Woman Stands Shining

The Community Learning Network is a collaborative of passionate, caring community members who want to support a better future for our world. The Community Learning Network is a grassroots 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization born out of this communal intention and global need. We are a web of real-people in real-places who work together to provide transformational real-life learning opportunities that inspire responsible, respectful, relational living and that nurture your most beauty-full, brilliant, joyful, and balanced self. We are committed to your well-being and the well-being of our community, our families, and our future generations.

Pat McCabe, known as Woman Stands Shining, is a Dine' (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader and international speaker. She is a voice for global peace, and her paintings are created as tools for individual, earth, and global healing. She has appeared in two documentary films: SEEDing Change and Journeying to Turtle Island and has presented at numerous conferences, events, and indigenous gatherings around the world including Bali, Belgium, Chile, Ecuador, England, India, Italy, Mexico City, Peru, Scotland, Sri Lanka, and in the U.S., as well as the national BIoneers Conference and the International Healing Conference in Bali. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, and hopes all peoples of the earth "can learn from Indigenous experience and re-member themselves and their own birth-right relationship with this Mother Earth." She draws upon the deep Indigenous sciences of thriving life to reframe inquiries about sustainability and balance, and she is devoted to supporting the next generations, the “Women’s Nation” and the “Men’s Nation” in being functional members of the “Hoop of Life" and upholding the honor of being human.

Pat believes what the elders have been speaking to: “what we are suffering from at this time on the planet is a crisis of relationship.” She points to the “Ways of Knowing” in indigenous culture as the key to sustainability and restoration of the Planet. McCabe also teaches the role of the feminine in Indigenous practices of spiritually and in relationship to community.

Pat believes that how Indigenous Peoples understand and heal their disrupted ways of living will have everything to do with the solutions the Global Community is seeking. As she participates in these conversations at Global Indigenous gatherings she hopes to be a part of bridging within Indigenous community: youth and elders, western trained and traditional tribal members, tribal identity and global citizenship.

She believes her work can help to bring about global healing, fostering a commitment on all parts to create a Global community which reveres planetary well-being and the re-membering of joyous and harmonious existence for all life on Mother Earth.

"The Science of Right Relations and Sustainability” explores:

• How indigenous peoples around the world have managed to live in one place for more than 1,000 years
• The crisis of relationship to place in modern, transient cultures
• How Ways of Knowing embraced by older cultures parallels the diversity that modern science says is key to healthy, thriving system

Tucked in the north-central region of the state of New Mexico, known as the Land of Enchantment, Taos is a small town in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains named after the nearby Native American village of Taos Pueblo, meaning "place of red willows." The adobe village of Taos Pueblo, inhabited for over a thousand years, is still a living community and was proclaimed by the United Nations as a world-heritage site.

"There is a timeless and eternal sense of peace and stillness here...something palatable yet invisible...

an indescribable yet irrisistible relief for the world-weary" JCC

As on of our recent visitors noted " Taos os a place where the land is constantly churcning, burning, pulsing under your feet. Those who join the dance...who find fluidity in the movement of being...who know how to be still while being pulled...who find excitement instead of fear in the flux of its rhythm...these brave raw seeking soul flourish and thrive in its transformatory splendor" Sharna Langlais