In 1983, Sharron Rose left her life in the United States, with only her young son beside her, to study sacred dance in India. What she learned there, so at odds with what she had been taught up until that time, changed her life.

The Path of the Priestess is partly biographical, the story of how Rose came to the path she chose, and partly instructional, with discussion of the place of women in the world and in divinity and exercises to free the divine feminine in all women.

The book is divided into two sections. In Part I, Rose discusses her path, her time in India, where she studied temple dance and learned how to embody the various divinities of Hindu culture, and what happened when she returned to the U.S. She talks about the next phase of her training, when she was a student of the Tibetan teacher Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, and learned the Tibetan ways of clarifying one's mind. She goes on to discuss her studies of ancient Egyptian dance and culture, and then her trainings in various healing arts. It is a fascinating biographical study, and includes some lovely photographs of Rose dancing.

Part II of the book is devoted to the place of femininity in Western and Eastern cultures and how the West has suffered by displacing the feminine energies of the goddess. It is a section sure to provoke deep thought in any reader. This section also includes meditations and exercises to help the reader experience the various aspects of the divine feminine.

The Path of the Priestess is a fascinating and thoughtful book, interesting both as biography and as an argument on why we need to return the divine feminine to our modern lives.

- Rambles
written by Laurie Thayer
published 17 January 2004