Shakti Woman. - book reviews

Vicki Noble writes with the integrity of one who knows and dares to speak. She is a visionary healer who addresses the most urgent personal and collective crisis of our time as a call for all women to honor their innate authority. Shamanism is not exclusively a male province. By understanding and inhabiting the body as a necessary prerequisite the gaining deeper levels of knowledge and higher levels of consciousness, women will lead more authentically empowered and effective lives.

Here are the formative experiences of Ms. Noble's personal unfolding as a female shaman. Corroborating scholarly data serve as a key to unlock some mysteries of the shamanic process. These experience provide the impetus and structure for Noble's teachings and practices.

In this synthesis of her personal path of spiritual questioning, scholarly investigations and shamanic experiences. Ms. Noble has delivered an inspiring and important work. She courageously holds the lamp of knowledge to illuminate the path of others. --Jennifer Roberts

What does see necessary is for each of us women to pull her focus back inside herself and to begin actively and intelligently to create the world we want. This may sound abstract, simple, and impossible at the same moment, since it seems so easy to focus on oneself and so impossible to change the world. But neither is true. For a woman actually to repossess herself and to center there is a monumental task, taking years of difficult, painstaking work. This is the work I am calling female shamanism, a gradual mastery of oneself, and a healing or recovery from the chronic dis-ease of our time. Once a woman has done the work of re-membering herself, she is much more able to change the world effectively.

A woman shaman has to learn to trust her instincts and intuition. This is not foreign to a tribal woman: She is raised in nature, with a body-based experience of existence that includes farming, seasonal changes, natural birthing and child rearing, music, festivals, and a shared sense of the sacred. A North American white woman somehow -- in the midst of a culture that denies her perceptions of reality -- has to come to believe in what she sees and knows as fact. How is she to do this? The earth is alive and the helping spirits are active, the elemental forces are there all the time, ready to mix and blend with our activities. The average person has tuned them out through a cultural reliance on a mechanistic science and worldview that doubts their existence. When a modern woman tunes into their presence, even as a mere possibility, they suddenly become visible in ways that cannot be denied, as if her eyes had a new ability to see.

Shakti Woman

Vicki Noble, 1991; 255 pp.

$14.95 ($18.95 postpaid) from HarperCollins Publishers/Direct Mail, P.O. Box 588, Dunmore, PA 18512; 800/331-3761 (or Whole Earth Access)

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