This painting is a ‘self portrait’ of accessing information from the earth and cosmos from 2009 called Inspired – sharing how Intentional Creativity works with consciousness in image form.
When Women Are Awake
When women are awake we are less violent to ourselves.
We are less violent to others and our children.
When women are awake, we stand against violence of all kinds.
When women are awake, we do all they can to awaken our partners.
If our partner is willing to be woken, they can be awakened by our presence.
When women are awake, we are called to awaken others by an incredible force within us
When women are awake we often see through the/our bullsh*t
When women are awake, we make every effort to raise awakened children.
When women are awake, the world wakes with us.
When women are awake, we often long to teach about awakening, awakening overflows with abundance.
We share awakening because it is one of the practices of being awake.
Being awake doesn’t happen one time and then you are awake, it is a continual revelation.
Being awake isn’t for the few who choose to become conscious by choice, it is a call to all beings.
Being awake doesn’t mean your stuff is in a pile, it means you know when it isn’t.
Being awake doesn’t mean you know stuff – it means you know you want to know stuff.
Compassion runs naturally through the river of awakening.
When women are awake, the hidden self reveals through acts of creation.
When women are awake, we can choose to live in our bodies as our home.
When women are awake, we seek reciprocity with the earth.
When women are awake, we are co-creators with our own consciousness.
When women are awake, we seek collaboration with awakened others.
When women are awake, we seek to be a blessing, and we are a blessing.
When women are awake, the inspiration to love is everywhere.
When we are awake, we often go rogue!
Laughter is heard in the land, women women are awake!
If you are awake and reading this, let’s go wake the others!
The time for waking is upon us. We can no longer afford to sleep without concern.
What will you do to cause your own awakening? We are right beside you, awakening too!
~ Shiloh Sophia
Dear One,
This is an excerpt from a book I am writing, and I hope you will get a cup of tea and join me to explore faith, creativity and speaking our truths. This may not be an easy read, I don’t intend for it to be confrontational – but I hope, liberating and awakening. Further, my emails are often long, a time to slow down and reflect, or pass it by. Writing to you is part of my sacred practice. I hope you receive some insights from these Red Thread Letters.
p.s. I am also writing this without an editor – because when it is fresh, it wants to be expressed, not one day next week. So it’s okay, you don’t have to let me know about my typos.
~
Awakening to Spiritual Freedom – How Intentional Creativity has informed my spiritual path
When we make ‘art’ of any kind with inquiry and love, the sleep begins to fall away. Creativity offers direct access to a soul space that calls us forward into awakening. A true connection with ourselves is stirred. The often hidden self can be revealed through any creative act paired with inquiry and intention. Aliveness is awakened.
Awakening through spirituality can (in some cases) be more challenging than we may have once believed. And can take a lot longer. I will speak for myself here – it is always worth it, but also a battle for me, as the stories I am being told continue to have challenges, as more truth comes to light. Much of that truth is through art itself, ancient images of the feminine telling a very different story than our ritual spoon-feeding. Yet I also don’t want to spend my energy on reaction and anger. This is where practice comes in right?!
I don’t want my spirituality all hung up with stories that institutions are telling. I want a spiritual life no matter what story is being told. Because I seek awakening, I can be on a spiritual path that continues to evolve as new understanding comes to light. I have no desire to assert one truth over another.
This might seem obvious to you – but it is not very obvious in a world culture in which one faith asserts truth over another. So even if you are hip to the trip, those sleeping around you, likely are not. And it is up to those willing to awaken and do the work, to discover a way of working with others that does NOT CONDEMN or fight them for their beliefs – but invites them to awaken for themselves.
ONLY FROM AWAKENING can one see what there is to see about truth and fallacy. And from here, if we are willing, we can begin the fall into love with the mystery
As I write this I want to cry and laugh. Yell out and dance. I have liberated my self from needing to have truth in order to be spiritually active. That took a long time for a woman, on a path of awakening. I work with thousands of women who are still in a half sleep state. It is NOT EASY AT ALL TO SEE what you are not seeing. It took 8 years of focused study and practice and untold hours at the easel to arrive where I am authentically – but I believe others can get here faster, because I am here. And yes, I am telling those who will listen all about it. It isn’t that I don’t still have personal beliefs and spiritual mythos I work with in my faith walk, I do. But it no longer defines my spirituality. My spirituality happens in a very different way than what I believe to be true/false.
Just ask Hypatia, the last librarian of Alexandria, what happens when what you believe is not what others believe. And even if you aren’t trying to convince them of your view. If your view is threatening to theirs, watch out. Your life may be in danger. We may think these times have passed, but the statistics worldwide about witch burnings and sacrifice of women who believe otherwise, show otherwise.
“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” Hypatia of Alexandria
Spirituality often has certain features of faith and belief, a kind of dogma is required to reap the membership benefits of the spiritual ‘club’ being offered. Even in circles that tend to be more inclusive, they can be militant about that inclusivity. Beliefs can be dangerous to awakening, because if you don’t adhere to what has been offered, you are considered rogue. I know this isn’t new to you. Yet more is being called of us at this time, there are more layers to reveal.
I suggest calling a circle of your peers where you feel brave enough, and ‘safe enough’ to share what is arising for you. Going rogue, at least for a time may, be important for many of us seeking to think for ourselves.Those of us who desire spiritual freedom are in for a wild ride. I will not let go of what is sacred to me. I just won’t let others tell me what that is. All life is sacred. Period. It is up to us to choose how we are going to treat this sacred life of ours.
Choosing to be spiritual without having a belief you assert as true can be scary.
I have experienced this feeling of fear myself – and if you do not adhere to the guidelines you are ‘out of order’ and may have your spiritual benefits revoked. Never was this more true for me than in the ancient Christian tradition of my roots, if you stepped out of the structure you were suddenly subject to the devil, damnation, or different stories of hell. People felt sorry for you – and what might happen to you. I am not taking a stand on spiritual stories others tell, one way or another. Nor am I fighting any of the systems specifically except this one thing. We have a human right to explore spirituality for ourselvses. I am inviting myself and others into other ways of working, so we can explore together. That all happens through Intentional Creativity.
I am taking a stand on my right to explore spiritual stories for myself without fear.
Now I am all for a spiritual path, I have been on one for most of my life. That said, it is not where my personal awakening really came to life. I am telling you my truth. My awakening took place through making art, with intention and prayer, in devotion to the Divine Feminine presence I understood as Mary. Without the art, it would not come. The art was the WAY I had the experience, and the way I found the courage to do the work I do, from 23 to today.
So you could say it was spiritual since I was praying in clay, paint, wood, stone and poetry – but it’s different. I didn’t then, and I don’t now require a set of guidelines in order to experience the Spirit moving. I experience the spirit moving because I am moved, because spirit is moving all the time. Some may call that spirit moving God or Life Force or Mother LIfe or Creator – but no matter what, it is moving through. And I shall call this movement sacred. For now my term for the Divine is Great Beings, and I am loving that freedom, and only I have to know what I mean. They also know, the Great Beings that is, see there is a belief. I believe they know me, somehow.
When I truly gave my heart into the service of the feminine, that was the beginning of my spiritual path. It is when I allowed Intentional Creativity to BE my spiritual practice, free of assigned deity and dogma that I found the greatest freedom, sacred space and Divine connection.
By awakening do I mean awakening to one’s own truth? Do I mean awakening to what is?
By awakening I mean as much self awareness as is possible in any given moment as allowable by the soul of that person.
As for myself, I am as awake as my soul allows me to be at this point on my journey.
I practice my spiritual walk through Intentional Creativity every day and I have since 23. I am devoted. Much of this happens in Red Thread Cafe, at the easel and at the journal, or right here in technology and in circle with my sisters of Intentional Creativity.
When I invite people in my community to ‘go rogue’, part of what I am speaking to is spending time in a new spaciousness of freedom to think for themselves. Are we so afraid of who we might be, if we are not adhering to a specific set of beliefs, that we won’t even try it? Ya. Most of us are. Then we wake up. But that too takes time to integrate authentically. There can be many years of being pissed off too – really pissed about feeling ‘duped’. It can even compound trauma and get stuck for a long long time.
Writing this to you today is not easy. Yet it brings joy to my soul. I am not trying to get you to believe what I do, but invite you to look at what you believe.
My mother Caron taught me this:
If you can stand where you stand
While I stand where I stand
and neither one of us is trying to get the other to agree,
then we have a chance.
It isn’t in us being the same, that we are strong,
but in being who we are
Most of us aren’t sharing who we are freely
for fear of being judged for our beliefs.
This creates a culture of hiding cloaked in a veil of unity.
Are we free enough to stand where we stand
without trying to solicit agreement?
Neither are we secretly thinking the other is wrong.
If we cannot speak freely and responsibly
we will never know who is really in the room with us.
I think this past few years in the United States is a wake up, showing us more of who is in the room with us that we didn’t know before. I hope this results in awakening for all beings on all sides. I hope for no sides actually but the side of humanity. This is my prayer –
Awakening for all beings. ASAP.
And that I have the courage to do my part.
I was talking to Jonathan my love, yesterday about my very select group of high level conscious caring friends, women and men I personally believe are awake enough and who believe I am too. There is an inherent exclusivity in this, because we are speaking at a level that the others understand – but that many do not. We also have in common serving great groups of many people, living from love as much as possible, doing our work, as well as taking HUGE risks – so we have a common language that allows us to support each other. We need this time together to keep going and keep sharing what awakening we have.
I asked Jonathan, what on earth we could do to wake the others faster….and we both agreed. Circles of peers gathered to be in conversation and creativity will be the fastest path – and help us feel less alone as we go. Once again, I am not claiming enlightenment lol, I am claiming I am as awake as I have access to today. How does that land with you? Do you feel awake as you can be for today? To explore, get a pen and paper and just draw without a certain image and just begin to ask…. as well as note what reaction comes up as you read this? Are you quick to agree, disagree? Tell me what you think? Have a higher truth? (You might be amazed at the emails I get in response, but I anticipate it and, know it is part of my job)
What awakening looks like for me, is mostly that I feel like I live in my body, my voice is not divided within myself, I am self expressed, I desire to serve from my love, and I am who I am. I feel whole. That doesn’t mean healed in every way. It means I experience myself as whole and do my best to live from that place. And I am also very concerned and uncomfortable about what is happening in our sweet world.
I am also aware of certain areas right now in my own life, that need vast improvement and I am resistant to those improvements, but I wrestle with them every day, in a good way. I try.
I don’t know ya’ll, but I want to keep talking and creating about it until more of us wake up. Are you up for that? Even if we don’t know what it looks like? Up for making a greater effort to become more and more human? To live the life we KNOW is open to us all, if we are only willing to create it together? When women are woke, we want to wake the others! Helllloooo! Let’s get movin’ ya’ll!!! This could also be a good time, and I want to be a part of making this a good time!!
I hope in some way this has served. If not, let it pass by.
I hope more laughter comes to support us in moving through the next part of the path!
With hope in my heart,
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Photo by Gina Fong
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Intentional Creativity Movement Updates
As we move towards discovering our brand you will see changes over time. We don’t always announce every feature or we may bore you with our ever-adapting way of working. We discover who we are as a company beyond yet inclusive of Shiloh Sophia through actually being in community.
You have begun to see the color wheel more – as well as the name Musea – and now we have landed on our wording – as Centers for Intentional Creativity. This is because there are now many places to study Intentional Creativity throughout the world emerging. I will share more on this in the coming letters, for now I just wanted to share this name adjustment with you. We don’t have a website yet – so for now all we have is our school and events information to share. More soon….
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