Waking and Healing with Sheila Foster

by MaryLou Richardson

Reprinted with permission from Water on Stone: Women's Ways to Global Change, December 1999/January 2000 edition

Recently we spoke with Sheila Foster, founder of the Temenos Center and The School for Women Healers, created to support women who have been called to a deeply feminine path of spiritual awakening and healing.

Could you tell us what started you on the path of exploring women's spirituality?

It began in the early 1980s. I had been on a spiritual search for a long time. I was interested in Jungian psychology and was also involved in dream therapy. One night I had what I now know to be an "initiation dream." In it, an old shaman handed me a couple of hot, fiery coals and told me to "carry the fire and don't get burned." Within a couple of weeks, some unusual things happened. I was diagnosed with a lump in my breast, and when I went to the doctor, I had a vision while sitting in the waiting room. I saw myself lying on a slab of stone - there was a woman with silver hair who plucked a black baroque pearl from my left breast, where the lump was, and she handed it to a younger woman who attached it to a necklace, and put it around my neck.

One evening soon after, I took my children to a movie. When we came back, I waved to my friend across the street, who was also arriving home with his little girl, and I went to bed for what turned out to be a very restless night. My son woke me at two am feeling ill, and I had trouble returning to sleep; I kept thinking about fire, and even checked my own house. At 6 a.m., our babysitter rang our phone, saying she saw flames coming from the house across the street. We called the fire department and ran over there, but by then the house was already engulfed, and my friends were gone.

This experience launched me into what I now understand to be a major kundalini awakening. I began to feel as if I were on fire, my skin burned and my face felt as if it had burned away. Within a few days, a friend took me to see a famous healer in Baltimore. It was Christmas time, and, when we walked into the little church, you could have cut the energy with a knife, it was so thick and sparkly. I knew the moment she put her hands on me that whatever was in me was healed. When I returned to the doctor the lump was gone; the doctor couldn't explain it. But the fire inside my bodybeing would not let up; I continued to feel as if my face were on fire. Something led me to look into anthropological literature, and that's when I identified what I was going through - a classic, out-of-the-book shamanic initiation. I was a mess for months, until a friend created a plaster gauze mask on my face which then began to contain the energy.

How did you decide to start the Temenos Center?

Well, after the dream and the fire and the kundalini awakening, everything in my life began to change. I was working on a doctorate at the time, and, within a few months, I dropped out, realizing that was not the kind of legitimacy I was looking for. My work began to shift from traditional therapy work to alternative healing. A few months after the fire I had another dream calling me to start a healing center - in the ancient temples the temenos was one of the areas, a vortex of energy, where people went for healing. I said, "Sure I'll start a temenos center" even though I didn't understand what that would mean. I began doing workshops on the feminine, got married, and moved into the country near Frederick, MD, where I was led to form a group called "The Wounded Healer." This was really the launching of The School for Women Healers.
It was clear that I was meant to investigate the Feminine and spirituality with other women, and the School would be the vessel for this. I believe that opening up and trust is the way of the feminine. We really can't know anything, we have to trust that we don't know. We come to realize that we can trust what's inside of us, all that we need is right there. So I just kept listening and following the breadcrumbs...

Could you describe the initiation program offered by The School for Women Healers?

It was started as a 3-4 year program where women therapists would come to workshops and retreats several times each year to explore their own healing and the Divine Feminine. We look at four feminine archetypal powers ¬ the Amazon, the Medial (healer), the Mother, and the Lover - over the course of a year, and then we return to them, in subsequent years at increasingly deeper and more subtle levels. One layer is uncovered, which leads to more being discovered and awakened. By walking the circle again and again, the Queen begins to emerge. By September of the second year women come back completely different than they were in June. They say "Hey, I'm really beginning to get what this is." During the second year we deepen this, and we also begin invoking the masculine energy. We have both energies, but we live in a world where the masculine and patriarchy predominates. Clearly we need to address the masculine energy in ourselves if we don't want to project it negatively into the world. So, women begin to develop a relationship to the masculine, by investigating their fathers, grandfathers, any men who have been in their life, working with their woundings around relationships, as well as their images of patriarchy.

One of the things we do that's fun, and powerful, is the women incarnate this internal, demonic masculine - the voice that says you're not worthy, you don't deserve it, why don't you get a real job. By exposing this voice, they learn how not to react to it and be enslaved by it. It doesn't matter how philosophically feminist you are, you can be enslaved by this angry masculine voice if you don't bring it to the surface. It's very challenging work, but we have a rough time being in right relationships if we don't do it.

How did the Samyama aspect of your school come about?

Samyama evolved from my own practice of meditating - not only was it bringing me peace and quiet, but it was healing old, painful, stuff I had been working on for years. I started using it with my clients and they said, "Teach us so we can do it too." So, the second wing of the school begam, Samyama training was born - which now supports all of the work we do here. Samyama has to do with our recognition of who we are - shifting our allegiance from the stories of the mind, to the heart and to direct experience. Silence is where we can learn to recognize the Truth. You still have your tapes running in your mind, but you get to see that they are just tapes, and that they have nothing to do with Reality. I hear from women who practice, that, as they do self Samyama, the more they sit in internal silence with attention to the heart, the quieter the mind gets. After awhile, compared to direct experience, this chatter just isn't interesting anymore. You might say, "Oh, there's that voice again," but you just know that it's not the voice of Truth. You begin to find direct experience so much better than the mind¹s stories. In this shift from the head to the heart, there's a complete paradigm shift as well.

You have been making a film about your work. Could you tell us about it?

A few years ago, Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander, one of my students in the School who had just finished working on her film-making degree, contacted me and said she felt called to film our work. We decided to form Dangerous Old Women Productions Unlimited, Inc., and we are producing our first film. We recently finished the first part, a 14 minute segment filmed during our Sacred Lover Initiation in Rio Caliente, Mexico, called Embracing the Divine Feminine. This has been a truly collaborative project - the community of women associated with Temenos (over 300 now) raised $15,000 to produce it, with silent auctions, you-name-it. I am amazed at how the Divine Mother keeps providing. It's interesting what gets evoked when we show this film clip, even among men.

Our mission is to awaken longing in women, to point women back to Self, and help them to realize they have everything they need inside. There seems to be a real recognition when women see or hear something that addresses this. We have been scrupulous in following guidance about what would come next, really waiting. Kirsten, who is devotional with the camera, has now completed about two-thirds of the filming. We recently learned we are a quarter finalist in the Moondance Women's Film Festival, which just happens to be in Boulder, CO, where I moved four years ago, and we're waiting to find out if our film will be accepted in the Sundance Festival. We also mailed our film to Oprah. Though we haven't heard back yet, a funny thing happened at one of our recent retreats: I was wearing big fluffy leopard slippers and a woman from Nova Scotia, who hadn't been to our retreats before and didn't know anything about our film, told me she had just had a dream that Oprah was trying on my slippers, but couldn't quite make up her mind whether she wanted them or not.

Did you ever imagine your life would follow this path?

I stand in wonder and amazement over what has been created. I think I was the last person to know what would happen here. This journey is so exciting, it's impossible to imagine being anyplace else. I remember back in the days when I would get scared and just hang on - you know, we can really whip ourselves up with fear - but now I get excited. I know there is nothing to fear. I keep meeting fear, and it heals...