You have talked about your Buddhist practice and also about goddess-centered cultures. How do these two things fit together? Are we talking about a new spiritual practice here?
"My interest and connection to Kuan Yin &endash; it must have been in the late '80s when I discovered her and loved her as a goddess, and became very much interested in Buddhism. She represented a lot of things for me, the deep teachings and practices within Buddhism, the whole understanding of finding insight and nurturing inside oneself. To really image her in a female form as a deity was so important to me.
She carries me
She carries me
She carries me
She carries meKuan Yin (detail)
by Sandra Stanton
"Buddhism offers a set of teachings for how to understand life. At the center of that is teachings about learning how to be completely present to life as it is, instead of projecting our own fantasies and our own mental projections onto the world and onto each other."In the Charge of the Goddess, there are a lot of correspondences to Buddhist teachings, for example, the end, 'I am that which is attained at the end of desire.'
"In Buddhism when you can reach a state when you are happy with how things are, present in the moment and not constantly striving for things but you're present, there's a big relief there, and there's a real similarity with that statement in the Charge of the Goddess.
"When that sense of desire, that kind of frantic wanting that is never satisfied &endash; and it's very much about our culture, I think, too - when that can be quelled - I don't mean in the negative sense about quelling all passion but more in the sense of addiction - then there's a sense of real peace, cause we're free.
"Also in the Charge of the Goddess, 'that which you do not find within yourself, you'll never find without.' That's a very Buddhist teaching. The wisdom is within. There are energies outside ourselves in the universe, of course, but we experience them in different ways.
"And I think some of these practices pre-date Buddhism.
"There's a similarity between the understanding of the cyclical nature of the existence and in Buddhism the deep understanding of the impermanence of everything. That's central to what we understand of the civilizations we call goddess-centered or earth-based people."
"Instead of fighting the fact that we're going to die and being terrified of it, and hiding all the dead people away in the cemetery and not looking at them so that we can all stay in denial that it's ever ever going to happen to us, &endash; most of us are shocked to think we're ever going to die, it's shocking. I think that to be able to meditate on that, whether you're doing it through Buddhism or through the goddess perspective, it's a very similar point of view.
"In the Hypogeum, they found thousands of skeletons there, people who had died. And in some places like in Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, they would bury the bones of their ancestors underneath the platforms of their beds! So they were sleeping on top of generations of people! It's a real understanding of death and rebirth.
"I think somehow it's central to what's missing in our culture.
"We're really taught to believe that we're going to live forever. Or if we're not taught that, we're taught that death is a horrible thing. It's not how the ancient people saw it at all. I think when you have a culture that honors that process and it's held in a sacred way, it's part of life, and it's a more profound, sacred experience when it actually happens. And for the ancients, everything was held in that same space."
no matter what you steal
You cannot stop the turning of the wheel.from Refuge, by Jennifer BerezanIt's quite daring to make recordings using a single phrase or chant. Could you talk about the use of chants in your work?
"I had begun to use a lot of chants in workshops and experienced the power of repetition, and investigate those musical and spiritual traditions. The power of the mantra and the repetition of it was becoming clear to me, and I thought it would be wonderful thing to use the phrase that describes and embodies the energy of Kuan Yin and repeat it many many times in a piece.
"In She Carries Me, I wanted to bring together the Buddhist deity and the more earth-based, ancient, universal, mother goddess which I felt was embodied in "The Charge of the Goddess" with my own reworking of my Catholic past.
"I thought I would take it upon myself to rewrite the Hail Mary in a way that seems more true, instead of calling her the Mother of God, I called her the Mother of All Things, which she is. To be the Mother of God is to be the Mother of everything! I invited a lot of women to come and be the goddess nuns doing the vespers the way that it is done in a traditional cloister late at night or in the morning, the whispering, but I wanted them to be more empowered, a female centered chant.
"With Returning, I felt even more more faith in the fact that there is an incredible power in working with chant repeated over time and layered in different ways. There's all kinds of solo sections that come in from different cultural traditions. It's all linked with an underlying drone and repetition.
"If you go hear a concert of traditional Indian ragas, pieces will last a long time. There's a consistency, a repetition of a mantric kind of drone underneath the music. We have no understanding of that here and so when you try to approach a record label with a piece like this, well, the feeling is you're not getting enough for your money, you're not getting ten different songs!
"You become completely present to the moment. It's a relief, a huge relief just to be doing that.
"There are people doing ritual, doing body work, who want a piece that will play that length of time
"The Tibetans will chant all night long. Traditional tribal people in Africa will chant and sing the same piece, the same rhythm, all night long, for three nights and three days and its part of a healing ceremony and the whole point is that you're repeating the rhythms until they're part of you. So an hour long piece is really not that long."
Returning...to the mother of us all...
Returning...to the mother of us all...So there is a healing aspect to this kind of music?
"There have been a lot of studies about it, but I like the mystery of things, I don't like to anaylze everything to death, but the very fact of repeating a mantric kind of phrase or listening to it that our brain waves are changed and our heart rate slows down and our immune system probably is stimulated in very positive ways, so just in the very physical cellular level this kind of music can be very healing and that's why people listen to it and feel changed. Sound is just vibration, and there are a lot of theories that our cellular structures are affected by sound. If I go hear a heavy metal concert I'm going to feel very different than if I go to hear Tibetan music. Working with sacred vowels and phrases can have a very positive impact on all levels of our being.
"And to me the goal is really about opening the heart and developing a heart that's more compassionate towards ourselves and the world with the goal of healing ourselves and healing the world. I think in these times things have gotten so sped up and we're so technologically oriented that people are looking for tools to help us reconnect back into what is profoundly meaningful. And in a lot of ways in our culture we've lost the sacred elements of music and dance and arts in general.
"I'm trying to create music that will help - me, really - reconnect in a way that I think is ancient as well as open the door for other people.
"My spirituality has been formed by nature more than anything. . . it's in all my music, the feeling of being very grounded in nature, in the actual physicality of the trees, the plants, profoundly touched by creation, and I think that's the goddess, the divine,…
"These pieces that I create don't usually come with too much of an agenda in advance. But I try to create things that are helpful for me and hope they will be helpful to other people. And with this piece, I wanted to express the beauty and power of the Hypogeum and of the ancient places because I do believe there's power in these places I hope that's going to be transmitted through the sound. I wanted to provide a voice for that.
"The goddess is largely shut out of the mainstream world. I guess that's one of my agendas, absolutely, is to try to bring the work of Marija Gimbutas and the understanding of our sacred history to the forefront, through the music."
Can you say anything more about art and the sacred? Is there any similarity between going to a concert and going to a religious ceremony?
"There are moments in all creativity where the sacred can come alive, it doesn't have to be what we would call traditionally sacred music. I've been to extremely secular concerts and had profound experiences . . . I think there's something about movement and sound, visual expression and color, it has power in itself itself.
"I do think if you're working with a specific intention, or using some of these techniques that are very ancient, using them consciously, that has a particular special power in it. But I would hesitate to say there's a split between sacred art and what we call secular.
"At the same time I do think that when music and art were separated from ritual life, then we ended up with the entertainment industry, art being created from a commercial point of view, and then it's all about making money and it loses a lot of its sacred power.
"My goal is to try to create music for the transitional times in our lives. We don't really have the music for dying, the music for birth, most women birth without music, without drums, without sound, it's kind of amazing. Most people die without that kind of support.
"The new album is very much intended to help people pass over and again for celebration and ritual and for birth.
"It was central to those ancient goddess civilizations. Birth life and death were all connected, that's why the temples were built in the shape of the womb.
"Returning is very much about the tomb and the womb being one."
End of Interview. Go on to a brief bio.
