Shakti’s New Voice is the first comprehensive study of Anandmurti Gurumaa, a widely popular contemporary female guru from north India known for offering spiritual teachings and music on satellite television and the Internet. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and religious-historical research—as well as unexpected and unprecedented outsider contact with the guru—Angela Rudertoffers an intimate portrait of “Gurumaa” that will be of interest to the guru’s admirers as well as to scholars. To examine Gurumaa’s innovation, Rudert turns to examples drawn from fieldwork research in the guru’s ashram and from other locations in India and in the United States. These examples specifically discuss Gurumaa’s religious pluralism, her gender activism, and her embrace of new media, in order to illuminate elements of continuity and change within the time-honored South Asian tradition of guru-bhakti, devotion to the guru. Raised in a Sikh family, educated in a Catholic convent school and understood to have attained her enlightenment in Vrindavan, the famous Hindu pilgrimage site of Lord Krishna’s divine play, Gurumaa refuses identification with any particular religious tradition, or “ism,” yet her teachings draw from many. She speaks strongly, often harshly, about contemporary issues of gender inequality, while calling for women’s empowerment, and she has established a non-governmental organization called Shakti to promote girls’ education in India. In the case of Anandmurti Gurumaa and those spiritual seekers in her fold, innovations and re-interpretations of tradition come from within the pluralistic setting of Indian religiosity, while they exist and act within a global religious milieu.

Covering eclectic topics ranging from South Asian religion to motherhood to world dance to ethnomusicology, this book focuses on contemporary selected experiences of women and how their lives interface with religion. Religion has often been perceived as the source of constriction for women's roles in society. This volume explores how modern women across Asia are mobilizing their faith traditions to address existential issues encountered in both the public and private realms, relating to economics, public participation, politics, and culture. As such, it is revealed that religion can be a powerful force for social change and ameliorating women's lives, despite use of religious doctrine in the past to limit women. Editor Zayn R. Kassam, PhD, and the contributors cover not only the commonly considered "Asian" traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism but also Christianity, Judaism, Bahai, and indigenous traditions. The book reveals that the challenges and opportunities Asian women face arise both from within and outside, whether in terms of developments within their countries or in relation to international political and economic regimes. The chapters explore how the issues Asian women face have as much to do with cultural and religious codes as they do with politics, economics, education, and the law; consider the varying ways in which family and motherhood are affected by the state's construction of the gendered citizen, by social constructs of motherhood, and by policies regarding women and children's access to health care; and identify the roles played by religion and spirituality in these circumstances.

Gurus and Media is the first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion. Illuminating the mediatisation of guruship and the guru-isation of media, it bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs and more. The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship, and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of ‘absent-present’ guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste and Hindutva. Throughout, the book foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, the book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly. Praise for Gurus and Media 'Sight, sound, image, narrative, representation and performance in the complex world of gurus are richly illuminated and deeply theorised in this outstanding volume. The immensely important, but hitherto under-explored, visual and aural dimensions of guru-ship across several religious traditions have received path-breaking and wide-ranging treatment by best-known experts on the subject.' Nandini Gooptu, University of Oxford ‘Gurus and Media casts subtle light on a phenomenon that too often shines so brightly that it is hard to see. This collection is a tremendously rich resource for anyone trying to make sense of that ambiguous zone where authority appears at once as seduction and as salvation, as comfort and as terror.’ William Mazzarella, University of Chicago 'This remarkable collection uses the figure of the mass-mediated guru to throw light on how modern Hindu mobilization generates a highly diverse set of religious charismatics in India. Because of the diversity of the contributors to this volume, the book is also a moveable feast of cases, methods and cultural styles in a major cultural region.' Arjun Appadurai, Emeritus Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University

Selected quotations from Gawain's "Developing Intuition, Creative Visualization", and "Awakening" appear throughout this line journal that contains eight full-color pages with an overlay providing a quote on one side and a nature photograph on the other.

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora. Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines. Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.

Transformational wisdom designed for both women and men to access and enhance the inner power of the Divine • Reveals how to activate your sacred sexual self and find your soul mission • Shows how to access the wisdom of the Galactic Center • Explains why men need the Shakti Circuit to connect with the Divine Masculine Shakti is the Divine life force that ceaselessly manifests, creates, and activates. Igniting this living power within is the key for both men and women to transform themselves and attain union, harmony, and peace. The fluid intelligence of Shakti enflames, empowers, and awakens, igniting life force, joy, and organic wisdom within. Uniting the forms of Tantra Yoga found in Indian, Tibetan, and Aramaic sacred traditions, Padma Aon Prakasha reveals how to activate the power of Shakti by opening the 18 energetic pathways of the Shakti Circuit. The Circuit begins with galactic energy entering the body at the Alta Major chakra, located at the back of the head. Traveling down the pillar of the spine through the root chakra, the Circuit passes through the Seven Gates of the Womb-Grail to link the sacred sexual center and the heart center. From the heart, the energy completes the Circuit by traveling to the third eye and back to the Alta Major starting point to reveal the All-seeing eye. Centered on the womb in women and the hara in men, the Shakti Circuit links the soul, body-mind, emotions, and chakras to the power and loving wisdom of the Galactic Center. The Power of Shakti includes the insights and experiences of both men and women as they activate the power of Shakti and shows that clearing all 18 pathways of the Shakti Circuit enables us to activate our sacred sexual self and find our soul mission.

Let me introduce you to a new kind of fairy tale! Discover the magic of the daydream world of Reverie. Meet the Princess Miriam, a delightful, giggley little girl who might well be a kid in your own neighborhood. Go with her and six of her friends as they pass effortlessly between our world and Reverie, accompanied by the only cat ever to have been made a knight! Meet Mara, the greatest sorceress alive and Miriams mentor in magic. The King and the Kitten. King Ormund has barely begun his reign when he must send his beloved queen and their baby daughter into our world. The Princess and the cat Miriam learns that she is more than an ordinary child, as she fi nds her way back to Reverie, and receives her fairy wings. Sunshine Black and the Giant Hannah (nicknamed Sunshine) is captured by a giant who tries to make her his pet child. Starlight Avery befriends a winged pony from Reverie. She and Starlight fl y to the ice-cream mountain. The Island of Silly Imagine an island populated entirely by clowns! Princess Miriam and her friend Shakti must go there to enlist the aid of the clowns in defeating the invading army of mulligrumps. The Treasure of the Mercaptan Kid Molly discovers a map hidden many years before in her new home. Her neighbor, Miriam recognizes it as a map of Reverie. The search For Baby Violet Abbie is utterly devastated when her baby cousin vanishes into thin air right before her eyes.