Published in Sequoia: News of Religion and Society, Fall/Winter 2006
By Jean Molesky-Poz
    
The structural violence against women – emotional and physical abuse, sexual harassment, and the systematic exclusion of women’s voices and lives in educational, political and liturgical contexts – marks contemporary human experience.  These structures, in turn, have developed habits of low self-esteem, negative self-worth and internalized anger.  They injure the health and wellbeing of oneself and of others.  Concurrently, another mark of our times is the worldwide awakening of women who look to a new paradigm for the transformation of our selves and of our societies. The turn has been to women’s spiritualities and nonviolent practices, which are embodied, reflective, inclusive, and transformative.  This emergent vision of life perceives all life as interconnected, understands that women’s work comes from traditions of wisdom, which generate life, recognize and release creative power, individually and communally, and nurture reverence and peace. Traveling with Turtle facilitates both the recognition of women’s internalized experiences of violence and the healing, empowerment, and creative activity of peacemaking habits.  
        
Traveling with the Turtle, a group process manual co-authored by Cindy Preston-Pile and Irene Woodward, considers “women’s experiences of violence and conflict and habitual responses to them,” so women can learn “concrete ways of making peace that are practical, creative, inclusive, and nonviolent” (1). This work emerges from years of group process reflective work with Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living, a program of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.  The authors, in solidarity with women and men who are working to end violence against women, have created a manual which not only facilitates groups to examine personal, communal, and global issues of anger and violence, but more, to recognize and engage creative sources for nonviolent social change.  Traveling with the Turtle is based on the premise that women’s spirituality is a powerful force for peacemaking.  
    
Traveling with the Turtle is more than a book.  It is a process developed by women for women.  The process is comprised of thirteen two-hour sessions.  The first two sessions introduce women’s spirituality and explore empowering images of the Divine.  The other eleven sessions, are organized in four parts:  Part I Power-Within, helps claim one’s own strength; Part II, Power-With, explores familiar responses to conflict and violence, as well as creative, nonviolent ways of making peace; Part III, Community-Power, considers how to build inclusive communities; and Part IV Sisterhood, honors social change movements initiated by women, and guides the group to develop and carry out a nonviolent action.  Appropriately, the final chapter is a celebratory ritual, commissioning members “to go forth.”

Each chapter, which formats a session, is guided by meticulously thought-through organization:  the goals of the session, a suggested timed agenda, including ritual practice, activities, readings; a list of materials needed, and suggested preparation for the facilitators.  Truly
the authors’ work as experienced educators, group facilitators, and organizers shine forth so that they have provided a seamless template for intended facilitators and participants. Each session is structured with an opening ritual or prayer, then various methods to explore women’s spirituality and peacemaking: sharing in pairs, small group reflection, large group reflection, creative imagination exercises.  Throughout participants are encouraged to express themselves in a variety of ways.  Between sessions, participants engage in a specific life practice, journal, and reflect on specific readings.  

Not only is the focus deliberate and the process finely honed, but integrated throughout the text are over seventy informative, thought-provoking readings, like Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Feminine Wound,” Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Creating True Peace,” Winona LaDuke’s “The Indigenous Women’s Network:  Our Future, Our Responsibility;” charts as “The History of the Goddess” or “Gender Violence Worldwide Throughout the Life Cycle;” and practical embodied exercises as “Fingerholds to Manage Emotions,” or “CARA:  The Four-Step Process for Nonviolent Engagement.”  Culled from women and men whose life work is creative nonviolent practice, these texts reverberate emerging deliberate and embodied peacemaking practices in diverse local and global communities.  The reader senses “a nonviolent movement is globally at foot.”

Visually, a company of turtles, or sometimes a lone turtle — symbols of Mother Earth, of wisdom, strength and power — trail through the text. In an early image a turtle has crawled onto the lap of a pregnant woman; in another, the turtle bridges two hands as participants are led through sessions recognizing new non-violent responses to conflict.  As the process gains momentum and women claim the creative power within, thirteen images of diverse women’s faces comprise the turtle’s shell, making transparent women’s intimate connection to women’s creative power and the earth’s fertility. In the last image, joyous dancing women, linked hand to hand, spiral around the turtle.  The turtle is on its back — vulnerable, exposed – perhaps images the vulnerability of the earth.  But at first glance, the turtle’s position counters the movement that the text on every page has generated, flamed, and galvanized into a dynamic forward motion.

This dynamic, engaging manual truly has listened to the conflicts, violence and struggles of women of our era. It provides an indispensable tool for reflective inquiry, for drawing new circles, for revising formerly received interpretations, and arriving at new insights, communities, and empowerment for social change.  This book can be highly recommended to groups of women, of any age, who want to explore their experiences of violence and anger, see the connection to the world we live in, and who want to change their own lives and world we live in.  

Jean Molesky-Poz, Ph.D. teaches in the Religious Studies Department, Santa Clara University and is author of Contemporary Maya Spirituality:  The Ancient Ways Are Not Lost (2006).