Diane Morrison-Healing Works Salon

01/01/2026

Freedom exists to choose and create.
Despite the ‘perceived’ limitations. ❤️

They were not nuns. And they were not wives.

They formed communities where women could work, live together, and practice religion without making lifelong promises. This happened in medieval Europe, where women had few choices, but not none.

For many women at that time, society expected only two paths. Marriage or the convent.

Marriage placed women under a husband’s control. Their lives focused on the home and children. Convent life required strict vows, obedience, and separation from the outside world. It also often required a large dowry.

But some women chose another way.

They were called Beguines.

The Beguines appeared in the late 1100s and early 1200s, especially in the Low Countries and parts of France and Germany. They did not marry, but they did not become nuns. They lived together, followed a spiritual life, and supported themselves, while remaining ordinary laywomen.

Many Beguines lived in places called beguinages. These were groups of small houses built around shared courtyards. They often included a chapel and common spaces. They felt more like neighborhoods than convents, even though they followed certain rules and sometimes answered to church or city leaders.

A Beguine did not take lifelong vows. She was free to leave. She could marry, return to her family, or choose a different path. Her commitment was voluntary and could change over time.

In many places, Beguines could control their own money and property, especially if they were unmarried women or widows. Laws differed from region to region, but they usually had more economic freedom than married women, whose rights were often limited.

Beguines earned their living through skilled work. They wove cloth, made lace, nursed the sick, taught children, brewed goods, and cared for others. They prayed together and practiced charity, but most also worked to support themselves.

This mix of faith, work, and independence was unusual.

Many Beguines focused on helping the sick, teaching the young, and caring for the poor. Some became important writers and mystics who shaped religious thought.

Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote about her visions in The Flowing Light of the Godhead.

Hadewijch of Brabant wrote poetry and letters about divine love.

Marguerite Porete wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls. She was executed for heresy in 1310, even though her book continued to spread anonymously for centuries.

These women claimed direct experiences of God. Some of their ideas made church leaders uneasy, especially because religious teaching was mostly controlled by men.

The Church's reaction was mixed. Most Beguines followed accepted Christian beliefs, and many communities were allowed to exist openly. Some even had local church support. But their loose structure and independence caused concern.

In the 1200s and 1300s, church councils investigated certain groups. Some were restricted or condemned, especially when individuals were accused of unorthodox ideas. Still, many Beguine communities survived and continued to grow.

At their height in the 1200s, thousands of women lived as Beguines across Europe. Large beguinages existed in cities like Ghent, Leuven, Cologne, Strasbourg, and Paris. These communities welcomed widows, women who could not afford convent dowries, and women drawn to religious life without lifelong vows.

They created spaces where women supported each other. Their work sustained them. Their spiritual lives did not always follow official rules.

Many beguinages lasted for hundreds of years. Several in Belgium are now UNESCO World Heritage sites. The Beguine way of life continued in different forms into the modern age.

The Beguines did not try to destroy society or religion. Instead, they quietly built another option within it. They showed that even in restrictive systems, women could find room to live differently.

Through shared work, faith, and practical organization, they created choices that formal institutions did not clearly offer.

In a world that pushed women toward marriage or the convent, the Beguines showed a third path. A life based on community, work, and devotion. And for many centuries, that path endured alongside the systems that once seemed to define women’s futures

12/29/2025

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
🙏🏼💛🙏🏼

The Vatican has returned sacred artifacts that had been held for more than 100 years to their indigenous communities.

The items were originally removed during periods of colonization, when cultural and spiritual objects were often taken without consent.

Their return involved formal ceremonies acknowledging both cultural significance and historical harm.

Indigenous leaders emphasized that the artifacts are not museum pieces, but living symbols of identity and tradition.

The importance of this moment extends beyond restitution alone. As institutions worldwide reassess their roles in cultural displacement, acts of return represent steps toward reconciliation, historical accountability, and respect for spiritual sovereignty—signals that long-held power structures may finally be shifting toward repair rather than possession.

12/27/2025

We all have direct access to SourCe within. Seek. And you shall find. ❤️

In the year 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was led to a stake in the heart of Paris, surrounded by a crowd of thousands. She had been condemned as a heretic—the first person the Paris Inquisition would burn for refusing to recant.
Her crime was writing a book.
Marguerite Porete was born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. She was highly educated, likely from an aristocratic family, and she joined the Beguines—a movement of women who devoted themselves to spiritual life without taking formal vows or submitting to male religious authority.
The Beguines lived by their own rules. They worked among the poor, prayed in their own communities, and sought God on their own terms. This freedom made Church authorities nervous. Women living outside male control, speaking about God without clerical permission, threatened the very foundations of institutional power.
Marguerite took this freedom further than most.
Sometime in the 1290s, she wrote a mystical text called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It was a conversation between allegorical figures—Love, Reason, and the Soul—describing seven stages of spiritual transformation. At its heart was a radical idea: that a soul could become so completely united with divine love that it no longer needed the Church's rituals, rules, or intermediaries. In the highest states of union, the soul surrendered its will entirely to God—and in that surrender, found perfect freedom.
"Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love."
She did not write her book in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French—the language ordinary people spoke. This meant her dangerous ideas could spread beyond monastery walls, beyond the control of priests and bishops.
And spread they did.
Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes, forcing Marguerite to watch her words turn to ash. He commanded her never to circulate her ideas again.
She refused.
Marguerite believed her book had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. She had consulted three respected theologians before publishing it, including the esteemed Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines, and they had approved. She would not let one bishop's condemnation silence what she believed to be divine truth.
She continued sharing her book. She continued teaching. She continued insisting that the soul's relationship with God belonged to no earthly institution.
In 1308, she was arrested and handed over to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris—the same man who served as confessor to King Philip IV, the monarch who was simultaneously destroying the Knights Templar. It was a busy time for burning heretics.
Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that entire time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with her trial. She would not answer questions. She maintained absolute silence—an act of defiance that infuriated the authorities.
A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They extracted fifteen propositions they deemed heretical. Among the most dangerous: the idea that an annihilated soul, fully united with God, could give nature what it desires without sin—because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.
To the Church, this suggested moral chaos. To Marguerite, it described the ultimate freedom of perfect surrender.
She was given every chance to recant. Others in similar positions saved their lives by confessing error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, who had declared himself her defender, eventually broke under pressure and confessed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Marguerite held firm.
On May 31, 1310, William of Paris formally declared her a relapsed heretic—meaning she had returned to condemned beliefs after being warned—and turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the public square where executions took place.
The Inquisitor denounced her as a "pseudo-mulier"—a fake woman—as if her gender itself had been a lie, as if no real woman could defy the Church so completely.
They burned her alive.
But something unexpected happened in that crowd of thousands. According to the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis—a monk who had no sympathy for her ideas—the crowd was moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her death.
She displayed, the chronicle noted, many signs of penitence "both noble and pious." Her serenity unnerved those who expected a screaming heretic. Instead, they witnessed a woman who seemed to have already transcended the fire that consumed her body.
The Church ordered every copy of The Mirror of Simple Souls destroyed. They wanted her words erased from history along with her life.
They failed.
Her book survived. Copies circulated secretly, passed from hand to hand across Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English. For centuries, it was read anonymously—no one knew who had written it. The text was too powerful to disappear, even without a name attached.
It was not until 1946—more than six hundred years after her death—that a scholar named Romana Guarnieri, researching manuscripts in the Vatican Library, finally connected The Mirror of Simple Souls to its author. The woman the Church had tried to erase was finally given back her name.
Today, Marguerite Porete is recognized as one of the most important mystics of the medieval period. Scholars compare her ideas to those of Meister Eckhart, one of the most celebrated theologians of the era—and some believe Eckhart may have been influenced by her work. The book that was burned as heresy is now studied in universities as a masterpiece of spiritual literature.
Her ideas about love transcending institutional control, about the soul finding God directly without intermediaries, about surrender leading to freedom—these are not the ravings of a dangerous heretic. They are the insights of a woman centuries ahead of her time.
The Church that killed her eventually softened its stance on mystical experience. The Council of Vienne in 1312 condemned eight errors from her book, but the broader current of Christian mysticism she represented would continue flowing through figures like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, and countless others who sought direct encounter with the divine.
What the flames could not destroy was the truth she had grasped: that love, in its purest form, is greater than fear. That no institution can ultimately control the relationship between a soul and its source. That words born from genuine spiritual insight have a way of surviving every attempt to silence them.
Marguerite Porete spent her final years in silence—refusing to speak to those who demanded she deny her truth. But her book has been speaking for seven centuries.
It is still speaking now.

12/24/2025

Joyful is the task at hand.
Joyful is the self healing work.
Joyful is the path of awareness.
We can do this. With love.
And maybe a box of tissues, and chocolate! 😅🤗❤️🍫

12/20/2025

Joy is a frequency, ha-hee! 😂❤️🤗😻

12/19/2025

Hangin’ with kinfolk today… 😂💜👽🌟
It takes a Galactic village to raise humanity’s frequency! Let’s elevate, my friends! 🔥❤️‍🔥🚀☀️

12/03/2025

Think about it… 🎯

Imagine standing at a party while someone enthusiastically explains a groundbreaking book you absolutely must read. You try to speak. He continues. Your friend finally interrupts: "That's her book. She wrote it." He barely pauses.
This happened to Rebecca Solnit in 2008. But she didn't just walk away—she wrote an essay that transformed how millions understand their experiences.
"Men Explain Things to Me" wasn't about one arrogant man. It revealed a pattern women had lived with their entire lives but couldn't name: the assumption that male authority comes with automatic expertise, even when demonstrably wrong.
The essay went viral instantly. Women everywhere felt seen for the first time. Within years, "mansplaining" entered the dictionary—though Solnit never coined that exact word. She simply described reality, and the world recognized it immediately.
But Solnit's insight went deeper than awkward social moments. She revealed something profound: "Men invented standards they could meet and called them universal."
Think about it. History was written by men, so male experiences became "history" while women's experiences became a subcategory called "women's history." Literature was defined by male authors, so male perspectives became "literature" while women's writing became "women's literature."
The "universal human experience" was actually just the male experience, rebranded as neutral.
What happens when we question this? Everything we thought was objective suddenly reveals its bias. Every "universal" rule shows its specific origins.
Solnit also exposed another truth: silence doesn't mean peace. It often means someone's voice has been successfully suppressed.
In "The Mother of All Questions," she examines the enforcement mechanisms disguised as innocent curiosity: Why don't you have children? Why don't you smile more? Why are you so angry?
She writes: "The question isn't why are women angry, it's why aren't we angrier?"
What looks like social harmony is often just successful silencing. Breaking that silence isn't creating conflict—it's revealing conflict that was always there.
Solnit's genius lies in connecting the smallest interactions to the largest structures of power. Being interrupted in a meeting isn't separate from violence against women—they're part of the same system that treats women's voices, bodies, and autonomy as less important than men's comfort.
In her memoir "Recollections of My Nonexistence," she describes walking through San Francisco as a young woman, constantly aware of threats—catcalls, stalking, the feeling of being hunted. Being silenced in intellectual spaces. Dismissed by colleagues. These weren't just personal experiences. They were evidence that women navigate the world fundamentally differently.
Yet despite documenting inequality, Solnit isn't nihilistic. She's a chronicler of defiant hope.
In "Hope in the Dark," she writes: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency."
She documents feminist victories—laws changed, attitudes shifted, voices amplified—to prove resistance works. That naming injustice leads to dismantling it.
Her message: The system isn't natural. It was built. And what was built can be rebuilt differently.
Rebecca Solnit gave us language for experiences we couldn't articulate. Every time someone identifies mansplaining, they're using tools she helped create. Every time someone questions whether a "universal" standard is truly universal, they're applying her framework.
Her work proves that feminism doesn't require rage to be effective. Sometimes the most powerful critique is delivered calmly, with precision, making injustice so obvious it can't be denied.
She points at the invisible—the assumptions we accept, the silences we mistake for peace, the "universal" rules that only apply to some people—and makes us look.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
And once you can't unsee it, you can start to change it.
Her gift is language. Her mission is liberation. Her legacy is that women finally have words for what they always knew.

11/30/2025

Pop-up RELAXATION STATION! 🪷
Holiday De-Stress. 12/21/2025.
1-3 pm.
Private Home. Montague, MA.
Come and chill the nervous system.
Experience deep relaxation and QHHT®️
Group Regression.
RSVP:
healingworkssalon@gmail.com
In person only. $44 per person.
This will be a small intimate group.
Space is limited.
Clear consciousness required.
Hope to see you there! 😇🥰💛
Bring your favorite blankie. 😴✨😁

11/24/2025

Simple reminders.
Life’s principles…💛

11/22/2025

I agree. The power is in the simple things. Great power. Is in you and in me. We the people. Are very powerful. It’s that simple. It just is. ❤️