User:Higlehart/sandbox

Born

Harriet Austen Iglehart

November 4, 1947

New York, New York

Education

Trained with Charlotte Selver, Anne Kent Rush, Marshall Rosenberg, Thich Nhat Hanh

Alma Mater

Bryn Mawr School For Girls (12 years)

Brown University, B.A.

Notable Work 

Womanspirit: A Guide to Women’s Wisdom (1983)

The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine (1990)

Website

http://heartgoddess.net/

http://www.alloneocean.org/

Hallie (born Harriet Austen Iglehart on November 4, 1947) is an American writer, teacher and activist. She is known as a spiritual feminist theorist and founder of the non-profit All One Ocean. Hallie’s first book Womanspirit (1983) was a primary inspiration for the Women’s Spirituality and Goddess Movement. Her second book The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine (1990) is generally recognized as the most visually beautiful as well as comprehensive book of Goddesses from around the world.

EARLY LIFE

Hallie was born in 1947 in New York City to Francis Nash Iglehart and Harriet Austen Stokes Iglehart, while her WWII hero father finished up at Princeton. Both of her parents’ families had lived in Maryland for many generations. When her father graduated, they moved to her maternal grandparents’ compound on a Maryland farm. Her father became a lawyer and civil rights leader, her mother a farmer and women’s health activist. At the age of 7, her father contracted polio and her family, now with four younger siblings, moved to her maternal grandmother’s house, closer to Baltimore for a few years before settling on their family farm in 1956. Hallie attended the Bryn Mawr School for Girls, beginning to learn classical Greek language and mythology at the age of 12. In the 1960’s Hallie attended civil rights gatherings with her father, including a talk with Fanny Lou Hamer in a Baltimore church basement. In 1969, she graduated from Brown University, with a B.A. degree in English Literature.

After finishing her degree, she attended Woodstock and “pulled up the asphalt covering the earth with bare fingers” at the Berkeley People’s Park demonstration of 1971. Then, a desire to test her self-reliance inspired her to drive from England to Nepal (traveling through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and back again over the course of a year. Much of this time she lived in the Indian Himalayas with the Dalai Lama’s community. She strongly considered becoming a Tibetan nun, but her experience with both Eastern and Western religious misogyny propelled her to work for women’s well-being, starting in her own country.

PIONEERING WORK

Hallie moved to San Francisco and became a part of the SF Women’s Health Collective in 1973, in the heyday of Bay Area feminism, improvisational movement and natural healing. In 1974, at the urging of Anne Kent Rush, one of her mentors, she taught the first Womanspirit class as a way to synthesize her activism and spirituality (ref: the Politics of Women’s Spirituality). She immediately started writing numerous articles as well as her first book Womanspirit: A Guide to Women’s Wisdom based on the classes, introducing a generation of readers to the sacrality of the earth; bodies and emotions; dreams; and the importance of integrative meditation and self and community-created ritual. Upon meeting Elsa Gidlow when they were both presenting at a women’s spirituality conference in Boston, Hallie became a resident of Druid Heights, from 1976-1986.

For twenty years, she taught workshops and led conferences in Japan, Europe and throughout the United States, including at the Graduate Theological Union, the University of California and the United Nation Women’s Conference. She often collaborated with other pioneers such as Vicki Noble, Starhawk, Charlene Spretnak, Chellis Glendinning, Mayumi Oda, and Carol Christ. She wrote her second book The Heart of the Goddess:Art, Myth and Meditation (1990), to share the richness of the images she showed in her classes. She chose to use her middle name as her surname, to honor her Austen matrilineal heritage, becoming Hallie Iglehart Austen.

In 1991, Hallie became incapacitated with a devastating illness that was much later discovered to be undiagnosed Lyme disease. She was bedridden and cognitively impaired for seven years.

“I became completely incapacitated with a mysterious illness, losing my health, my work, my sexuality and my community. Rarely able to teach and certainly not able to travel and teach, and with writing out of the question, I discovered how identified I had been with my work; my ego was shattered. At 43, I did not know whether I was going to live or die. I mourned the fact that I could not be doing more to help heal the planet. For seven years, I was unable to walk, drive, read or write more than a few minutes a week. In retrospect, I think those years in the Underworld opened me up to serving the Mother in a different way.”

After she recovered from her illness, she focused on ocean work. In 2000, with Vivienne Verdon-Roe and George Taylor, Hallie cofounded Seaflow, and worked with Michael Stocker, Mary Jo Rice and others to educate local, state and national public about the dangers of active sonars and other ocean noise to marine mammals and all ocean life. Seaflow was instrumental in bringing this issue to public attention, lobbying congress and bringing together Ocean Mammal Institute, National Resource Defense Council, Sierra Club, Humane Society, Oceana, Earth Island Institute and the Animal Welfare Institute to create an ocean noise coalition.

In 2008, Hallie met Qigong Masters Mingtong Gu and Linling Xie. She immediately began studying, practicing and teaching their form of Zhineng Qigong. Her journey to health culminated with this practice. In 2011, she founded All One Ocean, a non-profit dedicated to reducing plastic pollution in our oceans and waterways through community action and elementary school education. All One Ocean (AOO) has set up 50 Beach Clean Up Stations in California, Hawaii, Iowa, Alabama and Mexico, encouraging beachgoers to express their love of the ocean by helping clean it up. AOO’s third grade pilot program on making wise environmental choices, particularly with regards to single-use plastics, has met with enthusiasm from students, teachers and parents and is set to expand.

WOMANSPIRIT

Hallie was a pioneer in the emerging women’s spirituality movement in the 1970’s.

She wrote Womanspirit: A Guide to Women’s Wisdom, first published in 1983. The book was both a revelation and an affirmation for a generation of women finding themselves and seeking a spirituality more focused on the earth and other values attributed to the feminine.

Womanspirit practice relies on guided meditation, dream reworking, natural healing techniques, and personal rituals in one’s home and among groups of like-minded people. It encourages people to recognize and celebrate their bodies, their emotions, intuition, the earth and to create significant moments and passages in their own lives, rather than those ordained by the traditional liturgical calendar.

Karen Lindsey, Ms. Magazine says, “I went to a daylong workshop [with] Hallie Iglehart. ... This day gave me a taste of transcendence. ... Hallie’s clear, nonjudgmental personality .... strengthened me, taking me a step farther in my spiritual journey. ... I can accept the goddess as a wise and valued friend—a useful companion who has opened doors to places I might never have seen without her.”

Woman of Power magazine likens Hallie’s teaching to “a conversation with a kind and giving friend…a loving spirit, who herself manifests the inner wisdom she prompts us to seek.”

THE HEART OF THE GODDESS  First published in 1990, The Heart of the Goddess became a classic resource of worldwide Goddess mythology and artwork, from 30,000 BCE to the present. This work is distinguished by its broad scope, the beauty of the images and the extensive research. The 80-some images in the book include such contemporary artists as Herb Kane, Mayumi Oda, Karen Vogel, Mariano Valadez, Marcelina Martin, Asungi, Shan Goshorn, Robin Kahukiwa, and Vijali Hamilton. Listed in Ms. Magazine’s top 100 non-fiction books.

BELIEFS

From living with the Tibetans, Hallie learned that we are all part of one another and that kindness can be a religion unto itself. Based on Hallie’s personal experiences with the loving unity of all existence and inspired by utilitarianism, in which an action is judged by the most good it will do for the most people or other beings, she is known for her integrity and for walking her talk, with awareness of one’s own footprint on the planet. She believes, “The Earth is the foundation of our existence and we are inseparable from her. When the earth suffers, we suffer. When the earth thrives, we thrive. Not only do we have a moral responsibility to care for other manifestations of life, but we benefit as well.”

“If we learn to listen to the Earth for answers to our questions, we can tap into a wisdom larger wisdom than our own. We can become aware of the energy of plants and thoughts, which can influence the web of life. We may find that there is a field of love underlying and permeating everything. However, most of us are too busy and stressed to relax into this field. If we allow ourselves, we find that everything is connected, which is the basis of love. We separate ourselves from this field of love through alienation, distraction, exhaustion, obsessive and/or chronic negative thinking.”

Hallie believes that we need both spirituality and activism to be healthy and effective, like a bird needs both wings to fly.” Spirituality without activism can become isolating and self-centered. Activism without spirituality can lead to burnout. Personal spirituality, which develops our values, must infuse our actions, as distinguished from the separation from institutionalized religion and politics.” Further, “the human values of nurturance and cooperation are attributes that have been assigned by our society to women and the feminine, yet these values are beyond gender. In order for all humans to develop these parts of themselves, we must honor women and the feminine.”

PROJECTS

Seaflow

All One Ocean

Since 1974, Hallie has led Goddess workshops, rituals and conferences, including those at the University of California, Graduate Theological Union, United Nations Women’s Conference and other gatherings. She created many public ceremonies, including the Take Back the Night Ritual March and the closing ritual for the Natural Conference on Violence Against Women with Starhawk and others and at the Glyptoteket Museum in Copenhagen to open the United Nations international women’s NGO Conference.

WORKS

Hallie has written two books and has also contributed works in other media. Her books have appeared in translation in German and Japanese.

Non-fiction:  

Womanspirit:  A Guide to Women’s Wisdom (Harper & Row, 1983)

The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine

(Wingbow/Bookpeople, 1990)

As contributor:

Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries

Politics of Women’s Spirituality

Earth Walking Sky Dancers

Her Blood Is Gold

Nine Apples

(and more)

Other Media

Films: Keeper of the Beat

Audio Recordings: Womanspirit Meditation with harpist Georgia Kelly

YouTube:Heart of the Goddess Video with music by Jennifer Berezan, featuring Sharon Burch

PERSONAL LIFE

Hallie currently lives in a multi-generational household in a model green house she built in Mill Valley, California. She also resides partly in Maryland with her mother. She offers classes and private consultations on dream work, life transition rituals and Wisdom Healing Qigong.

SEE ALSO

REFERENCES

NOTES

EXTERNAL LINKS

Site interviews, References

SF Chronicle article on Seaflow

Womanspirit

Foremothers’ Book

Earthwalking Sky Dancer

Her Blood Is Gold

The Politics of Women’s Spirituality

Ms. Mag article

AOO

Heartgoddess

Take Back the Night link: