
Free Daily Podcast Summary
by Shiloh Sophia
Get key takeaways, quotes, and insights from Tea with the Muse in a 5-minute read. Delivered straight to your inbox.
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
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
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
Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe
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 v
* Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe
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
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Listeners also like.
Encouraging stories, images, poetry, inquiries and dares from the Muse at Intentional Creativity® teawiththemuse.substack.com
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Get key takeaways from Tea with the Muse in a 5-minute read.
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Tea with the Muse as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Shiloh Sophia.
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
Tea with the Muse publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
Tea with the Muse covers topics including Education, Arts, Visual Arts, Self-Improvement. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.