I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you my beautiful zaadz friends, for your support, encouragement, comments, and e-mails. Despite the laxity in my posting, your support truly inspires me in my work.
The paucity of posts is largely due to readying for my trip to India for which I leave on January 8. Once in India, I will post as I am able, but there may be long breaks in between. My primary blog is at http://barbararaisbeck.blogspot.com/.

This will be my fifth journey to India, and the second one in which I am going to work on the project of femicide. When I first embarked on this project, my ultimate goal was to gather survivor stories. Sadly, they are few and far between. While meeting with the director of a women’s shelter in Delhi last year, she informed me that those women who had escaped death were wanting to move on with their lives, not dwell on the past. I was unable to speak with any of them, though she was wiling to give me over 1000 case files of women who had been killed in dowry disputes. 



My goal continues to be collecting stories from women who have triumphed, giving them a voice and a platform so that they may lead the way in liberation for The Daughters of India. I look forward to sharing them with you.

Blessings for a peaceful and auspicious New Year. 



In Love & Light,



Barbara ;)

I've finally, after a series of mishaps, made it to India. Possibly the setbacks were there to hone my patience and perseverance, to ready me for the trials to come.

India is a pungent teacher of patience and fortitude. Her revolutions move in mysterious convolutions that defy logic. Not unlike the winding alleyway to my hotel that confuses me in it's curving path that veers in many directions that all ultimately lead to the same place. Being lost. In order to find. India teaches that. To lose yourself - your notions, truths, ideals, beliefs. Just let them all go, at least suspend them while traipsing within her perimeter. Not judging nor expecting, but rather observing, accepting. And feeling how fluently that moves in the psyche as compared to the way biases find places in our minds and bodies to latch onto and cause turmoil.

In some ways, India is like another home. There's a familiarity of myself here. It's the rawness of life that resonates with me, in its myriad forms - beautiful, grotesque, otherworldly. The systematic stripping away of distractions and compulsions; attachments that keep us from being fully present.

India wasn't a lifelong dream for me, or a place that I felt drawn to. But one day in a hospice training, with the question posed – "What would you do with your life if you had one year to live?" – I heard myself answering, "I'd go to India". I cannot really say where that answer came from; maybe I threw it out there because it sounded so outlandish. And wouldn't we want do something completely out-of-character and crazy if we knew that we were on our way out? Our one last hurrah that would float us above the pain in the final moments.

Nine months after making that proclamation – long enough for the idea to gestate – I was in India. And totally out of my zones that shield and comfort me. Nearly the moment that I touched ground, ghosts starting coming out of my closet, one-by-one, surrounding and taunting me. Without the safety net of distractions, they made themselves visible and were not easily placated. India does that. Shows us where our suffering lies.

She shows us her suffering as well. I remember the odd looks and inquiries I received from the participants in the hospice training, wanting to know why on earth I'd choose to spend my final days immersed in a place of such great suffering. I still get that – people wanting to know, why India?

The only way I can answer is, in suffering, in our own or being a witness to it, there is an opening that occurs. That opening can consume or liberate us. Or both. Consume, then liberate. And just at the moment that we think we've been liberated, the consumption starts again. The suffering doesn't just end, even when we beg it to. But I have learned that to observe it, allow myself to feel it, hold it, accept it, I can then let go of it. Not completely since our wounds leave scars, but enough to help me out of the fire and into the awareness of the lesson, that will, when I am ready, appear and show me a way through to the other side.

Namaste from India!