This winter has taken a toll on all of us. Beyond the obvious, I think there's a deeper reason why it's hit us so hard. The wild weather is just one more version of powerlessness pervading our daily life. There are so many things that seem out of our control nowadays. People are getting worn down by the carousel of confusion that we seem to have boarded.
​
What used to be mere annoyances and irritations have crossed over into rage, or its ugly wife, cynicism, or their malformed child, depression. Just to be clear: Rage is the lid we jam on top of our true grieving that comes to call us into our true love. Cynicism is the cold we apply to the fire of anxiety that is calling us back into our true power. And depression is a twisted form of devotion to the infinite.

Well, those are some big statements! I can't really unpack them all the way right now, or this article will suddenly veer to the left and never be seen again. But I'll say this: the paragraph above is about how our sacred power gets twisted - and so is the rest of the article below.

Look around at how much powerlessness is being expressed in every direction. The Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements are about calling those with inherited power into a conscious use of their power. Inherited power most often seduces us into unconsciousness. And when we exercise our power unconsciously, it brings great damage. 

Whenever unconscious forces, whether they are personal or collective, are called into the light of consciousness, they raise a great ruckus. I like to call the forces dragons - the forces that urge us to stay in our lowest consciousness. They wish to remain unconscious because in the dark, they can feed, without our awareness, upon our sacred power – the life force that connects us to all of creation. The result of their feeding is our sacred power is drained, we believe we are smaller and less holy than we really are, and we perpetrate that smallness on the external world through or decisions and actions.

Light kills these dragons. So, when the light begins to shine on them, they get very active in their defense of the dark. So we have the stupid backlash of All lives Matter and we have Trump, and moronic grinning goons with torches in Charlottesville, and we have the cable TV parade of every conceivable form of people competing for the biggest victim prize, and we have the breakdown of truth, because the dragons are masters of confusion. How to transform your dragons.

The literal translation of "the apocalypse" is "the uncovering." So, yes, we are in living in the "uncovering." In tradition, what is uncovered, or opened, is an injection of pure power from creation. This is the time you chose to be born into. Fantastic, yes?  What's more, you were born with the power to do the work that is needed. The dragons tell you every moment that you were born weak, you were born sick, you were born diseased, that your traumas have destroyed you. But if that is true, why do they choose you to live inside? Why are they eating your sacred power?

So we keep pouring light down into the tangled forest of the unconscious. This is one of our main tasks right now as human beings, this is the time we came into and the work we are called to do.

It's important to pour light down into your own forest, first, or you become part of the problem. Unhealed healers bring damage. Undarkened social justice warriors add to the feast for the dragons. They just create new karma. Facebook, by the way, is the playground for the creation of new karma, so be careful, please - your next lives depend on you using social media wisely. 

I've worked with four indigenous shamanic teachers in my life, and each one has said, "First, you must build your power." Every bit of my teaching focuses on this simple sounding idea. What does it mean to build your power?

In essence, there are two approaches. One is to look at what is draining (or blocking) your power, and stop the leak (or unblock the flow). The other is to identify the ways you can call new power into you, and call it in, hold it, and use it. This is an ongoing process – a life-long pursuit, a long journey with unexpected twists, and also with surprises so radiant they cannot be put into small human language. I – like you – like all of us – are working moment by moment on "building my power."

Even the use of that word, power, can be terrifying to people (it has been to me, and to many of my students) because one symptom of the inherited illness that we call Western Culture is that power is misunderstood and used very poorly. Power without sacred love of life brings destruction. (Love without power is mere sentimentality, which happens often in New Age spirituality and smiley Christianity. And love and power without wisdom is just spiritual farting. Wisdom is the breast milk of the Dark Mother of creation that brings you the power to sing healing into this world. Well, that’s another strange phrase that I don't have time to unpack at the moment.)

I hope I never give anyone the impression that I believe I'm oh so powerful and magical because I talk about these things. It's just that, for some reason, I've spent an ill-advised amount of time, money, tears and pain on learning as much as I can about all of this before I pass from this lovely earth, and I've been unbelievably blessed to seek out and meet beautiful teachers who have helped me grasp and use these ideas and practices. Those teachers have included human shaped ones, as well as the teachers shaped as mountains, rivers, crows, and many plants and animals - on and on they go.  My deepest love is working with all of this and teaching it.

Which brings me to the Celtic story, the Coming of Angus and Bride. It seems to be a pleasant little story about the transformation of winter into spring. But that inherited disability we call Reason has, for too many generations, tried to convince us to shrink the power in everything that comes from nature. The shamans know that stories about nature are a form of powerful healing medicine, because they know that what happens in nature happens in us, because we ARE nature.

(Okay, one more digression: Reason is not, in itself, a disability. Reason is a profound gift and tool for human beings. But, reason easily slips into arrogance, and when it does, it becomes a disability. The story of western culture has been like taking a lover with a great body and a full bank account but no heart. The Earth Mother has now become keen on where this relationship has been going.)

The Coming of Angus and Bride is one of the most powerful Celtic stories that exist. However, it's easily overlooked by the western mind because the story invites you into the mythic heart, and the medicine of nature. This is why I've made the story the center point of my online Spring Equinox shamanism class that I just put out a few days ago. The class takes you very deeply into working with the imagery – otherwise called divine forces or High Frequency helping spirits – that inhabit the story. It's a great way to use this Equinox and transition to spring a vehicle for spiritual growth.

rigid is not a giant human, or a human shaped ghost – it is the name we give to the mysterious power inside the first light of dawn, and inside the force of springtime. It is a radiant energy that rises at the beginning of day - the love song of sun and earth sung with every dawn. It is the radiant life force that rises up from the bondage of winter and carries the new life of springtime into the world. It is these natural powers that are being honored as a spirit of poetic inspiration, not because there is a big human who cares about rhyming schemes and iambic pentameter. We call these powers "Brigid," and maybe we imagine her looking a certain way, because it makes it easier to talk to her and about her.

I see it like this: Brigid is the force inside the element fire. What we call "she" is a quality of that fire - a sacred feminine energy, because the Brigid fire is the force that initiates and warms any new creation.  

In some forms, like dawn and early spring, that fire energy is sweet, spacious, gentle, careful, and delightful. In this way, she is the bringer of human inspiration – the Gaelic word is "Imbas" (Gaelic for "fire in the head") – the spark of "aha!" that bursts in all artistic and creative work. This is why the ancient Irish poets, who studied formally for many years, saw Brigid as their lifelong guardian, teacher and patron spirit.
And in this gentler form, she is also seen as goddess of the hearth – the place in the very center of ancient Irish and Scottish huts, where the fire burns constantly and cooks the food. At night, a ritual of keeping the house safe would be performed. The hot coals would be "banked" or "smoored" – separated into three small piles, with peat laid between and ashes spread over the top. This kept the coals from completely going out, and in the moong with a few gentle breaths they would ignite once more. A prayer would be made for protection of the sleeping family. Here is a prayer I wrote that you can use, adapt, change, edit:
 
I smoor this fire as Brigid herself would:
With the power of love
The power of life
And the power of protection
Around this house these powers spread
Like Brigid's cloak
Around the family
Around the herd
Around the land
May we rise tomorrow
Seven times stronger
Seven times more wise
Seven times more loving
Most of us don’t smoor the fire at night, but you can do this prayer to your body as you go to bed. The fire is in you, after all. 
 
In more concentrated form – with more heat – Brigid brings the warmth of springtime to melt the constricting forces of winter inside the land. This is why she is a healer, because she unbinds the death force, she evaporates darkness, and she melts hard, frozen, constricting winter where she finds it - whether in the land, or in the body, or the heart or the mind. She is "warmth" – an elemental energy in nature, and "warmth" underlies healing in many ways.
In even more concentrated form, Brigid is the intense fire of the forge – the fire that transforms something into a different shape. As the goddess of the forge, she is involved in making beautiful and useful metal objects, including weapons.

The heat of the forge needs to be intense because the iron does not want to change. It wants to stay the way is. So, when it is necessary to affect transformation, Brigid turns up the heat. In this way, Brigid is present in any initiatory event in our life, and in those events where we feel great resistance, she may come as a gentle flame first, but if our resistance does not melt away, she may turn up the heat.
Humans cannot bring new daylight to night, cannot melt the ice of winter, and cannot transfigure raw earth, by searing heat, into gleaming objects. So, I urge you to be careful about shrinking Brigid down into a sexpot with a crystal hanging on her forehead. Brigid may not look so sexy and mild to the iron – or to the parts of us in great resistance to the new life that she is bringing forth from our inner earth.

Brigid is spelled and pronounced many ways: Brigit, Bride, Brigh, Bridey, Brighid, Brigit, Briggidda, Brigantia. The name can be pronounced like the common girl's name, Bridgette or Bridget, or in Gaelic it can be pronounced BREE-ya or BREE-ja or Breet. Even the fact there are so many variations and pronunciations of her name give you the idea of how widespread, flexible, welcoming, assimilating and adaptable this figure is.

The root of her name – Brig – is the Gaelic word for "power." Brigid is power, and what is fire if not pure power? That Gaelic root, "Brig" can also be translated as "exalted." That is a great word for us to muse on, because we automatically think of exalted as "high status." But it also means "great joy." One of the most serious illnesses in our time is the inability to summon true joy. One of the most powerful ways to work with Brigid is to ask her to help you with authentic joy – not the distracting and addicting pleasures that dress up messily as joy, but actual joy. One of the best questions you can ask yourself is "What does joy mean to me?" (And do I currently have it in my daily life?) You can ask how you can retrieve lost joy (bring spring out of dead winter, bring new day from night, bring healing to your joylessness). These are prayers you can make to Brigid.

Traditionally, Brigit is the goddess of springtime – the goddess of new life emerging, of rebirth and renewal in all its forms. In this way, she is the premier figure of the east on the Celtic Medicine Wheel – the direction associated with dawn, springtime, new life, starting fresh, forgiveness, abundance and generosity, and with what the Christian tradition calls "grace."

In the Christian tradition Brigid became the midwife at the birth of Jesus. This expands her pre-Christian association with bringing grace into the world, with renewal and fresh starts for the whole world. The Christ beings the power of "Rejoice!" into the world, and Brigid is the one who midwives that power and carries it safely into our world.

In the Irish tradition Brigid is also credited with being the inventor of "keening"- the deep, frightening wailing song of grief, which she introduced after her son was killed in battle. Her song of grief was so powerful that it shook the warriors on the battlefield to their core, and they dropped their weapons. This is part of her story that doesn't make it into the usual categories, because it's not tidy, like the Roman mind wants Goddesses to be. But as a goddess of birthing the new, her keening calls out with great power to the forces that needlessly take life away - like war. And grieving is always a part of starting a new life, is it not? - in order to begin new, we must always let go of the old. In this way Brigid connect the east to the west on the wheel.
February 2nd is the traditional celebration of Brigit. Astronomically, this is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and year by year it can happen anytime in the first few days of February. In this way, Brigid is a solar goddess, and could be described as the Goddess not of the sun, but of light itself - and all the things we associate with light: spiritual wisdom, intelligence, truth, healing. And also justice: Brigid is also the Goddess of physicians and healing, divination and prophecy. One of her most ancient names is Breo-saighead (Pronounced "BREE-o SUH-yed) meaning fiery arrow – an image of divine justice. In the form of Brigantia, she offers big vision of time, and the heroic quest.

In the British Isles, the first signs of spring really do begin to appear at this time – the average low temperature throughout Britain, Wales, Scotland and Ireland is in the low 40's Fahrenheit. The crocus and snowdrops begin to appear, sometimes poking up through the final snow. The udders of cows and sheep begin to swell in anticipation of giving birth.

This is why Brigid is associated with milk – mother's milk of new life. Everything to do with new life, and ordinary, day to day life, is part of Brigid's domain, and this is perhaps the reason why she is so widely known and venerated. Everyone has to churn butter and tend the cows, and everyone is concerned about getting sick and healing from it. In some ways, Brigid can be seen as the goddess of the everyday life. That may not seem as dramatic as a war or death goddess, or the mythic figures that weave betrayal and wild magic. Brigid has a subtlety and gentle beauty to her power.

Is the first snowdrop of spring emerging form the dark less interesting or potent than a sword that guarantees victory or cauldron of rebirth? I say yes, easily as interesting.
 
In Minnesota where I live, the average low does not get above 35 degrees until mid-April. That leaves Brigid-ophiles in the great north needing to tweak the Brigid tradition some. We can't celebrate the visible signs of spring in the land on February 2, but we can celebrate it in the celestial realm. By early February, the angle of the sun begins to soften the ice imperceptibly, making ice skating slower and less smooth. In early February, in the great north, we can just barely begin to feel that the darkness of winter is easing, even if it is 7 degrees outside. Brigid is just beginning her great annual argument with the Cailleach, the goddess of winter.

Brigit's Day may not be a time in the frozen north to watch for crocuses or swelling udders, but it is a time for us to see the "opening of the east" on the medicine wheel. The north is beginning to close, the east opens. This is great day to celebrate!

Empires like Rome and modern America like to have specific dates on the calendar to celebrate deities. So, Christ was born on December 25th, and to deny that is blasphemous. Brigid's Day is February 1, so you better do your ritual.  This adherence to the calendar keeps order in the populace; it tells them how to live by delivering orders from The Authority, and Empires love that. But the indigenous mind goes by signs in nature, moon cycles, and guidance from Spirit. 

So, I like to celebrate the celestial aspect of Brigid in early February - the sun's midpoint between solstice and equinox. In the cold of February I like to do healing ceremonies with Brigid - healing for people, or land, or whole nations and the human  species -  asking for her to breathe her new life into old dead winter - the dead ideas, the dead  beliefs and ways of life that bring death to us and others.  
I like to celebrate the fight between Brigid and the Cailleach - the fight between new spring and late winter - in mid to late March (see the story "The Coming of Angus and Bride). And I like to celebrate The Goddess of Springtime in mid-April when I can see the new flowers emerging (for us it's typically the Siberian Squill, the most beautiful, delicate periwinkle flowers atop dark green stems. I think of these as Brig's Flowers, something that is not at all in Celtic tradition.)

I celebrate Brigid's hot flame of transformation whenever a new idea comes to fruition, into shape in this world. In this way, she can be thought of as a goddess of "manifestation."

Here's a very good overview of Brigit from Sharon Blackie: https://thehedgeschool.org/Blog/the-brigit-phenomenon/thehedgeschool.org/Blog/the-brigit-phenomenon/
Here is an interesting piece about Brigid and the Morrigan (The goddess of war and sex):
https://earthandstarryheaven.com/2016/08/31/brigit-morrigan/
 
Here's a long detailed piece on Brigid: https://www.druidry.org/library/gods-goddesses/brigid-survival-goddess
Here's a short audio telling of her: http://bardmythologies.com/brigid-the-goddess/

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. 
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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.