Vicki Noble - Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World

Thanks to everyone who has helped me with the Shakti Woman work, especially my students, who have tested these theories and put these practices into action in my classes, and the apprentices and teachers whom Ive trained to take the work seriously in their lives. Thanks to Khara Whitney-Marsh, my faithful assistant, who administered my school, screens all my phone calls, and thoroughly supports me when I shut the door to my writing room. Thanks to Reba Rose and JoAnn Peirce, who have listened so carefully, asked all the right questions, grown with me over the years, and who have begun to take the work out into the world.

Thanks to my husband, Jonathan Tenney, who has forced me to become more powerful than I believed I could be. Even the original dream I had about this book came out of one of our core arguments demanding transmutation. Our relationshipa dharmic one, with a sacred commitment to deep, personal transformationhas tempered and shaped me over the years. Like crystals that grow through each other, we have become aligned with each others growth. More than once, the ax blade of the Black Dakini has dropped, and we have lost our heads, but our deep bond remains unsevered.

I am grateful for the technical assistance I received on this book. Thanks to Jennifer Roberts, who originally made sketches for my magazine, Snake Power: A Journal of Contemporary Female Shamanism , and who has allowed me to use them here as well. Thanks to photographic friends Irene Young, Craig Comstock, Catherine Allport, Robert Ansell, and Helen Nestor for generously sharing their work. And deep gratitude to Laurelin Remington-Wolf, who remained undaunted by my whimsical assignment of some twenty-odd drawings in a short time. Her artwork has brought figures of the Goddess to life in a way that could happen only through personal faith and primal contact with female source energy. Thanks to Margaret Pavel, Anne Herbert, and Karen Vogel for giving my manuscript a careful and thoughtful reading, providing creative feedback at the right moment in time and to Kate Kaufman for coming up with the ingenious subtitle.

A little more than a year ago I was still stubbornly resisting the urgings of all my friends to use a computer for my writing. I maintained that the computer was the body of the colonizing beast that had taken over the planet! When I decided to publish my magazine, it was as if I died and was reborn. Without a single doubt (and through a great deal of personal debt), I bought a MAC II and a laser printer, then I used them to write this book. I would be remiss if I did not also thank my beautiful machine for such good work.

Thanks, too, to Clayton Carlson at Harper San Francisco, who said, Yes, what a good idea, lets do it , when I first told him about Shakti Woman . And I appreciated Jan Johnsons intelligent eye and thoughtful approach to my work, until her departure from Harper. Now I thank my new editor and ally, Barbara Moulton, for her seriousness and appreciation of my work and for her helpful suggestions along the way. Im very happy with the cover design, and give many, many thanks to artist Mayumi Oda for allowing me to share her version of the Black Dakini with my readers.

Finally, I thank the universe for my life and for the experiences I have had that allowed me to write this. I believe that any experience that comes through me can also come through others, and from this standpoint I teach and write about sacred things that cannot be fully expressed. May the Goddess be active in your life, as She is in mine, and may we renew our ability to embody Her energies at this time of planetary crisis. Blessed be.

V ICKI N OBLE
W INTER S OLSTICE , 1990