Bio
Monica Mody, Ph.D., M.A., B.A. LL.B.(Hons.), is a poet, writer, diviner, and scholar. She was born in Ranchi, India, and blends earth-ecstatic ancestral medicine and teachings. She is a bearer of the medicine of Kontomble, the elemental Little People as they are called by the Dagara from Burkina Faso.
Divination is an ancient technology for contacting the invisible worlds of Spirit and asking for their guidance, mediation, and assistance. Through divination, Monica seeks to restore the weave of an ancestral, reverent approach to wild planetary living in coexistence with the otherworlds.
Her interests include women's wisdom and motherlines, decolonial spirituality, resilience and resistance practices, and creative power of the word. She lives in San Francisco. Read more about her offerings including cowrie shell and voice of kontomble divinations, or contact her at artofdivinations at gmail dot com.
Divination is an ancient technology for contacting the invisible worlds of Spirit and asking for their guidance, mediation, and assistance. Through divination, Monica seeks to restore the weave of an ancestral, reverent approach to wild planetary living in coexistence with the otherworlds.
Her interests include women's wisdom and motherlines, decolonial spirituality, resilience and resistance practices, and creative power of the word. She lives in San Francisco. Read more about her offerings including cowrie shell and voice of kontomble divinations, or contact her at artofdivinations at gmail dot com.
Story
“…we seek to present our histories as affective, felt, intuited as well as thought.”
– Dian Million
Hello & welcome, dear visitor!
I have inhabited, and created, worlds of imagination, feeling/empathy, and inspired language for as long as I remember. Imagination is the key that unlocks reality.
I was born in Ranchi, India. The land through which flows the Swarnarekha, the river that is the streak of gold. I was a shy and introverted child, with books and the imagination as my foremost companions. In my twenties, when I discovered the desert flowers of poetry, of form, of genre, it felt as though a terrain that was my true heritage lay revealed to me. This contented me for a while until—increasingly disenchanted with the epistemologies of Cartesian dualism and existential nihilism—I chose to explore further.
It was when I reached deep into the back of my heart that I found not dark empty corners but a long forgotten relationship to soul, and spirit.
2011, Bay Area
Earth, mi madre, first oracle, helped me heal my instinctual nature, my instinctual body. Slowly, I learnt how to do ritual. Not the orthodox kind of religious ceremonies I grew up around (impugning), which stem from the hegemonic Hindu patriarchy of a middle class urban India. But self-created rituals, earth-centered rituals, women’s rituals, star rituals, with “Spirit…in charge”, and primal links to the hidden reality of energy.
Returning Home
In 2012, I went back to India on a pilgrimage. I travelled in the land of my birth, reconnecting with that earth and those waters, with myths and stories, with rites and ancestors. I found some answers, left with many questions. This process continued, culminating in my Ph.D. dissertation titled "Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: a Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness."
I have inhabited, and created, worlds of imagination, feeling/empathy, and inspired language for as long as I remember. Imagination is the key that unlocks reality.
I was born in Ranchi, India. The land through which flows the Swarnarekha, the river that is the streak of gold. I was a shy and introverted child, with books and the imagination as my foremost companions. In my twenties, when I discovered the desert flowers of poetry, of form, of genre, it felt as though a terrain that was my true heritage lay revealed to me. This contented me for a while until—increasingly disenchanted with the epistemologies of Cartesian dualism and existential nihilism—I chose to explore further.
It was when I reached deep into the back of my heart that I found not dark empty corners but a long forgotten relationship to soul, and spirit.
2011, Bay Area
Earth, mi madre, first oracle, helped me heal my instinctual nature, my instinctual body. Slowly, I learnt how to do ritual. Not the orthodox kind of religious ceremonies I grew up around (impugning), which stem from the hegemonic Hindu patriarchy of a middle class urban India. But self-created rituals, earth-centered rituals, women’s rituals, star rituals, with “Spirit…in charge”, and primal links to the hidden reality of energy.
Returning Home
In 2012, I went back to India on a pilgrimage. I travelled in the land of my birth, reconnecting with that earth and those waters, with myths and stories, with rites and ancestors. I found some answers, left with many questions. This process continued, culminating in my Ph.D. dissertation titled "Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: a Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness."
Dagara-Inspired
When I came across and in relationship with the Dagara tradition as brought to the West by Malidoma Somé, there was a sense of homecoming, opening, surrender, grief, peace, communality, lineage, and urgency. There was a confirmation. Not only because something in me rested at the intersection of community medicine and individual medicine at the heart of this worldview, but also because something else in me recognized its alikeness with the ancient primeval (goddess) traditions of the Indian subcontinent that my own blood ancestors carried.
The more I talked with the ancestors, the more I encountered myself.
Then there were the Kontomble. Carriers of magic, mystery, and medicine. My cultural wounds arising from a colonized worldview and patriarchy had been choking off my relationship and affinity with the little people. When I went through a ritual of merger with kontomble, a startling process of healing and intimacy began. The more I gave myself the permission to trust, the more I remembered. The more I remember, the more I want to serve.
When I came across and in relationship with the Dagara tradition as brought to the West by Malidoma Somé, there was a sense of homecoming, opening, surrender, grief, peace, communality, lineage, and urgency. There was a confirmation. Not only because something in me rested at the intersection of community medicine and individual medicine at the heart of this worldview, but also because something else in me recognized its alikeness with the ancient primeval (goddess) traditions of the Indian subcontinent that my own blood ancestors carried.
The more I talked with the ancestors, the more I encountered myself.
Then there were the Kontomble. Carriers of magic, mystery, and medicine. My cultural wounds arising from a colonized worldview and patriarchy had been choking off my relationship and affinity with the little people. When I went through a ritual of merger with kontomble, a startling process of healing and intimacy began. The more I gave myself the permission to trust, the more I remembered. The more I remember, the more I want to serve.
Community
The last few years of this journey, I have yearned for and sought to co-create a wild community: a community that sees, honors, celebrates, and brings forth our multifarious gifts; our dazzling strengths; our soft, wounded, shadowed, yielding vulnerabilities. A community that sings together and knows the songs that bring us home together.
My sacred practice of divinations and rituals is in some ways nothing but a bid to bring me-us into community: with each other, with the invisible and visible ones. I continue to learn about the heart of women's mysteries, the ways in which women have been cut off from and can reclaim their authentic power. I continue to teach and bring to the community all the wisdom and insights I have unfolded into.
The last few years of this journey, I have yearned for and sought to co-create a wild community: a community that sees, honors, celebrates, and brings forth our multifarious gifts; our dazzling strengths; our soft, wounded, shadowed, yielding vulnerabilities. A community that sings together and knows the songs that bring us home together.
My sacred practice of divinations and rituals is in some ways nothing but a bid to bring me-us into community: with each other, with the invisible and visible ones. I continue to learn about the heart of women's mysteries, the ways in which women have been cut off from and can reclaim their authentic power. I continue to teach and bring to the community all the wisdom and insights I have unfolded into.
Photo: Monica Mody
That I can draw on and recreate a sense of belonging and connection from each of these holographic circles, and leave an ant’s trail, snake’s trail, bird trail, human footprint for someone else to find.
What I will choose will affect not only me. I will not be choosing only on my own behalf.
Serpents
2018 was the year I met serpents. And, something I must have known was recovered during the Serpent Ceremony with Anandha Ray... An ancient, embodied memory of being in partnership with serpents. Of dancing with them. Of speaking the oracle with them.
My dance/movement practice had been readying me for meeting with the serpents. My dissertation too undulated its way towards serpents and their priestesses in South Asia, and the healing of ancestral, intergenerational, collective, cultural, and personal traumas through reconnecting with the spine.
2018 was the year I met serpents. And, something I must have known was recovered during the Serpent Ceremony with Anandha Ray... An ancient, embodied memory of being in partnership with serpents. Of dancing with them. Of speaking the oracle with them.
My dance/movement practice had been readying me for meeting with the serpents. My dissertation too undulated its way towards serpents and their priestesses in South Asia, and the healing of ancestral, intergenerational, collective, cultural, and personal traumas through reconnecting with the spine.
Writing & ScholarshipAs a writer & theoretician, I am interested in:
|
Kala Pani
My first cross-genre book, out from 1913 Press, mediates and explores the entanglement of state oppression and intimacy.
|
Academic Qualifications
Other Credentials
|
& Teachers & Guides, Including I receive Gayatri's lineage through my mother... and motherline
|