Leslene Della Madre

Leslene della-Madre is an author, poet, artist, shamanic practitioner, Nature lover, and truth seeker. She is a feminist philosopher and independent scholar. A cousin of Einstein, she has challenged mainstream beliefs in patriarchal religions, physics, and cosmology which has been the focus of her latest book, She Who Spins the Coils of Creation: Sacred Female Cosmology in the Electric PlasMA Universe. She was born and raised in the Bay Area in California. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1969 and embarked on a deeply spiritual path during the historic "flower child" era. During that time, she began her shamanic initiation into the realms of mind, body, and spirit and received many teachings and medicines from people, plants, and encounters with the spirit world. After traveling she returned to California where she made the decision to move to The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, which became the largest intentional spiritual community in the United States in the 1970s where she lived for nearly eleven years. There, she gave birth to two daughters who have now become a moving force for women’s voices in music. Leslene also fostered numerous children. She apprenticed in spiritual midwifery on The Farm and later applied those teachings to her death midwifery practice, authoring a book on her philosophy and experiences, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother.

After leaving The Farm, Leslene returned to northern California to care for her parents and settled in Sebastopol, California where she established a shamanic healing center. Her focus has been on healing the Sacred Female. She has touched many people throughout the years and continues to be a beacon for holding sacred space for counsel, ritual, teaching, speaking, and writing. Her shamanic practice lead her to partner with two female practitioners as co-editors of a textbook on trauma, Trauma-Informed Care, with an emphasis on military sexual assault. She is a midwife of the spirit, life, and death, and has served as a spiritual adjunct to the medical community of doctors and psychiatrists in the capacities of both colleague, and healer, and to the psychological community of therapists in the same manner. She currently continues her work, balancing life with activism, joyful living, exploring Nature, gardening, and continued spiritual growth. 

Leslene has taught workshops on death and dying in the U.S., Europe, England, Holland, The Netherlands, Mexico and Australia and is a contributor to numerous magazines, journals and anthologies.