Sacred Tension

Listen in for an invitation to become who you are. You don’t have to invent a new self and a new story. It’s already all within you. If you’ve been looking for your tribe, listen to this. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Good morning, beautiful beings, today’s spontaneous spoken word is here for those of us who want a new beginning yet need to honor the past. There’s an invitation here to slow down instead of rushing forward, to pay attention to the chemistry of transition and the sacred tension between where you were and where you’re headed. So many teachers talk about the significance of being in presence and in the now - because there is something here not to be missed. You get to curate the future. If you do not choose to do that, it will just become without your consent. Be a designer. Chart your course. Change your story. Shiloh Sophia Come gather with the MUSEA community in this complimentary 4 hour class called INSIGHT. Over 3000 women have taken this class and you are sure to love it. Come see what happens when you hand over the keys and go just off the map - don’t stop at the fairy cottages even if they offer you cake. May 1, consider joining us for the LEGEND Course hereApril 15-28 Color of Woman Applications are open Monthly Gathering for our MUSEUM Society - Riding a Beam of Light Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

You won’t want to miss today’s episode on a fundamental shift in consciousness regarding scarcity and abundance and our relationship to creation. There really is enough to go around, we just aren’t living that potential out, because scarcity is enforced. * You are enough and there is enough, here’s why* Making a big change in our view of what abundance is without bypassing * How I overcame scarcity yesterday on a drive up the mountain * Activating chemistry which supports seeing things in your life in new ways. View from Sonoma Mountain of Moon Mountain Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Hello Beings of the World,I know I know, lots to do and see and be. Lots of chaos and breakdown. But also this: Making time for you - making time for art. Making time to have tea with the MUSE.Come gather with the MUSEA community in this complimentary 4 hour class called INSIGHT. Over 3000 women have taken this class and you are sure to love it. Come see what happens when you hand over the keys and go just off the map - don’t stop at the fairy cottages even if they offer you cake. May 1, consider joining us for the LEGEND Course hereApril 15-28 Color of Woman Applications are open Monthly Gathering for our MUSEUM Society - Riding a Beam of Light I will see you in circle,Shiloh Sophia TRANSCRIPTHello beloved ones. Welcome to this episode of Tea with the Muse. This is Shiloh Sophia with an invitation and a poem. The poem I'm going to be reading is from 2019. And it is a poem that came out of a painting process. And the painting process is called Insight.Join us for this complimentary four-hour class with the Muse to open your heart and your mind to hidden insight. Experience a deeper level of intuition and guidance. And ignite your imagination through right and left brain. You can go to musea.org backslash insight and sign up. complimentary four-hour class just for you.And here's the poem that came from it. It's called Meet Me Off the MapThe keys you have been looking for are in the hands of your hidden self. The riddle is you have to know where to find that self and how to request the keys.If it was that easy, you would have already found your way in. The locked doors and boarded up windows and cages without hinges that can hold you tight may litter the landscape of your everyday experience, may clutter up the clarity of your truest voice and vision.That's why seeking the keys of the hidden self is essential soul work. That is why you keep looking. You just know there's something more, to you. After all, you are mostly stardust, you know. Surely that means you are meant to shine. The adventure to discovering your hidden self can be quite dangerous to your default settings,and your comfort levels, because the critic may stand and say: Hey you, there's no way in, and there are no keys to find, and you, my dear, are wasting your time and your mind.The voice of your muse may seem oddly silent in the cacophony of mixed messages. You may find yourself saying,Now where did that dream run off to, and how did I end up here again? Is this what I came here for? What's missing? Ah, that is a good question. Most of us trudge on, seeking but not finding, asking but not really knowing the way, lost in a seemingly endless to-do list.Making the time to have tea with the great mystery is likely the last thing on your calendar, unless you, like me and us, have tea with the muse. Will you dare to join us? Oh, good. All right. Go right at the old oak tree. Just pass the sparkly fairy cottages.And don't stop there, though, even if they promise you yummy cake. Make a left at the corner where it says: there be dragons. That's right, just off the map. At first, you might feel like you're following. And then you might feel like you're falling. Following and failing and fallingare all part of the journey off the map.I will meet you there, just off the map, and catch you up here in this space between worlds. Many adventures to be found. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Hear the story of Café from when I was 24 years old, as well as some suggestions for how to dress for café! Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

"I was born with an open wound, and colors pouring from it. Don't call me brave or a martyr; I'm just a woman who learned to love even in the midst of pain. I am a brush, I am a scream, I am broken flesh and a burning spirit. I paint myself because I am the only thing I know with fury, with tenderness. And if anyone doesn't like it, don't look at me, because I didn't come to fit in, I came to be."Frida KahloToday I want to share my story with you about my struggle to become a painter. I was so blessed to have two moms who were painters. But I wasn’t able to do what they did. It was hard. Eventually, something miraculous happened. We call it Legend. These are the origins of how the 13 steps that we teach came to be! I have had the honor of visiting Frida’s house on two different occasions. Each experience was transcendental.Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Community,Today I am sharing my very personal story of change you with you. It is about changes in the structure of our business, and our future, and and…. by sharing it with you I am making a declaration of change. I know so many of us are in deep change. I honor where you are even though I don’t know where that is. Now you know where I am. I am Living My Legend and this is how I create it, through image, language and connection with all of you.LoveShiloh Sophia All upcoming events can be found at http:www.musea.org Legend will be open for registration soon. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

This is a new poem that arose over five hours of the painting process with my community ♥️ Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Dear One,Surviving times of absolute power requires a focus on absolute beauty. In 1887 Lord Acton writes a letter to Bishop Creighton regarding how to write historically and morally about the Inquisition. “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”Since the time I can remember having self-awareness, around 5, I have been present to the danger that we are in.  It just all seemed so obvious to me that this whole thing was a set up. Of course, as I colored in my wonder woman coloring book, I was listening to the women at the kitchen table, drinking wine, and smoking cigarettes late into the night, talking about revolution. Danger and power over paradigms.Yet this awareness goes further back than that, because as I breast fed, my mother was engaged in conversations of safety, of food, of welfare, of shelter, of care. Not just for herself, but for the other women in the community who had even less than we had. And it seemed we had so little, because we were on welfare, but then, because my mother and my grandmother were artists, we were surrounded by the beauty of their creations. They built a lot of all our furniture by hand with wood and sewed some of our clothing, and our bedspreads and embroidered our pillowcases.  Beauty goes a long way.I think my somatic memory goes even further back, because my mother was attacked when she was pregnant with me. Research from the womb shows that the fetus has awarenessess of the things that are happening around them, that they react to the energies and language, and physical environment, how the mother treats herself and is treated by others. How could that not be the case, yet it is only recently that prenatal studies have proven the impacts on the fetus.  I think I was born hypervigilant. I feel like I was born watching.Born watching bad men do bad things. To themselves and to others.There is a part of me that finds myself surprised about what’s happening in the United States right now. Not because I ever trusted the government, but because the blatant arrogance and ugliness is being televised and tolerated. Yet that part of me that remembers, has been anticipating actions like this, that continue to erase anyone who is not the white male authority of the day, who declares himself in charge, regardless of the structures set up to protect us from such behavior. Of course the system was already broken. Of course, there was already corruption. Yet, in my view, what we are we are witnessing, and experiencing in our bodies, our hearts, our brains, our communities, our stories, is absolute power corrupting absolutely. Many of us may not have seen something like this in our lifetime. But it’s happened before. Over and over and over and we never learn because the history of what happened is written by the conquerers. Of course since there are over our over 100 armed conflicts right now, we are certainly not the only place that is experiencing something like this. I think the irony is that the world and we, have viewed ourselves as somehow an elevated nation. Then there is this: "We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within." This is a quote attributed to the late Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.This kind of dominance has been happening for over 10,000 years. Since the first people conquested, since the first oppressors oppressed others, since the first colonizers colonized land. It is worth noting that these were Tribes that were indigenous to their land, conquering other indigenous tribes, because if you go back far enough, we’re all indigenous to earth.  Those with light skin only evolved into light skin about 8000 years ago. And yet it seems that those who became “whiter” developed theories of supremacy that have absolutely zero basis in anything whatsoever other than inventing systems of power.The loss of matrilineal cultures, the evolution to light skin, the fabrication of wars and borders, isn’t actually very old. Yet the harm that was created and has never been healed and has shaped our lives and altered the fabric of creation - to such a degree that many of us barely recognize ourselves in this tragically unfolding story.  We are in shock again. The metal age invader blood in my bloodline, remembers things like this and how they begin. I am humming with the remembrance of violence.  This remembrance is why I do what I do in my work with women, art, story, and healing. We turn that humming into songs of resistance.  We make beauty out of what we have to work with. My grandmother assured me that we could definitely make a silk purse out of sow’s ear.My family left Africa over 80,000 years ago and settled in the area of Ukraine, Ireland, and Scandinavia.  All of these places have been a part of being conquested and conquestIng just like most of the places on earth. We’re not really talking about other people, these are our ancestors and there’s no getting out of it, our global family is in pain. we are living out intergenerational trauma. There does not appear to be any logic or reason or therapy that can solve the minds of the men who declare themselves in charge.  Instead of a spear, it’s a pen.A pen that creates orders that destroy lives and rewrite history. The reason for sharing this today is because I want you to take care of yourself. We have a long journey ahead at this time. I know that you can feel it in your bones. I know that so many of you are so worried. For good reason, and I’m asking you to turn toward beauty every single day anyway. The empaths Experience is registering such a high level of despair. The healers are inundated with the needs of other healers. Find your village. chop wood and carry water and bring your gifts, and do not turn away from the labor of the day. Listen to your elders right now if they are wise ones. Ensure that your little ones have plenty of art supplies, and lots of unstructured time with you. By unstructured time, I mean time that is not enforced by an agenda. Time where you let the elders and the children choose how the time is spent. For you, the women in my life, in my village, and on the edges of my village. I call you to gather and to really talk. Talk deep into the night at the kitchen table. Tell stories on walks in nature, come together in each other’s art studios and paint and pray and gather your beautiful powers around you. As Alice Walker says, hard times require various dancing!  I had the pleasure of illustrating the cover and the images inside of that book of poems.I remember times like this vibrating in my bones. I think you probably do too, even if you have a different language for it.  you must do what you must do to care for yourself. Only you know what that is. Yet, it would be very helpful if you had a village, where you encouraged one another to care for yourselves. Today, walk outside and connect with the Earth beneath your feet. Connect with your head in the stars. And put your hands into the garden soil, or into the creative mediums, or into the making of soup. Create!  creating will offer you tools for reflection, and resilience and offer you the kind of joy that guides us through the hard times.  join the council of wise ones and become more wise  together. Surviving times of absolute power requires a focus on absolute beauty.beauty will be found every time you look for it, but you need to decide to look. I am.Thinking of you with love. This love, the most powerful frequency on earth, is real. Let’s share our love. Shiloh Sophia ♥️Curate at www.MUSEA.org Sonoma, CaliforniaThis painting above was painted in Teotihuacan Mexico, it is called The Cosmic love affair between the sun and the moon Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Ones,It is with great joy, and also a deep feeling of change, that I tell the story that lead to our first Certification Teacher Training, Color of Woman. I would be honored for you to hear my story and why it matters, and how it may intersect with your story. Get a cuppa tea, and a journal and come listen. Applications open on the Full Moon Lunar Eclipse. Get on the list and watch your inbox, I am offering 20 live interview sessions with me. WarmlyShiloh Sophia Transcipt:The Rise of the Sacred Feminine through the Intentional Creativity LineageIn 2010, my family and I did something outrageous. We developed an intuitive painting process dedicated to revealing the Sacred Feminine within each woman. Any woman could learn it for themselves, and teach others how to do this step-by-step process. This was a journey to direct knowing and awakening to soul. You might wonder why this matters. Well, let me tell you! In the past 10,000 years of patriarchal oppression, the image and story and ceremony of women has been under attack. This is evidenced and measured in the statistics beyond counting. But there's something more. Being silenced, burned, and scorned, and altered into an image of ourselves we barely recognize is caught up in our bones and has greatly impacted our capacity to truly see and be ourselves. The colonization plan was not just about land and culture, but about women's bodies and brains and the children that they give birth to. Yet, we are remembering now because we have to and we want to.This has been a long journey to arrive here for many of us. It is certainly in the best interest of dominant systems for women's voices to be twisted and unable to be heard, but we know better. Let's continue to become a danger to the establishments!The reclamation of women and our access to our power is directly connected with chosen Self-Initiation. We literally take ourselves on a Journey of Remembering. We have to. There are many ways to say yes to that experience, and one of them is through the healing arts and defined lengths of time within which we commit to ourselves and our self-expression. Most women... with dedication, can arrive at their awakening on their own, but it is best in the company of other women on the path. That's where we come in. I was shown by my two mothers and that I have spent my life sharing with women and their families, a journey toward awakening to our fullness. Gifts being passed from hand to hand and heart to heart. In the first certification training we ever offered in 2010, Color of Woman, we taught women how to recreate themselves in their own image, their own story, and their own way of creating ceremony and how to design their own workshops, courses, and circles. This nine-month journey of reclamation created a Sheroe’s journey so that women could curate their own identity and design their legend for their lives. It was an astonishment to all who have taken the training. Really. We continue to be amazed.Every year I consider not continuing, and then every year I continue, because of the impacts. But this truly is the last year. Other things will rise up, but this is ready to complete. But it will be passed to all of you, and you will pass it to those you choose. The part that's completing is not the teaching of Intentional Creativity, but the Certification Trainings. For those of us called to be guides, helpers, and healers, in the process of discovering ourselves, we develop a hunger to share this gift of revelation with other women. How many breakthroughs have you had where you almost immediately wanted other women to know, but for them to have to not work so hard to know it? You share what you learned. That's how I felt when I awakened to my Soul Calling. I was 23. I was a total failure at art college. I thought I was doomed to work in an office until my moms, the Poet Mother, Caron and the Painter Mother, Sue called me to the mountain. For one year, they taught me to access image and language for myself. I call this Mother Tongue. My own style, narrative, and true essence began to emerge. A fire in my heart was lit in relationship to the sacred women and the Sacred Feminine.I realized that She, the Sacred Feminine, hadn't really gone anywhere. It was us who had lost sight of Her, but it was enforced, and She was removed from our lives with intention. Her groves burned, churches built over Her ruins, Her temples destroyed, Her images buried, burned, and marred. Her story is turned into myths where She is subjugated to him. Lies. No more. She was always in every single culture in the entire world since the beginning of humans. The removal of the feminine as equal from spiritual traditions and governmental positions and leadership frameworks has truly had one of the most devastating impacts we could conceive of.We are seeing it and feeling it now in new ways. FYI, if you think the narratives like this are somehow radical or feminist, please check your own narrative. Because women give birth to the children, and the children become the ones who guide the future. Respecting women is not a political position. It is rational humanity.After that year of initiation, I had a fine art career for 15 years with galleries and had incredible success. I sold hundreds of paintings and reached hundreds of thousands of people with my books. Then I gave it all up for a time to teach other women what I knew and felt. I thought I could keep both going, but I couldn't. I had to turn towards teaching instead of selling my paintings. I realized that what women really wanted was to do it for themselves, not just buy my paintings. The gifts of feminine power were were within reach.And, quiet as it's kept, you didn't need to have talent in art and writing to do this work. You just needed to be brave as you wield the brush and the pen, shaking in your boots about what's about to emerge. What is true within you will emerge in a specific sacred container as a quest to the heart of your Soul Work. That which is yours to cause and to create. It is women who make this sacred container for other women, women who have been on their path and have tested and proven the journey they offer as a pathway for other women.We aren't some kind of pop-up certification program developed by AI to entice women to empowerment. We have been doing this work for generations. We have a lineage. My two mothers were taught by their two mothers. You don't have to be an artist or a writer to create paintings and stories. We show any woman how to access this deep wellspring of remembering and claiming within herself to reveal her greatest work. Of course, it isn't really about painting and writing. That is simply the matter-based ritual we use to awaken ourselves to the energies living within us that are seeking expression.One of our graduates, Kerry Lee, calls this art with purpose. It's intentional creativity. I'm inviting you to join us for Color of Woman 2025. It will be our last training of its kind. Each woman will travel around the Alchemical Compass to meet five creative Sacred Feminine archetypes and create five major paintings. And she will make a book, her own book, hard copy and digital, of her story and images and teachings, a portfolio. Each woman will also design her own content with teachings and her own course for the workshops and circles she wants to lead. Have you heard of Jung's red book, where it all began? Each woman will create her own red book.We are deeply in need of visionary leadership from women who have done their work to Become. This approach, which we call Intentional Creativity, works within any field and any medium. It doesn't actually have to be painting. It's a philosophy. It's a lifestyle. Educators and healers from all fields, therapists, doctors, shamankas, plant medicine women, coaches, corporate C-suite career women, mamas, grandmas, and school teachers, can all use this approach to bring their work to life in living color so that she may live the colors of woman. Her own sacred feminine presence and soul rememberings. I remember when I made my very first book by the same name, Color of Woman. I was 25. I was trying to figure out what the title would be as I stood at Kinko's at midnight creating my first 25 copies, which were already sold to therapists who wanted me to put my images into a book. It was my mother, Caron who said, you should call it Color of Woman. (it had a blank cover of hand-made paper with rose petals and I hand-painted very title). Thank you Aletheia Mystea, the County Health Therapist who saw the value in my art and asked me to make a book for the women you were working with).Consider joining us for the 2025 COLOR of WOMAN cohort and graduating in 2026. You can take Color of Woman to certify to teach the Intentional Creativity Method, or you can take it as a journey for personal transformation and self-initiation. We've never offered this before, but since this is our last year, that's what we're doing.You will create a body of work, which is the work of a lifetime, the work of more than one lifetime. This training brings all the pieces together from all the areas of your life, weaving them with red threads into the fabric of creation that we as women co-create. You begin to see the through line of all of your life experience, all the jobs, all the workshops, all the lovers, all the moves, all the books you read, and all the revelations you had all along the way. It can all come together when you answer your Soul Calling.If you've been dreaming of designing your own courses and want to include self-expression, if you've been leading circles and clients in self-discovery and you want to take your work to the next place on the journey, if you are a woman ready to articulate her body of work in the world in an outrageously powerful way, then join us.At the beginning of a journey, there's excitement and fear and the feeling of possibility. A portal begins to open. But I want to take you to the completion so that you'll know what you will have in your hands. * You will have a real book with all of your paintings and the story you choose to tell.* You will have the articulation of your content in the form of teachings that can be passed on. * You will have the capacity to lead Red Thread and Sacred Circles in any demographic. We have a over 200 page manual on ways to lead and monetize circle in any setting. * You will have enough paintings for a solo show.* You will work with the Color of Woman Intentional Creativity Guide, our manual, which will show you everything that we've learned to this point and be able to use it to lead your own experiences. You will have $100,000 Visionary Business plan for your workshops and private clients so you can create life work from your gifts at a new level.* You will have experienced a community of women who have your back and are doing their own work. * You will become initiated in a cultural lineage designed to last for the next 500 years. We are imagining a world where women are equal, of course. Yet the truth is that women being in collaborative power with their own destiny will influence the lives of every single human who is a part of Earth. All life comes from a woman's body, heart, and mind. When women are vital to every decision and central to every culture, we will have the world we seek. Until then, we begin with summoning the guides.Let's let our imagination soar to show us the path ahead. This legacy and lineage of art matriarchs has been the gift of a lifetime. I invite you to become one of the Art Matriarchs in the lineage of Intentional Creativity. While we center the education on women, graduates can choose to share the gifts with anyone they choose.Lots of our graduates work with women, children, elders, gender fluid, and all of the above, as long as they can hold a paintbrush and a pen. I close with this quote from Carl Jung regarding the Red Book. This is at the beginning of the Red Book and also at the beginning of the Intentional Creativity Guide.“My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.” Carl Jung, The Red BookColor of Woman and the ceation of your own Red Book is the stuff and material for more than only one life. Join us for the breakthrough of a lifetim! With all blessings to the art ancestors who walked before us. We're doing the work. I hope I make you proud. With love, Curate Shiloh SophiaOur team for 2025Thank you Mary MacDonald for the continual support and vision.Thank you Jenafer Owen for the impeccable delivery of this work.Thank you Amber Bonnici for continuuing the legacy of unleashing the power of women.Thank you NaaKwarley Amissa for standing by me and us and all women.Thank you Liz Chamberlain for being the younger generation to carry this work forward in full color.Thank you trish O'malley for seeing and being the work working in all the ways it does. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe