Our culture often encourages us to be half-hearted. We are instructed to make money the guide for every decision. We call this the "bottom line." When we follow that instruction, we often find that our heart has been robbed of power. 

The heart is the doorway that Spirit uses to enter the world through us. That doorway needs power to fully open. A heart robbed of power is too small for Spirit to work fully through us, and it doesn't have the ooomph to open the door to Spirit. This is the recipe for how to live in half-heartedness – going through the motions, doing what's "right" or "reasonable" but lacking awe, gratitude, love and wonder.
 
I believe something insane: these times of tumult are the door to the human heart opening wider, so Spirit can come into the world in a new way. The forces that benefit from the closed heart - from people living in listlessness, fear and drained of power - are fighting hard to re-close the heart of humanity. But it's not going to work. (It's clearly insane for me to believe this.) (So: Wahoo.)

We are half-hearted for all kinds of reasons. Maybe we are trying to disprove our unworthiness. Maybe we are competing with something that may not matter that much? Or we are living someone else's vision? Or we are covered over by fear that we don't see. Bring attention, and bring the power of intention to that place in you. "This thing that I have been devoted to for this long - do I truly want to be devoted to this?"
 
The Buddhist teacher Tara Brach approaches this topic in podcast entitled Wholeheartedness. To the question “What allows us to be awake?” she repeats the answer of a famous Buddhist teacher: “Attention and intention.” 
 
The first step in healing half-heartedness in our lives, our jobs, our relationships, in our yearnings for our life, is to simply pay attention to where we are half-hearted, where we approach life with hesitation and lack of vigor. (In shamanic terms this is called tracking our power loss.)
 
We must begin by telling the truth to ourselves. When we don't begin with truth, Spirit will eventually bring the truth to us through disaster (the shamanic term: dismemberment). Truth telling is the single most important starting place for change of consciousness. (So it's no wonder that the forces of anti-heart begin with dismembering the very idea of truth.)
 
After truth telling (attention) comes intention. Brach says: “the antidote to depression is devotion.” That is a great phrase! It is devotion to your spiritual life that realigns and transforms your half-hearted energies, making you more able to negotiate the sorrows, frustrations and joys of this life. Humans are "meaning-making" creatures," and meaning only comes to us through the spiritual – the only thing that help give us transcendental direction, something which we need as much as vitamin C. 
 
And of course it completely matters what you are devoted to. Religious nut-jobs, conspiracy crackpots and greedy muthrfkrs are bursting with what they call devotion. But it only takes a little looking to see the flaw: their devotion is not to the transcendent, it is self-devotion, and it is entirely infused with fear – of death, of intimacy, of beauty.
 
What is devotion from a shamanic perspective? It has everything to do with escaping the presumptions of consumer culture: that things matter more than feelings, that things can cure our inner malaise, that things raise our value as beings, that God cares about our possessions. These presumptions - as old as the human ego - are the insidious mass psychosis of self-devotion, the killer of beauty and annihilator of transcendence, the poisoner of communality, the belittler of compassion, the "'second-rate religion that has programmed a society of ‘cheerful robots.'"
 
So, if you want to work into this, begin by asking "Do I want to live in half-heartedness?" Ask it to yourself several times, outloud. Be honest. If your answer is no, read on.

Ask yourself, "Where am I half hearted?" Bring your attention to the place(s) you feel halfhearted. You may run through a list: My work? My Relationships? My artistic life? My spiritual practice? 

Or you can ask your body, "Where am I half hearted?" Move your awareness throughout your body as you ask that question. Pay attention to sensation or emotions that arise. Locate the place in your body where you are half-hearted. Half-heartedness spreads into the belly and into the head too, into the muscles and blood and breath, and neurons. This is initiative work, so don't worry, don't judge, just be open and follow what comes up. When you locate a place in the body that seems to be responding to the question of half-heartedness, stay there, and sink in. Ask that spot to teach you about your half-heartedness. Open your dreaming eyes and let that place in the body speak to you through through images.
 
After some truth telling and information gathering about where you are half-hearted, then apply intention. Ask yourself what would make you wholehearted in this place. It's a mysterious practice to locate a place in your body, a place that is in pain or tightness, or lacking energy, and ask, "What do you want from me – what form of wholeheartedness can heal you?"
 
Another way of approaching it is asking yourself, "What do I want to be devoted to?" You can ask what kind of devotion you want for your work, from (and for) your relationships, etc. You may find yourself exploring The Nine Needs. Pick the top three and make them your project to fulfill.

These questions and practices may sound simple, but they may turn out to bring you a lot of confusion and angst as you try to tell the truth and bring wholeheartedness in as a healing force.
 
We fear that our devotion may fail – that we won't be able to do it. Or if it we succeed, our devotion will wreck our life. Being comfortable with wholeheartedness is like becoming comfortable with death. Both are a complete commitment to change.
 
If you want to work on wholeheartedness from a shamanic perspective, you can do the same two steps: tell the truth about your half-heartedness, then ask yourself what you really want to be devoted to. Then, you can call out a prayer to the Spirit(s) to come and fill you with vision, with courage, and with strength to act.
 
Alternatively, you can ask the spirits to come and “work” your half-heart. That “working” may mean something different from one person to the next. Being “worked” by the spirits is different from meditating on the question, and for me, it’s very helpful.
 
I wish for you a Holiday season and a 2019 of wholeheartedness.
 
I leave you with this poem from David Whyte:
 
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.
To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.
Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.
Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
 
~David Whyte, River Flow: New and Selected Poems

In many northern hemisphere traditions Halloween is the time to honor the spirits of unseen nature, the powers of destiny, wonder and mystery that surround us and permeate us, and to honor the ancestors,

People ask me how to honor ancestors. Many of us don't know much about our ancestors, and some of us despise our ancestors. How do you honor people you despise or don't know?

One of the keys is that we are not necessarily honoring the behavior of our ancestors. We are honoring that every life that has ever passed across the skin of this Great Mother Earth has been a hard life, full of turmoil, dilemma, joy, grief, wrong choices and bravery.  (This is actually one of the reason we come here to be in the body - we learn lessons faster and more deeply in the body than anywhere else.)

There is that old truism that forgiveness is not about the other person - it's about freeing yourself from a spell that keeps you small, locked in pain, locked in martyrdom. Forgiveness is not at all about forgetting, or pretending or denying reality. Forgiveness is about releasing a curse placed on you by trauma, or in shamanic healing terns, it's about releasing the energy pattern embedded in you. In Spanish this is called susto – the energetic remnants of trauma, embedded din our energy body. Releasing that curse, freeing yourself from that energy, clearing that susto, allows you to make a new world - one that operates very differently from the unhealed one. Forgiveness doesn't change the past; it changes the future. 

I believe that many of us (meaning peachy-moon-colored people of European ancestry) have come here in this life in part to do the healing on our ancestors that has been needed for centuries. If you are searching for a purpose in life, this is a great one. We do this healing on the ancestors in two ways.

One way is through ceremony, like this one. We ceremonially give healing to our unhealthy ancestors - we heal the way the life force had gotten twisted in them, and in this twisting, had blinded them to love, and made them deaf to beauty, and had made them into such hungry creatures that all they could think about was gathering more food to them  - in the form of actual food, but also in the perverted form of all addictions, including the addiction to status that comes from wealth. (I urge you not to do this kind of ancestral healing on your own if you are new to shamanic work, but work with someone who understands the ancestral world. If you do feel compelled to do this on your own, please ask your helping spirits to make you invisible to the unhealthy ancestors.) 

The other way we continue the healing of unhealthy ancestors is to live differently than they did. Change the inner reality from which their lives and actions sprung. This involves doing the very difficult personal work of undoing the patterns in myself that have been handed down, or sung into me. It involves opening my comfortable ignorance.

​There is a tremendous amount of this going on right now! A great deal of discomfort is pouring out of many of us. I believe this is because Spirit is cleansing us. Now that seems like a nice thing to say, but I want to make clear that I'm talking about a scouring, not a warm washing. The scouring is coming to all of us, there is no escaping it. The main questions as I see it, is do I try to run from it, and delay it, or do I jump in and be the first wave to get through it?  I believe those drawn to shamanic practice are part of the early wave to open the new future, a very different future form our current one. Shamanic practice builds the spiritual foundation upon which this new world will stand.

So when we "honor" our ancestors, we are honoring the fact that our ancestors carried the Life Force their entire life and they passed it on to us so that we may carry it, so that we may protect and defend and work with it. Whether we love them or despise them, we stand on their shoulders. For those ancestors who we admire, we ask that they send strength and wisdom up through our bones so that we may work with the life force with as much courage and beauty as they did. 

For those ancestors whose behaviors disappoint, horrify or wound us, we do the hardest and most wonderful act: we send them beauty, medicine and food through ceremony in order to heal what was unhealed in them during their life - and in that unhealed state they perpetrated things that were wrong. We use some of the strength we get from the healthy ancestors, and send it downward to clear susto in unhealthy ancestors, so they no longer need to reach up through our bones, and into our lives, and grasp at our life force to feed themselves. And we commit ourselves to doing a better job wielding the life force than they did.

It is a tenet of shamanic practice that life exists on a circle, and to heal any part of the circle brings healing to other parts of the circle. Here is a secret: When we heal our ancestors we are healing ourselves and our descendants. We cease the repeated generational distribution of spiritual poisons. Here is the other secret: unhealed, we repeat the perpetrations of our ancestors. Healed, we awaken and create waves of different actions in this world. 

The shamans remind us that we have our human ancestors, but we also have our non-human and pre-human ancestors: the fertile earth, the fruitful sea, the rocks, the winds, the stardust, the tides, the lightning, the creatures great and small - all of these are our ancestors and we will honor them and feed them the food of beauty in our ceremony. This is work you absolutely can and should do on your own. Stand outside and say hello to every living thing you lay eyes, ears or skin on. Make prayers of gratitude and send them love and strength for the coming winter. Thank them for the gifts they bring to the web of life. This kind of prayer, done regularly, can change your life. 

I'm wishing you a bountiful and beautiful autumn. 

Because I'm a theology geek, I think a lot about the term teleology: the study of the purpose of everything. What is the purpose of the universe? Where is the universe going? I'm in the universe, so wherever it’s going, I'm going too.

In Celtic shamanic tradition there are three core questions you ask a traveler on the road: Where are you from? Where are you going? What's the purpose of your journey? And there's a fourth question: Who are your people?
​
There's a link between those two paragraphs, and it comes in the form of Albert Einstein's famous quote: “The most important question you can ever ask is if the world is a friendly place.” This is a teleological question, and working a spiritual path begins with wrangling with that "most important" question, and answering it honestly for yourself.

​Einstein's extended quote is valuable here:

Your spiritual maturity (or, if you prefer: soul age) factors deeply into how you answer Einstein's question. Younger souls, or less mature theologies are rooted in the first answer. They tend toward hierarchical spiritual structures that tell people what to believe.

Atheists, agnostics and scientific materialists are grounded in the second answer. They value their own personal inquiry and answers, and they are grounded in one part of the human experience: reason. Mystics and shamans occupy the third answer. They marry reason and poetry, logic and dream, emotion with analysis, tradition with direct personal experience.

I suppose each group believes their answer to the question makes the most sense, and they may think the other groups are naïve, immature or downright stupid.

I do know this: how you answer the question creates the kinds of prayers you make (and I declare that everyone, in each of the three categories of answers prays, even if they don't call it prayer!). How you pray determines the decisions you arrive at, and your decisions are the soil from which all of your actions spring, and your actions create your reality. In the third answer (the universe as a friendly place) our prayers are a co-creation with the universe, and this is the most effective way to pray. 

So, your life depends on how you answer that question!
​
If you want to move out of a victim mentality because you've had enough of what it can show you about life, if you want to move out of pessimism and cynicism, then give a try to standing in the friendly universe and answering those four Celtic questions from that place. This is big work, long work, deep work, and it may not be easy for you, so have some patience with yourself. It also can be lonely work, so  seek out a teacher and community who can help you. (This answers the fourth question: who are your people?) 

Here are two ideas to chew on: maybe the purpose of your life is not about your career or your children or your travels or your "goodness." Maybe your purpose is to become a healthy ancestor - to do your spiritual work now because we have had scores of generations of unhealthy ancestors, and we need healthy ancestors to help us, and all of your spiritual work now, in this life, is preparing you to serve the descendents from the spirit world (or yourself when you come back). 

Or this: maybe your purpose is simply to raise your spiritual maturity level in this life. Maybe you were born into that less mature religious tradition in order for you to grow your way out of it in this life. Stepping from level 5 to level 6 in this life is a great purpose, an achievement!

Well, those are just ideas to chew on. 

Be honest with yourself and with the world. Be patient. Be committed. Go into the fear. Don't be afraid to claim your power when you feel it. Flowers will come. 

Upcoming workshops

Next Drum Circle

Shamanic Healing with Jaime

Sandra Ingerman has a way of making shamanic practice simple, straightforward and accessible. Her new book offers you concise, straightforward guidance on the fundamental elements of making ceremony. Below is an excerpt of THE BOOK OF CEREMONY: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life. 
​

There's far too much ridiculous stuff in our daily life. We're constantly lied to and manipulated, and everything is about money. This stream of bulls*** acts as a corrosive on our most important spiritual energy: trust. We cannot advance on our spiritual path – indeed, we cannot move forward on anything meaningful - without first summoning trust, and our trust is under constant assault.
 

DH Lawrence wrote:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
 
That word, "repentance" carries a great power. I read it not in the old Christian sense to feel guilty, but in a broader way: to become open. Guilt, shame – the vibrational patterns of the wounds to the soul – these energies close us off and make us small, hard, brittle. The difficult repentance means to gain clarity on what has made me small and brittle (difficult!), and to apply cleansing to that place by asking the Breath of the Holy to fill me with the original fragrance of the flowering earth (As Martìn Prechtel might say). This repentance is accompanied by new behaviors, of course.
 
Lame Deer wrote:

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere - a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up.
 
So it's good that we are now in the direction West on the Medicine Wheel, because the west is a powerful ally in a world of corrosive bullshit. Actually, I believe the human species is in the west – our species is in an initiatory cleansing. The thing about initiation is that it can come with a formalized structure, which helps it be safer and a little easier, or it can come without safe, sacred containment, which means the same initiation unfolds as disaster. Our species as a whole seems to have chosen the latter, but each of us individually can choose to step into a sacred container to help facilitate the initiation. This is what shamanic healing and shamanic training is for in our modern times. 
 
Our human world is bursting with forces wanting to shrink our natural immensity - forces that try to convince us we are defined by our fears, lusts, insults and wounds. When we stay in those vibrations, our energy leaks out, and then we are more easily controlled. The most dangerous thing to the ruling powers is spiritually alive, energetically protected, shame-free, trust-filled human beings. This is what the West teaches us to become. This is why working with the medicine wheel is so powerful.
 
Click here for a 27 minute audio ceremony of the meditation below (use headphones).

The West is associated with the element water: that element that travels unceasingly between the three realms - under the earth, across the body earth, and into the sky, known shamanically as the underworld, the middle world and upper world, or energetically as the belly center, the heart center and the head center. Water is an image of humility, for it submits to the shape into which it flows. And yet, water wears away mountains and in this way it is an image of patient power- and trust in patient, measured action that results in tectonic change. Water is an image of faith, for onward it flows – continually falling, actually - toward an unseen sea whose song it hears within itself; flowing over and around countless obstacles, wandering, wending and winding, searching for home, drawn onward by the haunting music of the soul. (Like us!) When we feel the powers of grief, joy, awe and intimacy, they are carried by water out of our body and into the world.  Water is an image of transformation, for it shapeshifts into ice and steam, wave crest and whirlpool, droplet and tide.
 
Here's a simple meditation with the west. You can actually do this meditation at dusk outside, or you can merely visualize it. The image is this: that moment when the blue sky of day begins to fade toward indigo, and the first star appears. Dusk comes to evaporate that illusory blue veil that we love so much, and that comforts us. The blue sky fades away to reveal the truth: there is no sky, no blue shell of day. We are traveling through a sea of immensity, unspeakably beautiful and unfathomably vast. We are sailing on a sea of Mystery. Be present with his image. Breathe the powers of the West into you. With each breath ask the power of the West, the living Spirit of the West, to come into you and cleanse you. Ask it to help you trust yourself, trust Spirit, and trust in love. As the west to help you see where you have been made small by wounds to the soul, and ask it to wash those vibrations from your body. Wash them down into Mother Earth, who gladly accepts them and eats them, and transforms them into compost. All of this may bring up grieving, which is another healing power of the West.  Ask the West to evaporate the illusions that make you too small and that keep you from seeing – and participating in – the Immensity of Mystery that is our world's natural state. You have to ask for what you want from Spirit. 
 
I love the west and I hope this can help you work with this wonderful teacher and healer.
 
Blessings,
Jaime

In a few days I'll be taking a group to Scotland to wander the land, make offerings to the Mighty Ones – the mountains, caves, waterfalls and wells we will visit.  And there may a little scotch tasting involved. Below is my wordy mediation on the Celtic direction west, the Faeries and the negotiation with life. I also have uploaded an 11 minute audio called Navigating Doubt. You can listen to it here.
 
As summer wanes and autumn emerges, the Celtic shamanic tradition tells us that we are entering into the mythic west—the direction associated with dusk, the horizon where the sun vanishes, with the element water, with grieving and letting go, and with the theological ideas of destiny, faith, fate – and with the Great Mystery of what lies beyond the horizon.
 
Where goes the sun at dusk?
Where go the stars at dawn?
Where go I when the west wind blows
From the land beyond, from the land beyond?
 
Religion is often framed as the path to inner peace. Priests of all kinds make a promise that if you adopt their mythic structure, you will know peace. In this world of struggle, peace is acquired if you opt to jump in the boat with Jesus, or Kwan-Yin, or the Tao or the Rosary, or downward facing dog, or the shamans. On and on the promises go.
 
In the Celtic shamanic tradition, the Gaelic phrase An Sith (pronounced Ahn-Shee) means to be "at peace." The literal translation is "with Spirit." However, Sith has a wide variety of meanings. It is the "land of peace" that we go to when the west wind blows us from our bodies and into the otherworld. It is a land of constant feasting, music and sexual pleasure. But sith is also the people of the otherworld – the spirits and the faeries.

The popular notion of faeries is that they are funny, mischievous little Tinkerbelles who kinda like us. They give us treasures and pleasures, or powers - like the ability to make exceptional music. The author of Peter Pan says, ""When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy.  So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl." That sounds super nice.

​But in Celtic tradition the Faeries are far more feared than admired or loved. One central thing Faeries are known for is coming to steal the life force out of things. They come to steal the essence of a newborn baby, leaving only a limp shell that grows up deformed. They steal the life force from mothers who have just given birth, and they die or never recover their vitality. This is why, in tradition, a group of women would stay with the new mother and baby for three days - to ward off faery attacks. Faeries do the same to cattle and crops – take the essence, leaving the useless shell.

To be a little fair, the Faeries seem to most often choose the farmer whose field is bountiful and beauteous, but who nonetheless complains. There is - sometimes - an ethical code for the Faeries that we do very well to learn and live by: gratitude and generosity are the keys for keeping on their good side.

 So being An Sith – with the spirits - may not really be a path to peace. And this is why I get a little queasy when I see the scores of workshops on Google promising to teach you how to attract Faeries and how fun and magical it will all be. J.R.R. Tolkein may have had it right when he said, "Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary, and dungeons for the overbold." In the Celtic tradition, people spend far more effort protecting themselves from "the good people of peace" than trying to see them, and trying to attract them is seen as naive at best, or actually insane. Life with the Faeries is a struggle of balancing what the unseen can give to us with what it can take from us.
 
So, what are we to do with this?
 
In every time and every place, to be alive is to struggle. It does not matter who you are or what advantages you were born with or what has been held back or stolen from you. Every one of us struggles through this life, each in our own way. One of my favorite phrases, attributed to various wonderful people from Richer Niebuhr to Mark Twain to Aristotle (ah, internet...) goes: "Be kind to everyone you meet, because each person is carrying a heavy burden."
 
Yesterday on the driveway I looked down to see two tiny black ants dragging some kind of moss-green-winged bug across the crack in the sidewalk. The winged thing wriggled frantically. The unflustered ants bore it over what, to them, were huge boulders, down into that deep cavern and up again, over the mammoth dried leaf, the winged thing writhing the entire way. Maybe the ants were asking “why must we struggle so merely to attain a meal for our family?” And the winged thing: “Was I born merely to struggle and become food for these moronic goons?”  And into the west, beyond the horizon, they dragged him.
 
I was in the Boundary Waters once and, at dawn, saw an eagle splash into the mirror-smooth water a few feet away and extract a wriggling fish. I swear the eagle had a glorious smile of satisfaction on its face and the fish's face was filled with shocked dismay. In that gentle dawn light, the droplets of water flew up like diamonds around them both. Pleasure and horror were equally decorated in jewels. Off to the west they flew.
 
Every religion tries to answer the question of why we struggle, and then tries to provide a framework to soothe the suffering we all carry. All religions are full of stories of humans struggling with the unseen and the Holy, for all sorts of reasons, and with all sorts of outcomes. But I believe there is a common thread through the stories of humans struggling with the divine:  the struggle refines and matures the relationship between the humans and the Holy, between the seen and the unseen. And perhaps it is only through struggle that the relationship between humans and Holy can evolve. Perhaps the Holy recognizes this about us, and therefore regularly delivers new struggle to us.
 
In the Celtic tradition, the heart center is a cooking pot into which both joy and sorrow must be poured. Both ingredients are necessary, both must be fully cooked, together, for us to make the mature decisions for ourselves. And when the two ingredients are cooked, the pot itself transforms into the cauldron of wisdom. Only cooking both sorrow and joy can open wisdom in us.
 
I believe the entire human race is at a point of transformation in our relationship with the Holy. There was a time when we did not bury our dead, and then we did. There was a time when many began to believe the Holy is Male. This was a major evolution of the relationship between us and the Kosmos.  That time has passed, though it lingers on like a scab.  I believe you and I are alive at a major evolution of human consciousness.  We are going to learn – or re-learn in new ways – to live in right negotiation with the earth and its creatures. We can only do this through the cooking of both sorrow and joy in our hear cauldron.  According to some of my teachers, this coking will be complete within the next 50 years and new world will open before us. I like believing that.
 
The human mind and spirit is on fire right now, cooking the ingredients. Seeing this, believing this,  helps me move through the day, as I wonder why everything feels so screwy, why it feels like I'm being dragged into the chasm by ants.
 
My main prayer these days, each morning, is "make me ready to participate fully in this evolution." In other words, teach me to cook.
 
I'll be gone for most of September, but in October I am excited to head into working with the ancestors, and then onto working with Reindeer for the winter solstice. If any of that interests you, click here.Classes, Retreats, workshops and events
 
Here is a link to an 11-minute audio called "navigating doubt." It has some ideas and a healing song at the end that I hope can be of help.

If you ever wonder why theology is important, just look at the sickening use of bible quotes to defend immoral acts. An immoral theology underlies our entire culture.

Let me be clear: Christianity is not immoral. The theology underlying our culture – the one proclaimed by well-coiffed white people benefitting from their inborn privilege, the one infesting far too many of our lawmakers – is not Christian. That's just a name they give to an immoral theology to make it sound acceptable, like calling SPAM "spiced pre-cooked ham spread," or calling jails for five-year-old Spanish speaking children "tender age shelters." The actual guiding theology of American culture springs from people with a spiritual maturity level of second graders.

Too many of our law makers, judges, religious leaders, business leaders and cultural influencers are following the God of second graders. We have two ways to deal with this fact.

One is to confront them all the time while they are in power, force truth on them, compel compassion to be made into laws, and to replace them with people who carry a more mature theology. That's a long, difficult process and it is outward facing. One of my teachers says that people with young souls – souls still in basic training, and therefore more under the sway of lower human impulses – make up a large percentage of the population, and a huge percentage of people who are drawn to power in business and government. It's just the nature of things on this planet, the nature of how human consciousness is evolving. It’s frustrating for older souls – people who have been in bodies of both genders many more times, and learned more karmic lessons - to have to deal with younger souls who always want to make the rules.

The other way is inner-facing: to work deeply with your own inner theology, to continue to mature it. It's easy for people to take a look at the theological bullshit spouted by many of our leaders, and the theological cowardice in church leaders and so-called devout worshippers, and say "to hell with all religion." It's also easy for people to dive into new age neo-shamanic woo-woo as a way of pretending they aren’t part of the larger problem, and that they are more mature than others. But the God of second graders is present in all of us, in all theologies. It is incumbent on each of us to work to mature our inner theology – and it can only happen with discipline and courage. If you don't do the work, you abdicate the world to the God of second graders.

Therapy can be fantastic and very helpful. 90% of the clients I see have had a great deal of therapy, and very frequently they say the same thing: it's helpful, but there's something that it didn't get at, there's still something "there" or "not there." 

It's not therapy's job to mature your inner theology. That's the job of your spiritual practice. There is a line where therapy can't cross because then it becomes spirituality, and spirituality is not of the mind, it is not of science; it is soul work, and energetic work, it is work in the land that has no labels. You cannot mature your inner theology through the mind. The mind uses the door; the soul climbs in though through the window. Spiritual work uses the tool of the sacred imagination. (This is also why shamanic healing can get at certain things that therapy can't, and it's why if you judge shamanic work through the lens of the mind, it cannot make sense, meaning it cannot be placed safely in a category of the mind, which really means Spirit cannot be controlled by us, which terrifies the bejeebers out of the mind.)

Be aware that you came into this life riding on many generations of people who have been told to give up their spiritual authority to the "ordained." You've been told, often by the ordained, to mistrust your sacred imagination and  your own direct connection with Spirit. When you mistrust yourself, cut yourself a little slack - you have generations of naysaying embedded in you. 

(By the way, we think "ordained" means to be made spiritually mature or special, to be spiritualized in some authentic way, to be made different from other people, but it actually means to "be put in order" - to stand in the proper line. We come from a long line of people told to be quiet and line up behind the official teller of the "one true" cosmic story who has agreed to stand in the right line. Well, this is a whole other article that I can't get into here.) 

​The number one phrase I hear from students and clients is "Am I making this up? (Meaning my experiences with Spirit – lovingly ephemeral or starkly dramatic, gentle or frightening – are they imaginary, and therefore not trustworthy, not a guide for living?)

"Am I making this up?" is the wrong question. Of course you are. Every inner theology, or spiritual world-view is born in the imagination, and then moves out into the world. In fact, everything in our life is born first in our imagination. You become a lawyer in your imagination many years before you graduate from law school. You become a wife, a poet, a criminal, in the imagination well before you enact this dream in life. Every act you do, every plan you make, starts first in the womb of the imagination. The new world begins inside, and if it doesn't begin there, it won't come into being.

The right question is "Of the many realties I can make up right now and bring into being, which is the best? For me, for those around me, and for those that come after me?"

I can imagine a world made of fear and constantly changing enemies, a world heading toward the shit-hole, and I can bring that into being and enact that. I can imagine a world in which everything hurts me, everything has been taken from me, in which I'm a constant victim, and I can enact that dream. Are those the dreams I want to bring into being?
If you've read this far, you are likely someone trying to enact the dream of "I am part of an opening of consciousness in my species, I am waking from a long dream that came from a younger consciousness in my species – a consciousness still very present in many of my sisters and brothers - and now I am ready to be a carrier of the new dream," which is a way of saying "I'm ready to be an early enactor of that new dream."

Throughout history, it's never been easy to be the early enactor of anything! You get blowback internally and externally. You are told you'll be tossed out of the tribe, which is a way of saying you'll be alone, slow, weak and tasty and therefore eaten by animals. At some point you say: "Okay. So be it."

I like to replace the word "dream" with "song." This springs from the beautiful work I've been blessed to do with the Shipibo people of the upper Amazon in Peru. For them, song is the way of calling the new dream into reality in this world, and they are masters at ritual singing. The world is always struggling to call in the new song, which replaces the old song that keeps repeating the old dream. It takes a lot of energy to call in the new song. But the new song carries in its melody and its intention, the new instructions for the new world.

So a great deal of your core spiritual work is to keep calling in energy – asking Spirit to call in the new song to your mythic center, to refine and mature your inner theology. Shamanic practice is very helpful with that – in fact, it's what shamanic practice is all about.

Here is a practice you can use at this time of the high, bright summer. Right now the sun is strong and bright and hot. It is singing very loudly right now – singing the sweetness into the fruit, singing the fullness into the crops and the green into the land, and singing sparkling fire into the edges of the wave crests. This is a great time to ask the Singer of the New Song to sing the new song of maturity and wisdom down into your head – the new song that will help you become more mature spiritually, and that will support you in your quest for healing old wounds; and ask for the new song for our species to be sung into you – the song we need to step up and out of the worn out, destructive inner theology that guides too many of us now.
​
This is a simple practice: You can do this as a meditation or visualization, or shamanic journey. consciously ask the Great Spirit, or Mother Earth, or your Spirit Guides, or God, or Jesus or Guadeloupe, or the Mountain Spirit, or the Plant Spirits, to sing the New Song down into you – through the top of your head. You can do this quickly as a ten-second prayer, or as a long meditation with visualization. And you can do it repeatedly, and not only in the summer. This is a very simple practice but it can be powerful and rewarding. You can also say back to Spirit: "I am ready to sing the new song of my species. I am ready to be a carrier of the new song. Please help me hear it, learn it and sing it."

Let the new song flow into you. Listen. Listen some more. Start Singing. ​

Check out my summer classes and shamanic experinces here, here and here.

Greetings Dear Students of Beauty,
 
May Day (Beltane) is upon us. It's typically celebrated on May 1st, but this an imposition of the western mind, which loves calendars that are disconnected from nature. Celestially, Beltane is the time in the earth's orbit when it passes the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. In 2018, the Astrological date of Beltane falls on Saturday, May 5th. I'm not an astrologer, but here is a link to one.

The Celtic world sometimes divides the year in half (sometimes in quarters, sometimes in 8). Right now, we are crossing from the dark half to the light half (in the northern hemisphere). The word Beltane originates from the Celtic God "Bel", ("the bright one") and the Gaelic word "teine" ("fire"). Beltane celebrates the crossing from winter to summer, from the dark half of the year to the light half, the un-fertile, waiting, receptive half to the fertile, pulsing, ebullient, fecund half of the year.

By unite, we are talking about the village, one another - let's all celebrate together. We are all humans, so of course  we carry wounds and old arguments in us, but right now, this very large thing is going on in nature - we are passing into the fertile season, the time of abundance and joy.

​And by unite, we are talking about the marriage of sky and earth, sacred masculine and sacred feminine, for in this uniting, all life moves forward into its next shape. This is why Beltane is often celebrated with lovemaking. 

A simple practice (beyond taking your lover "hand in hand") is to do a little wooing of the earth. Go someplace you love, or imagine it, and just woo it. Woo the living daylights out of it. Tell it how beautiful it is, how you love it so much, how you love the curve of its mounds, and radiance of light on its skin, the sound of its laughter. Pour love into that spot on the earth. You might also do this to distressed land (or water). Pour love into it, in order to heal it, for love heals. If this kind of shamanic work interests you, check out Shamanism WIthout Borders. 
 
The western mind (and the Church) likes to have things set on certain days – days constructed by humans and their calendars. But Beltane is a several weeks-long energetic field of "increase." In the British Isles, spring has fully sprung by Beltane, and so it's easy to go out and cut down the newly green sycamore twigs to decorate the village. But a glance out the window in Minnesota reveals that, while "celestial" Beltane is arriving, the Beltane of the landscape is still only just emerging. So, we can celebrate both. Astrologically, you can use these days around  Saturday, May 5th to make prayers for your increase, your abundance. In a certain way, you are uniting your prayers to the great energy swelling up all around. It's like tossing a flower onto a wave – the wave rises up and carries the flower along on its power. Let the rising energy of the earth carry your prayer for your own increase. 

The first task in making a prayer for your own abundance is to decide what you mean by abundance. It's fine to pray for money, but much of the of time when we are praying for money, underneath we are actually praying for something else: love, safety, calm, recognition, freedom, personal power, confidence, connection with others or connection with Spirit - on and on. We have been trained by our culture to believe that money is the solution to any problem, even though the evidence is overwhelming that this is not true. In fact, when we pray for money without actually discovering what it is that we truly want, we end up creating more suffering for ourselves – even if we get the money! (There are shamanic reasons for this that I can't delve into in this writing.)

So try your best to first figure out what the actual abundance is that you are seeking. The trick is to focus on a feeling, not on outward results. Money isn’t a feeling. What feeling is it that you want to feel, that you are not currently feeling? Just pray for the feeling, and never mind the money, and then watch for the ways it can be delivered. 

I am not saying money is bad. I've prayed hard for money many times, so that I don't have to freak the hell out once again at the end of the month. But I've experienced amazing magic when I delve into the scarcity under the scarcity. Here is a sample prayer:
 
Power of the fertile earth, power of the singing sun, power of new life, power of new beginnings, Spirit of Life, you fill everything with abundance. I bless you and I thank you for your help. I ask you to bring to me the abundance that I've been seeking my whole life, and maybe seeking for many lifetimes. (Name this abundance if you can: love, confidence, freedom, etc…) Bring it to me now, in this lifetime. Show me what life is like with this abundance that I've been seeking. Bring it to me now. Let me carry this abundance in me and use it wisely. Deliver it to me. Deliver it to me. I make this promise to you: I will do my part to open my mind, open my heart and open my body and receive the abundance you deliver. I open myself now. I open myself now.
 
Those words are just suggestions...don't memorize-- speak from the heart. If you want to visualize, you can see the new summer sun pouring down blessing onto you and into you, or the "power of emerging life" pouring energy up into you.
 
So, at this Beltane, I wish for you the power to:

Unite and unite, and let us all unite
For summer is a-comin' today.
And whither we are going we all will unite
In the merry morning of May.