Dr Joanna Kujawa is an author, scholar, and spiritual detective.
Sacred Story
My spiritual awakening did not happen suddenly and was not made up of one event. Rather, it has been an ongoing journey of awakening. I was brought up in a devotional Catholic family and was fortunate to always be exposed to beautiful images of the Divine Feminine but, spiritually, something was missing in this; I longed for a more experiential type of spiritual knowledge.
My first encounter with this kind of spirituality occurred within the tradition of esoteric Hinduism, which teaches that everything in the Universe is a spiritually imbued consciousness. I traveled from Toronto to Asia and then on to Australia to study esoteric Hinduism with different spiritual masters. Later, when I thought I had found what I was seeking, someone handed me the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and invited me to go to Jerusalem. This is where I began my journey through the Gnostic teachings on Mary Magdalene – a process which has recently culminated in my writing The Other Goddess: Mary Magdalene and the Goddesses of Eros and Secret Knowledge. My journey continues.
Dr Joanna Kujawa is an author, scholar, and spiritual detective. She received her BA and MA from the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, and her PhD from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. As an active academic for over 20 years, she uses her scholarly training to investigate topics other academics often pass over, such as: Can spirituality and sexuality be experienced as one? Who was the real Mary Magdalene? Is there a lineage of Goddesses now resurfacing in our collective experience of spirituality?
Apart from her writings for academic publications on spiritual travel, Joanna has also had her short stories and essays published through various media and in many prestigious anthologies, including Best Australian Stories, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, She Rises and Rebelle Society. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Goddess Studies. Her book, The Other Goddess: Mary Magdalene and the Goddesses of Eros and Secret Knowledge will be published in April 2022.
Follow Joanna at her YouTube channel.
FUN FACTS:
- Joanna lives in subtropical Australia with her husband and an opinionated dog called Humphrey.
- At 20, she left communist Poland for Paris, France with $10 dollars in her pocket.
- During her initiation to the tradition of esoteric Hinduism known as Kashmir Shaivism, she experienced herself outside space and time.