WHAT?! The ♥️ neuroscience 🧠 of self-expression 🎨 (so excited)

Hi EveryoneI hope you can get just as excited about this research as I am. It has been around a while but I am just putting the peices together. References are below.I want you to EXPERIENCE THIS for yourself. Here are three ways NOW!Shiloh SophiaBook a call to explore our 9 month training called Stardust Initation starting in JuneJoin me for my NEW class, called Threshold - we are gonna paint aiwth power!Come along with me and my BFF Amy Ahlers to explore navigating this wild wild worldThe Neuroscience of Self-Expression: Why the Brush Knows Before We DoI want to speak to you about something I am so passionate about — the neuroscience of self-expression. It comes from my root system, because I come from the Stardust Lineage, and we are creative, spiritual, magical women who pass tools of Intentional Creativity from hand to hand and heart to heart. This isn’t a woo-woo idea, and neither is it entirely scientific. It’s a hybrid. Sometimes the brush knows before we know what’s actually going to happen.I want to tell you about a researcher at Drexel University who has spent a decade strapping near-infrared sensors onto people’s foreheads and watching what happens when the human brain is firing and wiring the moment the paintbrush touches the paper or the canvas. Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this? Her name is Girija Kaimal — Wow. I would love to have a cup of tea with her. Of course, she doesn’t know me. She probably will at some point, because I’m going to reach out. And she’s probably never heard the words medicine painting — one of the terms we use for our work, because it’s an approach to painting that’s healing. Her data has been confirming what the women in our lineage have known since the 1930s. Self-expression is healing. Painting for us is a spiritual practice. It is not just a hobby. It is literally a neurological event. And guess what? When you paint with intention, the event begins before the brush ever touches the canvas. If you’ve worked with me, you know I talk about this all the time as energy equals matter at the speed of light — your energy as thought, expressed through your physical body, the equal sign, manifests matter at the speed of light on the canvas. Are you kidding me? Yes. The neurological awakening of what’s going to happen happens before the brush touches the material.You may also be aware of another piece of research that adds to our point, by Audrey van der Meer, a Norwegian neuroscientist who has proved that writing by hand wakes up the brain in ways that typing cannot. Imagine how many kids these days are no longer learning to handwrite?! Her work is finding something so incredible about what happens when people are actually handwriting — she’s measuring how the brain encodes the writing of letters into memory, and the brain is lighting up. When Kaimal’s team did their research, they put 26 people in headbands — the kind that read blood flow inside the prefrontal cortex literally in real time. (Gosh, I wish it were here.) They were given three minutes to color in a mandala, to doodle around a circle, and to free-draw whatever they wanted. The results were published back in 2017 in Art Therapy. Guess what? All three activities lit up the medial prefrontal cortex. Wow. Wow. That region is part of the brain’s reward pathway. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? That’s the same circuit that fires when someone you love walks into the room. This is when you get to have tea with your best friend and you’re jumping up and down. This is when your lover winks at you and you know what’s coming next. This is when those of us in Intentional Creativity know that I’m going to do a power-packed livestream that’s going to knock our red striped socks off. We feel love.The people she studied were not artists — most of them. And their brain did not care, in a literal way. Their brain didn’t care if they were an artist. Their brain rewarded them anyway, for the simple act of creating color across a page with their hands. What’s interesting too is that working inside of shapes — as in coloring — really does something powerful to the brain and to memory. It’s just so exciting.In a separate study, the same researchers took 39 adults, gave them 45 minutes with markers, clay, and collage materials — nothing structured — and measured the cortisol in their saliva before and after. I kid you not. Cortisol in the saliva. Cortisol is the hormone your body produces under stress, the one that keeps so many of us awake at three in the morning, especially those of us going through midlife. Seventy-five percent of the participants showed lower cortisol after making art. No skill required. No talent required. No making it pretty. No perfectionism required. It is not an act of performance. It is an act of self-expression. The brain is responding to the act itself. It’s in a way metacognition — becoming conscious of becoming conscious, while being intentional about what you’re creating.There’s something else I want to add, because when you’re coloring and your brain doesn’t have to make decisions, you can actually break a psychotic loop. This comes from nurses at Stanford who use my coloring books, Color of Woman. If they could get patients to color, they could break a psychotic loop. Wow. Why are we not talking about this more? Whether you’re in a psychotic loop or not, wouldn’t it be helpful to know that you could sit down and color and you would start to go into a different brain state? This is so important. (And it doesn’t work if there’s a blank page — for that psychotic-loop piece.)Now, our part in this. For close to 30 years I have been working with creating with intention, and since 2008 I’ve been training others to work with Intentional Creativity. I have not been teaching people to become brilliant artists — though some of them are. I have not been teaching people to make perfect paintings, though some of them do. I have not been teaching perfection technique to make a painting that would hang on the wall of a gallery. No. We’ve been into self-expression — to see what happens inside when you express yourself.Painting like this is a way of * Exploring our inner world. * A way of coming face to face with the often hidden identity within ourselves. * A way of activating the inner healer and the energies that go with that. * A way of catalyzing the brainwaves to move from beta to alpha to theta, so we can cross over into that state of the imagination and reach the subconscious domains. * A way of allowing the canvas itself to be a portal — to hold what the body carries* To express into form what was once inside and didn’t have anywhere to go. * A composting of energy, now expressed onto the canvas. We call it medicine painting. Tens of thousands of people in our community have painted with it, and before I started doing it, we had two generations of artists who did it before me.Here’s what the neuroscientists have not measured — but I would bet my brushes and my striped socks they would receive incredible results. The study in Kaimal’s lab gave people markers and said, Go. There wasn’t an intention set. Of course, the intention was that they were being measured. BUT. There wasn’t an invocation. There wasn’t a prayer. There wasn’t a lighting of a candle. There wasn’t a moment of asking what the piece of paper or the canvas wants to express to us. There wasn’t a moment of what message are you receiving. And the cortisol still dropped. BOOOM DIGGITY. The reward pathway still lit up. The body still received a measurable gift — and the “able to experience it” part is super important to me. Because when we do this work and invite people to experience and acknowledge that it’s happened, it creates more reward and more bliss and more affirmation and more faith that we could do it again and again. Which is why the science matters to me — because I want us to be able to do it again and again, in risk groups, in affinity groups, in groups of children, with people who need it. We need to bring this work everywhere.Imagine what the data would look like if the people being measured were bringing an intention. An intention to heal an illness. An intention to repair a marriage. An intention to pray for the end of war. Do you know how much power comes into the field, into the body, when one of us places our hand on the canvas and the other hand on the heart and says, What wants to be revealed? When a woman holds the red thread with other women in her circle, when she blesses the water and the cup of rain with holy water sprinkled from the places that matter to her, that brush is then charged with all of that energy. When we set an intention to alchemize trauma and wounds from years ago, patterns stuck in the body — then, when the brush expresses lightning, because we are daughters of lightning, it gets moved.In Intentional Creativity we say that the intention sets the field. This comes from Einstein’s theories “the field is the sole governing agency of the particle”. The energy around us is what’s creating what goes on the canvas. The thought we have and the intention we set will impact what shows up on the canvas. Then we observe it with our eyes, and the material goes back through the brain and translates back through the hands again. The moment you choose what this experience is for, the body has already started doing the work of translating the thought through the body, and the brush is just the place where the choice makes the inner vision possible — and then visible.What the neuroscience is beginning to show is that this is not metaphoric. Self-expression is not just a great idea. The state of the nervous system, before this act of beauty, this act of devotion — I’m so humbled by this. You can tell I’m just all lit up. When we come to the canvas, our nervous system is firing and wiring in a particular way. When we bring intention to the canvas, the nervous system shifts and becomes more regulated. The heart and brain can come into coherence. A brain and a mind that has been communicated with — that this sacred act will enable you to receive different signals — will receive messages you can’t even imagine. Intention is a neurological primer of possibility. All meditation teachers know this. Our grandmothers who blessed the bread while kneading it, know this. Our aunties who sew the quilts know this. Every woman in our community who has ever painted herself back into her own body and told her own story — we know this. We’ve crossed a threshold into another way of being, and there is no way to step back from it, because once you know, you know.More studies are coming, and they will demonstrate what we have already been practicing. They will catch up to what we’ve already been doing. Consider what this means for us — for women in midlife, who have been carrying grief and rage and trauma and versions of ourselves we’ve tried to leave behind in those old relationships. We’ve worked it. We’ve gone to therapy. We’ve used our journals. And yet something still isn’t moving. Painting with intention opens the door to a healing that most of us could never imagine was possible with something so simple — something that does not require talent. The data from these researchers shows us that the brain rewards the act of self-expression, having nothing to do with skill.You do not need to know what’s going to happen. You do not need to control the outcomes. In fact, if you try to do that, your brainwaves will change and perhaps constrict. Intention does not require a known outcome. It requires inquiry and a willingness to show up and to not be in control. You don’t even need to believe it’s going to happen for it to work. You just need to show up. Your cortisol is going to drop anyway. Somewhere in the medial prefrontal cortex, lights begin to fire and wire. The reward begins to spark. Your nervous system registers that something on your behalf has begun. And then there’s the craving — the craving to do it again.The handwriting research showed us that we lose something when we are just typing. The painting research shows us that when we bring ourselves to the canvas, we actually create wellbeing and bliss. But I want you to hear that you do not have to be talented. You do not have to know what you’re called to. If you will pick up a brush with us and cross a threshold and set an intention — if you will ask the questions you’ve been afraid to ask in the good company of other powerful women — then we can cross the threshold together. The canvas reveals an answer. Our paintbrush is less like a brush adding color, and more like an archeologist revealing something that’s already inside. Our vision is that you already have everything you need inside of you, and what we’re doing is creating a condition in the field that allows it to be expressed.And so, with my heartfelt invitation and my emphatic hand motions — which you cannot see — I invite you to join me for Threshold, a brand-new class that is going to rock our world, because that’s what I’m intending is going to happen, and it happens every time as long as people show up. Plus, there’s a money-back guarantee. Or if you’re ready to dive into the big mama codex of our work, it’s called Stardust Initiation. You can find everything at musea.orgThis is Curate Shiloh Sophia, and I’m looking forward to gathering with you and transforming our brains and hearts and hands as we fire and wire together. As we say in the Stardust lineage: with our feet on the good red earth and our hands in the stars, our hearts on our sleeve and our hands in the medium, we create — and we become the oracle that we are seeking. It happens in real time. It happens right now. And it happens every time1. Van der Weel, F. R., & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945/fullOpen access. The 36-student EEG study referenced in the opening of the piece. Note: the lead author is Van der Weel; Van der Meer is corresponding author and the public face of the work.2. Kaimal, G., Ayaz, H., Herres, J., Dieterich-Hartwell, R., Makwana, B., Kaiser, D. H., & Nasser, J. A. (2017). Functional near-infrared spectroscopy assessment of reward perception based on visual self-expression: Coloring, doodling, and free drawing. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 55, 85–92.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019745561630171XThe fNIRS study showing medial prefrontal cortex activation during the three art tasks. 26 participants. Doodling produced the strongest signal.3. Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 33(2), 74–80.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421656.2016.1166832Open access. The cortisol study. 39 adults, 45 minutes of art-making, 75% showed lower cortisol afterward, no correlation with prior art experience. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Thoughts from Café with love With love ❤️ Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

What the Stone Did Not ForgetThe lineage of the sacred feminine from Neolithic Europe all the way to the Stardust Lineage.There is an image of a woman small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. She is less than four and a half inches tall, carved from Neolithic limestone over 28,000 years ago near the Danube River in what is now called Austria. She is all curved. A sacred feminine body with a round belly, full breasts, wide hips, a body in its fullness and generative power, honored in the most permanent material available.She has no face. She does not need one. She is not a portrait of an individual woman. She is every woman. And she is a statement about what the female body means, what it carries, what it represents, and the cosmology of the people who made her. She is, of course, the Venus of Willendorf.She was once tinted with red ochre, the same iron-rich pigment as human blood, and women’s blood. Even in the act of carving, there was an awareness of the connection between body, earth, and cosmos. The stone itself was not incidental. The stone holds what time cannot otherwise keep. The stone holds the story and remembers.Across a vast arc of prehistoric Europe and Asia, from France to Siberia, archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of similar figurines spanning thousands of years of human creative life. Each one encoded the same understanding. The female body is sacred. It doesn’t represent the sacred. It is the sacred and created from the sacred. She is the source. She is the organizing principle of human life.Honoring the feminine because of matriarchy was not something radical, was not feminism. It was not simply embedded into the fabric of early human cultures. It was actually what the fabric was woven from — not just embedded, woven from. It is the very fibers of the tapestry.And this story lasts for thousands and thousands and thousands of years before the eventual widespread emergence of organized warfare, before the legal and theological structures that would later declare the female body a problem to be managed and named, before the invention of land ownership.The stone did not forget, even as later cultures obscured, suppressed, and reinterpreted and renamed what these figurines meant. The stone holds the story. The clay holds the imprint.Marija Gimbutas and the Language of the Sacred BodyMuch of what we know about these ancient cultures comes from the work of Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and one of the most important and most contested scholars in the 20th century. She spent decades excavating what she called Old Europe, the Neolithic cultures of prehistoric Europe that flourished before the arrival of the patriarchal peoples from the Pontic-Caspian steppes beginning around 4000 BCE. In the regions of what is now known as Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, the Cucuteni-Trypillia era, she documented cultures that developed sophisticated symbolic systems over thousands of years, deeply rooted in agricultural art and the cyclical understandings of life.In thousands of figurines, burial sites, ceremonial objects, and symbolic markings, she identified a coherent visual language — circles, spirals, triangles, and the female form encoding an entire civilization’s understanding of life, death, the regeneration cycle, and the sacred. This is not primitive decoration. These are not fertility charms made for male desire. These are acts of reverence and collaboration, a co-creative relationship, symbols encoded into stone and clay, telling a story about who we were and perhaps who we could be.And she found no weapons there until later.Her interpretation, by the way, has been challenged and debated by subsequent scholars. Her naming, her description of the archaeomythology of the ancient mothers — to this day, archaeologists are trying to disprove her theories and relabel her findings.And yet the figurines — it’s even hard to call them that. The mother. She just exists. The symbols recur across vast distances and thousands of years with a consistency that really demands no explanation. We honored her and her body. Whatever the precise nature of the social structures that produced them, the female body represented in these artifacts is the power. She is the primary symbol through which a civilization found its meaning.That understanding did not disappear when the cultures that held it were disrupted. It went underground, literally, and it survived in objects and then modern day practices that the dominant culture wasn’t successful in stamping out.So much they took from us. So much we remembered. The stone remembers, and the stardust bones remember.Lenore Thomas Straus — Choosing the MotherThis is how it leads into our Stardust Lineage.In 1937, sculptor Lenore Thomas Straus received a commission through the Public Works Administration — sometimes called the Works Progress Administration — in Greenbelt, Maryland. This is one of the New Deal communities being built during the Depression, supported by the Roosevelts’ vision for an American public life. Lenore worked on multiple projects connected to this era of public art, and photographs document her alongside Eleanor Roosevelt in a hard hat.Lenore also made a note that these communities were being built for white people, but by Black people. That is part of the story. The untold story.For the Greenbelt commission, Lenore was given latitude to choose her subject. It was going to go in the town square. She chose a mother and child — not a warrior, not a statesman for the area, not an allegory of progress or industry. A mother kneeling, with her child holding a cup with both hands. It is carved across three four-foot limestone blocks from Indiana, twelve feet of stone placed in public space, and functional — a water fountain. Just like a woman, she wanted to make sure it made sense. Utility and reverence made inseparable, the act of offering water given permanent form in stone. The sculpture was commissioned in 1937 and completed in 1939.This is, of course, a conscious choice. With the full range of American civic iconography available to her, with the imprimatur of federal commission behind her, Lenore Thomas Straus chose to place the sacred feminine body in a public square — a mother and a child.She also carved in a separate commission the Preamble to the Constitution in stone, also in Maryland.She knew what she was doing. She was doing what the Neolithic carvers had done across thousands of years — inscribing the female body and the values of a society that honors life in the most permanent material available.She wrote of her relationship to carving stone as an artist: Quietly, I bow to the stone.To our community, this summarizes the root system of Intentional Creativity. The sentence holds an entire philosophy. The sculptor does not dominate the material. She listens to it. She honors what it carries. She brings her full devotion to bear before she raises a hand to shape it.Greenbelt, Maryland is where Lenore Thomas Straus is from — Prince George’s County, Maryland.Lenore Thomas Straus became the teacher of a young artist named Sue Hoya Sellers. She recognized Sue when Sue was seventeen years old. Sue had ridden seven miles on dirt roads to find her, a portfolio strapped to her bicycle, clothes starched and ironed, two years of preparation. Lenore called her a young artist, and Sue was one.Among the things Lenore passed to Sue was an understanding that the sacred feminine image belonged in the hands of women — that carving was not decoration, that it was transmission, and honestly, a form of decolonizing the female body.Sue carried this forward in her own large-scale work, including a monumental pregnant woman carved in wood commissioned for Alice Walker that stands at Stardust Ranch in Sonoma — the sacred feminine body again in the most permanent material available, given to the woman who had sat at the table with Sue, given to the writer who told me that to be happy is one of the most revolutionary acts.And Sue passed this assignment to me when I was twenty-four. Sue co-mothered me, and this was among the most sacred things she passed forward.A Cold Day and a Palm-Sized PrayerI remember the day.It was cloudy and cold on the mountain. Sue and I, months before, had gone out to dig the very clay from the earth — red clay. She wanted me to understand the whole cycle of making. Finally, the clay was made. It was placed in my hands, and she said: make it fit the palm of your hand. For prayer. Put your intention into it.I brought the clay into my hands and began to shape it. I didn’t know what it would become, but I knew that I was called to make the Sacred Mother. It was the first thing I ever made out of clay.Amazingly, years after Sue’s death, Lenore’s daughter Nora sent me a small figurine carved in stone — one of Sue’s earliest works — a goddess figurine, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It was only then, holding that piece, understanding what Sue had been handed and what she handed to me, that I received the full weight of the assignment — not as an instruction, as a lineage, as a specific, unbroken transmission of an understanding that Lenore had carried from her own teachers, and they from theirs, all the way back to the women who pressed their hands into cave walls and shaped limestone into figurines small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.It makes me think of my recent visit to Malta — how the Sleeping Lady of Malta is so tiny she can almost fit in the palm of your hand. But there were also sculptures so huge they were claimed to be made by giantesses. Lenore and Sue did the same thing — made the tiny and the large.Lenore was a Norwegian woman. She decided to carve an enormous sculpture, a mother and child. She went on to carve the Preamble to the Constitution in stone. She taught Sue and Sue taught me — from hand to hand and really from heart to heart.And when I think of this teaching and share it with my students today, I feel the throughline of the sacred feminine image always emerging and becoming and arriving in and through our hands. Back at the beginning, right at the time I made that sculpture, I knew I wanted to change the way that women were treated and the way that the face of the feminine was regarded in my lifetime.Thousands of paintings are part of it. The carrying on of a Stardust Lineage — from Neolithic limestones to these stardust bones.Us. We.Footnotes(1) The Venus of Willendorf is housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. On the red ochre tinting and its connection to blood symbolism in prehistoric ritual contexts, see: Jill Cook, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (British Museum Press, 2013); Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (HarperCollins, 1989).(2) On the geographic distribution of similar prehistoric female figurines: Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989), Introduction; Cook, Ice Age Art (2013).(3) Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (HarperCollins, 1991). On the Kurgan hypothesis and the cultural transition beginning around 4000 BCE.(4) On the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture: Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989). See also: John Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology (Routledge, 2000) for a more recent treatment.(5) Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989). On the visual symbolic language of prehistoric European artifacts.(6) For scholarly critique of Gimbutas’s methodology, see: Lynn Meskell, “Goddesses, Gimbutas and ‘New Age’ Archaeology,” Antiquity 69 (1995): 74–86. For a balanced recent assessment, see: Douglass Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines: Corporeality and Representation in the Neolithic (Routledge, 2005).(7) Lenore Thomas Straus, Mother and Child, Indiana limestone water fountain, commissioned 1937, completed 1939, Greenbelt Homes Inc., Greenbelt, Maryland. Commissioned through the Public Works Administration / Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Photographic documentation of Straus with Eleanor Roosevelt held in the Stardust Lineage archive. For archival verification, consult Greenbelt Museum records.(8) Lenore Thomas Straus, Preamble to the Constitution, stone, Greenbelt, Maryland. Documented by personal visit. For archival citation, consult Greenbelt Museum records and WPA Federal Art Project documentation.(9) Lenore Thomas Straus, Stone Dust. Exact page number to be confirmed before publication. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Our voices have been silenced for generationsThis is a call to make it really conscious so we can answer our calling in real time. This message WILLL matter to you if you can taken just ten minutes. I made it FOR YOU. And class on Monday! Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

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A few ideas to support you with regulating your nervous system and managing your energy throughout the day Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Reading of the Red Guild book of the Graduates of Intentional Creativity-since 2014 we have been signing this book at in person gatherings, this is at Wild Water Creek. Graduation as a Curate - being blessed by a red stole embroidered by Naa Kwarley and given to me by Liz. This is at Stardust Ranch. The ring of roses is the circle the graduates stepped into….including me.On the Cusp of Equinox: A Turning of the Lineage“You will be bathed in stardust” Carmen Baraka to Caron McCloudWe are on the cusp of the equinox and the new Spring moon.The cherry trees are blooming, and a fine yellow dust from the oak trees settles over everything—including me, if I sit here long enough.I’ve just come back from a swim. I’m sitting in the sun. And as usual, my thoughts turn to you. Yes, you.The Love That Chose Another PathI didn’t get to have children.After many miscarriages, I found myself holding so much love—so much desire to nurture—and nowhere traditional to place it.I had been so deeply loved, so well nurtured, that consciously or unconsciously, I chose to channel that love into community.But I didn’t want something temporary. I wanted something enduring. Not people who came and went—but people who might stay for a lifetime. Or maybe even longer.Our Elder Carmen Baraka used to say, at the most meaningful gatherings:“Maybe we agreed to meet here.”I’ve always loved that idea. This idea weaves into the ancient knowing of the red thread—that we are already connected, already called. That each of us carries a piece, and that we are here to witness one another’s stories.Today, I invite you to witness mine. A personal and professional graduation.I recently got to Graduate with the last graduating class for Color of Woman (as it now exists). I graduated with 80 women (who will be acknowledged during the Equinox Ceremony. I am officially now carrying my title as Curate with many other women.Becoming the MatriarchThis is the evolution of a sacred feminine entrepreneur into a matriarch.I’m a few months away from turning 56. I still don’t have children of my own, and my relationship to community is changing.But something else has settled in. A wisdom. An elemental wisdom.It feels both deeply sacred and completely essential—so basic, and yet strangely elusive. Completing a CycleI’ve just completed a body of work that began in my early twenties with Color of Woman—a journal filled with the images that awakened me. That became 25 years of art galleries and eventually the Intentional Creativity Teacher Training.In the coloring book, the first images are where I came into myself.Where I said yes to my sacred work.That cycle is completing.What a joy.What a challenge.What a gift.Because the truth is—I am an artist.A poet.A ritualist.I am not a COO.I am not a president.I don’t even resonate with the word “founder.”I am a Lineage-Keeper.The Teachings Are SimpleWhat I carry is both from this lifetime and from the ancestors.And what I teach is incredibly simple:Make what you make with love.Place your intention into it.When you bring your focus to what you are creating, it changes—and so do you.Everything is frequency. When you attune your frequency, your world shifts.This language is my mother tongue. And when women hear it, they remember:“Oh yes… I know this.”It is easy to understand. It takes practice to live.What Was Taken—and What ReturnsThere was a time when this knowing was not lost.But over thousands of years, systems of domination stripped women of their innate knowing. We need to restore that knowing from within our stardust bones. This is the Pathway of 9 Promises that I teach.* Shaping who we are and who we are becoming: Identity and Living from Source* Knowing what we wish to speak from Intelligence: Access to Voice and Speaking* Being connected with how we fee our sensuality: Bodily sovereignty and Health* Trust in our own thoughts and Intelligence - Curating our Consciousness* To define our Spirituality - Aligning with our Soul and Higher Self * To gain access to Prosperity - Activating Manifestation in the ways of women* Unbridled Free Self-Expression - Catalyze Liberation * Living Your Calling: Co-creating Vision and Designing your Life * Authority: Claiming a Self Initiation Ceremony to mark moving from where you have been to where you are going nowWe were taught to live from the mind, disconnected from the body.To distrust our intuition. To believe our Souls could be owned.None of this is true.Your soul cannot be brokered.Your body cannot be owned.Your voice cannot be taken—only suppressed.As we are seeing right now how often women’s voices are being supressed. The Tension of Modern StructuresAnd yet, here we are. Here I am. Working inside systems that were never designed for us.For the past decade, I have done my best to participate in business without becoming extractive. I’ve sat in meetings, studied numbers, navigated software, and built systems and managed teams and navigated taxes and oh so many things that were not in my wheel house. And what I’ve found is this:It is incredibly complex. And it is not where I come alive. (and I am not good at it)What brings me alive is teaching.Circle.Ritual.Art.Poetry.Inviting transformation.That is where I belong. In circle with my teachings.A Necessary SimplificationSo I am making a change.Not because I am stepping away—but because I am stepping in.I am simplifying everything.What is emerging is called:Stardust LineageA distilled expression of everything I’ve learned and taught.Rooted in my book, Stardust Bones, this work will guide the next 3–5 years of my life and teaching.What Comes NextThis work will continue to be accessible - yet centered within the one thing that I am here to teach for this next cycle. Stardust Lineage www.stardustlineage.com Enrollment is open now * Complimentary offerings for all * Ceremonies for all in the Cura Council * Affordable entry points to experience the work* Immersive weekend experiences around the world* A 9-month mentorship called Stardust Initiation - enrollment is open now* A new form of licensing the work so you can teach it if you are a healer or a coach - not traditional Certification like I have been doing. This work is meant to live through you.To be taught in your own voice. Shared in your own way. Carried into your own communities.Because the teachings themselves are simple, essential, and universal. This is a Rites of Passage I believe all women can benefit from at least once in her life.A Living LineageThere are nine core promises within this work—each one is a direct reclamation of what was once suppressed.And what I realized when I taught it the first time (in a different template) was this: These promises are not new.They are the exact places where women have been silenced—and are now being restored.An Invitation and a ReleaseSome of you will walk forward with me into this next chapter. And some of you will feel complete with the time we shared. Both are right.I release any threads that are ready to be released—with deep gratitude. There is no need to stay if it is not aligned. You will feel the resonance if it is.A Love That RemainsThis love I feel for you—It is real. It is the truest thing I know.It is my mother tongue.And as I find my way forward—more sovereign, yet still deeply connected—I carry you with me.Those beside me.Those behind me.Those ahead of me, calling me forward.I Am Not Stepping OutI am stepping in. And some of you will step in with me. I will see you on the path.Shiloh Sophia ”And the point is, you have to design a point for yourself” Caron McCloud“We are all cooling sacks of stars” Sue Hoya Sellars“When you can hear the stories of the past, the information of the future and the power of the now, understanding that all aspects are in play at all times, this juxtaposition of realities triggers Omni Presence in a way that can be understood. Everything actually isn’t always fleeting, not if you see it as all aspects in play simultaneously. When we can truly understand the depth and breadth, then we can understand that everything that has been and will be, the knowledge of all time, is already within us. We must move through the Corridors - the portals of our timeless mind, body, spirit, the realm of the oneness of creator, of source, the realms of all possibilities. Native peoples, indigenous peoples have an understanding of quantum physics and quantum mechanics but just have different language for it. There is no end to the circle, it is actually the everything and the closely concurring nothingness. That place where time and space are moving through you, and you are the observer and the recipient of cosmic favor. Where is the jurisdiction of truth? It's in the unfolding of the layers of our existence.” Carmen Baraka "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any” Alice Walker Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

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I just want you to knowthat if you need love right now,love is here.Feel it flowing between us.Whoever needs hope right now—there are plenty of reasons to feel hopeless.But this message arriving to you right nowis evidence of hope.Hope is something cultivated between us.It doesn’t just appear.We make hope happen.If you’re wondering who is out therewho understands,I want you to know:there is.It’s not just that you’re not alone.It’s that many of us are feelingthe same feelings you feel.Even though it may seem likeyou are the only one inside this lifefeeling this way.Isolation can make it seem that way.And for whoever feels likethis life might not be worth it—I’m here to remind you:it’s worth it.But you have to make it worth it.My mother Caron said something once:the point is, you must design a point for yourself.Life is worth it.But that doesn’t mean everythingis going to work out.It’s part of the human conditionthat everything doesn’t work out.I’m not saying life is worth itbecause things will go your way.Some things will.Some things won’t.That is the common thread between us.It’s not all going to work out.But the things that do—those need to be cherished.Celebrated.The rising of the sun.The first birds of the morning.Winter citrus on the vine.Petting your cat.Being warm enough.Coffee in your cup.Waking up can be hardwhen everything around usfeels chaotic.You must look for beautyeverywhere.We can bring our own meaningto everything that is happening.We have to bring our own meaning.Borrowed meaning about this lifedoesn’t work.I wish someone had told us that sooner.You have to make your own meaningjust like you have to make a point.We think a lot about the pastand how we cannot change it.But we can find a new contextthat makes it meaningful now.I’m not one of those peoplewho believes everything happens for a reason.I don’t.I believe in mistakes.I don’t think you chose your trauma.Or that you deserved it.Or bargained for it.Or that it was karma.And I don’t believe you agreed to itin some previous incarnation.I know some people do.I don’t.I do believe in an intelligent universe.But a universe that scripts sufferingfeels more manipulative than intelligent.I like to believe our soulsare far too wiseto choose to be victimsand perpetratorsover and over again.How’s that working out for us?What I do believeis that power-over structuresare doing their bestto remove our capacityto remember that we have choice.It’s a potent strategy.If we believe we don’t have a choice,we stop looking for one.And I want to validate something:You have every reasonto feel miserable,depressed,or hopeless.This isn’t misery loving company.It’s simply honest.I feel the temptation myselfbecause of what’s happening around us.The wars.The files.The behaviors.The administrations.The commentary.The price of cheese.Really.And yet—right now,if you’re reading this,I want to remind youthat the curation of your consciousnessis yours to do.And truly,that is the work.To curate your consciousness.To move out of the default settingsof personality and circumstanceand decide:From now on,I will curate my consciousness.To do that,we need intentional chemistry.Even with chaos around you,your consciousnessis still yours to navigate.Until we realize that,life feels like it’s happening to usinstead of through us.Curating consciousnessis a choiceday by day.A choice to repair the narrativethat has been deeply impactedinside each of usthrough cycles of conquestand devastationacross space, time, and place.Our souls knowthere is another way.That’s where hope comes from.Because there is another way.And we know it.Part of what makes this moment hardis that we can feela better way is possible.Each one of us can choose that way.In every decision.Every relationship.Every moment.We can chooseto lead from the heart.The choice is ours—if we remember we have it.I know that many timesit doesn’t feel that wayin our hearts,our bodies,our minds.But I want to tell you:you do have a choice.Some daysthe only assignmentis to reach towardthe possibility of a choice.The fragment of a choice.The fractal edge of a choice.Even if you cannot yet feel itas a lived experience.Choice as a lived experienceis still there.And I’m hereas evidence of that.Years agoI created a paintingwith two of my dear friends,Mary MacDonaldand Shannon Thompson,founder of Shakti Rising.Shannon passed away suddenlya few years ago.Just when life was opening for her—a new home,married,finally slowing downafter a life of service.She’s not here in the form anymore.But she is one of my ancestors now.When I would talk to Shannonabout hope like this,she would laugh at me.A big cackle.At my optimism.But we shared a devotionto life,to women,to care,to the Divine Feminine.We gave our livesto tending that.To curating it.Today I don’t know exactlywho this message is for.But I am thinking of Shannon.And I’m thinking of a young girlwith the initials K.L.A girl who lived in my home once.A girl I helpedmove through selective mutenessthrough creativity.A girl whose father couldn’t help her.When her brother was dying,I held her hand.When she tried to take her life,and survived,we painted together.Her life has been hard.Very hard.I haven’t been in touch for a long time.But I see her sometimes.Her eyes look hollow now.Tattoos on her face.She has enduredsome of the worst thingsmen can doto women and girls.So I send messages.Sometimes through her mother.Sometimes just into the field.Speaking to herat the level of soul.Because after what she has lived throughhope can be very hard to find.So I speak to her.To you.From my heart to yours.Right nowI’m about to have tea with the muse.This is one of the waysI practice intentional chemistry.Moving from beta—stress, reaction, problem-solving—into alpha.Into an intuitive love zone.Sometimes sending you these messagesdoes that for me.Loving youlifts my mood.So from my heartand my homeand my cup of tea with the muse—to yours.This is Curate Shiloh Sophiawith a messageof unreasonable hopeand an invitationto belongto yourself.You are not alone.Lean in.Don’t isolate.I am leaning in. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

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