as some say he set us back in our understanding of the universe. This new view is based on the Electric Universe and is something that children can understand. Though it is not really new, as it seems most indigenous cultures understand it, it is new to current western minds, and it is my view that teaching it to children as well as in institutions of “higher” education would offer a real sense of connection in body, mind and spirit. An embodied sense of the universe rather than an experience of disconnection offered by mechanistic theory would have far-reaching effects across the realms of human experience, just as mechanism has, though in my view not in a positive way. An embodied experience of connection will inform in a different way. It is the female way.

May peace, beauty and love prevail on our beautiful Earth.

Meet Mago Contributor, Mary Saracino – Return to Mago E*Magazine