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. ​

Here is prayer you can use and adapt in anyway that is right for you.
(If you are reading this on a mobile device it may not display well - it's in two side by side columns. Try clicking on "go to web version" on your mobile and it may display right.)

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.

Dear Drummers of the Growing Fire,
 
We live in a world that normalizes harshness. Each day our world, our conduct, our communication, gets a little harsher because each day what was once harsh is now normal and acceptable. How do we escape being drawn down into it?
 
The answer seems easy - so easy that it seems trivial and dumb.  However, it is quite powerful and even life altering. 
 
It takes intentionality and discipline – two things that the powers that rule your daily life want to keep you from adopting. The powers want you to remain distracted, angry at tweets, fearful and depressed, horny, lonely and envious, so that your energy is drained, and in the end, you yearn to just "Chill and Netflix." In that state, the powers can do what they want, with a numb and compliant populace. How do you pull yourself out of the numbness, and stop being compliant? 
 
Here is a key: shamans say draw your personal power from nature. Nature is a larger power than the foces of culture. Nature carries more weight - and more wisdom - than the King, the Priest, the Judge, and even the executioner.

Beginning Tuesday, we get to live through a wondrous few days of the super, blue, blood moon. This is a great chance to practice drawing power from nature in a formalized way, the way the shamans teach.  
 
How to do it: Make a vow to start your day with a prayer, asking anything in nature to deliver power to you. Right now, you can use this wondrous super moon that is growing. When you wake up, before you glance at that device (and get drawn into its hypnotic power), before you begin worrying and stressing and building your daily armor, lie in the bed, or sit on the edge, place your hand over your heart center, imagine this place in your body being open and soft, and ask the moon, the sun, the tress, the animals, the cold wind of winter – anything in nature that you find powerful  – ask it to deliver into you, into your body, into your energetic signature, some of its power. That place in nature can be anywhere - close by, a place you know, or distant - a place you once visited, or want to. It can be the landscape of your childhood, even if you haven't been tehre in decades, for the landscape of your childhood is one of your protectors - it's embedded in your energetic signature. 

Here is a way to draw power from the moon. You can use any words, but here's a simple example:
 
Mother moon,
Growing pure white and radiant in the winter sky,
Send some of your power into me right now
So that I may walk through this day with strength.

Think about the "power" the moon represents to you. Maybe it's "distant calm." Or being receptive to the love of the sun. Or maybe it's the "inconstant moon" that Juliet warns Romeo against:

               JULIET: O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon, That monthly changes in her circle orb,
                                 Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

But another way of seeing the "inconstant " moon is "the adaptive, resilient" moon, the moon that reminds us that everything flows, because this is how nature works. 

You can ask the moon to deliverer into you - into your heart center, into your energetic signature - these powers. So that you may live with the kind of strength and effectiveness that these powers bring. 

Here is a more elaborate version, my version drawn from ancient Scottish prayer structures:
 
Beauty of the skies, gem of the night!
Mother of the stars, gem of the night!
I bow my head to you.
Weaver of dreams, weaver of the next shape, gem of the night!
Lamp in the dark, guide for the heartfelt seeker.
I bend my knee to you. 
Come, Silver-Faced One and play my body like a drum.
Play my skin, play my heart, call them open.
Send some of your power into me.
Mother of the night,
Weaver of the new dream,
Weaver of the new day
and the new song,
Come and call me, too, into my fullness.

After the moon moves through its fullness in the next few days, we are still in a more subtle, but just as wonderful "growing power" time. We are approaching the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and the light is steadily growing by two minutes each day. You can ask the growing sun to deliver power to you.

​On the Celtic medicine wheel, we are in the time popularly associated with the goddess Brigid, seen as the goddess who brings the springtime. Early February is her time to begin to rise up from the land. Bridget or Brigid is a Gaelic/Irish female name derived from the noun brígh, meaning "power, strength, vigor, virtue".  You can ask the sun to deliver power, strength, vigor and virtue into your heart center. 
 
Make this a morning discipline. Before your feet touch the floor, make prayers for power and strength, and give thanks to nature for bringing medicine when you ask. Again, the prayer can be very simple:

Hello, sun. You are so powerful, so full of power. You bring all life to earth, and I thank you you and honor you. Send some of your fire, some of your power, some of your light into me right now, so that I can walk though today with strength, vigor and virtue. Thank you. 

Here is my more elaborate version, again drawn from ancient Scottish prayer structures:
 
I welcome you, sun of the seasons
As you light the new day.
You travel the sky on strong wings.
Your steps are strong on the path through the stars.
Each day you climb the high mountain singing the song of life into each of us.
You are the old one.
You are the wise one.
You are the beautiful one.
You are the glorious grandfather of life.
You are the mother of fire
And the bringer of power.
Each night you descend into the deadly sea
Without distress and without fear.
You rise up again on the wave of peace
Like a youthful Queen in bloom. 
Great sun, give me a little piece of your power so that my steps may be strong,
So that I, too, may bring life and blessing to the creatures and the earth and the people. 
I wish you well on your journey through this day
And through all of your days.

Making prayer in the morning, before you do anything else, is a basic and easy way to integrate shamanic techniques into your life. You may be surprised at how effective they are!

There is a next powerful step too: replace the impulse to check your email with a 20 seconds of prayer, of drawing power from nature. This single sentence can truly alter your life. How many times a day to you compulsively check your phone for em,ail or text or Facebook? Replace one, then two, then a dozen of those impulses with prayer asking for power form nature. You may be amazed at how this shifts your energy. 

Even though the light is returning after the winter solstice, January is the cold and dark month. The holiday lights go dark, the parties stop, and it's just us and the darkness now, and the cold wind, and survival. And looking toward the year ahead.
 
A friend recently sent me this little poem:
 
In the dark times
Will there still be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
             -Bertolt Brecht
 
On January 1, we enter a new month and New Year under the bright gaze of the full/super moon. I don't think the squirrel in my crab apple tree or the crows pecking at the end of my driveway care that it's 2018 or January 1. But we humans love and need mythic markers to help us make sense of the journey of life and that support us as we craft prayers for new habits. That bright moon guiding us into the New Year carries a lot of power for us in all of this.
 
What does it mean to sing about the dark times? It means we acknowledge them – we recognize the pain, we see it and don't look away. But to sing about the dark times means that we refuse to let the pain of life be our definition of life. It's no easy task; no easier now than 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 10,000 years ago.
 
The song that we sing in dark times – where do we learn it? We can certainly learn it from an existing tradition. The old Quaker hymn goes:
 
My life flows on in endless song
Above Earth's lamentations.
I hear a sweet tho' far off tune
That hails a new creation.
 
Life betrays us. People betray us. Institutions betray us. The body betrays us. We betray others and we betray life, and ourselves. This is a hard truth about being human. The story we have invested so much life in, or so much hope in, suddenly crashes to shards. We are cast - or we cast ourselves - into chaos and darkness. We call this betrayal.
 
So we need a song. A song that reminds us that a new creation is coming. Betrayal hurts and life would be far happier without it. But betrayal is a form of initiation, if we have the eyes to see it. Betrayal is the doorway to the new life. Betrayal blows the doors off its hinges, but now the way is open, and there's no going back, life as usual is no longer possible. A new truth shines.
 
We need a song to remind us that all of this is about opening the new creation. Otherwise, we spend life looking backward at the pain, and pain becomes our story and our definition of life. The song turns us forward, and carries us through the doorway.
 
Have you noticed that nearly every fairy tale, every sacred story, every decent play and movie we enjoy has betrayal at the core of the story? Jesus needs Judas to kiss him to drive the story forward. The naïve, dreamy youngest brother needs his greedy older brothers to toss him down the well or he will never climb out to become king. The girl in the Celtic tale "The Corpse Watcher" wants to leave home so as to grow up, and her mother refuses to give her a blessing for her journey, so she leaves empty handed. That mother's betrayal leads the girl to take a job watching a corpse overnight before the wake the next day. During the night, the corpse sits up and takes the girl on a magical journey of power. If she had received the blessing of her mother, she would have been able to say no to such a gruesome job.  
 
To be human is to a) be betrayed at some point, and b) to be the betrayer at some point. Betrayal and "failure" are not the same thing, but we conflate them. Betrayal is the initiation into a new wisdom. When you are betrayed, a door opens to a new creation. When you are the betrayer a door opens. And it may be that betrayal is the tool needed to open a door closed so tightly. It may be that betrayal is the only force strong enough to force that door open to the new creation. 
 
In the dark times, the new song begins to be heard. We just came through a Christmas season in which one main story is of a spiritual figure who delivers a new gift down the chimney. Shamanically speaking, this is the Star Spirit, Pachatata, Grandfather Sky singing the new song down into us, through our crown chakra.
 
So, we can learn songs from tradition, but we can also just open our "chimney" and ask for the song to come. And then begin singing. It doesn’t have to be words – it can be just vowels. This is something you can try in January – don’t be nervous, don't judge yourself. You can begin by simply saying – to Spirit, to yourself – "I'm in dark times and in my heart I feel [this] and [this] and [this]." Begin by opening your heart to the dark. Then open your chimney and ask the Star Spirit, the Spirit of Immensity, to pour down the song of the new creation into you. Sing it. If the singing brings tears, congratulations to you – that's a good song. 

Today, across the vast expanse of northern Europe, sub-Arctic Russia and Mongolia, stretch many nations of reindeer-herding people. The Sami, the Evenki, the Chuckchi and many more. Many cultures, languages and customs abound, but something these people share is a deep physical and spiritual bond with the reindeer. The reindeer provides food. It provides power to pull a sleigh. In antiquity, the hides provided clothing, the antlers tools. The reindeer is the life force embodied. It is a giver of life, a mother, a sustainer of life. It's no wonder that there are many stories about the reindeer as the mother of life.
 
It's easy to think of the reindeer as connected only to northern peoples, but, at the end of the most recent glacial period, 12,000 years ago, reindeer were plentiful farther south: in Ireland, Scotland and the UK, all the way to southern Spain, and, in the Americas, as far south as Nevada and Tennessee. Reindeer were so numerous in Europe 16,000 years ago that this period in time has been called the Reindeer Age. Researchers say that Reindeer (including both the forest caribou and arctic reindeer) are the most widely distributed animal on the earth. The reindeer follow the ice as it flows back and forth across the earth. 
​ 
Here is why this is important to me: Twenty-five years ago, the Reindeer emerged from the soil of my DNA's consciousness, called up by a ceremony performed by a teacher from the Sami people that culminated with him stabbing me in the chest with a reindeer antler. I'm not a reindeer herder, I'm not Sami. So by the standards of my western, linear mind, Reindeer coming to me, living in me, becoming an ally, teacher and helper, is just crazy. Or it's merely fake. It's ego; a white man new age fantasy. 
 
But when I view this through the wholistic lens through which all of my shamanic teachers have taught, the lens that says just because Reindeer isn’t here right now in the dense bodily form doesn’t mean she's not here in Spirit, I open the possibility that, Reindeer was inside my spiritual DNA and decided to emerge.
 
One of the most important prayers I've been taught is to feed and nourish the Spirit(s) of whatever land I am standing on. One of the phrases I've been taught is to bless "all those that walked this land before me"- may they have peace and plenty and blessing, and may I walk in harmony and respect of the land. This simple prayer is incredibly difficult and seemingly fully hypocritical in the urban environment in which I live, but it has been an enormously educational daily prayer for me, and I do my best. 
 
It's easy to think that the prayer is directed only at humans - at ancestors or previous human inhabitants of this land. But the animals, the stones, the waters and even the viruses are our ancestors. The prayer addresses all of the beings who lived on, walked on, and needed this land beneath my feet. So I often find myself, in Minnesota, blessing the Reindeer that once walked this land before me – in linear time, thousands of years ago, and in shamanic (and geologic) time, merely a blink ago.

​Ailo taught me a great amount in a brief time, and, every time I think of him, I'm grateful. He passed into the other world a few years ago and I send him prayers every morning. He told our small group two stories about the reindeer that sunk deeply into me. I don’t know if these stories are “traditional” Sami stories. All I know is that Ailo told them to us.
 
The first story was how the creator had created everything and every creature, but had yet to inject life into any of it. Creator asked, "Who among the creatures will sacrifice their own heart to be placed the center of the world, to beat life into everything?" Reindeer said, "I will give my heart so that all may live." The creator said, "I knew you would, because to bless the world is in your nature."
 
It is that mothering heart, pumping warm life-force throughout the world, which keeps everything alive at each moment.
 
That image is not that different from the idea of “God’s steadfast love” found in the biblical tradition. But unlike the western story in which the male God stands aside from creation and outside of nature, Reindeer's heart is female and inside everything. And everything receives Her blessing, not just the "chosen ones" or the ones who "believe" correctly or who are obedient to the hierarchy. Everyone gets the blessing.
 
Reindeer's heart beating at the center of creation is also a similar image that Christians apply at advent and Christmas to the Christ child — that powerful idea (and so silly to the rational mind) that the creator cares for our well-being and so implants the power of love into the very foundation of reality. We can draw on that power. We can call it up into us, and project it out of us, to make our lives better, or to help make someone else’s life better, or to just bless the world.

For 15 years I’ve guided a Winter Solstice ceremony which has grown into a four night run. A hundred people each night come to drum together and make merry (what I call “Spiritual Wahoo”), and to work with the Reindeer Spirit. In act one, I offer them a cleansing ceremony with the Celtic figure called the Old Bone Mother – the one who comes to take what needs to be taken. (That's another story.)
 
In act two, I offer them an opportunity to enter sacred time and space, to enter into a visionary state and ask Reindeer Spirit for a blessing. They might ask Her to carry them to the sun to retrieve lost vitality. Or to give them antlers for protection in a dark time. Or to ask for guidance for the coming year. They might ask Her to come and pierce their heart open so that new love can flow in and out. Hundreds of different experiences have happened over the years.
 
I do this solstice ceremony because when I asked her what I could do for her, Reindeer said to me, "Untwist my story for your people." In other words, help release Her from the shrinking curse perpetrated on her by the industrial-machine-mind story of Rudolf, the little boy reindeer who helps Santa, the jolly male CEO of the northern toy factory, manned by low-paid non-unionized male workers, stay on deadline for his mass production schedule.
 
Our story of Santa is the epitome of industrial culture shrinking down a profoundly beautiful, healing and far more useful otherworldly story in order to support our hyper-consumerist Christmas season. (Archetypal psychologist James Hillman calls consumerism an act of substituting “more” for “beyond.” We are a culture without a healthy sense of the beyond, and so we settle for merely having more.)
 
Ailo Gaup stabbed me in the chest after setting a safe ceremonial space and dancing in a circle around me and chanting a gruff melody for several minutes - his personal song (called a Joik, pronounced "Yoik") to call the Reindeer Spirit into the work. In this physical world, he stabbed me in the chest with his reindeer antler, and, in the Other- world, where most of me was at the moment, Her antler pierced my heart and a vision of the Great White Reindeer as mother, healer, sustainer, protector and resurrector burst open in me. She came to me, breathed silver breath into me and did a few other things that I don't talk about. Since then She has helped me in my work as teacher and healer.  I send prayers to Her every morning too. All she asks of me is try my damnedest to be part of the Great Turning of Consciousness in my species, to resist my impatience, greed, and arrogance as much as I can, to be realistic in this world, to untwist Her story for my people, and to dance Her once a year. So I do my best.

Reindeer mate in the autumn, and male reindeer shed their antlers at mating time. So at solstice time, any reindeer with antlers are likely female. When I first learned this about female reindeer and the antlers, it turned my mind around about our common Santa story. Santa and the reindeer are not an all-male team delivering manufactured goods, as industrial western culture has taught us - the whole story is about the Great Mother doing what is in her nature - blessing - and us participating in delivering Her blessing. 
 
Mrs. Clause apparently does nothing but knit socks and make cookies for the elves, and in this you can spot something profound buried by the patriarchy. The goddess is buried in many western tales as the servant, a wife, and the old hag. I think Mrs. Clause is another suppressed image of the Great Mother, who repairs our wounds (knits the socks) and brings us joyful nourishment (the cookies). The marriage Mr. and Mrs. Clause is a marriage of the divine feminine and masculine. They work together at the darkest time of the year to bring healing, meaning, and guidance.
 
My Winter Solstice Blessing ceremony culminates with a group of shamanically trained “reindeer spirits” delivering a blessing to each audience member by singing and rattling over them while I dance under a reindeer hide while holding two immense antlers. In this way, I get to deliver on my promise to dance Her once per year, and She delivers to every person in the audience whatever she will deliver to them.
 
The Reindeer delivers the real "Christmas present" we seek: the resurrection from whatever darkness has taken us prisoner, the return of lost life force. She delivers what we really seek: not “pretty presents,” but “Beautiful Presence.” 
 
It is in Her nature to bless the world, and to bless those who ask sincerely. A teacher told me a long time ago that "to bless" means to expand one's direct contact with Spirit, and to curse is to sever that direct contact, or shrink it, or twist it. We live in a world that seems to be reveling in the manufacture and distribution of curses, and I simply cannot imagine what more fundamental need we have than to be blessed – to be expanded into direct contact with Spirit. Only this expansion can cure our love of hate, our lust for death, our gleeful delight in casting others as the villain so we need not look at ourselves. Only blessing can give us bigger eyes, more open ears and cleaner hearts so that we may become more fully human, and so that we can become better servants of this lovely earth.
 
A few years ago Reindeer gave me a song. She gave me the images and I worked the words into a structure that for my own human fun, uses the trochaic tetrameter found in the Finnish Kalevala, an ancient epic mythic poem. Please feel free to use this song however you wish, add to it or change it however Reindeer tells you to, and always give it away. 
 
Weaves her new light into dark bones
Breathes her breath into the old wounds
Flickers fire in the cold heart
Calls the song back from the deep dark
 
Repeat and end with:
Guides the antler to the heart

About Jaime Meyer:
Jaime Meyer’s eclectic background includes earning a Masters' Degree in theology and the arts from United Seminary of the Twin Cities and 30 years studies with a variety of shamanic teachers. His book Drumming The Soul Awake is an often funny and touching account of his journey to become an urban shamanic practitioner. He is president of the board of directors of the Society of Shamanic Practitioners. Click here to find out about his 2018 year-long shamanism program and shamanic excursion to Peru.  
 
Sources:
 
Ailo Gaup, The Shamanic Zone (Nittedal Norway, Three Bears Publishing, 2005, 2014). Originally published in Norwegian as Sjamansonen by Tre bjørner forlag.
 
Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People Boston - New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
 
Science Nordic: "Reindeer genes show clear influence from last Ice Age"
http://sciencenordic.com/reindeer-genes-show-clear-influence-last-ice-age
 
Reindeer General Information:
http://www.think-differently-about-sheep.com/Reindeer_general-information.htm#Wikipedia
 
Amusing Planet: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/04/the-deer-stones-of-mongolia.html
 
Mental Floss:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/29470/11-things-you-might-not-know-about-reindeer
 
Distribution of Reindeer (1894 Government Report):
"Reindeer (Cervus tarandus) are not only boreal but circumpolar animals, occupying a habitat in common with the ice bear, musk ox, arctic hare, lemming, snowy owl, ptarmigan, Eskimo dog, and arctic fox. Though comparatively little known, popularly or scientifically, outside of their frozen domain, they are the most widely distributed mammal on the globe, inhabiting portions of Greenland and Labrador, the margin of Smith Sound,* both sides of Hudson Strait, of the entire breadth of British America east and west of the Rockies, parts of Alaska, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Finland, Lapland, Norland, and the northern half of Russia and Scandinavia. Their range belts the entire Arctic Circle without a break, and extends from the northernmost limit of polar exploration southward to latitude 52° (longitude 1400 west), where the reindeer meets the Bengal tiger in the jungles of the Amoor River, in Asia. In North America it drops to latitude 55° on Eskimo Bay, in eastern Labrador; to latitude 59° at Fort Churchill, on the west side of Hudson Bay; to latitude 550 in the Peace River country, and touches latitude 54° on the Aleutian peninsula, in Alaska. In middle Russia the limit is about latitude 55°, while in Norway it would not be below latitude 65°, owing to the proximity of the Gulf Stream, which renders the climate too mild for them, as well as for the growth of its favorite food, the reindeer moss. In the Glacial period this succulent lichen (Cladonis rangifarina) grew much farther south, of course, and the range was proportionately extended, remains of this animal having been found in the middle United States and in Italy, according to Prof. Theo. Gill. Reindeer cannot be acclimated in regions where the conditions are unfavorable. Experiments in various countries have proved this.
https://books.google.com/books?id=U0o3AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=reindeer+in+minnesota+glacial+era&source=bl&ots=QzJz2bAc-y&sig=ixY1U5n2HqWnuwuEiRUBV_zq9ls&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiPjvauut_XAhWL8YMKHcVSAKgQ6AEIZTAN#v=onepage&q=reindeer%20in%20minnesota%20glacial%20era&f=false​

​Dear Drummers on the golden skin of wonder,
 
I want to delve a little into my personal journey to shamanic practice and why I see shamanism as an antidote to much of the malaise we feel.  At the end of this piece I offer you a simple and potent shamanic practice. 
 
I came to shamanic practice out of life as an artist. I was a playwright for 15 years, living in the kind of splendor to which artists are accustomed: making literally tens of dollars per year off my writing, living in the three-room upstairs
apartment across from the crack house where, nightly, large men in long leather coats that concealed sawed-off shotguns stood stoically. I started my workday at dusk by risking bodily death sitting on my crumbling, no-railing balcony overlooking the used car lot, drinking Yukon Jack and marveling at the way the slanting orange light washed with such innocence over the curled hair of the hookers walking by on Lake Street. I'd write deep into the night and sleep deep into the day, going for weeks without talking to people, then do whatever I could to make a few bucks, and repeat. My days were spent on one purpose: opening my imagination wider, and letting in whatever would come in. It is, as all artists, monks and shamans know, terrifically lonely work, charged with the giddy precipice-power that comes from actively courting insanity.
 
As I began to encounter shamanic books and then teachers, I realized that my writing process was not like other writers I knew, and it was as shamanic as it could be. I put on recorded drumming to write to, and it sent me into an otherworldly place where people came and talked to me and told me what to do next. I called them "characters in my play," and they were usually human. Later they became spirits, often not human (or perhaps more than human). As I tried to put these spirits on stage, my plays became progressively weirder and less produceable by anyone but myself. It's just very difficult to describe in the stage directions: "The Kuhem Men are part man, part hawk and they speak in a guttural whisper that sounds a little like rhythmic singing heard just out of range of the firelight, late at night in the woods."
 
At a certain point I had to admit that my playwriting life was over and I was morphing into something else.
 
In our culture, opening the imagination is a radical act of disobedience to the prevailing powers. The last thing the orthodox Church wants you to be is imaginative. It gives you a brief list of acceptable images - white dove, angel (Caucasian), Ted Neely Jesus and, on good days, grapevine. But it warns you that to open the imagination to images outside the accepted list is very dangerous.
 
The church fears imagination but science dismisses it as playtime and nonsense. School gives lip service to the imagination but education is about training us to become enfleshed machines, and imagination is valued only as it applies to money making.
 
So we grow up, each of us in this culture, with heavy restraints on what may be the human being's primary creaturely power: imagination. We grow up creatively skewed and malformed like those miniature trees pruned to droop and weep because we think they are beautiful like that.
 
The suppression of our innate human power points us right to the world we have built: the "LOL-Nothing-Matters-Fuck-Off-Binge-Watch" world in which what Kim Kardashian says matters to people.
 
My point in this darkly painted picture is this: if you feel disconnected from Spirit, from your imagination, from joy, it's not you. You're living in a time where they've stopped training your spiritual imagination, and that results in malaise.
 
The imagination is the meeting ground between the unfathomable, ungraspable, untamable, un-nameable mystery of creator/creation and the human. The imagination is the banquet table at which God and human meet to feast with one another. There is no meeting with God except through the translator of the human imagination. The raw, immense power of the divine, the 10,000 languages it speaks at once, can only be stepped-down and translated though the tool of the human imagination.
 
This is why shamanic practice is such a useful spiritual path and why it is such a powerful antidote to the soul-shrinking powers perpetrated on us by the modern industrial machine mind. It's why shamanism is an antidote to delusional, xenophobic, conspiracy theory laden paths we call "religious conservativism."
 
Shamanism is the path of opening the sacred imagination. It is the invitation to the overflowing banquet table of creation. Shamanic practice is just that - a way of being and of practicing, not an enforced system of believing abstract ideas or stories.
 
(So-called "conservative") religion begins by progressively containing and limiting your wild sacred imagination with, "You must believe only these few things or it's damnation for you!" Shamanism begins with opening up the sacred imagination and preparing you to negotiate with sheer wonder. People uneducated in shamanism sometimes think it is about fa-la-la fantasizing, but shamanism is very much like science: it's based on repeatable experiences that create observable effects in the immediate world.
 
Shamanism was with us tens of thousands of years before religion, emerging from hunter-gatherers. The shaman's first job was to locate animals, because if you walked five days in the wrong direction to find them not there, everyone might starve. Modern shamanic practice is really not that different; it's about locating nourishment and guiding us to it.
 
Another word about those "religious conservatives": All of these folks are newcomers to this world. Shamanism predates them by many millennia. People who practice shamanism are actually the ones who are conserving a far older, far more mature theology. 
 
I close with this succinct list of indigenous and shamanic core values and precepts that are also a list of antidotes to modern cynicism and disconnection. This list comes from The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicine to Life on Earth by Stephen Harrod Buhner.
 
"While containing numerous variations, themes, and differences these nonindustrial epistemologies do contain a basic framework that is very similar in a number of areas. Most assert that:
At the center of all things is spirit. In other words, there is a central underlying unifying force in the Universe that is sacred.

• All matter is made from this substance. In other words, the sacred manifests itself in physical form.
• Because all matter is made from the sacred, all things possess a soul, a sacred intelligence or logos.
• Because human beings are generated out of this same substance it is possible for human beings to communicate with the soul or intelligence in plants and all other matter and for those intelligences to communicate with human beings.
• Human beings emerged later on Earth and are the offspring of the plants. Because we are their offspring, their children, plants will help us whenever we are in need if we ask them.
• Human beings were ignorant when they arrived here and the powers of Earth and the various intelligences in all things began to teach them how to be human. This is still true. It is not possible for new generations to become human without this communication or teaching from the natural world.
• Parts of Earth can manifest more or less sacredness, just like human beings. A human being can never know when some part of Earth might begin expressing deep levels of sacredness or begin talking to him. Therefore it is important to cultivate attentiveness of mind.
• Human beings are only one of the many life-forms of Earth, neither more nor less important than the others. Failure to remember this can be catastrophic for individuals, nations, and peoples. The other life in the Universe can and will become vengeful if treated with disrespect by human beings."

 
Practice
 
A simple, potent shamanic practice that I call, "being with the land." The core of shamanic world view is that there is more than one world, or the way I like to put it: there are many layers to reality, and the one that our five senses discerns is a very small part of the whole.
 
The practice: Stand on a piece of land. This may be your backyard, a park, in the wild, or even a parking lot outside your office. Open your imagination, and "see" (feel) a line of connection from your heart to the grass, a tree, a cloud, the sky, the dirt, flowers - to anything nearby not manufactured by humans. Feel (see) this line of connection as a color, perhaps a thread or beam of light. It connects you to anything at all that is "land." When connected, it "plugs you in" to that cloud, or tree, or grass. And you begin to exchange energy. You send the energy of thanks to it, and you can say, "Thank you." Or you can say, "You are my Brother/sister/uncle/aunt." Do this for a few moments - for at least three times as long as you think you should. So, for example, if after one minute you think, "This is sorta crazy, or "I'm bored." or any other resistance comes up, do it for another two minutes. There will be a ppoint at which you receive an energy back. It may come in the form of an emotion, an image, a message. Muse on that the rest of the day. 

Blessings,
Jaime                        

​Next week's eclipse is inspiring a great deal of conversation. It is said that we are in an "open portal" right now between the lunar and solar eclipses, and that portal that can be used to focus your vision, reevaluate life and to do ceremony to activate intentions. I like the idea, and I want to offer you some practical ideas for using this portal time.

First some cool background: it's said by mystically inclined folks that eclipses magnify and increase the power of the full and new moons, that blocking out the light from either also opens a flow of raw celestial sun or moon energy to be received by us. Science, of course, is dubious on whether eclipses have noticeable physical effects, but it has been observed that whales and dolphins and many birds change their behavior a few moments before a solar eclipse. Whales swim to the surface, hang out through the eclipse and then dive a few moments after it's over. Water birds stop foraging before the solar eclipse. Animals lie down to sleep or roost. According to one observer, the Amazon jungle goes quiet during a solar eclipse -a fairly amazing thing, since the jungle is never quiet. Because humans are part of nature, and because eclipses stir us emotionally and imaginatively, it's obvious that eclipses have observable effects on earth.

So, how can we swim to the surface and use this open portal?

Well, first, there's another bit of background: the Celtic shamanic angle. Besides the eclipses, we are at the time on the medicine wheel known in the Celtic world as Lughnasadh (LOO-nuh-suh) – the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. It's a major spoke on the wheel of the year and is called the time of the first fruits, when the harvest begins to come in. If you feel the revelry of summer and the harvest, and at the same time, feel that gnawing sense of autumn beginning to show its presence - that slight feeling (or growing panic) that summer is beginning to end that’s a Lughnasadh feeling.

Here are a few easy personal ceremonies you can do at this time:

The simplest thing is to merely take some time to imagine the graceful flow of our solar system - visualize the the orbiting planets, each spinning in their own way. Revel in the wonder - the immense distances between our planets and yet the tiny size of our solar system in the big picture. 

First, before any prayer or meditation work like the  below, remember your protection. Say or think: "I am surrounded by Spirit's protection" and really take a moment to feel it. Imagine or visualize that protection any way that works for you.

Sit quietly, imagine that open portal, and ask Spirit to pour down "the new song that is good for me" into the top of your head. That's a sentence full of mythic language, so explore it in whatever way feels right to you. Say to yourself: "I am ready to begin singing this new song…" See what happens.

Use this open portal time to "reset" your energies. Enter into a quiet place, and ask Spirit in whatever form it wants to come to you, to cleanse you of acquired negative energies. You can bump this up by imagining yourself in a place in nature - any place you find powerful, and ask that place to use its power to cleanse you. Example: imagine yourself on a mountain. Let your sacred imagination open and let the mountain cleanse you in whatever way a mountain might. Instruct your body to release its hold on any energy that has been embedded in you that is not useful or that is toxic. If you feel the energy in certain part of your body, talk to that place and ask it to release its hold on that energy.
Move away from the cerebral or analytical and focus on the feeling. Rather than saying "take out my co-dependence" or "release my inability to express myself clearly in relationship" or "Take away my mother issues," just identify the emotion: "Remove this old fear," "belly- release your hold on this resentment," etc. (It can help to take a moment to locate where in the body you most feel the emotion, and ask that part to release it.) 

A more general approach: Appeal to Spirit to remove what it sees as the problem: "Spirit remove whatever embedded energy or pattern is blocking me, limiting me, or wrecking my intention form becoming ever more real."

This portal is a great time to open your forgiveness. Ask Spirit to come and open your forgiveness and make you new again. 

Lughnasadh calls us to into gratitude for the abundance offered to us by mother earth, and to ponder what we are harvesting in our own lives; to consider what seeds we have we planted in life, and what is being harvested from those seeds. Ideally, this pondering can lead us to value our lives, and acknowledge with pride what we have done well, how we have acted with courage against our limit fears, how we have overcome smallness and how we have allowed our curiosity to lead and shape us. And this is a terrific meditation to do right now during this time: make a list of your skills, successes and best moments - things you've worked to learn, skills you've worked to refine. Don't let that negative voice win when it intervenes to say, "You're really not that good at that."

An example for me: My flute playing. I'm not at all a great flute player. But there was time I didn't play at all, and then there was a time that I said I want to learn, and there have been times I've practiced, and now I can play a few simple tunes in front of people, very often without squeaking or missing notes. So it's a skill I've worked at and now have. Another example: in a recent argument with someone, I realized I was wrapped in fear, and that's why I was arguing. That's a success - to see that after so may years of not seeing that at the time its happening. It goes on the "success" list. This exercise can be remarkably challenging in a culture that revels in making us feel small, sick, flawed, and powerless.

Lughnasadh also calls us to ponder sacrifice and gratitude, and the relationship between the two. In the Celtic story, the sun god Lugh established the festival of Lughnasadh to honor Tailtiu, the earth goddess (his foster mother), who delivers the abundant harvest and then perishes. This is how the earth works, and all abundance that we experience springs from the Earth Mother's bestowing her body to us. The festival was a celebratory party honoring the Great Mother's gifts to us, and also a funeral honoring her self-sacrifice. The festival gathered the disparate tribes together to negotiate peace agreements, arrange marriages, worship together and engage in revelry, feast and games.

Gratitude is a very popular topic but I have a shamanic twist on it. See gratitude less as a pleasant thought process – of reminding yourself to be happy - and more like medicine. See gratitude as a physical medicine that you swallow. It pours down into your body, cleansing your arrogance, ignorance and martyrdom, dissolving them. Ask the body (and Spirit) to wash them out of you. Don't delve into self-deprecation. This is not "I'm so full of these shitty energies and it's why things are so hard for me…" Just agree that to be human is to take on negative energies, like dust form the road, and to be human in relationship with Spirit is to have a partner than can help cleanse us.
​
I hope some of these ideas are useful to you. 

It is 1992. I am in Taos, New Mexico, sitting cross-legged in a dim, wooden-floored room in a comfortable conference center. I am one of thirty people who have traveled from far and wide to be here, to learn how to retrieve lost souls. The shaman is teaching us how to travel to the spirit world, discover where the lost soul has gone (or who has stolen it), and how to coax it back into the person’s body where it belongs. This may require negotiation, or trickery, or a fight with the spirit that stole it. It requires asking the spirit world to teach you a healing song. It requires a large   crystal to light your way in the other world. It is a seven-day course. I'm in the seven-day course because I want this. I can't imagine anything more fascinating and worthwhile in this lifetime than helping someone to retrieve their lost soul. But inside, I'm moaning with doubt and fear.
 
Soul retrieval is a cross-cultural shamanic healing practice, remarkably similar from culture to culture. In shamanism, the soul is not, as it is commonly imagined in western theology, an intact being, trapped inside a prison of debauched flesh. According to the shamanic view, the soul is an energy field. The body is part of this energy field too – the part that is discernible by the five senses, as the nineteenth century visionary artist William Blake said. The soul is the part of the energy body that is not discernible by the five senses. The body is the densest part of the soul – the part that does not survive death. What we perceive as death is only the body's limited, dense perception, and what we fear in death is only the body-based ego's fear of what it does not comprehend. So in order to work with the soul, we need to "see" it using other senses. We need shamanic sight.
 
Soul retrieval acknowledges that, as we move through life, traumatic experiences can cause disruptions or breakage, or even shredding of our soul/energy field. Parts of it can split off and become lost in the other world, leading us to feel a general sense of absence, an un-wholeness, a pervasive feeling of not being all quite “there” — an aching ennui, a steady depression, a darkness (mild or severe) permeating our days and nights.
 
“Trauma” can take many forms. Violence, or accidents, or illness, or shocks to the emotions are traumas. But long periods of common humiliation can do it too – such as junior high school, or many office jobs, living in an addicted family, or living under capitalism. Living a life that you know is wrong for you, but living it for all sorts of very good reasons — like, “just six more years of this shit and I’ll retire with safety,” or "I have to stay in this marriage so my kids/parents/friends won't think ill of me. Any of these sustained traumas can drive chunks of your soul away. Carl Jung said Western culture as a whole suffers from a loss of soul.

Writing this now, after moving into full time shamanic work for the last several years, I have this to say:
 
I do soul retrievals all the time now in my practice, and they hardly ever look or feel like they did in my week-long training. For example, I don’t use a crystal to light the way in the otherworld. I still think that’s cool, and I suppose I could use it, but I just don't seem to need it. Also, that healing song, given to me by that icy stream, has been with me now for all these years and has never ceased to be powerful and effective. I have many more songs now, but that one will always be special to me. 

Because soul retrieval is such an evocative term, and because we live in the "Web MD" internet world where everyone can self-diagnose, I find that many people contact me saying, "I need a soul retrieval." As I said above, probably everyone in America can benefit from soul retrieval, and there is no doubt that soul retrieval works, in different ways for different people. However, In my work, soul retrieval often accompanies other healing work which must be done first. Doing a soul retrieval without the other healing work is a little like planting a new tree in garden without ammending the soil. You want the soul part to come back into good land, healthy land, so that it wants to stay and thrive. I also find that soul parts come back spontaneously when I'm doing other healing work on people, so soul retrieval itself may not need to be so utterly dramatic. 
 
All ceremony – including soul retrieval – is about the resuscitation of beauty. We live in a culture that doesn’t understand beauty, and is afraid of beauty. Beauty is manifested spiritual power; it is the breath of the divine, almost but not quite made physical and palpable. All shamans are in the business of the resuscitation or nourishment of beauty.
 
In our culture, we confuse money with beauty, and status with beauty, and dominance with beauty, and this has caused immense damage to our souls, and when the soul is damaged, we cause damage to our lives and to the world. Institutional religion confuses beauty with obedience. We feel how this poisons us, but often cannot articulate it for years, decades.
 
Beauty, by its nature, refuses to be tamed by humans. Beauty comes not to obey our small ways, but to shatter the smallness that has been imprinted on us in so many ways. Beauty is a spiritual power, the breath of the Holy, and it does not arise from the senses or the intellect, but comes from beyond both. Beauty is what transforms us, what bends reality anew, what calls the soul back, for the soul does not wish to return to a body devoid of beauty.
 
So, let us be about this business of resuscitating beauty, in ourselves, in others who ask us to, in the world in which we live. It is a task made huge by our many generations of communal soul loss, so let us be about the task with patience and fortitude.

​Sometimes I get a tired of the newsletters and Facebook posts promising "transformation" and a new shiny life free of old patterns. Ah, Gawd, I just realized I'm talking about my own newsletters and posts. I'm the one who is boring me.
 
Here's the thing: yes, of course we are transforming, and yes, even with so much evidence lacking, I actually believe humans are in a paradigm shift that is raising our vibration-consciousness-maturity-soul age-flamy flame. And yes, I believe we can absolutely choose whether we ride this wave or get swallowed by it, and that’s the key to the spiritual path. But I want to tell you a little story and the title might be, "But SHEESH - I could just use a little beauty!" 

I've been working this shamanic training thing very hard for many years, and even harder for the last six, because my life shattered open when my marriage ended and among the crows picking through the carnage, the daisies and white birches and new pine trees began emerging. Did Spirit crash my life so as to open it so I could finally devote myself full time to building these skills that would permanently marginalize me from my culture but make me a better servant to my people and Spirit? Yeah, I guess.  
 
So I've been going to Peru every six months, studying hard with a family of shamans, and to New Mexico two or three times a year, studying hard with a family of shamans. And recently, I added another teacher in the mountains and I suppose I'll be studying hard with him. The study is like a constant roller coaster ride with fear, thrill, doubt, more thrill and, inevitably, vomit. The work is loaded with mystery and, yes, power, and I've seen my healing and teaching work get stronger and my life get deeper and more interesting.
 
So, every time I get into the room with my teachers, I'm thinking really hard: "I'm here to transform. To get better. To get… better." And so a few weeks ago, sitting in the declining evening light as the shamans were whispering prayers into their tobacco, preparing for the hours-long ceremony, and the cacophony of daytime jungle birds was giving way to cacophony of nighttime jungle birds, I'm whispering my prayers: "Oh Spirit, make me better, oh Spirit make me deeper, oh Spirit make be a better teacher, healer, servant…and my mind and heart are absolutely loaded down with Grand Intention for Transformation, and Grand Intention for becoming more skilled, and Grand Desire to Know Spirit more and become a Brighter, more goldy-shiny, hotter burning flamey-flame human, and advance and progress and evolve and open and BLAH BLAH Freakin' BLAH.
 
And I put my hand on my heart and wept.  And these words spilled out: "But Spirit, really, I could just use a little dose of beauty right now. A little…dose…of beauty." And it came.
 
Because Spirit really does give me what I am asking for. And most of the time what I'm actually asking for is just a new form of old trouble, I guess because trouble is inside my comfort zone, and I think fighting a giant lizard with a sword in my living room is different from hacking a giant boulder to bits with a hammer in my living room, but the thing is, both are happening inside my living room.
 
And so I made a prayer to step outside and ask the stars to just send a cooling song down into my head, and. God be praised, they did. And so that’s what I want to offer this summer - just a little dose of beauty. The links tell you more:  Three Moons Summer Ceremony / Pilgrimage to the Boundary Waters / July Healing Special

(With apologies to the poet Rilke, translator Robert Bly and Spirit channeler Paul Selig):
 
Sometimes a person puts down the hammer
And leaves the great boulder in the living room unsmashed.
She walks outdoors and sings, and keeps singing,
Because there is a church in the stars whose doors are flung open only by song.
 
Sometimes she returns to the house and cooks a meal.
And sometimes she wanders off, singing, never to be heard from again
And her children say blessings on her as though she is dead.
 
And another person remains inside her house,
And dies there, among the shards of rock.
And her children sell the house
And move out among the swirling songs of the night world
Looking for a new church.
And maybe they learn to sing.