On Holy Ground, Learning to Love the Earth Our Mother: An Evening with Luisah Teish October 21, 2011

Luisah Teish will speak at The Natural Way about learning to love the Earth, our Mother, and will share her personal stories of growing up in the South and her relationship to the land. She will recount and examine cultural myths that have mis-educated us into alienation from Our Mother Earth.

Teish will identify the affects this estrangement has on the individual, the human community and the Earth Herself, help us contact this wounding and to begin to release it through visualization, chanting and conversation. Her teaching is based on material from the upcoming book "On Holy Ground: Committment and Devotion to Sacred Land," co-authored with Leilani Birely, a Hawaiina Kahuna and Hula teacher.

LuisahTeish is an initiated elder (Iyanifa) in the Ifa/Orisha tradition of the West African Diaspora, and she holds a chieftaincy title (Yeye’woro) from the Fatunmise Compound in Ile Ife, Nigeria.

In 1969, Teish received initiation into to the Fahamme Temple of Amun-Ra in St. Louis, Missouri. Presently she is the Chair of the World Orisha Congress Committee on Women’s Issues. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Spiritual Therapeutics from Open International University’s School of Complementary Medicine in Colombo Sri Lanka in 1993. She is also a devotee of Damballah Hwedo, the Haitian Rainbow Serpent, under the guidance of Moma Lola.

A resident of the Bay Area for thirty years, Luisah Teish has been actively involved in teaching transformation and working to insure justice and peacekeeping. Ms.Teish designs and conducts weddings, naming ceremonies, memorials and numerous seasonal celebrations. She has studied indigenous Native North and South American traditions and has conducted workshops on Black and Native American culture at Medicine Wheels (under the directions of Sun Bear’s tribal elders)

Ms. Teish is the author of several books on African and African American Spiritual Culture and Feminist Myth.

More information is available in her bio at http://www.luisahteish.com/

Details about Natural Way: Indigenous Voices programs can be found on the Earth and Spirit Council website http://www.earthandspirit.org .