Meet Lisa Cheney-Philp

We were lucky to catch up with Lisa Cheney-Philp recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

There is a time in my earlier life that I call my “Desperately Seeking Dharma” phase. It came about 15 years after my mom’s death from breast cancer when she was 45 and I was 15, not coincidentally when I was crossing my 30 year old threshold which tipped me closer to my mother’s age when she died than my age when she died. I was fairly settled into an academic and professional life that was not centered around this pivotal childhood experience, and it slowly but surely shifted my trajectory toward a different future that brought it front and center.

At this time I had not actively turned toward her death and my grief in a way that had brought me relief and meaning. I had, for the most part, stayed calm and carried on, in line and in fashion with my generally stoic German ancestry. Externally, I was doing well, internally I was dammed up and diverted from my most generative and free-flowing path.

I started to get curious about what my mother’s experience was, and found ways to act out my curiosity. I said yes to a Yoga for Survivors training, for example, and learned more about what her year and a half journey from diagnosis, through surgery, and to death might have been like. This experience led to into a rich and ongoing relationship with yoga, as a teacher and a practitioner, that continues today.

When I felt outwardly successful but inwardly dried out with my professional path as a health planner, I said yes to a twelve-day vision quest experience with Animas Valley Institute with the hopes of having a soul encounter, and returned with the knowing that I was “the one who wears the crown of becoming, and the one rewrites history and changes the ending.”

Soon after that I left my career path without knowing what was next and turned toward, and said yes, to the daunting task of bringing new life into my family, which at the time meant talking to my partner about trying to have a child, the more difficult path for us to accept. Accepting this path was the crux, I had presumed, so we were blindsided when we had a miscarriage six weeks into my first pregnancy. I was confronted with the reality of my story. There was death on both sides of me and I was still standing. What is the meaning of this? I demanded to know.

It was during this time that I met a new friend and companion, the first woman I had met so far that was living a version of my story. Her mother was dying from cancer, and I was trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to restore life after my mother’s death. We peered at each other from opposite sides of the Life/Death/Life threshold. We inspired each other forward and wove our stories together so exquisitely, I imagined when I became pregnant again that my daughter would be born the same day as her mother died.

I found a good therapist that helped me navigate pregnancy and early motherhood in the context of miscarriage and motherloss, helping me hold the realities and fears of losses amidst the more culturally-approved and valued new beginnings.

I picked up a small sculpture of a closed-eye elder woman singing with a river pouring out of her heart and held in my hands all that I was longing for and couldn’t articulate, all that had never been taught to me, the ways and wisdom of water and the feminine spirit. I courted her until she began to share her secrets with me.

When my friend’s mom did pass, not long after my daughter was born, she called together a circle of women and shared the details of what it was to actively tend to her mom through her end of days. Listening to her, I realized I wanted to be able, if presented with another opportunity, to show up differently than I had for my mom and family when I was 15. I wanted to be able to do things and say things that I had been frozen to previously, and knew that I didn’t have the skills to match my desire.

This led me to a death doula training program with the Conscious Dying Institute where I sought personal development alongside an opportunity to process the new grief I was experiencing as a new mother mothering without my own mother. In this program I learned three important lessons: 1) that it wasn’t that my mother died, but how she died – in a contracted, death-denying culture – that had caused me so much harm, 2) that my story wasn’t unique, there are countless others suffering in the same ways that I had suffered, and 3) that I now was ready and willing to help change our endings.

When I finished that program, I began slowly shifting my work away from all I had studied and planned for in my earlier years, and turned toward the work I do now as an artist, healer, and river guide that seeks to bring awareness to the importance and practice of well-tending endings.

I have also, in the process, grown my spiritual and artistic capacities tremendously, by learning how to communicate and collaborate with the spirit world through intuitive arts and shamanism. Artist, writer, and shamanic practitioner, Katherine Skaggs, has been a tremendous teacher and supporter in my growth, as well as the writings and teachings I have received through books and in-person learning with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

It is difficult trying to build a life and a livelihood carrying a vision that is so much more than a professional identity, and at times I get discouraged and doubt or second guess my choices. However, I am getting more practiced in trusting my story and the rich wellspring of meaning it provides me to stay rooted in its deeper currents. So much so, that I’ve recently resolved to accept a homecoming from that “Desperately Seeking Dharma” phase from many years ago now, and fully step into a “Done Doubting Dharma” stage, where I commit with increasing conviction, to stay the course.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Women of the Water is first and foremost a vision that I steward and a way of being that I practice. It is also the name of the business I founded in order to share the gifts and knowledge I’ve received and to continue practicing alongside others in community.

The vision of Women of the Water is “from source to sea, well women flowing freely”. This means that from the beginning to the end of each lifecycle, women’s wildness, willingness, and wholeness are intact and the flow of their lifeforce is free from dams, diversions, pollution, and misuse.

The mission of Women of the Water is to be a source of relief for women by repairing harm and building community. Together, we well-tend lifecycles, especially endings, with creativity, intuition, and nature as our guides.

What is exciting about this vision and mission is that they bring attention to and restore the integrity of the parts of lifecycles that are most commonly overlooked and undervalued in our culture, the second halves (which includes things like decline, dying, death, exhales, waning and new moons, Fall and Winter, evenings and night times, water and earth, integration, and rest, older adulthood and elderhood). They also celebrate and cultivate right-brain functioning which includes intuition, imagination, emotional intelligence, creativity, big picture/contextual thinking, and visual and artistic expression.

The services I’m most interested in supporting clients with right now are:

1) Shamanic Journeying and Shamanic Healing – these services connect clients with the wisdom, insight, and imagery of the unseen spirit worlds so they can receive loving, light-filled and ease-full support, guidance, and healing in their darkest moments

2) Custom Artwork – these and hand-crafted drawings, tools, talismans, and totems that I create to translate the imagery and messages from the spirit world into physical form which support the ongoing integration and application of healing and wisdom received.

3) Individual & Small Group Deep Dives into Fairy Tales, Myths, and Archetypal Stories using conversation and expressive arts activities to process universal and deeply personal themes, characters, and storylines.

In addition to these services, I also offer individual and small group grief work that includes therapeutic processing, coaching and creative facilitation and death doula services that include end-of-life planning and holistic, hands-on support to and through end of life for those dying and their caregivers and loved ones. From late spring through early fall you can also find me co-leading private canoeing, paddleboarding, and rafting trips with women on the Colorado and Green Rivers.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1) Curiosity – a mentor of mine once told me that our brains can’t hold fear and curiosity at the same time, that when we feel afraid, if we can ask a question, we can flip the switch from fear to curiosity, even if that question is: What am I afraid of? or, Fear, what are you trying to tell me? Without curiosity, there would have been no inquiries, no questions to live by or live into, no magnetic pull into the mysteries of the unknown territories internal and external

2) Intuition & Creativity – these two go hand in hand for me and are the greatest gifts I’ve received from studying the ways and wisdom of water. Intuition, as I learned most astutely from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, through Women Who Run With the Wolves and the Vasalisa the Beautiful story in particular, is a gift often handed down from mother to daughter, through the female lines of our ancestry. However, I received no such gift, at least not overtly or tangibly. I felt deep grief upon this discovery, that this gift had been forgotten at best, or intentionally ignored at worst, and also great determination to relearn, reclaim, and therefore restore it by whatever lengths necessary so that I could pass down this precious and necessary expression of intelligence and wisdom to my daughter. I think of intuition now as inner knowing, and creativity, as the ways we express our inner knowing in the world. The ways we act on what we know. The ways we live our intuition into being, the ways we offer our intelligence and wisdom to ourselves and our communities.

2) Experiential Learning – the opportunities I had to learn in real time with my whole body, have been the most profound and impactful over time. As a self-proclaimed “high-achieving student” I was very good at memorizing correct answers and learning theories in books. What was less comfortable and skillful for me for most of life was learning from the world itself, and applying what I had learned in scripted settings in a messy and complex world that doesn’t hold up to scientific rigor most of the time. Learning from, with, and in nature, and learning to listen and move with my body and heart rather than just with my head have helped me become a more embodied, well-rounded, and holistic being.

Cultivating curiosity begins by asking questions. Each year for the last several one of my new year’s resolutions has been to ask better questions. I’m always on the lookout for great questions. I collect them from books, coaches, spiritual thinkers, the unanswerable the better.

Cultivating intuition begins with self-trust. Ask yourself, what do I know right now? forgetting about needing to know how you know and setting aside all the things that you don’t know right now. Let yourself off the hook of needing proof. If this is too difficult, start with the mantra, “I have nothing to prove.”

Cultivating creativity begins with willingness to be a humble beginner and to fail. One of the hardest parts about creating for me is the possibility and overwhelming likelihood that what I am able to manifest will be merely a tiny fraction of what I can envision, that the manifestation will be a disgrace and a disappointment to the idea. Accepting that possibility and acting anyway with the belief that an expression of love for the idea itself is enough, however poorly executed, is the key.

And for experiential learning, my advice is to start small, with low risk opportunities. Ask yourself, am I willing to try this? Willingness comes from the switch being on curiosity rather than fear. If you want your switch to be on curiosity, but it’s on fear, pivot and find another opportunity that meets you where you’re at, where your curiosity is clearly and cleaning compelling you to say yes.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

Over the last year and a half I have been doing ancestral healing work with a friend and co-conspirator, Kari Grossman of Ancestral Streams. With Kari’s guidance and support, I have been able to call upon my intuition and creativity to be a source and steward of healing for all four lines of my ancestors. Now, rather than being weighed down energetically by the burden of ancestral deficit, I feel relief from those burdens, confidence in my ability to offer meaningful help in this new direction, and the empowerment and comfort that comes with having a well team of ancestors with gifts and resources in abundance at my back to serve humanity with and through me.

In this process, I’ve put my hands to several art projects inspired by and asked for by my ancestors. To make these creative offerings has been deeply inspiring, surprising, and nourishing to me. Next month, I will have a sort of capstone experience as I journey with my husband and daughter (and my ancestors in the spirit world) to many of the places and lands in Germany that my ancestors call home.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.womenofthewater.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenofthewaterllc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-cheney-philp/

Image Credits

All photographs except two are credited to me, Lisa Cheney-Philp.
The photo of women singing is credited to Joel Cheney-Philp.
The photo of women crossing a river is credited to Emily Graham.