July 27th, 2010
Teri Degler: “Listening to the Fiery Muse”
an interview with Teri Degler
An award winning writer, Teri is the author/co-author of ten non-fiction books, including The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest (Random House of Canada) and one for young adults, The Canadian Junior Green Guide (McClelland & Stewart). Written in conjunction with the highly respected environmental watchdog, Pollution Probe, it became a Canadian best-seller.
After completing two books on the environment, Teri began to focus much of her writing on topics related to creativity and contemporary spirituality, subjects of deep personal interest to her. Teri first began studying yoga in her twenties in Paris with a teacher who had lived in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram for more than twenty years. Several years later she traveled to India to meet Gopi Krishna – considered by many to be the world’s leading authority on kundalini. Since then she has been a student of the philosophy behind yoga and has been involved in researching the link between creativity, inspiration, and mystical experience. Both her latest book, The Divine Feminine Fire: Creativity and Your Yearning to Express Your Self (Dreamriver Press), and The Fiery Muse deal with this topic; she has also written a number of articles and spoken widely on the subject.
Her workshops on creative writing and the link between creativity and spirituality have met with great success, and she now divides her time between leading workshops and writing.
She is an active member of PEN Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the Institute for Consciousness Research, and she was one of the founders of the Kundalini Research Network in the United States.
Teri speaks with Joanna about the serpent power as an evolutionary force of transformation, longing & fear, Shakti/Shekinah/Sophia, creativity and the Divine Femenine…
Introductory music: ”Amazon Beginnings”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
’s unusual path focuses on the hand-held frame drum, the world’s oldest known drum. For fifteen years, she researched the history of this drum in religious and healing rites in the ancient Mediterranean world culminating in her book, When The Drummers Were Women. Layne has been featured in many music festivals including the Touch Festival in Berlin, Seattle Bumbershoot Festival, the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, Tambores do Mundo in San Luis, Brazil, as a soloist at the World Wide Percussion Festival in Salvador, Brazil. Her recordings include: The Wave of Bliss, Invoking the Muse, Trance Union, Since the Beginning, and she has two instructional videos: Rhythmic Wisdom and A Sense of Time.
Anne Baring is a writer and retired Jungian analyst, is author and co-author of five books including The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, The Mystic Vision, The Divine Feminine, and a book for children, The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time. Anne’s website