Like a Serpent in a Rope: Re-imaging Woman’s Moving Body as Site of the Sacred Feminine

Louise Pare presented Like a Serpent in a Rope: Re-imaging Woman’s Moving Body as Site of the Sacred Feminine:

Western patriarchal religions erased female images of deity and in so doing inhibited women’s process of becoming divine women. Iconographical analysis of images and artifacts of prehistoric goddess cultures documented that woman’s moving body was the embodiment of the sacred. Using a multi-disciplinary approach which includes scholarship in women’s spirituality, somatics, and yogic studies as well as the writing of key French feminist philosophers, I argue that woman’s moving body is a site of the Sacred Feminine. I will present research on Sacred Transformational Movement as a new embodied spiritual practice which enables a woman practitioner to bring forth new images of herself as the embodiment of the Sacred Feminine. The stories of seasoned women practitioners will demonstrate how this work enables women to image themselves as the embodiment of the divine in order to correct and complete the central project of Christianity which is “embodied knowledge.”