About
Queen Mama Donna
Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, award-winning author, popular speaker, and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions of people in more than 100 cities since 1972. She has published four books, a CD, an acclaimed quarterly journal and writes a column for UPI (United Press International) Religion and Spirituality Forum. Mama Donna, as she is affectionately called, maintains a ceremonial center, spirit shop, ritual practice and consultancy in Exotic Brooklyn, NY where she works with individuals, groups, institutions, municipalities and corporations to create meaningful ceremonies for every imaginable occasion.
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CALLING ALL QUEENS!
The Queen's Chronicles
Offers
upbeat, practical, and ceremonial inspiration for all women who want to
enjoy the fruits of an influential, passionate, and powerful maturity.
I would appreciate it if you would please forward The Queen's Chronicles to people who might value it.
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Dearest Queen Mama Donna,
With your help, I made a shift and a commitment. Thanks for all the good work and great fun you do. Blessings,
-Queen Paddy, ND
Consult the
Midlife Midwife
The transition from Maiden and Mother to Queen can be a difficult one, fraught with hard lessons and lots of loss. It takes great determination and courage to confront and embrace the changes brought about by the midlife passage.
It can be really helpful during this confusing time to have the inspiration, advice and encouragement of a counselor, coach, or mentor - someone who has been there and done that and is ready to help you do the same.
Queen Mama Donna offers upbeat, practical and ceremonial guidance for individual women and groups who want to enjoy the fruits of an enriching, influential, purposeful, passionate, and powerful maturity.
TURN YOUR MIDLIFE CRISIS INTO YOUR CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT!
Further information: www.thequeenofmyself.com
Click on Individual Consultations.
Sessions are available in person and by phone. To make an appointment, call 718-857-1343 or email the Queen at TheQueenOfMySelf@aol.com
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
-Anna Freud |
A Queen Event
Near You
OCTOBER
NEW YORK
Saturday, October 18
2PM
HALLOWEEN PARADE BLESSING BAND REHEARSAL
Mama Donna's Tea Garden & Healing Haven
Park Slope, Exotic Brooklyn, NY
To join the Blessing Band contact
cityshaman@aol.com
Thursday, October 23
6PM Refreshments
7-9:30PM Workshop
BECOME THE QUEEN OF YOUR SELF:
CELBRATE YOUR MATURE EROTIC POWERS!
A ritual workshop with Mama Donna Henes
Eve's Garden
119 W. 57th Street, 12th Floor
New York, New York 10019
Info: 800-848-3837
www.evesgarden.com
click on GREEN
$40. (includes: crown and royal amulet bag)
Sunday, October 26
2PM
HALLOWEEN PARADE BLESSING BAND REHEARSAL
Mama Donna's Tea Garden & Healing Haven
Park Slope, Exotic Brooklyn, NY
To join the Blessing Band contact
cityshaman@aol.com
Friday, October 31
6PM
GREENWICH VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE
Led by Mama Donna and her Blessing Band
Avenue of the Americas from Spring Street to West 21st Street
Manhattan
To join the Blessing Band contact
cityshaman@aol.com
NOVEMBER
NEW YORK
Saturday, November 22
10-4PM
BECOME THE QUEEN OF YOUR SELF:
MEANING, MOXIE AND MAJESTY IN MIDLIFE
A ritual workshop with Mama Donna Henes
The Grace Within
195 Blue Point Avenue
Bluepoint, New York 11715
631-772-6469
thegracewithin@yahoo.com
$100. (includes crown and amulet bag of royal treasures)
Sunday, November 23
12-5PM
INTUITIVE TAROT READINGS
With Mama Donna
The Grace Within
195 Blue Point Avenue
Bluepoint, New York 11715
631-772-6469
thegracewithin@yahoo.com
$100. |
Have Crown, Will Travel!
To discuss booking Queen Mama Donna for a reading, presentation, workshop, or a keynote address in your area, call her at 718-857-1343 or e-mail her at TheQueenOfMySelf@aol.com
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The Queen's Emporium
Make sure to visit The Queen's Emporium, which specializes in all manner of elegant, practical, and frivolous goods to fulfill all the royal needs and fantasies of The Queen of Your Self. Therein you will find a choice collection of goods to augment and accessorize your royal prerogative.
Anoint, Adorn, Enjoy!
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Imagine Your Ad Here!
Welcome to our new advertiser,
Turquoise Specialist For Jewelry Designers. Thank you for your support and your desire to network with our fabulous royal readers around the globe. May you be successful in your endeavors and blessed with spiritual and material abundance.
Would you like to offer information about your business to the 4000+ Queens in our royal network across the country and around the world?
Advertising listings in The Queen's Chronicles are available for $50/per issue with significant discounts for ongoing listings.
For more information and to place your order contact: thequeenofmyself@aol.com or call 718-857-1343.
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Royal Resources
for Queenly Women
Our extended circle of Queens includes some mightily talented women. Please support them by availing yourself of their superior services and by buying their excellent products.
Maguire Pubic RelationsExpertise in journalism and marketing qualifies us to position and deliver the news of our clients
Licensed Acupuncturist and Chinese Herbalist.Focusing on women's health and other chronic issues
Psychic reader, medium,
pet communicator
Simple Recipes for Hibachi
Herbal Magic & Sacred Space
SpiritLiving E-Magazine
Offering Everyday, Practical Eco-Spirituality to Connect the Hearts, Minds and Spirits of People Across the Globe
The Dreaming Goddess
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Hail Queens!
September always feels like New Year to me. It carries so much more significance than does January 1. The first crisp hint of a chill in the air always shakes me out of my summer lethargy, wakes me, makes me more alert. It focuses and concentrates my attention. I can smell the possibilities of a fresh start in the air.
Reinvigorated by the sunny days and laze of summer, life now begins again in earnest in schools, government agencies, cultural institutions and businesses across the country. There is an unmistakable aura of enthusiasm and energy in the air, a palpable sense of intensified determination. This annually renewed resolve seems so much more natural than the resolutions we make at the turn of the calendar year.
Fall jumpstarts everything, including itself. Labor Day has become the popular indicator of autumn, rather than the equinox, which occurs three weeks later. In the same way, Memorial Day, which predates the solstice by three weeks ushers in the civic summer season. By this reckoning, school starts in the fall, even though it is still summer.
Most of us have been indelibly imprinted with the excitement and optimism of the first day of school. There is nothing quite so inspiring as buying blank notebooks, pencils you have to sharpen yourself and some brand new white shirts. So clean, so fresh, so hopeful.
The Jewish New Year falls in the fall. My memories of the High Holy Days that I celebrated as a child with my family have little to do with organized religion. Rather, I remember a domestic sense of auspicious new beginnings: major house cleaning, usually a new outfit to wear to temple and, best, we ate off of the good china with the real silverware.
I think of my birthday as being in the fall, but it is actually four days before the equinox. Our birthday is our own personal New Year. It is an annual reunion that we have with ourselves, and attendance is required. Our birthday is our periodic opportunity to take serious personal stock. "How am I doing?" as Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, would always ask. Like any new beginning, our birthday is an ideal time to sharpen our priorities, realign our perspective and rededicate ourselves to living the very best life that we can.
Every September I take time out of time to evaluate my past experiences and actions and to prepare myself mentally, physically and spiritually for the coming year. I usually retreat to some extent and fast to some degree during the two-week period surrounding my birthday. The new and full Harvest Moon, and the autumn equinox usually coincide.
This experience is intended to center me and slow me down. It is my birthday gift to myself. During my fast/retreat I devote myself completely to cleansing and centering myself: body, mind and spirit in readiness for the future. I rinse my system with fresh water and teas, I clean my house and altars and I use yoga, meditation and t'ai chi to flush my mind clear of the mental detritus that I have accumulated.
Since the early 1980's, I have kept a birthday book. Therein, I ritually record an accounting of the past year. I process my impressions and my life lessons. How have I grown? What have I learned? And what is it that I just can't seem to get through my thick skull? I plot my progress. I ponder my possibilities. I pour over my problems.
I plan my goals. I read my year's astrological forecast. I do a tarot reading for myself. And then I am ready - ansy, even - to begin again. Ready. Set Go!
With blessings of best intentions and beautiful new beinningsnew beginnings,
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Embracing Your Majesty
Since I started my Midlife Midwife™ practice, I have received many requests for detailed instructions on how to become a Queen. "Dear Mama Donna," women would write, "I want to be a Queen, too. How do I access my power? How can I feel good about myself? How do I change my life? How do I find magic and spiritual wisdom? How do I know what to do? How do I learn how to rule?"
The reality is that I cannot possibly know how anyone else will attain her Queendom, I only know how I came into mine, and that is largely through hindsight. The truth, my truth, at least, is that there is no one truth. We must each find our own way in this world.
As a shaman, I teach through example, but not through dictum. I can and do offer information, exposure, personal experience, encouragement, inspiration, suggestions and support to my constituents, but I cannot - dare not - pass judgment or establish rules and laws. It is simply not for me to say.
When my students and clients come to me for help and spiritual guidance, I listen to their concerns and embrace their needs. I pat them on the back, give them a good, swift kick in the butt, or let them cry on my shoulder, as needed. I can tell them what I did in such and such situation, how I did it, what I learned from this or that lesson, but I cannot tell them what they should do. How do I know what their souls need? Only they know what they know.
I can and do, of course, aid them in reaching into the well of their own deepest wisdom, and help them to hear the messages from their best inner Selves. A woman who has attended several of my workshops recently hugged me and told me that I had changed her life. "Well, no, of course, I didn't, honey," I assured her. "You changed your own life." The fact of the matter remains that I could not give her what was not already hers.
Taking Charge
Each one of us has a story, a myth, a legend to write, to paint - and to live. The shamanic assumption from which I operate is that every person has her own mission in this lifetime: her own path, her own dreams, her own symbols and sensibilities, her own visions and designs, her own way of learning, her own personalized hard-won lessons.
We each have our own singular life to live. Every one of us must figure out for ourselves the fullest, richest, most effective, ethical, and satisfying way in which to do it; and moreover, that each and every one of us possesses the wisdom, the power, and the response-ability to make it so.
You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
-Erica Jong
The story of our lives is ours to create. We can design our own roles and ideals, compose the scripts, and author the sagas of our own futures and that of the environment around us. While we cannot necessarily control the circumstances and influences that present themselves to us in the course of living, we can choose how we will respond to them when they do arise. Our power of choice is our sole control in the world.
With each new paragraph, each turn of the page, each new dawn, each new season, each moment in time, each blink of the eye, each beat of the heart, we are gifted with another opportunity to exercise our right to choose. Coffee or tea? Lemon or milk? Right or left? Stairs or elevator? Vacuum? Vote? Cheat? Trust? Care? Dare? Change? What paths we take, what decisions we make influence how the story will proceed and who we will be from this day forth. As George Eliot reminds us, "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."
The difficult times that we encounter in our lives might tempt us to dull our senses and opt out of any upsetting experiences, choosing not to let things "get to us." We often try to ignore the hard parts - pain, fear, guilt, grief, confusion, anger, and disappointment - dilute their impact, drown them out in an endless list of pleasurable addictions: soporifics, anesthetics, mood enhancers, caffeine, food, hormones. We can even turn ourselves off altogether.
We don't have to engage in the emotional upheaval. Nobody is making us. We could choose to drink cabernet and watch Public Television, play cards, play bingo, play it safe, every night for the rest of our lives if we wanted to. It is an option. It is ultimately up to us whether we succumb to the unexamined life or try to figure out what the hell is going on inside us and around us, and engage in it, alter, change, and grow with it, so that we might fulfill our greatest destiny and dreams.
You need only to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have
been and done, which may take some time, you are
fierce with reality.
-Florida Scott-Maxwell |
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Queen Alice
'Well, this is grand!' said Alice. 'I never expected I should be a Queen so soon -- and I'll tell you what it is, your majesty,' she went on in a severe tone (she was always rather fond of scolding herself), 'it'll never do for you to be lolling about on the grass like that! Queens have to be dignified, you know!'
So she got up and walked about -- rather stiffly just at first, as she was afraid that the crown might come off: but she comforted herself with the thought that there was nobody to see her, 'and if I really am a Queen,' she said as she sat down again, 'I shall be able to manage it quite well in time.'
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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The Queens' Court
The Queen's Court is a gathering of sovereign women of a certain age - our dear peers - who graciously offer guidance, inspiration and encouragement to each other.
We Queens know what we know. And we know a great deal. Our experience has made us wise. So, feel free to consult with our cyber counsel when you are need of sage advice or wish to explore a particular topic of interest.
Who knows what can come out of these sister alliances we are building?
-QMD
Dear Mama Donna,
I have filed for divorce. I have one more paper to sign and send to my lawyer before she draws up the necessary papers to serve my soon to be ex. It's been pretty rough because we live in the same house. He doesn't want a divorce. He wants a separation agreement so that he can retire and be carried on my insurance policy. I want a divorce. I want to be emotionally free of him.
I'm feeling good about it. Actually, once I began the process, I've been a lot happier. I am getting ready to sign and send my lawyer the final papers. It is the beginning of the waning moon. It is also our 35th anniversary, although the last 15 years shouldn't count. I'm a bit anxious. He's going to fight me for everything. I want to buy him out of our house, but I don't think he will let me. It's spite, because I want the divorce. Anyway, it will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. This is a "Goddess of My Own Self" experience.
-Marley, PA
Dear Marley,
Last year, a woman I met in Indiana told me with great excitement and pride that she had just gotten divorced. The reason, she told me, was that she realized that when widows weep into their husband's graves they are really crying for the life they never had. That epiphany propelled her to create a life for her Self that pleased and fulfilled her. Brava! for staking the claim of your future and standing up for your Self in the Court of Queenly Justice. Long may you reign.
Best regal blessings,
-xxQMD
Please send your response to Marley and share your experience and advice to: thequeenofmyself@aol.com.
Your letters will be printed in the next Queen's Chronicles. |
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The Queen's Correspondence
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to The Queen's Chronicles. Please keep your comments coming. And do feel free to make suggestions about content you would like to see. Or anything else, for that matter. It is a joy to connect with you.
Letters In Response To The August 2008 Issue
Another gorgeous edition. You blessed me.
-Susan, MA
I loved the article about peace pilgrim. She was incredible.
-Naomi, NJ
Thanks, Queen. So fab. I have loved Peace Pilgrim and I thank you for renewing that love.
-Linda, NY
Just a note to let you know how much I enjoyed your newsletter! I've been a devotee of Peace Pilgrim's for a very long time. She was such an amazing model for us all! Much love to you,
-Jade, CO
Thanks so much for the description of the Queening Ceremony. And for the stirring story of Peace Pilgrim. Reminded me of that Grandma for Peace person who was still around a few years ago.
-Terese, NY
Please send your responses to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.
Your letters will be printed in the next Queen's Chronicles.
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Where the Queens Are
ENGLAND
My dearest Sister/Teacher,
Hearing
you address the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury exploded inside me
with such joy and inspiration, expanding my vision and experience
one-hundredfold. Possibly more, but who's counting? Just let me say it
now and I will say it forevermore, how immensely grateful I am for our
meeting and the transformation in my life since that time.
Reworking
the triple face of the goddess into the fourfold face is something I
would never thought of doing, even though I had been living the life in
my own little World for some time. I am traveling my little private
road to Queendom.
The menopause is such a liminal time for
women. There are so many women out there who need the inspiration and
guidance of the Queen in their lives.
I have a dear friend,
Lyn who had an operation, which unexpectedly killed her ovaries. She
was deeply shocked at her sudden infertility and during one our
conversations, asked me if I would Crone her into her new life. I said
I would not, as I was not a crone. But I would certainly be willing to
crown her into her own sovereignty, and that is what we did.
At
the ancient oak trees, Gog and Magog, Lyn's power place in the sacred
land of Glastonbury, she crossed the Bridge over the Blood River and I
welcomed her, with much ceremony and not a little magic into the world
of the Queens.
She really loved the ceremony. She feels powerful and independent. And also very grateful. And so do I!
-Jennifer Cooper, England
Please send your Queenly news!
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Kudos to the Queens!
Fay Hutchcroft, England; Susan Plum, Mexico; Lorraine O'Grady, NY; Jane Runyeon, PA; and Linda Vallejo, CA; on the exhibitions of their artwork.
Laurie Sue Brockway and Victor Fuhrman, NY, Pet Prayers and Blessings: Celebrations and Ceremonies to Share With The Animals You Love; Claire Elizabeth Terry, England, The Art of Living; on their new publications.
Wickham Boyle, NY; Margaret Flanagan, NY; and Karen Malpede, NY; on their theatrical successes.
Patricia McLaughlin, ND, on establishing the Women's Wisdom Center.
Dr. Jane Petro, NY, on her move and new home.
Vijali Hamilton, UT, on the release of her new DVDs, The World Wheel Journeys, and Of Earth and Fire, and CD Sacred Chants (with Edie Hartshorne, CA).
Send
your good news, achievements, accomplishments, successes and
celebrations so that our international circle of sovereign sisters can
send you blessings and accolades.
And we are glad to so. It is
a joy and a privilege to share in the fortune of another woman. I
recently heard Oprah say the saddest thing ever - "The hardest thing
about being successful is having someone to be glad for you."
It
takes a centered and confident Queen to break that pattern. There are
60 million thrones out there. One for each of us. There is plenty of
purpose, passion and power for us all. May we use it well! |
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Circle of Concern
Please
Offer Your Purest Thoughts, Your Heart-Felt Prayers, Your Great Good
Feelings, And Your Very Best Blessings For Healing and Peace of Mind to:
Amy,
NY; Amy, TX; Berenice, NY; Carol. NY, Daile, NY; Deni, NY; Dominique,
NM; Donna, NY; Edie, PA; Gail, OH; Geraldine, CA; Ilene, NY; Irma, FL;
Jo, AZ; Joan, ME; Kimi, NJ; Letitia, VA; Linda, NJ; Linda, NY; Lynne,
NY; Maureen. NY; Marjorie, NY, Naomi, NJ; Randi, NY; Roberta, NY;
Sherli, NY; Susan, MA; and Terry, CA.
May Their Spirits Rest in Peace:
Maude Mayo
Nikki Verruso
Please
send your requests for physical and spiritual healing and positive
energy so that the powerful women of The Queen's Court might send their
prayers and blessings to you in your time of need.
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
-George Eliot |
It is my hope that as more and more women rise to reign in the fullest potential of our supremacy, we will harness our purpose, passion, and power and direct it toward creating a more balanced and peaceful world. This is the legacy of Her majesty.
-QMD
Turn Your Midlife Crisis
into Your Crowning Achievement!
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