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?
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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!
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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. 
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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.
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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.

There is a secret I want you to know: how to move from small, bitter bitching to actually opening new life.

The secret is so simple that you may instantly reject it. I want to, all the time. And yet, when I actually apply this secret, it actually does work. 

Bitching is a form of prayer, but we don't see it as such, and that is the first part of the secret. When you find yourself doing the old whining, the same old Bitch 'N Moan, stop for a moment and realize that you are making a kind of prayer.

Bitching is a prayer about how powerless I feel. Psychology has a perspective on this, and so does theology. In classic theology, the other word for bitching is Lament, and there is a prayer structure to support it which you can find throughout sacred scriptures of every tradition. Bitching is actually the lower form of lament. Lament seeks to change reality, whereas bitching seeks to remain safely mired in martyrdom and victimization, to get some attention, but not actually change the situation. Find the biblical lament structure here. I'm indebted to the teachings of Jose Luis Stevens for helping me meld the biblical lament structure with shamanic prayer.  

The "lament" prayer structure as Shamanic prayer

Bitching is marked by its repetitive and mostly unconscious nature. We mumble about how this or that sucks, and it's something we mumble about frequently. If you want your mind blown - in an uncomfortable way - ask three friends what you bitch about frequently. "What is it you hear me complain about all the time?" Be ready to be surprised and maybe chagrined. One of the best things you can do to advance your daily consciousness is to become aware of your repetitive behaviours, especially ones that you are only barely aware of. Inside those behaviors are held the keys to opening your smallness and flooding it with large light. 

Once you open your awareness about your repetitive bitching, you can ask what your true feelings are - what powerlessness are you actually putting voice to in this complaint? That's when you are ready to make it effective prayer. 

The classic lament prayer structure goes like this:

• The complaint or lament: This and this and this was bad. (For shamanic prayer, the lament is placed in the past tense - even if your are feeling the lament powerfully right now. Read on for why.)
• The transition out of smallness and into immensity. In the biblical tradition this is called the "and yet." Bitching is our way of dancing around in our smallness and powerlessness. And yet, the world is not just inside our little heads - there are greater forces operating than me. 
• Remembering mystery, immensity and wonder. Affirming Spirit is in control.
• The petition to that greater power:  please help me/us
• Praise for the greater power. ​

The world of news, politics and advertising is all about generating psychic noise designed to pull you away from grounding yourself in your personal power. Team Trump is expert at noise, and superb at bumping us off of our center. He says something outrageous, the TV heads foam at the mouth and so do we, for days. Just when the foam starts to thin, he offers us more noise.
 
People bumped off their center buy a lot of crap they don’t need because they are depressed and cynical and filled with meaninglessness. So capitalism loves spiritually off-center citizens. Depressed, cynical people loaded with debt and meaninglessness don’t rise up against the prevailing orthodoxy, because they are too tired from all the noise – the fear, rage and envy perpetrated on them by the prevailing orthodoxy. So psychic noise is great for the prevailing orthodoxy.  
 
The noise damages us and makes us ill, psychically and often physically. Yet we can’t seem to break away from checking our device an average of 46 times per day. Why?
 
Part of the prevailing orthodoxy’s noise game is to convince us that we must stay “engaged” or we are “part of the problem”- that reality is moving quickly and we must not be left behind, that being outraged means we care, and that we are knowledgeable of the issues and therefore part of the solution. None of that is true. 
 
So it’s hard to break away. And we joke about our addiction to the device. But it's really not a joke.
 
Shamanic practice is all about forging a relationship with your own power as it is connected to the Great Un-name-able, Un-tame-able Power. If you want to connect with Spirit more deeply and if you want to help build your personal power rather than have it leak away (or stolen away), I took on a simple discipline a few months ago that has really helped me.  
 
First, I took a vow to not look at my device when I first wake up. This remarkably simple act can be utterly transformative. So, job one is so simple: give yourself space when you first wake up. Don't go to work yet in your head. Don't plan how you'll win that argument that's coming today. Don't step into the old frenzy. Give yourself space to be a human being. You've just come back from your nightly healing and teaching session with Spirit. Let it sink in.
 
Then, in that space you've created, try one of these, or do them all in a series. Do them "before your feet touch the ground,” meaning while you are lying in that dark, half-asleep state, or at least sitting on the edge of the bed.

1. Remember who you are. You are not your job. You are not your income, your possessions nor your debt. You are a human being on a spiritual path.  Say it to yourself: “I remember who I am. I am a human being. I am Spirit embodied temporarily in this form. I am made of mystery. I am nourished by beauty…" I like saying these things at least three times, and saying them out loud is best. And, of course, add any other words that are right for you.
2. Place your hand on your heart center and address Spirit: “Thank you for making me a human being, with all these capacities for love and wisdom. Help me open more to love and more to wisdom today.”
3. Thank the land you live on. Especially in the urban environment, we hardly ever bless the land. For me, the land is my 120’ x 60’ urban lot with my house on it: “I send thanks to this land which lets me live on it, which holds me, and supports me.” As you bless your spot of land, you can stretch that thanks outward, to the land around you, in larger and larger circles - the city, the Great Plains, the continent, the planet. I like to also bless the hands of the people who built my house, and the hands of the family members they were supporting with this work, and I like to bless the people who have lived on this land before me, and all the creatures who live on this land with me.
4. Visualize a line of connection between your heart and several parts of the landscape. Some should be close but others can be father off. For example, this morning I drew lines of connection between my heart and:

• the two tall Norway pines by my driveway,
• the ground in my backyard underneath my ceremonial bent-willow house that I use for prayers and healing work,
• the crows I could hear flying overhead, squawking,
• the few visible stars remaining in the dawn sky,
• The sun which will rise in 30 minutes,
• The Mississippi River which feeds us all,
• And a faraway mountain top I’ve been on.
• You can change up the connections each day, although it's really good to connect to sun each day.

 
After drawing the line of connection between you and several of these living entities, give it time to become solid. Don't rush. You can visualize the connection as silver or golden light between you and these living helpers. Then, ask them to give you some of their power. Ask them to help you be human today. You can ask them to help you be more wise and loving, and you can also ask them for specific help. For example, today I asked those living entities to help me be focused and not overwhelmed by a project I'm working on – to let me be free of voices of self-deprecation and fear, and to help me open my creativity, to help me cut down extraneous snore-inducing writing, to nourish my eloquence, and to eliminate the recent pain in my gall bladder.
 
Let that power flow into you, and let it take some time. Nature is happy to deliver power into you so that you can be more human. Nature wants us to be the best human we can be, to come into our fullness. Nature wants everything to come into its fullness.
 
You can do all of these suggested acts or select one or two. The point is, you are giving yourself time to come into your true humanness before the noise (otherwise known as "the world") takes you.

There is a next level to this also, and involves memorizing short poems. Memorizing is hard for me and I detest it, but there is a great power in having poems living inside you, because they are like slow-release vitamins and pain killers.  I often (only half-jokingly) say that the worst thing to happen to our spiritual lives was the invention of the printing press. It heralded the decline of the human memory - exponentially exacerbated by the internet. Memorizing short poems and fairy tales not only infuses you with Spirit-light, it's also good as a defense against dementia. 

There are thousands of poems for you in the world. Below, I offer you my adaptation of an ancient Irish prayer of protection called St. Patrick's Lorica (lorica means "body armor"). The St. Patrick version is a Christianized gloss of an indigenous Celtic protection charm, and I've restored it in my own way.  If the long version puts you off, I follow it with a simplified version easier to memorize and adapt in your own language.
 
By the way, I'm completing an educational packet of essays, poems, meditations, audios and prayers to be used during springtime. This blog piece is part of that packet. More information here.
 
I arise today, through
The strength of Creation
The light of the sun
The radiance of the moon
The mystery of stars
The splendor of fire
The speed of lightning
The swiftness of wind
The clarity of air
The depth of the sea
The wisdom of tides
The stability of the earth
The firmness of rock
I summon today
All of these powers between me and every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul
Against curses and incantations of the fearful, envious and angry
Against poison, against burning
Against drowning, against wounding
No arrow shall pierce me
No fire shall burn me
No water shall drown me
No rock shall crush me
Power before me and behind me
Power above and below me
Power all around me
Power within me
Power within me

(If you really want to have deep fun with this, memorize it, and then as you recite it out loud, get louder and louder and shout the final nine lines!)

Here is the simplified version:
 
I arise today wrapped in the strength of sun and moon, stars, earth, fire, wind (just keep listing Earth Beings until you run out). 
Wrap yourself around me today, wonderful powers,
So that I may walk in your power.
So that I may bring blessing to this world in my own way.

To conclude: 

The actual goal of all of the above is to extend the morning moment between sleep and waking - to extend the "in-between" time - not quite this, not quite that - where, according to Celtic tradition, is the place we meet Spirit, and therefore our own humaneness. 

So, try the first couple of things in the above list while you're in bed, waking. Then get up and pour your coffee or tea, sit in your chair, and do the “drawing connections” part there. The goal is to stay free of the device ("the world") as long as you can in the morning - to give yourself a morning discipline that sets your energies for the whole day. And the goal is to substitute the compulsion for the device with prayer work. Doing this, even minimally, will shift your life. 

That compulsion/addiction to glance at the device whenever there is any kind of lull in your attention is a learned behavior whose intention and result is to leech your energy. You are, mythically and in cyber terms "opening your fortress and inviting the Trolls in." This list of practices offers you new learned behavior which strengthens your core spiritual powers. 

You can extend all of this this work by turning to the poem work instead of some of the 46 times of glancing at the device during your day.  I put the poem I’m working on memorizing in my notes app on the I Phone. So when I get that jolt of need to glance at the phone - while in line at the grocery store, or at lunch or while pumping gas - I can call up the poem and continue the memorizing. The great thing is, to the world, I appear to be like everyone else - wrapped in the hypnotic miasma of my device. But in reality I’m acting out my rebellion to the prevailing orthodoxy by memorizing poetry. Yes, shrewdly subversive.

​Blessing to you, dear Humans.

Join me in Peru in May! There is still time to reserve a spot.