Devi: Mother of My Mind is a creative interaction with Indias Yoga, Shakta, and Tantra traditions. This book uses the epic literary genre to imagine the mind liberating struggle of these teachings. It combines academic study and translation with the meditative quest and questions of a woman and mother.
The goddess Devi symbolizes the wholeness of life, the vital continuum interconnecting body and spirit. She is also the Great Mother, the perennial gestator, birthgiver. The goddess traditions of India preserve, develop, and practice the most completely female oriented system in the religious history of the world. Devi celebrates and proclaims this powerful counterbalance to dominant male oriented externalized systems. Internalized myths, philosophies, legends, songs, and rituals gradually move the narrator towards their inherent wholeness. An appendix gives the details of the sources and contexts of the devi traditions in India.
About the Author
As a poet, professor and scholar of comparative religion, mother, and practitioner of yoga for more than thirty years, Suzanne Ironbiter writes to integrate literature, learning, and experience. She received her doctorate at Columbia University, where she specialized in the neo-Platonic mystical tradition.
|
"This is wisdom indeed for our time, embedded, gem-like, in familiar stories that catch the eye by their unexpected sparkle."
—Rachel Fell Mc Dermott, Associate Professor at Columbia University
|