facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Sylvia V. Linsteadt
Sylvia V. Linsteadt is a novelist, poet, scholar of ancient history, animal tracker, and artist.
Sylvia V. Linsteadt is a novelist, mythologist, scholar of ancient history, and a certified animal tracker. Her work over the last 12 years—both fiction and non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, feminism and bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land. She is the author of the collections The Venus Year, and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising (Usborne, 2018 and 2019), and the post-apocalyptic folktale cycle Tatterdemalion (Unbound 2017) with painter Rima Staines. Her works of nonfiction include the award-winning Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area (Heyday, Spring 2017).
course
Rewilding Mythology
For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of mythologies. Just as landscapes were stolen and terraformed so were whole pantheons uprooted from their social and ecological contexts. How can we reroot, rewild, and retell?
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When Women Were the Land
Sylvia Linsteadt explores the earth-rooted, life-revering cultural heritage of Old Europe, a heritage that predates the origin stories and epics we all learned about in school. Through myths, archaeology, creative practices, and nature connection, you'll uncover and re-story the matrilineal heritage that revered the earth and the female divine.
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Reimagining Women & Power
How can we reclaim and reimagine power to create new cultures grounded in interdependence and liberation?
audio journey
Advaya takes you outside
Spending time outside our four walls is key to connecting to and relating with nature and each other. So find your nearest window, garden, park, or forest, and allow us to provide you with tools that have the power to guide your daily life and shift your worldview. These audio practices are designed to be listened to screen-free.
audio journey
Turn Inward with Advaya
As the world moves through cycles of light and shadow, growth and stillness, so do we—explore diverse pathways to rest and renewal with experts in practices of yoga, breathwork, dreaming, and storytelling.
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Introduction to Our Lady of the Dark Country
Women of America, of Europe, women of my blood and mothers of my ancestors, women of all the lands of this Earth: the words in this book are needles. Thread them where they need to go: through your body, through your life, into the ground as roots. They have come from a true place in me, from the place where forgotten stories have been buried, and I give them to you in these pages gladly.
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Hestia's fire
Drawing from the Greek concept of εστία, this essay by Sylvia V. Linsteadt turns to the hearth as a powerful underlying symbol of chaos in all origin stories.
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Tracing ancient motherlines
The conversation between Chiara Baldini and Sylvia Listeadt explores non-patriarchal societies, the role of women as stewards of the land and water, and the need for reclaiming ancient practices for healing, reciprocity, and social justice
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Land and public space
Traditionally dominant paradigms of power have involved extractive, disconnected, inanimate relationships with the land, in part also because the land, “Mother Earth”, has been frequently gendered as feminine. Within new understandings of power, how can our relationship with land change too? What are alternative, whether new or historical and ancestral, ways of situating and embedding ourselves in land? How do we redefine our relationship to and with the ecosystems, spaces, and communities we are inhabiting?
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Webinar: When Women Were the Land
Trace pathways of myth, archaeology, nature connection back into pre-patriarchal cultures indigenous to these lands, cultures that centered the earth and the female divine.
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Webinar: Ancient Motherlines
Are famous Greek goddesses like Hera, Demeter and Aphrodite her descendents? What kinds of rituals, practices and myths were associated with her worship, and how long did they survive in Europe? Is there an alternate history of Europe that we can tell by following motherlines like these, instead of the fatherlines we are used to hearing about? And how is the wild, ecstatic god Dionysus connected to her, and to the memory of the matrilineal Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe? Together, Sylvia and Chiara will discuss their individual but overlapping research on these topics for the first time in a public online conversation. You will come away with a deeper understanding of the history of the Goddess in Europe, and of the patterns of being beyond patriarchy that still exist, just out of sight, in her lands.