Drumming The Soul Awake Blog - Blog

Easter letter to Jesus

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:54:05 GMT

Dear Jesus,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for a long time. To be honest, the reason I haven’t is that my heart breaks into uncountable shards when I think of you. I sometimes try to pray to you in the morning, but all I can seem to muster is “Dear Jesus…. What the hell?”

I remember when you came to me on that winter night in 1973, after walking home from the weekly Wednesday night youth for Christ soirée with Kevin. He was for sure going to be a minister some day and he already, at sixteen, had the high, wavy televangelist hair and the certainty for it. We hugged goodbye and shouted “maranatha!” (“He is coming!”) to each other and I headed along my street among the thick snowflakes dancing down from infinity, each one humming like its own small crystal bell.

I lay in my bed buzzing from Jesus-love and God-mystery and the lingering fragrance of strawberry that wafted from Carol Stevenson’s hair and the pink shine on her Jesus-loving lips.

And you came to me. At first as one of the ten thousand snowflakes drifting down, then growing into the shape of a white dove passing through the ceiling, down, down into my forehead where you burst like silver fireworks through my whole body.

As I trembled, love for everyone and everything coursed through me - even for Troy Ondreczeck and his weaselly little sidekick, Scotty, who tried to beat me up that one night even though we used to be friends, but they had become victims of reefer madness exactly like that movie we saw in health class had predicted. Your words “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” filled the inside of my ears and I felt bad for whatever sadness was inside Troy and Scottie.

And your words “By their fruits ye shall know them,” floated around me, and I knew that’s the only way to tell a true Christian from a false one. I knew that you would always be there as a mirror for me to check my own falseness in, and it would always be up to me whether or not to look in the mirror.

The next day I tried to tell Kevin about you, and about how we should forgive people, and love them, and try to remember that people have a lot going on that we can’t see, and that God is too big for us to understand. And Kevin rebuked me, saying that everyone who is wrong is going to hell and we should not give them a second thought. Then he listed a whole bunch of people who are going to hell – Hindus, and those bald guys in orange robes, and Catholics, and the one that really got me thinking was “people who live downtown.” Also, Charles Schulz, the cartoonist, will go to Hell because the sweatshirt I often wore showed Linus with his finger pointing to the air like a Greek philosopher saying, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” It does matter, said Kevin, and Charles Schulz is going to Hell, and I had better burn my 46 Peanuts cartoon books or I, too, will burn.

So, Jesus, what I’m trying to say is, you’ve been with me for 52 years now and the white dove isn’t the only way you’ve come to me. Remember that time I did something bad and it was tearing me apart inside, and you came to me and took me to that well, and gave me a drink of that cool blue water, and I thought “I’m never going to do that bad ting ever again.” Remember that time not that long ago when I was in the Amazon Jungle, weeping my guts out in an ayahuasca ceremony because I’m so filled with doubt and fear that I'm so damned stupid and worthless and fake and arrogant and stupid, oh I already said that, and you came and touched me on the forehead and that burst of silver galaxy light came again and your words "fear not" rang through the jungle and everything lit up? I try to remember all these times, but still, when I try to talk to you, I just want to weep with dismay.

I can’t help but think of Kevin, and how somewhere he's grown up and out in the world, preaching somewhere. And my other high school friend, Dirk, who went to a giant youth for Christ convention in Dallas and when he came back he was so different, and he asked me if I had been saved and I started to describe how you came through my ceiling and filled me with - - he cut me off, and with his blue eyes gleaming like the sheen on a freshly sharpened sword, he said, “No! You are not saved until I decide that you are.” He's grown up now too and preaching somewhere.

So, Jesus, every time I think of you, my heart breaks. Because Kevin and Dirk are everywhere, and I don’t understand how, but they became your spokespeople. They rolled the stone back into place and re-sealed you in darkness and told you to stay in there and shut up. And that’s why my heart breaks, and that’s why I haven’t written to you over the years even though I have wanted to, and it’s why I can’t make prayers with you.

The thing is, I don’t want to spend my relationship with you worrying about Kevin and Dirk. But they also have those gleaming eyes, and television networks, and that certainty, and lots of guns. And they are incrementally, day by day, giving themselves and their flocks permission to kill me in your name.

And, oh, yeah, there’s this one: when I was in Seminary, and studying the Gnostic Gospels – you know – the ones banned by the early church. And in one of them the disciples ask what they need to do to be aligned with the divine. Fast? Give alms? Make the correct prayers? And you said: “Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate.” That one is floating around me all the time too.

So, what I’m saying is, my heart breaks for the opportunity you handed all of us, and we failed you. We failed you.

But then I think and my old pals Steve and Deedee, and James Talarico, and the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, and so many others who are also out there preaching what you actually said instead of stuff made up by preachers in the 1800, like the rapture, and when I think of these Christinas I think how easy it is to tell the difference between actual faith and performative piety that covers up the “whitewashed tomb of the heart” that you mention in Mathew 23 – a place that looks clean on the outside but is filled with death and decay inside.

And, Jesus, as I write this letter to you, the most radiant tiny golden finch has just landed on top of the bird feeder a few feet away. She's scoping out the food I've put out, deciding if it's the right food for her. So, I guess, if you can let me know if I’m putting the right food out, I’d really appreciate that.

If I could muster a few words for you, I guess what I’d really want to say is: Jesus roll that stone back again. Not enough of us got it on the first try. Open the doorway again for your people and set them on your path. Roll it open. Please, Jesus, roll back the stone again.

The Friction of Resistance

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:20:28 GMT

I live in South Minneapolis, a few blocks away from both places where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed. I’ve been to their memorial sites to make prayers and have been warmed and moved by the incredible humanity pouring through my city.

Since you cannot be in Minneapolis right now without thinking about resistance, I’m thinking about it a lot. As early February approaches, it brings the Celtic holiday called “Imbolc.” It’s the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox, and as the days grow perceptively longer, Imbolc can be seen as the time of kindling the new fire of springtime. Every newly kindled fire is born out of some kind of resistance , some kind of friction – a transitory moment in which the fire may or may not light. The match head scrapes along, the lighter clicks, the flint resists until the spark agrees to leap out, lightning must crack open the still air.

This is the “conservative and progressive” relationship in a nutshell. The new flame needs the friction in order to light. Many spiritually minded people naively have believed that the “change of consciousness” we are praying for would happen without resistance, that some kind of golden light would float down around us and we would simply awaken. That has never happened. Every awakening is accompanied by the desire to linger in sleep.

I do believe that humans are in a rapid expansion of consciousness, if only for one reason: for the first time in our communal history, we can no longer honestly ignore the interconnectedness of everything on earth – not just locally and tribally, but everywhere. I also believe that the vitriol we are seeing is the natural resistance to a new flame being lit.

However, what we are struggling against is as old as two-legged humanity. The true enemy has always been ignorance, greed and hate. Every spiritual tradition says these are the three diseases, corrosive energies, or lower energies present in every single human. Each one of us is responsible for uncovering them in ourselves and trying our best to dissipate them. The food for these three old enemies is fear, which is why anyone trying to keep you in ignorance, greed and hate feeds you an unending banquet of fear. It is helpful to also reverse this: whoever is feeding me a banquet of fear is only trying to keep me in the small space of ignorance, greed and hate.

Imbolc is a celebration of the Celtic goddess Brigid (Bridget), known as a fire goddess. She is the subtle fire of inspiration inside the dawn light and the warming of Springtime, and the hotter fire inside healing, and the intense fire inside transformation from one shape into another. These energies are available to each one of us, all the time, no matter our station in life, our history, or our failures.

Ignorance, greed and hate are winter-ish forces: cold, brittle, and compacted. Right now, as the sun angles higher in the sky and light increases day by day, we can remind ourselves that this expansion out of winter is also internal for us, and species-wide. We too have a song inside us calling up the new plants. It is said that Brigid breathes new life into the mouth of dead winter. This is a decent mantra for today.

There is the outer resistance that I see so gloriously all around me in my neighborhood and city. But we also can summon an important inner resistance, by refusing to get sucked into the fear that feeds the three enemies, particularly hate. Going to a protest takes courage, but it also takes courage to stand tall in this inner resistance and refuse to fill the air with your own righteous hate. Hate has its own ignorance because it robs the person you hate of their broad, complex and nuanced humanity. Rather than praying to God to utterly destroy your enemies, the hard prayer is to ask my enemies to be healed of the three corrosive powers that are acting on them and through them. One of the most radical protests you can do right now is to refuse to live in the fear that is being shoveled into our mouths. That, of course, is not easy to do.

Tibetan Buddhism suggests a simple but challenging practice called Tonglen (“taking and sending”). It’s a layered practice, but one aspect is holding in your thoughts someone who is lost in ignorance, hate and greed. You understand them because you too have been lost in these energies in your own way. You imagine taking those energies from them by breathing them in. Then on your exhale, you send to them the energies of blessing that you have experienced in life: love, awe, gratitude. These are the antidotes to hate, ignorance and greed. This is not at all an easy practice. It is especially difficult to do it without condescension, which is arrogance blended with ignorance.

Tonglen practice is, in my mind what Jesus was describing when he said, “I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44) and Luke 6:28: "Bless those who curse you.” This is the long-term solution to our troubles, and we fail at it again and again. So, we must return anew to the effort and keep trying.

I leave you with my version of an old Brigid prayer at Imbolc:

On Brigid’s day the light is growing.

On Brigid’s day the warmth is rising.

On Brigid’s day the birds will be building nests.

On Brigid’s day the sheep will be birthing the lambs.

On Brigid’s day the new fire will warm the land.

On that day Brigid breathes new life into the mouth of all dead winter.

How to Not Do New Year's Resolutions Backwards

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:46:51 GMT

Well, it's that time again: New Year's Resolutions. We've been taught to do resolutions backwards. We begin with the commitment ("I'm going to get in shape!" "I'm going to activate a spiritual life!") and assume that taking action will bring results into our heart and spirit. We do this because we've been taught to act like industrial machines - you simply flip the "on" switch (the resolution) and the product (life-change) will be spit out the other end. Discipline is the fuel that fires the resolution machinery as it chops its way through our laziness and resistance. But guess what everybody? We aren't machines. We are poems afloat on an ever-shifting sea of love and yearning.

The problem here is that resolutions are most often made from a place of self-deprecation, even self-contempt: Something is lacking in me, I hate myself for it, and I will – MUST! - change. This is the backwards way we’ve been taught to make resolutions.

When we begin with what is ugly in us, we are lodged in fear. No decent, long-lasting change is fueled by fear. Fear can create swift change, but not good change, or long-lasting change. Any intention that sprouts form the soil of fear will soon wither, and that’s why the New Year’s Resolution failure rate is so high.

So, I suggest this approach to the New You that wants to emerge in the New Year: Forget about self-improvement. Whenever that voice raises up needling you to better yourself, sit down, take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, imagine your heart center opening, and ask the Spirit of Creation to "show me right now what is trying to convince me that am trapped." After a few moments of contemplating that, try turning your attention to this question: "Before my parents conceived me, what was my original nature?" Spend some time with that. The shamans may call this “touching your true nature,” and this is the pool of power from which to set intentions.

Here is another idea: Forget about "this is what I should/must do to become better." Place your attention on a simple (yet totally loaded) question: "How do I want to feel?" (Not "how do I want to stop feeling," but "how do I want to feel?"). This is a deceptive question. Voices may quickly pop up saying "Bah-humbiddy-hogwash! That's so simple-minded! It’s denial and spiritual bypassing! It’s shallow! And everything is out of control and so very complicated - in this shit-flooded world, you can’t just choose how you want to feel!” You absolutely can, because we do it all the time. We just typically choose to feel like the world expects us to feel, which is, often, lacking, guilty, mad, overwhelmed, afraid, greedy, envious – on and on.

Shamans understand a "resolution" as a commitment we make in partnership with Spirit, including one's helping spirits and nature allies. The Celts called it "the vow to the elements,” and it's one kind of shamanic prayer. But our helping spirits don't read our self-contemptuous, discipline filled action plan ("I will start working out!") because it's usually full of the fear of being judged, which means its secretly written by other people, often without us even being aware.

Spirit reads our heart and it understands that an intention spoken cleanly from the upper heart can be activated in many, many, many ways, most of which the rational, practical, mind - obedient to cultural programming and social judgment - quickly rejects. (What I mean by "spoken cleanly" is an intention that is purely, courageously, sincerely your own, not one foisted on you by someone else or by the culture. And what I mean by "upper heart" is an intention free of any fear, an intention that makes you feel happy when you behold it.)

So, my advice is: give a try to framing your clean intention of how you truly want to feel in 2026 and then ask Spirit to help you activate it. Ask your helping spirits to design and show you the action plan. (God help me, I’m going to say it: your helping Spirits are like AI of the otherworld, and what you need is a clear prompt.) If you want to resolve something, resolve to watch for the plan they create for you. Resolve to say yes to it when it arrives. Resolve to be open to it arriving in ways that you never thought it could. Resolve to be courageously, sincerely, loving yourself.

Finding Power in the Darkness: The Medicine of the North

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:24:46 GMT

Here we are, together, in the dark time. The dark is physical, as in the long winter nights in the northern hemisphere. And it’s metaphorical, as in all the dark energies washing through the daily world.

On the Celtic Medicine Wheel that I work with, we are now in the direction of the North. This is the direction of dark, winter, and cold.

• The East is the sunrise and springtime.

• The South is noon and bright summer.

• The West is dusk and autumn.

• The North is winter, the deep night, and the deep dream. It is the direction that acknowledges the struggles of life.

Many spiritual traditions affirm that discomfort is our finest teacher. The ego wants a life of comfort, but comfort is not why we came into this body. Spiritual power comes at a price, and that price is discomfort. This can be a hard lesson to grasp. This is not to say that we should seek discomfort merely to prove our worthiness or power – that's just another game of the ego. The focus is on learning to be a "true human" - on training our spirit self - not just on acquiring a string of painful experiences to boast about.

This medicine wheel is out there in the world, marking the seasons and the hours of the day. But it is also inside you, in every breath you take: the inhale is East, the full breath is the South, the exhale is the West, and the space between—the dark, empty stillness—is the North. Every direction on the wheel is an ally, offering us medicine, wisdom, and power, if only we learn how to ask.

The Gifts of Struggle: Endurance and Fierceness

The North acknowledges a core truth of being human: To be human is to struggle, and often to fight battles. We are told by the wisdom keepers that external battles are unaddressed internal battles. What we don’t deal with inside us spills out into the world to cause trouble, and to create karma. The Jesus of the banned Gnostic gospels said it like this: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you" (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70).

The Dine' (Navajo) people tell about the two heroes who, in the beginning of time in this world, battled and killed many of the monsters left over from the previous world. But they left some of the monsters untouched because these monsters could become our teachers. Lice were left on earth because they teach us to wash ourselves and keep clean. Stupidity was left on earth because we learn best by making mistakes. The cold was left on earth because it teaches us how to survive, make life-affirming decisions, and take care of one another.

In some forms of Christianity, it is said that we are “learning theology in the Devil's classroom," meaning that the devil is here to teach us the difference between virtue and vice. This work, to stand up strongly against the cold wind in the struggle of life, is a critical part of refining the soul.

Cross-culturally we see stories of wise beings battling the lower forces of chaos. In the Celtic tradition, it’s the battle between the people of the Earth Goddess Dana (or Danu), and the misshapen, gluttonous creatures known as the Fomorians. The Fomorians are horrible beings, but they also carry the power of fertility and knowledge of farming. In a sense, they are pure “want,” untempered by the higher wisdom of Spirit, vision and the arts. Both the Fomorians and the People of Dana are inside each of us.

The North is our powerful ally in our life struggles, offering essential medicine for hard times: endurance, patience, openness, and piercing common sense, discipline, decisiveness, fierceness, and trust in life. It can help to take your struggle to the ally of the north, tell it all the ways you feel up against the wall, and ask it to deliver these medicines to you to help you endure the struggle, or to change your perspective – to raise it to a higher level – so that is no longer struggle.

The North reminds us that all new life begins in darkness. It is the womb where the next cycle begins, the profound, dark stillness that precedes creation. For me, the North is the birthplace of prayer, because all prayer springs from the paradox inside us of wonder and awe mixed with our reality of disappointment and struggle. A shamanic prayer does not so much plead with God to take away the discomfort, but to open and ask for power, clarity and wisdom to navigate the inherent struggles of life.

If you are in any building right now with heat, it's because deep in the belly of the building is a little piece of the sun bringing life to you, creating a bubble of protection from the cold. To help us stay alive while learning from the cold, the Great Sun placed a bit of itself in the belly of the Great Mother (scientists call this the molten core). The Mother delivers that energy to protect us in cold times. So, in cold weather, it's good to thank the Great Sun and Mother Earth for the way they care for you and ask the cold what it has to teach you about becoming a true human.

Seriously, I'm saying: make prayer of thanks to the spirit of the furnace. Or as a colleague of mine says, “every morning give thanks to your cats and technology, because each has a mind of its own that we cannot control but we need them both.”

The great sun also placed a little bit of itself inside your body – in the upper right chamber of your four-chambered heart. Scientists call this the sinoatrial node. It is a tiny bundle of neurons that deliver a burst of energy about every second, which tells the heart to beat another beat. That energy comes from the other side of the doorway of the heart – the doorway to Spirit. So, inside your heart, about every second, your internal medicine wheel, delivers day and night, summer and winter, the four seasons, waking and dreaming, and the four sacred directions, all teaching you every second. Inside you, every second or so, is a little winter solstice. This heart-center is the fifth direction on the Celtic medicine wheel – the direction of “sovereignty” or “power to make my own decisions about life.”

The cold months are a good time to ask Spirit to open that door of the heart and give you a good hint about what you need to learn next on this journey to becoming a true human.

I leave you with one of my all-time favorite poems that, for me, is about gathering strength from the darkness.

The Jewel by James Wright

There is this cave

In the air behind my body

That nobody is going to touch:

A cloister, a silence

Closing around a blossom of fire.

When I stand upright in the wind,

My bones turn to dark emeralds.

Advice from the Plant Spirits

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:59:34 GMT

For about eleven years, Ive been doing plant "dietas" (diets) in the AMazon Jungle. Its a challenging experience of fasting, ingesting a single plant each time and making prayers and mediations to the plant spirit to merge with my energies. Sometimes the plants give messages like this one:

But faith is made of wonder, which is expansive, extravagant, exuberant, vulnerable, grandiose possibility. Wonder is the very substance of creation, and the the first element well before hydrogen. Wonder spreads between all things and connects all things. Wonder wears down and breaks open all shells. When the shell of your body finally opens, it is wonder that will come to you, singing with arms open, saying “let’s go, friend!”

Belief shrinks and excludes, as a cup can only hold a certain amount of liquid. Wonder flows in and out of all cups. All arguments – between people, groups, and even between the voices inside you - are made of this: someone's shell is having pressure exerted on it by wonder. Belief has one motto: never surrender the shell.

We tell you: You’ve been taught to believe that life is random chance; that there’s little chance of life arising anywhere, including here. They tell you you are spinning on a lonely rock afloat in a lonely sea. Whether you take that story as a recipe for meaninglessness, or as a great blessing, or as polish for your arrogance, you’re living inside their shell of "the great mistake."

But their story doesn’t see the space between stars as alive, nor the space between people as song; nor silence as music. Their story doesn’t see the motion of the weaver's hands as a part of the weaving.

Once, a great teacher said, “Watch out for all those earth rocks, because each one is groaning to produce new life.”

A flash of wonder comes to you, and you see yourself as the glint inside the dewdrop at dawn. But their old motto of random chance whispers: “You're just making that up.” Every morning you awake with a feeling that you’ve been somewhere else for a while. But their old motto says, "that's just a regurgitation of psychological flotsam.”

And yet, every spring, the crocus blossoms appear, as they were always going to do. Every summer the lilies dance, as they were always going to do. Every fall, the apples emerge from the tree, as they were always going to do. And when the winter comes, when there are no more apples, and no more lilies, the rocks themselves begin dreaming into being the next life that you cannot yet imagine, fed by the song of the sun that is inside the mother's molten earth womb.

We tell you: The earth wanted you here or you would not be here. The great weaver wanted you in the design or you would not be here. You wanted to be here or you wouldn't be here. You were always going to arrive here, at this time, to be sweetened by wonder. This earth was always going to be alive, and you were always going to join in the dance of life, as a glint inside the dew drop, a sound of water pouring over rocks, a heart beating with its warm drum song of praise, the sigh of the blossom opening.

The Celtic Lughnasadh (LOO-nuh-suh): First Harvest

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:04:37 GMT

The Celtic Lughnasadh (LOO-NUH-suh)

Though its commonly celebrated on August 1st or 2nd, August 7th is the actual astronomical “Lughnasadh” – the midpoint between summer solstice and fall equinox. This part of the wheel of the year is wonderfully paradoxical. It is the start of the harvest season, the celebration of the bounty of the earth. At the same time, it is the beginning of the death of the growing season. The plants give up their blossoms, fruits, and grains and then begin to die. The door to the west on the Wheel cracks open; the summer wanes, the transition to the dark encroaches.

Two Lughnasadh Ceremonies You Can Do

This is a powerful time to celebrate your successes, your own harvest. Many people have trouble with this! We often prefer to focus on the things we’ve failed at, haven’t yet succeeded at, or are wrestling with. We know in our minds that we “should” celebrate our completions and our skills, but there’s a resistance to that. “Oh, that’s bragging!”, we may say. But if you never celebrate your goodness, your achievements, your impact, bragging isn’t the problem, perhaps false modesty is, and that’s a roundabout form of arrogance (“I’m the most modest of anyone I know!”).

Remember that our skewed and twisted culture loves to implant the idea that most people are losers, and it conflates winning with money, social status and sexual appeal. These are the three main spiritual poisons according to many mystical traditions. They poison our authenticity and honesty, and our ability to commune fully with Spirit.

Your completions that you celebrate don’t have to be dramatic in an exterior way, or in any way that the culture approves of. Your skills and achievements that you recognize and celebrate can be invisible to the world. Being able to step away from self-criticism more often than a year ago is a great achievement. Having put together a nice small garden is something to celebrate. Being kinder to people, because you’ve wanted to bring more kindness into the world, is mammoth. So, take some time in the next few days to sink in to recognize your gifts, your talents and your successes. Certainly, muse on it privately, but it’s vey powerful to say these things out loud to someone you trust who is able to honor what you are doing with this Lughnasadh practice.

This is also a wonderful time to make offerings of gratitude to Mother Earth, who gives her body to us to eat. Find something harvested recently that is delicious or beautiful to you. (For me it is Colorado peaches, having just arrived in stores.) Make prayers of gratitude onto it and leave it outside on the ground (where no one will see it, preferably).

I leave you with a bit of “Beannacht / Blessing” by John O’Donohue:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

How I bargained With Death in New Mexico

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:42:04 GMT

I happen to come across this piece that I wrote ten years ago, on my first ceremonial solo in the wilderness, before I started studying in Peru. I hardly ever look back at old writing, and I am always uncomfortable speaking of visionary experiences that have come my way, fearing that speaking them is all about my insatiable ego. But I was struck by the vows to Spirit I made ten years ago and how they have played out. I don’t think you need to fast in the wilderness for days or swallow hallucinogenic brews in order to make vows to Spirit. These experiences can help clarify your prayers, but, as I say below, it is the tears that bring power to your prayers, and it’s the years that Spirit listens to most.

Summer, 2015

This is a small story of how I bargained with Death in New Mexico, decorated by a few random miracles and some thoughts about shamanism as a spiritual path.

In our group meeting the evening before we all went out on the land, someone made a comment about being afraid. One of the teachers said, "Well if you were certain you were going to live through it, it wouldn't be much of an initiation would it?" I love that phrase so much and intend to say it whenever I can from now on.

He said that in his tradition, the shamans say that our main job as human beings is to become "walking blessings." We become a force that blesses everything around us: other people, animals, the land, the spirits, the ancestors – on and on. We become "walking blessings." That, too, is a phrase I want to hold close to me.

It made me think about something that Martìn Prechtel, a Mayan teacher, said to me so many years ago about the same topic. He said that the shaman's main job is to bless. And I remember a Unitarian minister telling me once that the archaic meaning of "blessing" is to expand one's palpable relationship with the holy, and to "curse" is to separate or shrink one's relationship with the sacred.

But Martìn also put a caveat on the idea of blessing: it's dangerous to be blessed by an unblessed person. This implies, and I think the Peruvians might agree, that to become a walking blessing entails hard work that involves deep cleansing of the ego (or the false personality, "the parasite," the small self, the Nafs-al-Amara - it has many names). If the person blessing hasn’t done this work and followed it with the work to align themselves with the Big Love, it is more likely that they are merely projecting their unfinished psychic business into the people they are supposedly blessing. So there's a lot of work to be done to become a walking blessing, and some care to be taken by those seeking to be blessed.

So much of the shamanic path is about wondering if I am “just making this up,” and wondering if things that happen really did happen. If you were kneeling over your little smoking coal, making prayers of thanks to the land and the elements, and when you say “…and thank you to the winged ones who are here with me-” and suddenly two little yellow birds fly a few inches over your head and land playfully in a nearby branch and stare at you, followed by a hummingbird that suddenly appears three inches from your eyebrows, hovering for 20 seconds before departing, followed by a raven flying over and croaking one deep caw seemingly directly at you, you may too wonder if it really happened.

And when, on the very first day at the communal camp your head feels like bursting open with pain and you are nauseous, and sweating profusely with some kind of weird fever that just seemed to jump into you, and you are waiting for the leader to make his way around the circle of people with his ridiculously large cigarette of Peruvian sacred tobacco, blowing huge clouds of purifying smoke on each person’s head, and you think, “Oh God, I’m for sure going to barf on the shaman when he blows that on me” and when he does, instantly the headache, nausea and fever vanish completely, you may also wonder if this was real.

And when Woodpecker Boy appears to the night before you go, up, and says, “When you get up on the mountain my people are going to peck you open and give you a healing” - and three days later they do - you may also think this is not real.

For us, shamanism as a spiritual path is fundamentally about learning to expand, or to redefine what is “real.” We have been sold a small universe by the powers of western culture. Shamanism is all about expanding that small, hard, and often cold universe that has been given to us.

Well, enough of that. The 500 details of what happened to me in New Mexico actually don't matter. What mattered was becoming open, vulnerable, throwing my body and spirit and psychology open to Spirit, to be worked in whatever way it chose.

Now the story of bargaining with death.

Two days in: I have not felt hungry this entire time, but I do feel myself getting weaker and slower from lack of food. I’ve conducted ceremonies and experienced many sudden tidal waves of emotion – anger, regret, grief. Not much fear, which surprises me. I’ve wandered in and out of the stone circle I constructed with the quartz rocks abundant on the mountain, but mostly I’ve spent time inside the circle.

I'm now sitting quietly in the pine tree shade inside the medicine circle, the sun sinking behind the tops of pines to the west. My chest suddenly swells with pain, and I'm flooded with piercing fear. Three years ago, I went to the emergency room with chest pain. The doctors said they didn't know exactly what had happened but “let's just call it a heart attack.” I always knew it wasn’t primarily physical, but a call for a profound change in my life and behavior. But since then, I’ve carried in the shadows of thought that I could blink out of this life at any moment. My father did that - he was sweeping my brother's garage, and he was "dead before he hit the ground."

So, my chest pounds and I’m sweating with fear, and I think to myself “My time has come. This life is over.” I grieve that I won’t be able to say those final one hundred important things to my two sons. A giant wind – and I mean immense – whirls up behind me. It doesn't blow on me – it’s blowing 15 feet behind me, bending the pines with a tornadic whoosh, wrenching brown needles and dust up from the earth, whipping them into frenzied mini-cyclones, and carrying everything to the west. At least my death is mythic, I think: literally being picked up and carried across the western horizon by a breath from the great abyss. That’s really good, although no one will ever know.

I cry out a loving goodbye to my children. And then cry out a loving goodbye to the everyone I have ever known. I ask for forgiveness for the mistakes I’ve made and pain I’ve caused.

And to the wind, I say, “Take me if you want, I know I can't do anything about it." And then I add, "But I really don't want to go. I have a lot of love yet to give and receive, and I have a lot of work to do for people." The wind rushes, my chest pounds. I go on, “So take me if you will. But if you decide not to, here's the vow I will make to you: I will live with more joy, I will become a walking blessing. I make that vow to you.” The wind rushes, the trees bend and my chest pounds. I add on. “And you can take me now, but if you don’t, I’ll deepen my commitment to the work. I’ll work harder on releasing the grasp my small self has on me. I’ll get tidier in my ceremonies, I’ll spout fewer self-deprecating jokes, I’ll doubt less and trust more.” I make this vow to you.” The wind rushes, my chest pounds, and I add on, “Take me if you will, but if you decide not to, here is the third vow I make to you: I will allow myself to be loved. This vow I make to you if you let me live."

And like that, the wind dies down. The pain in my chest vanishes. All is quiet. One raven caw from a distance.

After a few moments of absorbing exactly just what may have happened (did I seriously just successfully bargain with death?), I notice the sun is almost sitting on the hilltop across the valley. I had decided earlier to climb the 80 or so feet up the craggy rocks near my site to make my prayers for the people back home from the crest of the mountain. I gather my supplies and start scrambling up the rocks, unsteadied by fasting, thin air, and the lingering fragrance of Death’s breath. I think it would be the height of irony to negotiate my way out of a fatal heart attack only to stumble clumsily off the mountain and die a few minutes later.

Near the top, I see a noble pine tree, one of those trees with powerful presence, growing impossibly out of what seems to be bare rock. Twisting limbs reach in every direction like some kind of divine dancer, green-needled fingers gathering power from the four directions and feeding it into the earth - or perhaps dispensing it outward to the world from the depths of the Mother. Reddish bark makes the tree look alive and warm in the slanting dusk light.

As I reach the top, breathless from altitude and mystery, I stand up and am stunned by what I am suddenly a part of: a 360 degree vista of valleys and hills reaching out hundreds of miles. To my left, a giant pulsating rainbow arcing over the entire eastern horizon, like a forgiving gateway flung open to admit new life. To my right, a western sky aflame in orange and red, kissing the delicate undersides of indigo clouds that visibly roil and undulate from this celestial caress.

And me, having just made three vows to Death which had, apparently, stayed his hand for the time being, my back against the tree of power at the center of creation, gasping a few rudimentary prayers of gratitude that I lived to be here for this moment.

I kneel, light a little coal, burn tobacco and make prayers for my people. Specific prayers for those who asked for them, prayers for those who wanted to ask but forgot. prayers for wholeness and peace of heart for those who read my little bloggy musings, and for those who instantly delete them, for those who have come to our drum circles drums for years, and those who came once and never returned thinking I was a kook or a charlatan, for those who returned after six years, and for those who just cannot ever seem to make it – for all of them, prayers from as deep in my heart as I can reach. When I pray, I nearly always weep, and I’m heartened to remember my teacher relaying to us the words of his teacher: “When you pray, pray with tears.” Martìn echoed this when he said that tears shed during ceremony are one of the sweetest foods for the spirts and the ancestors.

I pray for my people to receive whatever it is that fills them with such heart-twisting yearning, for them to receive the love that they deserve, for them to be whole again, to retrieve what has been lost or what has been stolen from them, for them to let out the song hiding inside of them, for them to feel wanted at long last, to stop fearing abandoned or trapped, and to have the courage to resolve what needs to be resolved between themselves and others, and between themselves and God. I pray that they are forgiven and that they forgive. I pray that whatever veil hangs between them and Beauty be lifted, that whatever wall has been erected between them and their inborn soul-power begins to crumble, and whatever role I can play in that inner renovation, that I am given the grace, the skill, clarity, and more life to work on their behalf.

Standing on a desert mountaintop between the great gateways of birth and death, blessed unimaginably by this land and by Spirit and by people back home, I pour prayers into the earth for my people, who are everyone, whether or not we have ever met.

Down from the dark hilltop and at my tent once more, I thump heavily onto my sleeping pad mumbling that already I can barely believe this day has happened, and I hope that I can trust that these things actually happened, and hang onto that trust. In the distance to the south, the mournful howl of a farm dog: a welcoming song to the stars shyly appearing in the blue-black sky. To the north, a sudden low, shooshing , through the trees: a nighthawk is hunting. Something’s time has come, and the hawk gratefully lives another day.

And, by the loving Grace of all that is mysterious, so do I.

Equinox

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 20:22:49 GMT

It’s the Equinox – the “time of balance,” but many of us don’t feel in balance. We feel the opposite – we feel in the gripped by chaos.

It helps me to remember that our self-created whirlwind is not Spirit’s whirlwind. The balance is there, right now, in the energies pouring around us, but our self-created story gets in the way of seeing it. It’s not bypassing, denial, or delusion to remember to look through the bigger eyes of Spirit to get a different perspective on what’s going on.

In the world of spiritual work, in plant medicine, shamanic initiatory experiences, in Buddhism - really in all committed spiritual work, there is an idea that when you step into the next level of your spiritual work, “your shit is going to come up.” It is naïve for us to believe (or be sold on the idea) that we can open new power and connection, or new consciousness, all through pleasure, peace, and joy.

I’m about to head off to Mexico for a daunting week of work with my teachers. I’ve been cranky as hell all week. Anxious, angry. Literally stumbling around, off-balance. Indecisive, confused, and very small-minded. I yelled at a guy that didn’t deserve it, then felt ashamed for two days. I suddenly realized, oh, yeah – I’m in the arms of Sprit, asking to step up, open up, grow. My shit is coming up. It has to, to clear the way for the whatever Spirit is going to deliver. I don’t like it. Spirit should work differently. It should be easier. The fact is, that’s not how it works. The number one skill here for the seeker, is to not get stuck in the shit as it oozes out. See it, acknowledge it, and let it go. None of this is easy.

Our nation, our species, is in this same place, at the threshold of the new consciousness. And our collective shit is coming up right now, which can be seen – if we want to see it this way – as a strong signal that we are getting worked by Spirit. Worked really well.

For me, the main task right now is to take on attitudes and practices that help move the shit out of us but not get stuck in it.

There are a few simple practices you can do to help. (I’m teaching a class that goes into depth on this that starts April 2.

Maybe the most important thing is what I mentioned above: spend time each day sitting in the larger view. Just sit quietly, five minutes, and be with that larger view. Breathe deeply. Simple.

Second, because we feel so victimized by circumstances (I didn’t vote for this, I’m not one of those crazies, I’m a good person surrounded by lunatics, the broligarchs are the evil ones, etc.) a difficult but powerful attitude is this: I chose to incarnate in this time, in this place, in these circumstances. I came here to work my own life task, which clearly involves navigating these whirling energies, or I wouldn’t be here. Three questions with working with right now:

What would it look like to step outside of my current fears and blames?

What is mine to do?

How can I be of service to the Good right now?

Third, don’t underestimate or diminish the power of your prayers. Everything that has ever co me into being through a human being began first in their prayers. So, be mindful with your prayers, but diligent.

Blessings of the equinox be on you.

You, Cows of Bashan!

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 17:47:47 GMT

Which God is running this show?

Apparently, we now live in the shining city on the hill where empathy is weakness and cruelty is both a strategy and entertainment, where the statue of liberty is waving a club as a smirking F-Off to the tired and poor. Astonishingly (as if anything can astonish us anymore) the strong and gleefully cruel ones are also super devout Christians. I don’t understand why other Christian leaders don’t state the obvious: These folks are not Christians. They are a new religion, the deformed child of a polyamorous marriage of social media, capitalism, and the Old Testament (but with all the poetry, wisdom, and social justice stripped out).

I think about the prophet Amos in those same scriptures who called the wealthy “You cows of Bashan!” meaning fat, well-groomed cows. He actually aimed the insult at the wives of rich men, but I think Elon Musk uses enough hair products and plastic surgery to qualify as a cow of Bashan. In my book of Amos, all the pampered billionaires and the preening faux manly men parading around social media these days are cows of Bashan. Amos said to the cows of his time that soon they will all be taken away with meat hooks because of their lack of empathy and smug superiority.

When I listen to MAGA-ites speak of God, I think of Carl Jung’s idea that humans need contact with awe-inspiring forces far larger than ourselves, or we get very small minded. we implode in on ourselves, and convince ourselves that we are the gods – that what we hate, God hates. Without true awe, which shatters us in certain ways, we shrink and collapse inward, and we spend our life amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The Hebrew prophets and the psychologists are clear: arrogance can become pathological and self-destructive.

When I hear the Republicans talk about God, I cannot help myself from thinking about the ancient Gnostic belief in the Demiurge : that the material world is not created by the true, supreme God, but by a lesser, imperfect being whose goal was to entrap souls and feed off their suffering and worship. A God who demands to be worshipped or he will kill you, like a leader who demands to be thanked and adored - clearly these are not worthy beings for our adoration. The Gnostics saw the God of the Bible as that Demiurge, not as the Supreme God. They saw Jesus not as a blood sacrifice to wash away sin (something the demiurge would be totally into) but as a blazing light illuminating our roadmap to free ourselves from the small, awe-less, false, hate-filled universe of the Demiurge. Not "Jesus saved me," but Jesus showed me. All of this thinking got the Gnostics banned and killed by the institutional church. Of course. Amos got killed by a politically well-connected prelist's son.

I think about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s speech (from two years ago, but floating around the internet now) where he describes cruelty as a conscious effort to stay un-evolved as a human being, and kindness as the difficult practice of moving our animal fears out of the driver’s seat so that our more evolved kindness can make the decisions for us. I like that so much. That’s as clear of an explanation as any for what’s going on right now. Maybe he will be president in a few years, after we find out what happens when you turn the government over to teenage boys.

Speaking of the boys, I think about how so many bro-dudes in the billionaires’ club seem to be devoted to the “transhuman” movement whose vision is eternal life as a sort of human/cyborg creature. Apparently the wanna-be trans-humans, like Peter Thiel (PayPal founder who is the puppet master of JD Vance) believe that death is an aberration. They see a world where billionaire trans-humans rule over a “Christian” world from their own island. They imagine a king of Olympus, but its really more of a Rolex-wrapped Lord of the Flies, except everyone is chipped and hydraulic in some way. Beyond the irony of their embrace of the “trans” word, I just have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to live eternally at all, much less on the island of lost boys with the bros.

I think about a Norwegian aphorism: “Death is the mother of beauty.” The bro dudes are seriously malnourished in actual beauty. They think beauty has to do with gold or with penises. But beauty has everything to do with vulnerability. This may explain why they are so afraid of death, because it is our ultimate vulnerability.

I feel sad for the bro-dudes when I think about what they are missing from this precious opportunity to be a human being, and how their denial of death equates directly with their lack of empathy. They could be using their immense power so beautifully. So beautifully! But, instead, they build rockets (penises again, sigh) and spend their energy finding ways to make the poor suffer more. But when I think about their easy cruelty and their off-the-charts arrogance, I don’t feel sad for them anymore; I just find myself wondering what form the meat hooks will take and when they come.

I want to be more spiritual about all of this. I want to be in neutrality and compassion. I want to see myself as conscious and compassionate and large-minded and gentle and loving and all Jesussy and Budda-y. I try every day to claw my way up to that 5D throne of light where all old shamans certainly sit.

But I really enjoyed it when I stumbled on that meat hook image. It felt good, and now I really like Amos.

I am not sure what my point to this entire piece is, except, I guess, this: If you are grieving and afraid, and mad and astonished, I’m with you, I’m all of those too. Let those energies live in you so they can help focus you. Grieving is important and appropriate right now because grief can ferment blind rage into right action. The time is building for right action. Let's be ready.

Meeting 2025 with power, strength and joy

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 18:09:44 GMT

Rebellious Advice for the New Year

Many people in my life don’t have optimism for 2025. Instead, they see a darkness looming. I feel like this often too. The social media provocateurs on “both sides” are dedicated not to describing reality or helping you understand the world, but only to stimulating your vitriol. That is the business model. I’ve had a 2024 full of that, and I want to be free of it in 2025.

I also want my life to be about much more than constant dread and outrage and finding distractions from both. I also want to help, in my tiny way, to participate in building a better world, a more loving world. I refuse to fall into the emotional trap set for me by the influencers, the talking heads, the pundits, the screamers. All of them are intent on drawing me down into their small universe, and I’m staking a 2025 claim: I freakin’ refuse to live in someone else’s small universe.

For me, 2025 is about two core strategies: 1) protecting myself from being devoured by the purveyors of the small universe, and 2) calling in expanding powers, life force, the binding power of love-mystery.

Here are my strategies for thriving in 2025

• A daily spiritual practice. A spiritual practice has one basic goal: to replace the power that we lose as the world drains us. There are uncountable practices, but I believe the core is doing the practice in the morning before the whirlwind of the day begins. Dedicate time for intimacy between you and creation.

• Refuse to get lodged in outrage. Outrage is a useful splash of energy to kick open the door to justice. But it’s a terrible bathtub to soak in all day. Outrage is also a dopamine blast, and that’s why once we get lodged in it, we need more and more. There are two movements out of outrage. First, the (not easy) practice of acceptance. Acceptance is a savvy spiritual practice. It is not “giving up,” withdrawal, or denial. Acceptance is seeing reality for what it is, without succumbing to vitriol. Check out Pema Chodron or Tara Brach for help in this.

• Pick who you want to help and focus your energies there.

• Explore tonglen meditation (a Buddhist technique). See here . Or here.

• Commit to taking in live arts made by, presented by, and attended by, live humans. Especially try unfamiliar art forms. This opens your curiosity which is core attribute of the creator spirit.

• Rather than texting that friend, meet them.

• Put strict limits on your social media intake. What you eat, you become. If there is evil in the world, its name is algorithm. Decide not to add that comment that echoes the outrage. Decide not to post that new outrage. Refuse to play the game called “add to the woe.”

• Stop multi-tasking and pay attention to one thing. This is the critical skill of “concentration” taught by shamans and Buddhist masters, among others. This skill imbues you with the defense against distraction, and distraction is a tool used by the small-universe purveyors to keep you confused and powerless.

• Sing. Sing praise and blessing to the trees, the wind, the birds, the earth, the sun, the moon. You don’t need words, and you don’t need to sound good. You only need to open your love and give it voice. If that love-singing is lubricated by tears, congratulations.

• Make art, especially shitty art. Unhitch yourself from any desire to make it appealing, or fine, or pleasing, or valuable to the world. Focus on using it to open the feelings you are afraid to open.

• Cook meals for yourself and others. If you think you’re a bad cook, just use salt and garlic powder on everything.

• Read poetry out loud, and sloooow. Speak it three times more slowly than you want to. Repeat some of the lines over and over.

• Memorize short spiritual poems. If poetry is new to you, a good place to start is Rumi, and here is a very good book . Leave the phone out of the bathroom, print out a poem in 20 point bold Helvetica, and tape it on the wall cross from the toilet. This gives you focused time each day to memorize. (Poetry also s great for the bowels becasue it slows you down.)

• Of course, spend much more time outside, especially in open spaces or green spaces. Bless the earth and thank her for giving you the opportunity to be in a body. Bless all the other bodies you see around you.

• Invite some people to a game night at your house or a suitable public space.

• Enter into the Buddhist perspective that you have already lived billions, yes billions, of lifetimes, and that means that every person you meet or see has been your mother in another lifetime.

• Remember that you’re going to die someday, and the great gift is that you don’t know when. You may die before you reach the end of this sentence. Or maybe next week, or in 40 years. What a gift, this uncertainty! Meditating on this reality helps to focus your decisions.

• Before drinking water, bless it.

• Bless your partner regularly, and your children, and your friends, and, silently, strangers, and those who you despise. To bless means to ask for expansion and intimacy with creation. (Don’t send “healing” to people without their express permission. In blessing we ask Spirit to do the work.) Be careful of becoming spiritually arrogant. Blessing doesn’t make you holy or superior, it just helps glue life together.

• Remember that the purveyors of the small universe want you to feel chaotic, depressed, and powerless, and when they do, they win. Be a rebel: allow yourself to feel joy. (Harder than it seems. Ask yourself what real joy is to you, and how you tell the difference between joy and distraction.)

• Be kind to strangers. When they return kindness, add it into your “the world is good” list. When they are unkind, open your heart and pray that love comes to them.

• Place your attention on “My Divine Yes.” In the biblical tradition of the prophets, there is what’s called the “divine no,” and “the divine yes.” The divine yes is what glues life together. The divine no is what tears it apart. What is the highest, most noble human attribute – the core gift from Spirit that you believe is the most fundamental to promoting life? Inside that is your divine yes. We all emerge from the wavy sea of pre-creation. The deep current of that great sea is the ungraspable energy of “wanting to become” – what the philosopher Spinoza called conatus (effort or endeavor) and what the Celtic shamans call yearning. I name that core yearning: love, the love of life for life itself. It is this love that coaxes us into existence, into form, that binds all things together, and that bestows upon you that not-quite-touchable yearning you feel in your depths. All politics, culture wars, economies, empires, even planets and galaxies will pass away, but the glue of life, the yearning of life for life itself, persists through it all. Find your divine yes, and work it, bring it into the world somehow.

May you be blessed by the mother of life

May you remember that she is always here to cleanse you and call new life into you

May you remember that darkness doesn’t last

And that love is stronger than fear

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

And to others.

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where

there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.

May you be uplifted, rekindled, brightened, and warmed by Love in the coming year.

That Big Question is not Going to Get Answered

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 23:03:06 GMT

Wrestling With Greater Angels

Your big question is not going to get answered.

You have a giant question writhing around inside you. For each of us it may be a different question, but we all have one. You’ve been wrestling with it, trying to articulate it your whole life, trying to find an answer.

The image comes up for me of the Tarzan TV show from my boyhood. Every episode it seemed like he wrestled some creature in the river – a crocodile, a snake, a bad guy. When you look at nearly all of our childhood cartoons and other shows, and many faery tales, there’s a lot of wrestling with some adversary. This is at the core of the western mind: to be alive is to wrestle with the unknown. For the western mind, the adversary is a tormentor to be vanquished.

For the shamanic mind, that adversary is an ally, a teacher of power, someone to listen to. I’ve learned this as I have gotten older, and as I’ve walked the shamanic path now for 40 years. There is a place in my western mind that wants to tell me I have failed, because I should have answered that giant question by now. This is the mind fueled by dominance, which fantasizes about putting the struggle to rest, putting it behind me, killing it. But the shamanic mind is fueled not by dominance, but by expansion, which focuses on what the mystics call “transcend and include.” We wrestle to learn, expand, transcend this current bit of wrestling, include its learning and power in us, and walk on.

Of course, the giant question in you puts out tendrils like the invasive weed. The giant question becomes scores of other interlocked questions. Western philosophy, and its self-important brother, theology, tell us that constant questioning is a sign of intelligence (and a mark of being smarter than other people). Socrates was famous for advising, “question everything.” This may be true, but it also may be a recipe for a weed-filled garden of the mind. The Buddha warned people against getting lost in unanswerable questions because they are just another form of distraction - like the 1,000 thoughts of fear and desire that arise as soon as we begin to meditate. Let all that shit go, as the wise ones say.

According to the western philosophy, there is one giant question: “Why is there anything at all?” Or “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Then the thought-Kudzu begins its invasive glee, and the tendrils begin snaking their way out:

Where did I come from?

What is there after "This”?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

How shall I live?

The inner voice demands a cogent, final, unchanging answer. Guess what? That’s not coming.

We can only “answer” these questions through contemplation, then taking on a faith - an inner story. But faith doesn’t provide answers, it provides us a story to stand on so that we can make decisions and walk the earth. Faith allows us to claim who I am in the scheme of the great mystery and generate actions from that place. Faith is not final solid ground, but a current launching pad for our actions. The great mistake made by seemingly all of us is to believe that once we have a faith, it must never change. Nothing in nature never changes, so to quest for an unchanging faith is unnatural. Faith is an activation of the bigger mind – call it wisdom if you will. - bigger than the "yes/no" daily mind. This mind is the one that holds the great paradox of life – not in comfort, but in respect and reverence, wonder and amusement. The poet Rilke says it like this:

This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings. ( Read the whole wonderful poem)

So, I say again, your big question is never going to get answered. Accepting that makes life so much easier.

Should you stop asking your big question? Not at all. That leads to nihilism – the idea that nothing matters, like when I was one day riding the infamously dicey 21A bus through central Minneapolis. I took a seat in the very back, and saw scrawled with a finger in the dirt on the window: “Grave = Why Bother?” That’s “sinking to the bottom like a fish going to sleep,” as the Sufi poet Rumi says. You can live like that, but it won’t make life easier or more fun – it will just dull everything that comes your way, like self-prescribed lithium.

The magic of being sentient is it gives us a lifetime of asking questions while understanding that they won’t be answered. It can help to enter the asking as “exploration of mystery” rather than a demand to receive and answer.

I'm thinking about the spiritual catch-phrases, "raise your vibration," "create your own reality," "ascension," and "personal transformation." These are all good things to work on, certainly. But they are also incredibly active. It's worth remembering that our culture (the “Protestant work ethic”) has embedded in us a largely unquestioned belief that our life’s task is to work, work, work - that our value and identity come from our doing, doing, doing. We easily apply that same unquestioned belief to our spiritual life. We convince ourselves to be optimistic so that we can summon hope so that we get to our frenzy of manifesting. It doesn't matter if your frenzy is about climbing the corporate ladder, bringing justice NOW, or ascending your spiritual ladder, if you're living in frenzy, grasping for some purity or completion that is lacking in you, it's still frenzy, which is something to look at.

Hope is important, and so we want to focus on "ways out of this mess." But I’m challenged by the Buddhists saying hope is the other side of fear, and the two are always connected, like heads and tails on a coin. The Tibetan Buddhists say we cannot escape fear through hope; we escape fear by abandoning hope . Throw the entire coin of heads-tails/hope-fear into the wishing well.

That’s a difficult idea to work with, because our cowboy mentality equates abandoning hope with "giving up," which only a loser would do. You'll never get 1,000 clients, or get rich, or invent that new gizmo, solve that problem by giving up. You'll never reach spiritual perfection by giving up.

The shamanic approach to all of this echoes the Buddhist in terms of releasing fear and the grasping that comes with it. Toss the entire coin into the well. But the reason I’m a shamanist rather than a Buddhist is the next part of the shamans’ advice: Release fear, and open complete trust in Spirit; rather than fearing, then working and grasping, release all fear, open trust in Spirit, and allow yourself to be guided. Clearly, this is a “next-level” skill, or humanity would be far different than it is.

My teacher says a core shaman’s motto is, “fear is never justified.” He says, when you feel fear, just turn to the fear, and tell it, “You have no power over me. Fear is never justified.” Keep saying it until the current fear dissipates. I wrestle with that, but I try to use it, and it is often transformative for me.

When I go out in the dark morning for my daily prayer, I often get wrapped up in prayers for manifesting, growing, maturing, serving, expanding. Often, what happens is nothing happens. No new idea, new inspiration, new confidence, new answer. But often, a slight breeze raises up during my prayer. The little wind chimes in the garden sing, and a power dances around me reminding me that everything is far bigger than my frenzy of manifesting, and that I might consider trying to be more like the wind chimes. It might be good for me to stop singing prayers for a minute and try to let the hum of the earth sing its way into me and hold me. The earth-hum is a real thing, measured by instruments. One geologist described it "like TV static slowed down 10,000 times." When that breeze comes up, a phrase flows into my mind: “I am in my unknowing.”

This phrase affirms that 99% of everything is beyond my understanding, and I should not forget to travel into that spaciousness, that void, that womb of all possibility, as often as I work work work on my personal transforming-vibration-ascension-holy wahoo.

So, a truly simple practice of abandoning hope and the frenzy of personal growth is to sit quietly in the dark and allow yourself to be in your unknowing. Here is a helpful set of mysterious phrases you can use:

I am in my knowing (take a moment to describe for yourself three things you absolutely know, and feel that feeling.)

I am in my unknowing (take a moment to describe for yourself three things you absolutely do not know, and feel that feeling.)

I am in my trust.

The Tibetans add in this wondrous practice: Hold your cupped hands out. Imagine the earth in your cupped hands. Really see it and feel it in its beauty and suffering. Then hold it up, and release it into the care and supervision of -- call it whatever pleases you: infinity, the void, the enlightened ones, the Mystery, the deities, the Holy Ones, the Great Spirit, Source, the Tao. "Here take the world. It's too big for us to manage. You take it." Like so much of what I've learned, I wrestled mightily with this practice for a long time. But I say now, I love it and find it very helpful. I don't know exactly why, but I do.

A few years ago, I did a difficult few days of work with Ayahuasca, which is regular part of my training in Peru these last ten years. I entered the week with a searing question: “How do I know if I am ordained?” That word, ordained, is not shamanic, but its an apt word for what many shamanic practitioners worry bout: “Who am I to be doing this kind of work?” This doubt is seen in the ever-present argument on social media over what makes for a true, real, authentic shaman. This is a big question for anyone doing shamanic work, because it’s about claiming spiritual authority and confidence. Doing that takes a long time, with a great deal of self-healing, study, and courage. As D.H. Lawrence says:

..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.” ( Find it here )

The Ayahuasca journey was nightmarish. For two hours I switched off between weeping and vomiting. My head was pounding so hard I felt sure I was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage. I came to the conclusion that I was going to die in this ceremony and had to be okay with that. I crawled up to my teacher for a healing, and for over an hour he worked on me with song and tobacco smoke, with fragrant water and more songs as I continued to weep, vomit, almost pass out, repeat.

Suddenly the ceiling above me opened, revealing the starry cosmos, and the big dipper shining. An old man and old woman gazed down at me with some compassion and curiosity. She dipped a ladle into the big dipper constellation, and poured drops of what I can only call “pearlescent star-milk” into my head. My weeping and vomiting ceased. The headache faded nearly instantly. I was left with a slight dizzy, dazed and full feeling. The old man smiled at me and said, “Does that answer your question?”

Not really. Yes, sort of.

This is the way it is.

Under the Panic: Mind The Gap!

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 20:02:33 GMT

What kind of person do I want to be?

This week has been filled with panic. Every week is panic nowadays. The election. Democracy. The Cataclysm.

I think about the signs in the London subway: Mind the Gap. They remind you to pay attention to the space between the train platform and the train’s car. Some of the gaps are big enough to fall into. Years ago, in Inverness Scotland, an old man fell into the gap, and the train I was on ran over him.

This takes me to the famous phrase (attributed to everyone from Plato to Victor Frankl to Mark Twain): “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” To stay in our power and access our freedom, we need to mind the gap. This world is designed to deliver panic to me. It’s my choice to mind that gap between that “stimulus” and my response.

The acerbic comic, Bill Maher, said recently that panicked people ask him, “My god! What if Trump is re-elected?! His answer: “We go on living.” Under the unending forms of panic that this world will deliver to me, my basic question remains unchanged: What kind of person do I want to be? Panic always wants me to Blind the Gap - the recipe for falling under the train.

Does it help me to have big spiritual explanations for why the evil doers seem to be winning in the world today?

Does it help me to know that it’s not just here in the USA - that authoritarianism is attracting people all over the world? Worldwide, people are experiencing the evaporation of “ existential safety. ” All the norms that have crumbled leave us feeling like there's no solid ground to stand on. Authoritarians promise one thing: to restore safety. That's the attraction, and it's why their actual policies and character don't matter to frightened people. All decent spiritual work is about addressing existential safety head on.

Does it help me to know that humanity – and perhaps the earth itself – is in a spiritual initiation, something that has happened many times before? For the first time, we are all, across the globe, truly in this together. Every initiation involves a grueling process of releasing the current identity before you have any real clue as to what the next identity will look like. The immensity of this global work cannot be overstated. Fluffy theology likes to pretend that initiation is some kind of pleasant light of new wisdom that gently opens your mind. That has never been true. No birth happens without pain.

Does it help me to know that channeled entities from the mid-causal plane have made it clear that our collective human soul age is evolving out of the young soul stage and into the mature soul stage? The younger soul's universe is more black and white, good versus evil, all about "me." We are evolving toward more nuance, more interdependence. In a fairly short time, many of the killing fights we are having right now won’t be on the table anymore. (By the way, if you are reading this, you’re likely not a young soul. And by the way, being an older soul in no way means you are better, calmer, happier, smarter or wiser than a young soul. It just means that certain things that matter to young souls matter less to you, because you’ve already explored them in previous lifetimes.)

Does it help me to understand the idea of extinction burst : a sudden and dramatic increase in behavior when reinforcement for that behavior is removed. A toddler whose bedtime screaming has always resulted in his parents running in to soothe him will scream louder and longer when the parents decide to stop running in. A person who has had unquestioned authority will become more brutal when it's clear that their reign is over.

Does it help me to know that nearly every tribe’s functional myth – the myth that describes how God wants “us” to act – been shattered by the new reality of global interdependence? The clarity of the tribe is gone, and the authority of the old tribal god is up for question. We’re all wondering what “God” wants from us when "God" is no longer local and tribal.

Does it help me to know that ancient predictions from the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Toltecs and others have pinpointed our time period as “the new sun emerging ?” A completely new foundational life energy is pouring in, never before seen, and while no one knows what life will look like, the new sun will help us – and compel us – to reinvent life as we know it. It will be difficult, but life will be far better for all.

Yes, all of these things help me.

These ideas pour some spiritual support and a kind of bigger optimism into the gap between the panic and my response to the panic. They help me understand that I cannot control any of the energies listed above. They are too big. Moment to moment, all I can do is mind the gap between panic an my response to panic; mind the gap between the ground I'm standing on and the train that is leaving the station. Minding the gap means asking myself the same question again and again: “What kind of person do I want to be?” This question doesn’t change, no matter what kind of whirlwind is spinning around me, no matter where the train is heading.

Is this easy, is it a magical fix? Heck no. But calling in support from Spirit helps. Ask Spirit to pour power and support into the gap with you so that can make the best decisions about who you want to be at each moment, in your own power and freedom.

The New Rule

Mon, 20 May 2024 16:01:48 GMT

Navigating a world out of control

The great Sufi Master, Rumi, born 700 years ago, says,

“It’s the old rule that drunks have to argue and get into fights.”

He’s talking about zealots. Fanatics are drunk on bad wine – the wine of the ego – and the outcome is always predictable: arguing and fights. We have many zealots these days, and a lot of bad wine. In troubled times like ours, it’s hard to tell the difference between justice-making and zealotry. The guide, as always, seems to be if there is any real listening going on, or just sermonizing and shouting.

Rumi goes on to describe the mystic (“the lover”) who wanders the land trying to find true spiritual inspiration. Wandering around, head in the clouds, she falls into hole.

The lover is just as bad: she falls into a hole.
But down in that hole she finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.

And then, Rumi’s poem leaps into the stratosphere:

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.

This is where we are right now. Everywhere – the ground that we have been standing on for so long – is breaking, and the shards of what we once stood on are falling everywhere. Then, in one of the most beautiful lines ever written, he says:

Here’s the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the Glassblower’s breath.

(Rumi, “The New Rule,” translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks)

I try to keep those two lines as a mantra in the back of my mind to help me through these times where everything is falling everywhere. Those words describe what I hope, hope, hope, is happening to our world right now.

In every spiritual system, there is the idea that Spirit, not humans, control reality. “Let go; Let God” is a common phrase for some.

Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman offers a sweetly potent prayer as part of larger meditation: Imagine holding the globe of the earth in your hands. See all the trouble, the vitriol, the fear, going on in that small ball. Raise the globe up to the heavens, release it, give it away, and, addressing the uncountable Buddhas, the deities, the enlightened teachers and mentors, the powers of creation, say, “Here, you take the planet. We’ve messed it up. We can’t fix it. We can’t fix our own problems. But you can. Take it. It’s yours.”

I was harshly resistant to this brief practice at first, because it reminded me of religious zealots saying “God is in control! God's will!" whenever they are faced with issues they don’t want to see or attend to – issues of justice and suffering that we absolutely can change.

But I must say, I have used this little visualization frequently in my daily practice in the last year, and there is something in it that relieves some pressure for me, and helps me breathe more freely. The thing is, we do have to remember that we are not in control . It is one of the secrets of human life that we must come to terms with. HOW you come to terms with it - how you relate to the lack of overall control - determines what kind of life you will lead.

If you have any sense of the Great Mysterious Spirit of Life, it’s helpful to remember that, as mere humans, we know nearly nothing of the larger reality in which we swim. It’s helpful to formally acknowledge that, and “let go.” And, if you do have sense of Spirit as willing or eager to interact with you, then a prayer acknowledging this lack of control over realty is great, followed by asking Spirit for strength and help navigate the world, asking for clarity, love, wonder and compassion to guide you, rather than fear.

As summer begins to open, as the full moon approaches, my wish for each of you is to let the moon help you disrobe from any outdated clothing you’ve been wearing for too long, and sing with ecstasy as you allow yourself to fall toward the glassblower’s breath.

Prayer for the Sun

Wed, 01 May 2024 14:56:16 GMT

Greeting the Father/Mother of Life

I wrote this as a Beltane prayer to honor the return of the light half of the year. However, greeting the sun is a core prayer practice and this prayer can be used as a morning prayer or summer solstice prayer. I've played with some phrases and structures from charms found in the Scottish highlands. Feel free to use it, adapt it, make it your own.

You are the sun of suns

Bountiful mother of life

Singer of the great song of flourishing.

How grateful I am to behold you once more

When so many have passed beyond

Since last I bowed my head to you.

Bless, oh light of life,

Music of wonder and delight,

My loved ones, my family, my children and my animals.

Bless the people of earth and all creatures of life.

Cleanse them of any sickness,

In mind, in heart, in body and in soul.

Open the wondrous road of fruition to each one.

In the windswept hills, on the blossoming plain, in the rivers and waters, and in the deep.

Bless everything in my dwelling

And in my responsibility.

Bless them with the abundance that they have been seeking for all of this life and all other lives.

The creatures and crops,

From hill to valley,

From wave to wave

From gust to gust

From edge to deep

In currents and soil

Bless all with your great song of full life.

Protect us from all harm

From all evil

From arrow, spear and blade

From unkind words and thoughts

From envy and narrowness of heart

And all theft of life.

Deliver fullness and fruiting to each,

A full four-chambered heart to every one.

Health, endurance and vision to each

And, to each,

Sweetness of soul.

The Struggle With Faith

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:10:26 GMT

Don't sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep.

From chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching (circa 400 BCE, China)

…The living are soft and flexible.

When we die, we become hard and stiff;

The dead are rigid, unmoving.

The greenery - grasses, plants and trees

Growing are tender and supple,

Dead are dry and brittle.

…A tree that won’t bend

Easily breaks in storms.

The hard and strong will fail,

The open-hearted prevail.

I want to talk about faith. To be honest, I’m afraid to use that word because it’s been co-opted too often twisted into a sickening pretense. I’m afraid because faith is too big of an issue for little me to step into. And mostly I’m afraid that maybe I don’t have any real faith.

So, here I go.

Faith is difficult. We’ve lost so much faith in what we used to have faith in. That’s both heartbreaking and wonderfully freeing. I see the tsunami of anger flowing through the world today as primarily an expression of both our heartbreak and freedom as faith in old things crumbles. It’s difficult to summon faith while we swim in anger.

Sometimes I think it’s best not to have faith in anything. It’s a world of lies, pretense and manipulation. Nothing can be trusted, everything is meaningless. Once, on a bus through central Minneapolis, I sat in the very back seat. Scrawled with a finger in the dust on the window: “Grave = Why bother?”

This is the classic philosophy of nihilism, from the root, “empty”: the world is empty of meaning. I so want to dive into that state of mind. But every teacher I admire - the Buddhist masters, the shamans, even the Christians say don’t go there. The Sufi poet Rumi says, “Don’t sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep for the winter.” So, I think, Nihilism = not the solution. Nietzsche, (“God is dead”) one of the fathers of nihilism, said it was actually an important passageway in human development. So, maybe we are all, right now, in this passageway together. I don’t know.

Then I think, well life may not be meaningless, but at least I can stand firmly in a place of utter, total mistrust. Everyone has a hidden agenda, and at least I won’t fall for that. That takes me into the classical stance of skepticism and cynicism. I don’t use these terms as insults – they are philosophical positions, wisdom lineages from ancient Greece (Phyrro and Diogenes). Both philosophies have at their core a practice of “standing apart” from the world, of relying on one’s own judgment rather than accepting without question the story being told. There’s power in that, in trusting myself, and only myself.

But mostly there’s a sense of safety in that, of standing apart. But if I’m standing apart in overall mistrust because I’m afraid of the grief that comes with trying to have faith in something, then I’m just standing aside from intimacy with life. I really don’t want to waste this entire incarnation living in a cold, walled fortress.

I want to have faith in life. I want some warmth and beauty out of this incarnation. Not the uncountable twisted, thin forms of passing warmth and fake beauty my culture tosses my way, but real warmth and beauty, real awe. John O’ Donohue, the Irish poet-mystic, calls this the "longing of divine urgency.”

The mystical traditions throughout the world tell us we have two urges: the small urge toward repeating our fears, and the other toward inconceivable awe and love. We can follow either. Your longing for the divine is matched only by the Divine's longing for you.

Taking a breath now…

The old definition of faith is something along the lines of “unshakable loyalty to an unprovable story.” In that definition, the marker of real faith is unbending rigidity. A faithful person is steadfast, immovable, uncompromising. In that old definition, to be faithful means to harden yourself against the world of flux and change, make an enemy of whatever carries change. However, since life is always in flux, the old definition means we harden ourselves against the life force itself.

It's helpful to draw a distinction between belief and faith. Belief is a mental activity, of making a mental commitment to a story or set of teachings. Faith is not intellectual; it is a sensory experience. People leave religions when those systems only offer belief but not a full-bodied faith which carries us into intimacy with life. When religions become enemy factories, they no longer offer faith.

It can be said that much shamanic healing involves, in one way or another, restoring someone’s intimacy with life. The healing involves locating and clearing the places in the body or energy field where the trust in life has been blocked. Then new energy (blessing) is poured to that place. Then the person takes on practices that change old habits that were standing on the mistrust of life.

Here’s the thing: faith is supposed to be difficult. When we became sentient, we entered an agreement to wrestle with life rather than blindly eat, shit, acquire, reproduce, and die. Real faith always, always, always, has some struggle in it, because real faith is always growing or shifting, like all other alive things. The tulips buried in the dark ground right now in early spring need to struggle to send the first green shoot up. They don’t know if there’s a rock on top that will stop that shoot from reaching the light. Struggle comes first, then results – and results are not guaranteed. Discomfort is part of the price of admission to faith, for being alive and sentient.

So, I propose we replace the old definition of faith (“unshakable loyalty to the unprovable”) with, “Faith is my clumsy dance between the smallness of things and the largeness of things, and my exploration of the wonder in no guarantees.”

And, I suggest we replace the word “belief” with “awareness.” Belief is mental, but awareness is embodied – it is an act of opening to the life force. We can argue over beliefs because arguing is a mental game too, just like belief. But it‘s really impossible to argue over awareness.

Here are two very simple but potent ways I have been taught to work with awareness (one taught by humans, the other taught by the spirits). Both require you to first take some time, slow down, breathe a bit, enter into an open state.

First: Merely ask yourself: “What am I aware of right now?” This is a classic mindfulness meditation approach, opening to one awareness after another, letting them float by, withdrawing any judgement from whatever arises, with no need to fix anything. Withdrawing judgment is the key. Just be a witness. As soon as we enter judgement, we exit the realm of faith. To let go of judgement, let go of any and all story that is attached to whatever arises. That is so easy to type, but it’s a lifelong task. If all you do in this life is work to train the mind in this way, it puts you in the top percentile of sentient beings. If you are unfamiliar with the work of Byron Katie, check out her Four Liberating Questions .

Second: Sit or stand (preferably outside), close your eyes, and explore what you are aware of around you in the physical world (rather than inside you – emotions and thoughts – which is the focus of the first practice). Move your awareness outward, more and more and more, in ever-widening circles. For example: I am aware of my heart beating, aware of my breath moving, my organs working. Give this time. Then I am aware of roots under the earth, the tulips under the earth and the decomposers at work in the soil.. I am aware that they are there right now. Give this some time. I am aware of sparrows’ wings flapping. I am aware that the neighborhood hawk is swooshing somewhere, unseen. And that dog that howls so mournfully every day at 10 am, for three minutes only. Someone rolling trash cans to the curb. Slight wind. The angle of sunlight. People riding a bus on a nearby street. The Mississippi river, a mile east of me. Satellites orbiting. Moons, planets, galaxies. Try to hold the entire picture of all that you became aware of - awareness of the totality of all this life going on all at once, right now, around you. Hold this awareness as long as you can. When thoughts or emotions intervene, (“Damn- did I leave the stove on?”) let them go, as in the first practice, let go of the emotions, let go of all stories connected to any of the images, and return to holding the totality of life happening around you right now, all in movement, all in flux, ever-shifting.

The master teachers say these practices should be done for at least ten years before asking, “why am I doing this?” But if you do these practices for even a little while, you may find that you have stepped into the present moment - otherwise known as the eternal dance of life. The outward expansion of awareness takes you out of the smaller, rational mind, into what can be called the bigger mind, the primal mind, the mind that always touches the real world, the “spacious silence” that is, in every spiritual tradition, linked with pure Spirit. The present moment and faith are married, and it is right here where all power resides. The Celtic tradition calls this, “The music of this moment – the finest music ever made.” Creation is never in the past, never in the future, and never afraid. As is faith.

How to Summon Optimism in this World

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:17:36 GMT

The only effective way to change the world

How to Summon Optimism in this World

Follow me on a winding journey:

1. Authenticity:

People like to argue over what is authentic and what is not. In shamanism, in all religion, in art, in science. In my world of Western-urban-neo-shamanic practice, it’s always “how the indigenous masters do it or did it” is authentic. I don’t discount that, and it’s why I’ve spent nine years dedicating myself to contact with indigenous lineages. But there is something else that’s more important to attend to.

A slight digression to illustrate: Jesus was not an authentic Jew. Buddha was not an authentic Vedic Hindu. Marcel Duchamp was not an authentic artist when he placed a urinal into a fancy art exhibit in 1917. Max Planck was told by his professor in the 1880’s not to pursue physics because everything had already been figured out. He wasn’t an authentic physicist when he opened the door to quantum theory. None of these seekers were worried about authenticity. Their focus was on how our understanding of truth evolves, and their attention was on opening the door to the next level of truth.

Strictly speaking, authentic, ancient, original shamanism does not necessarily involve love or compassion. Its concern is purely about power and how to use it. Shamans had/have access to a power beyond ordinary consciousness (what we can call the spirits) and they learned to wield it. They could wield it with or without love or compassion. That is as true today as it has always been, and this is the basic difference between what we now commonly call a shaman and sorcerer.

So, a better and more effective ongoing concern for anyone practicing shamanism is to place your concern on whether you are operating with love and compassion rather than whether you are operating by authentic ancient rules.

2. The Safety of Naiveté

I used to think that we would invent warp drive and everyone, including the oil barons, would shout hooray. It didn’t occur to me that the oil barons would resist the invention of warp drive because it would put them out of business. It didn’t occur to me that change would always involve the reality that most people aren’t interested in a better world; they are interested in maintaining their current pleasure.

I fell with ecstasy and optimism into the feminism and civil rights of the 1970’s, which spurred the deconstruction of the “God-As-Giant-White-Man” archetype. I didn’t realize that calling those transforming energies forward would, of course, call up resistance – the backlash toward feminism and civil rights that we see now.

The difference between naivety and optimism is the awareness of the price to be paid for positive evolution.

Our world is in a massive transformation. It is naïve to think the resistance wouldn’t be massive, deep, dangerous, and deadly. We spend much of our time and energy wrestling with that resistance - we spend a massive amount of energy raging on social media, or giggling to the videos in our bubble where our side owns and ridicules the other side. It is important to allow the anger because anger is the natural response to waking up our compassion for the suffering of the world.

But anger is only the door to compassion. If we don’t continue through it, into actual compassion, it hardens into the concrete of hate, and that is the story of our time. For “both sides” of the political strata, hate has concretized, and concrete can only be moved by physical smashing. This is where we are.

3. The Practice of Compassion

You cannot summon true optimism without summoning compassion. Optimism without compassion is just hiring a different general for the same army. Compassion is not a state of mind, nor a gift that some good people have, and others don’t. Like everything else with being a human, it is a practice. If you are someone who believes in multiple lifetimes, and that we come here to learn, there is really only one thing that we are ultimately here for, and that is love: to learn to love ourselves, and find a way to love others.

We mistake love when we believe it is a human feeling, an emotion. It is not. It is an energy field. Of all the energies (powers) that we have available to us to work with on this physical plane, love is the energy that we feel when we are in full awareness of the Creator, Source, God/Dess, Spirit. Contact with Spirit manifests in the human body as the feeling we call love.

This is where shamanic training enters. We practice working with the trees and plants, with our guides, with the elements, with the medicine wheel. Love-compassion is a power that we must practice, or we don’t get better at it. We cannot enter into optimism without practicing love.

Pablo Casals was the finest cellist of his generation, world famous, wealthy, a master. In 1957, at the age of 80, Casals was asked why he continues to practice five hours a day. He answered: “Because I think I am making progress.”

Professional athletes practice the fundamentals every day. Throw the ball, catch the ball, run with the ball. Everything about making a difference in the world – individually or for the whole - involves rigorous, non-ceasing practice.

But somehow, we want to believe that compassion is something you have or don’t.

4. Powerlessness

I struggle with a sense of powerlessness in the face of such immense challenges we face. Besides organizing, voting, working to get more voters like you to the polls, and protesting, there is very little I can do. I often worry that prayer and meditation and inner work are my way of escaping reality - some kind of real-world-bypassing. And that can be true.

But I always come back to this: if I see love as an energy field, it changes the perspective. The quantum physicist Max Planck, said, “When we change the way we see things, the things we see change.” This is the way of the quantum world, and it is the way of compassion as well. Victor Frankl, the famous author and Holocaust survivor, said, “Everything can be taken from [us] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We have ample, direct evidence of the reality of energy fields changing the world. In the last few years, hatred and derisiveness – energy fields – have been called into the world in massive amounts, and it has changed our world.

So, the most practical, and only truly effective way to change our world is to fill your life and the immediate world around you with more love and compassion, with kindness on every level – as energy fields being called in. There are places I want to say, “Yes, – except for that person, or that situation.” And that is exactly where I need to focus my practice. Is this easy? Of course not. But did you think changing the world would be easy? Did you think being a human being would be easy? Being a vapor being living in the rings of Saturn is easy. You’re a human in a body - you’re in spiritual grad school here.

If you have a compassion practice already, then this article is hopefully just a helpful reminder and a booster. If this article helps you realize you don’t have a compassion practice, here is simple way to start:

When you are watching your in-the-bubble videos where that horrendously horrible idiot is spouting their stuff, and the host is “taking them down,” and it’s funny and awful, take a moment to realize all the suffering going on at that moment:

Your suffering that you are hoping will be assuaged by making fun of the enemy, or by feeling superior to them.

The host of the video’s suffering, that their skills, intelligence and wit need to be focused on this kind of work rather than on creating beauty in the world.
The suffering of the horrendous person, who is so filled with fear of loving and being loved that their true radiant being has become twisted.
Call in the energy field of love – the presence of Source, the forgiveness of the Christ, or Mother Mary, the radiance of White Tara or Guadalupe or Brigid, the fearless awareness of the Buddha, the motherly love of Earth Mother and Sky Father – whatever form it may take for you - call it in for all three of you, to wash out fear.

You can find 1000 more formal ways to practice compassion by Googling “how to practice compassion.”

In Closing:

Compassion is not weakness.

Compassion is medicine for the sick.

Compassion is not denial.

Compassion is healing for the world.

Compassion is not fantasy.

Like magnetism, gravity, and light, compassion is an energy field that can be used.

Compassion is not pity.

Compassion is strength sent to help.

Compassion is not pacifism.

Compassion is engaging with the world on the level that the world needs most for long-term positive change.

Compassion is not a nice periphery action.

It is your medicine for optimism.

If you like this piece, please feel free to share it.

- Jaime Meyer is President of the Board of The Society for Shamanic Practice. He is a practitioner living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For classes and personal sessions: www.drummingthesoulawake.com

Embracing The Dark Feminine in a World of Seeming Chaos

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 23:02:11 GMT

In the northern hemisphere, as we step into winter, the north on the medicine wheel, we have stepped into the embrace of the Dark Feminine. What is this power, and how can we work with it? I hope this article helps you grasp what is happening in our world right now from a mythic angle, and I offer some practices that may help.

The Celtic tradition has many instances of a young man encountering a repulsive, hideously ugly old hag who offers him some kind of power – often, water from a well – if only he will kiss her. Most of the men who meet her refuse in disgust, but the one who will become king embraces her deeply. The Celtic hag is the archetypal Dark Feminine, the initiator of the masculine into its mature depths.

Many of the patriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) meet their wives at a well as the woman draws water up. The motif signals that these are the men who will lead. While the women characters are not the “loathly hag,” archetype, they carry the same initiating power.

It’s important to point out that, while these stories seem to focus on human men, we will get ourselves tied in patriarchal knots if we don’t remember that we all have masculine and feminine inside us – the stories are not always about gender.

The Dark Feminine comes to initiate the masculine into its own darkness – refining and fermenting the light, youthful masculine into its depths. In the Celtic world, the men who refuse to kiss the hag are either left behind never to be heard from, or they are sent on a journey to suffer in their arrogance until they have a breakthrough.

“Beauty and the Beast” is an example: The arrogant prince is offered initiation by the old hag at his door. She appears in a rainstorm, holding a rose, asking for his hospitality. He refuses, slams the door, and she changes him into a hideous beast. He ultimately receives the same initiation – expansion out of self-centeredness and into the power of love and compassion – he just must take the long road through suffering.

This is the world we are living in. The “shift in consciousness” that so many of us are talking about is an initiation of the light masculine being facilitated by the dark feminine. She’s at the door with the rose of expanded love, asking to be let in.

In a way, I’m describing here a reversal of our common ideas of light and dark, whose roots are in Plato (400 B.C.E.) and Neoplatonism (300 C.E.). In that philosophy, we transcend out of the dark (chaos) and into the salvation of the light (wisdom, unity with the divine.) Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christianity and on New Age thought, but not necessarily on shamanism.

In Neoplatonism there is a not-so-subtle valuing of the direction “up” and a distaste for the direction “down.” This is why statues of Plato nearly always have him pointing up with his index finger, echoed by later images of Jesus in the same pose. In that system, up is masculine, rational, holy, God and perfect. Down is feminine, dreamy, messy, corrupted by animal instincts.

The Dark and Light I’m talking about here are energies present in nature, and transcending or ascension don’t apply. The point is to work with all of the energies, banish none, integrate all.

The western mind is lodged in the light masculine - the energy of the teenage boy. There is exuberance and great energy there, but, as yet, little wisdom. In its simplest expression,” light” equals “youthful, naïve, joyfully self-centered” and dark equals “refined, fermented, nuanced, with a larger vision.” Light and dark energies are not better or worse than each other, and we need a balance of them in us.

Daily life for the light masculine is mostly a sustained competition for dominance. The goals are very short term. We’ve been in the grip of the light masculine for several thousand years. It’s difficult to not be angered at what the unrestrained light masculine has done to our world, and it’s tempting to hate men, hate the patriarchy and lay blame there.

But we can also try this to reframe that anger: Spirit is all about curiosity and exploration. It wondered what it would be like on this planet to let the light masculine have full reign, untethered, untempered by the feminine. It's found out the results of this experiment and is now ready to initiate the masculine into its darkness, into its wisdom. This is where we are.

In the ideal, the path of human life is one of continued darkening – being refined by life, expanded in our vision, fermenting from simple, sweet juice into nuanced, full-bodied wine. The process of darkening is one of learning, through experience, to marry grief with praise, gratitude with fear, joy with sorrow.

In the Celtic tradition, this is all work with the cauldron in the heart center – the Coire Ernmae, the cauldron of “vocation.” It is our work in this world to cook joy and sorrow into one soup, rather than seeking to summon joy but banish sorrow, as we have so often been instructed to do in the light masculine word.

Most spiritual paths have dark feminine deities and characters that are there to help us in our darkening. A few examples are Lilith and Mary Magdalene in the west, Kali and Durga in India, the Aztec goddesses Coatlicue (“Serpent Skirt”) and Coyoxauhqui (Golden Bells). In the Celtic world, the Irish Cailleach, the Welsh Cerridwen, the “Loathly Hag,” and the Russian Baba Yaga are a few Dark Feminine presences.

How do we welcome the Hag in to work with us? Something to remember: we work with her consciously through spiritual practice, inner work, and wisdom work, or we work with her unconsciously through disaster and suffering.

One practice is from the Buddhist world: the practice of Tonglen . Let’s say you feel resentful of the nincompoops, naysayers and prevaricators in power. Breathe in that resentment, and let it fill you, let yourself feel it. Then on the out-breath, send compassionate prayers to the people you resent, wishing that they be relieved of their suffering, that they become wise. It’s important to avoid arrogance here, assuming that I am the wise one and they are the lesser ones. A more shamanic approach might be to use the out breath to invite the Dark Feminine into the world, asking her to expand wisdom in all of us.

Another good idea comes, perhaps strangely, from Jesus. Not the Jesus in the official scriptures, but the one from the gnostic “Gospel of Thomas.” His disciples ask him what they need to do to be in alignment with the divine. Fast? Give alms? Make the correct prayers? Jesus answers, “Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate.”

That is the amazing, radical Jesus that people originally fell in love with. If we lived those two practices, our lives would transform.

The Dark Feminine facilitates our initiation with two main powers. One is dismemberment. This is the power of deconstruction, of “releasing what no longer serves.” The second is digestion. This is running energy through a system, separating the nutrients from the waste. I look around the world now and see the Hag fully at work.

A side note that I can’t resist. The digestion element is why I see my backyard compost bin as a shrine to the dark feminine. Whenever I toss the kitchen scraps in, I make it an offering to the Hag of transformation and ask her to continue to work on me.

A great story to help you in all of this is Snow White. Forget about the Disney version. Read the original Grimms version because it's more visceral and disturbing. In the original, Snow White keeps refusing the advice of the dwarves not to let anyone into the house. (The dwarves are dark masculine powers – working inside the earth, mining minerals, a form of digestion.) She keeps letting the evil queen into the house because the queen offers her beautiful (but poisoned) objects. The dwarves return and move the energies through her. Finally, the queen gives her the poisoned apple. Snow White chokes on it and falls into an initiatory coma. She wakes up not because the prince kisses her, (that is the light masculine’s version of the story) but because his men carrying her coffin stumble on a root poking up and drop the coffin, dislodging the piece of apple she has been digesting in her fifth chakra, and she wakes up a queen. Here is a link to the story: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html

And here is a great podcast I recommend after reading the original Snow White story: “This Jungian Life Podcast”: A podcast from three Jungian therapists, this episode unravels the story of Snow White and female initiation. https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-144-fierce-female.../

One of my teachers says that our world will be totally different by 2050. That sounds very hopeful. But it took 1,000 years after Padmasambhava “tamed the spirits and demons of Tibet” for the warlords of the time to incrementally surrender their grip on dominance, open their vision, and allow Tibet to become a peaceful culture.

Whether we are in the final 30 years of this initiation, or we have centuries to go still, all each of us can do is work to be darkened, bit by bit, lifetime by lifetime, through the grace and fierceness of the Dark Feminine.

Many blessings on you, and many blessings on all of us, wherever we are on the path of darkening.

A personal addendum: This piece has taken me several days to write. I’ve spent time by my compost bin asking for guidance, and it has given me plenty. Late last night I went out to it with a bowl full of icky stuff from the refrigerator. It was dark out, and I was in a little bit of a hurry. I poured the stuff in, and suddenly a racoon leapt up from the inside of the bin. She raised up on her back legs and hissed at me, terrifying the living bejabbers out of me – I yelped and stumbled backward. I’ve lived in this house for 15 years and have never seen a raccoon at the compost, although it makes perfect sense. I took it all as the Dark Feminine making a dramatic appearance.

Wahoo.

The Sense of the Sacred

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 16:52:37 GMT

An interview with MysticMag

I'm pleased to link to this Interview with Mystic Mag. I address topics like how shamanic healing's goal is the restoration of beauty, my own experiences with spirt guides, and how the never-ending argument over the term "shaman" is tiresome.

https://www.mysticmag.com/psychic-reading/interview-jaime-meyer/

Autumn Equinox and the Well of Wisdom

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 21:14:49 GMT

So we swing into the dark center

So, the autumn equinox arrives. So, once again, we swing into the other half of life. Between the light and dark, between summer and winter, between dancing and dreaming, life has put up a swing.

Summer is filled with outward, ebullient growth, action, and light. The summer is the sensory, sensuous half of the year. Then, equinox comes, and we are called inward - called back home like the grazing animals, called to our dark center, to our boundless in-scape, our inner expansive mystery, which is painted on the land by the cooling air, the draining of the green from the land, the exit of birds.

The Celtic wisdom keepers tell us about the well of wisdom which can be found in the Otherworld. Five streams flow from the well, out through the world. These are the five physical senses. The summer is the radiant, joyful expression of those five sense-streams. Then the equinox arrives, and we are called to the other part of the well of wisdom – the center, the source, out of which all five streams flow.

The Celts remind us that to be fully alive and human, fully in our power, is to drink not only from the

five streams of the senses, but also from the very source of water. The fall equinox calls us home from the summer dance, back to the source-pool of mystery. We need both of these energies, or we lose our depth, our humanness, and we get trapped in our small self, our false personality.

It's easy to get lost focusing our attention only on the five streams, sometimes frantically leaping from one to the other, trying to gulp down as much as we can. Most of our cultural training is about “achieving” entrance to the dance party, and then doing anything at all to stay there.

The great secret: every human drinks from the source. The five streams flow from the source, so with every bit of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, you drink from the source too. You don’t have to “be” spiritual, act spiritual, or do spiritual things in order to drink from the source. If you are alive, you are already drinking from the source.

I point this out to help lift any of that old German Protestant work ethic that may be weighing you down (“You are only worthwhile if you verk, verk verk!”). I also point it out to dissolve any spiritual arrogance burdening you (“I work so hard spiritually, and really, I am a little holier than other people.”). The truth is, God, Earth Mother, Spirit – none of them judge your worthiness. It’s only people who love that.

If we come here to Earth School to learn our karmic lessons, if we enroll in the University of Imposed Physical Limits (“go, fightin’ Egos! Rah! Rah!”) to advance our eternal soul by having material experiences, we will do all of it, whether or not we get super spiritual, or learn those secret techniques, or meditate longer than anyone we know, or get that certification in shamanic quantum spinning and weaving. None of that makes you more spiritual or more worthy. There is no spiritual competition. No one is better at this than you, nor ever was, nor ever will be.

The only purpose of any spiritual training, no matter what shape it takes, is to make your drinking from the well of life conscious rather than unconscious. When we do the work of life more consciously, it reduces unnecessary suffering. Rather than learning our assigned karmic lessons through repetitive disasters, we can learn them through wonder, beauty, love, and awe. Shamanism reminds us that everything is energy, and it’s up to us which energies we choose to swim in.

The Celtic wisdom keepers acknowledge that it is not easy to make one’s way to the well of life in the otherworld, and then it’s not easy to drink from the center. It takes some dedication, stamina, curiosity, courage, a map, a guide. To make your way to the well, to drink, not only unconsciously from the five streams, but the center itself, is the path of being not just “one who lives,” but “one who makes life an art.” It is to become one of the Aes Dana (“Ace Dahna”) - one who is blessed by the Great Mother of life. Another translation is “one of the gifted people.” Dedication to making your way to the source reaps the gift of making life not a mere stumbling of hormones, genes, and reactions, but an art.

At this Autumn equinox, I wish you a beautiful journey home, a smooth swing into the dark half of the year, a good entrance into the dreaming time, a good journey of making your life an art.

Clearing Away This Cosmic Frustration

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:55:58 GMT

When you heard the Titan mini sub imploded, did you imagine being inside it at that moment? When you watch the videos of people jumping off cliffs, do you feel it? Do you like horror movies for the gasping “jump scare?” Do you dance and shout when your team scores? Do you like kissing? Have you heard that Mount Everest is littered with bodies of climbers that will never be brought down?

The Eastern mystics say that everything we love, every pleasure and danger we chase - including our traumas - is for one purpose: to open a gate for the finite mind to plunge into Source momentarily. To jump out of our self-imposed, limited identity and into the infinite, into Source. You know this Source. You feel it.

We are all taught, early, to place a veil over Source – by our family, our culture, our religion, our economics. And by traumas – not the trauma itself, but our reaction to it, the way we carry it, hold it, nurture it. The people you’ve been mad at for so long? Probably your veil-placers.

We want more than anything to lift that veil, and let Source shine through us. And at the same time, we totally fear lifting that veil, because of how that might shatter our reality. It’s this dance that creates those suffering habits we return to again and again. We invent habits to distract us from thinking about what's beyond the veil, habits to distract us from being mad about the veil, and habits to keep us from lifting the veil. Dance, dance, dance, dear human.

Okay, I understand - because the mystics and the blogs have told me repeatedly - that “I am Spirit.” Spirit is manifesting in the world as me. I am Spirit experiencing the experience of experiencing this experince. Yeh, I get it.

But why does this Great Spirit - Boundless Love, Pure Awareness, Limitless Wisdom – choose to manifest in this place of unending limits, with uncountable forms of ignorance and frustration? Why does it give me that vague memory of Boundlessness to haunt my thoughts, to hint in my dreams, to hunt me from the dark?

I say, quickly without thinking about it much, “We come here to learn!” “Earth School!” “University of Embodied Experience!” But learn what? What it feels like to be frustrated? To be filled with yearning and unmet desires? To have my heart crushed and to feel my body slowly degenerate?

Western theologians have tied themselves in knots for millennia over the question of why God created a world in which He knew we would “fall from grace” and He would then punish us with pain of childbirth, sweat of the brow, and then death, but He went ahead with the project anyway. Why? What kind of God is that? There are a billion words written about this, half of them in German, of course, but I haven’t found any that answer the question with anything beyond “we know not the will of Mighty God.”

The mystics tell us (and the shamans agree) that it is only a small part of us that is mad and frustrated at all of this. It’s a small, not very bright, totally self-addicted part of the larger “me,” but it’s loud and persistent; an internal Lauren Boebert. It is unclear about what exactly it is afraid of and mad about, but because it is so loud, I can easily come to believe that I am afraid and mad to my very core.

The small self has a powerful imagination, but its imagination is very small in scope. So, it can imagine unending forms of enemies, disasters and threats but it can’t see over the fence surrounding its tiny backyard, the yard of wrongdoing and right doing. In fact, the small self is terrified of even peering over that fence to behold the boundless field of knowing and unknowing, in which the mystics and shamans cavort. It spends its time planting angry flowers and judgy-weeds in its small space.

Although the small self doesn’t really know what it’s mad about, I believe I have discovered the key:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver, from “ The Summer Day “

I worship Mary Oliver as semantic goddess and I would gleefully wash her feet if she asked, but she articulates here the core error of the western mind, and the source of several millennia of vague anger. Western religion says we only have one life. Materialst science says the same thing. We are raised with a double-whammy of one-lifeism.

Nowhere in nature does anything live only one life, then vanish. Everywhere in nature, everything lives again and again and again, in different shapes. The small self believes the current shape must remain in the same shape (that tiny imagination again). Its small imagination cannot fathom actual transformation, so it makes it an enemy. This is why we imagine our soul looking just like us, but kinda glowy. - but probably younger and thinner.

The most poisonous lie that the false self tells us is the “one (and only) precious life.” All of western religion is based on this. That’s why the most devout people in the western world are the angriest. But they often don’t really know what they are mad at. Spoiler alert: it’s God they are mad at, for bringing us here, tricking us to disobey Him so he can punish us, so we must suffer, and must obey his capricious and hypocritical law, and must endlessly - with forced sincerity - praise Him for His goodness, and then, after all that - we croak. They can’t admit the anger at God, so they focus on being mad at people they are afraid of - the “rule-breakers.” And of course, anyone who looks over the fence is a real problem.

So, why does Spirit desire to manifest as this delusion-riddled, limited world? Why would Boundless Wonder jump into me - this tiny cooking pot poised over the butt-searing flame of life? The answer to that question is actually So. Damned. Easy. And if you sign up for my webinar, “The answer is so damned easy” for only $39 by midnight tonight, you will learn what people throughout history have been begging to learn.

Screw it, I’ll, just tell you.

We come here to learn, incrementally, how to take the next bigger leap into Source. With each jump you make, you can stay in the water of the infinite longer, you can smell more of the fragrance of Source. The poet Rilke said , “This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

Sometimes that pervasive fear you feel comes from the small self holding you down in the Boebert judgy-weed yard. But sometimes your fear comes from the fact that you are leaping into the next larger or deeper gap between your small self and the infinite. This is why we need human teachers, by the way – fellow humans who have made the bigger leaps that you are about to make. They can help you prepare, and they can keep you from making a naïve leap that will end up in an imploded submersible or on some frozen Everest crag.

Here are some ideas and practices to help you:

The first key is to admit that the “you have one life” story is false. That may actually be very difficult for your western mind. It may take many lifetimes. Our life isn't precious because it's so rare - fleeting, ephemeral, and then totally gone. That's is an absolute recipe for short term, totally ego-based living - in other words, the world that the western mind has created for us, and in which we all live now. for Our life is precious because each experience, tiny to shattering, ecstatic to debilitating, is a doorway to the infinite, if we have the courage to see it that way.
The second key is to allow the Universe to be as big as it actually is, which is far bigger and weirder than any of us have ever imagined – or can.
The third key is to admit that you feel the whole universe as a presence, in you and around you, in and around everyone and everything. Regardless of what your inner Boebert is currently complaining about, you are, in essence, never separated from the quantum-entangled flux of creation. Tibetan Buddhists say, "look around you - every being you lay eyes on has been your mother in some other life."
The next key is to enter into the idea that the universe was never created – it has always been. There was never “nothing,” and there never will be. When you allow yourself to enter this, you can skip past all of Western theology, and just enjoy your life.

Let’s say there are 100 quadrillion ways Spirit can manifest in the endless, eternal universe (that’s far too small a number, but it’s helpful to place some kind of “big” number on it.) In your endless lives and shapes - billions of lives in every shape imaginable, from nematode and virus to salamander to wandering Sapien - this world of the veil, this planet of limits, this cooking pot of “I want,” is only one tiny part of your great, limitless experience that you can never even imagine.

Here is the most simple and potent exercise you can do, right now, and any time, to clear away this frustration of life.

Close your eyes. It helps if you sit in some kind of meditation posture - cross your legs or cup your right hand in the left hand. Really get to meditating. Meditate the hell out of this. Say to yourself, “I am meditating.” Feel good about that. Do it for a while. I am meditating. I am meditating. Then after a while ask a simple question: “Who is meditating?” Ask that a bunch of times. And then ask yourself, “Who is watching that person meditate?”

This is a practice that mystics, yogis, monks, and shamans use frequently, sometimes called “cultivating the witness.” The big, sloppy, delicious question then to ask is, “Who is the witness?” The answer we want to get to is along the lines of, “The one watching is Awareness itself.” In other words, Creation, Spirit, Boundless Wonder – it’s the witness of everything, including little you trying to meditate.

To take this exercise down the shamanic path a few steps, after witnessing the "one who is meditating" for a while, turn your attention now to the “one who is afraid." Watch that person for awhile, asking, “Who is it in me that is afraid?” Watch how they act, what they do. Stalk them for a while, see where they like to go, and what they like to do. There are next, deeper steps in all of this, and you can explore some of them in our August Three Moon Ceremony if you want to.

I leave you with this:

How I become hyacinth

How I become daffodil

How I become hosta

How I become sedum

easily divided easily rooted

How I become the two-tone

whistle chirp in that far off oak

How I become something you never planted

How I green from brown

How I heave up your mulch

and crawl to you in your winter slumber

How I spring from pruned branches

How I become again the weeds you poisoned

How I emerge out of dead vines

How the longer you know me the bigger I grow

How you think you can cultivate me

How long it takes you to see

How I become you.

Solstice Spirit Brings the WD-40

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:40:03 GMT

Opening the Four-Chambered Heart

The summer solstice is the height of the south on the medicine wheel. The long days, the heat and intense light and warmth - everything is reveling in the life force coursing through the world, bringing all creatures into their fullness. The south, and the solstice, are connected to the energy of heart: the intense love of life, the passionate song of creation, joy, and wholeness.

The human heart has four chambers. In the material world, these are the two atriums and two ventricles, and each has a job to pump oxygen throughout the body. In the spiritual world, these four chambers of the heart pump spiritual power through us.

The clear heart pumps the power of true, clear, unafraid expression through us.

The open heart pumps the power of creativity, curiosity, and tolerance through us.

The strong heart pumps determination, courage, confidence and discipline through us.

The whole heart pumps faith, passion and love for the All through us.

To be human is to have this awesome source of power implanted in each of us. And to be human is to wrestle with shutting down or constricting one of more of these chambers. When the flow from any chamber is constricted, we leak energy, we become more susceptible to psychic attacks, and we create more suffering for ourselves and others through our decisions.

When the clear heart is blocked, we put on the act for everyone, we hold ourselves to inoffensive niceties and become comfortable with little lies on our tongues and the tongues of others; we make excuses and live in constant apology.

When the open heart is blocked, we become mistrustful of the unusual, we become listless and flat, uninterested in beauty, exhausted by change; stubbornness rules us, we easily fall into blame and finger pointing.

When the strong heart is blocked, we feel victimized by everyone and everything; inner voices of worthlessness control us, we can’t get anything done and we make fear our most trusted advisor.

When the whole heart is blocked, we lose faith in creation, we lose faith in the power of love to heal; cynicism and arrogance lie on our couch all day; wry cleverness and sarcasm rule our language as a defense against intimacy with awe and wonder. .

Much of our journey through childhood is about being taught to constrict one or more heart chambers, to diminish the flow. Think through your childhood. Which chamber was closed down in you, under the guise of becoming an acceptable person? For those who, as adults, decide to walk a spiritual path, much of the work is about renovating these chambers of the heart and reopening their flow.

These times we are in are all about Spirit renovating our hearts, wrenching open the old rusty valves. That painful squeaking you hear around you and feel inside you - what if that is not all made of old trauma and new fear? What if there is third thing operating in you: Spirit, with its can of WD-40, lubricating your old four-chambered heart valves, opening, opening, opening. Cool silver water and warm golden light flowing, flowing.

We are being flooded with new information and new knowledge. We already know that more information is not the solution we need. Information needs to be cooked into wisdom, and that is done in the cauldron of the four-chambered heart. Spiritual teachings, scientific discoveries, psychology – all of it needs to be cooked in the cauldron of the heart in order to be of any real use. Opening the heart, re-opening any chamber that has been constricted, is the core to every actual wisdom path, and its where the work is.

The first bit of the work is to merely become awake to this radiant, powerful, awesome gift implanted in you by Spirit. Make the decision to spend time each day visualizing this luminous gift in your body's center. Decide – yes make the decision – to trust that it’s all true, this heart of power. That is who you truly are.

We spend a great deal of time each day imagining the opposite – how wounded, limited and insufficient we are. We make this our daily habit, our daily meditation. The shamans call this being addicted to our suffering, riding our wounds like it’s our trusted horse. So, make the decision to also spend as much time imagining your silver and gold radiant-power heart, and make that your horse.

Then, you can go on to review each of the four chambers of your heart, asking which one(s) operate with a lower flow than you want. Ask Spirit to come with that WD-40 and turn the rusty sprocket. Face east in the morning and say it out loud: “Bring it, Spirit! Bring it! Bring the WD-40. Bring it now!”

Look at the qualities I’ve outlined in each heart chamber above and decide to put one into action in some simple way. You can begin by asking which chamber scares you, which one is most daunting. Ask, "What would my life be like if that chamber were fully open?” Ask Spirit to give you strength and support in all of this.

Wahoo.

Where Can I Take Refuge?

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 14:24:59 GMT

In Buddhism - and in Shamanism as I have learned it - the first teaching is that life is “full of unsatisfactoriness.” The word “suffering” is most often used, but I think words like jacked, bollix, fubar, and GMFU (Got Me Fk*d Up) are descriptive on a day-to-day level. The Christians call it sin, which, in its original definition, was a term from archery, meaning “to miss what you’re aiming for.”

“Missing the target” comes from not being centered in our power. In archery, a calm, still breath is critical. Every spiritual tradition tells us that it is “grasping” that causes all the trouble. Grasping takes over when we don’t trust Spirit. Spirit is the most expansive and elegant thing we can comprehend, and when we trust it, we, too, become expansive and elegant. When we don’t trust it, we shrink, we lose our expansive and connecting breath, we become clumsy, tight and inelegant, and our aim goes awry.

And we grasp for new knowledge, for old happiness, for solid security and gleaming love, for pleasure, acceptance and worthiness. Every tradition says clearly: the more you grasp, the more you push it away. And yet, here we are, reaching all the time, with our “gimmee gimmee gimmee” hands.

There is a difference between joyful growth and desperate growth; it’s the difference between how Spirit works and how our smaller self works; it’s the difference between culminating in a wondrous harvest or in cancer. It’s not the desire for growth that matters, but the grasping, which is borne of fear, which is borne from lack of trust in Spirit.

A common phrase for Buddhists is, “I take refuge in the three jewels: the Buddha, the teachings, and the community.” The shamanic translation of this may be: “I take refuge in Spirit, the practices, and relationships (with everything).” Spirit, as it is seen through the shamanic lens, is always changing, exploring, creating, growing, shifting, dissolving, flowing. But with Spirit, there is no fear, anywhere. The single best practice we can do is 1) remember that each of us is that also. And 2) approach everything like Spirit does: exploring without fear. Is this easy? Fk*k no. That's why we have 10,000 lifetimes. But when it GMFU, it helps to return to that simple knowing and breathe.

Try this: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a cliff so high that you cannot see the bottom. You gaze over, look down, and see nothing but blackness. You drop a rock down, see it vanish into the dark, never hearing it hit bottom. You understand that it’s not just beyond your sight, it is, in fact, bottomless. Now, turn around so that the very tips of your heels are on the edge, in fact, the heels are over the edge, and you are only held onto the lip of the cliff by half of your feet and toes. How do you feel? Isn’t this how we all feel, inside, all the time?

Now, let yourself fall backwards over the cliff, and keep falling. There is no end. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep Falling. Keep Falling. See what happens.

Meeting the Piranha People

Mon, 15 May 2023 17:48:33 GMT

For me, shamanism is all about working with the uncountable forms of fear that arise as we wander our way through life. Fear is so deceptive because it often dresses up as wisdom or common sense, as creativity, as morality, or as devout faith. It is a Herculean task to stay aware of how we are guided by fears that we don’t want to engage with, and we often fail.

Failing is no actual failure, of course, because the mystics tell us we came into the body specifically to engage with fear. When we were a pre-embodied spirit, what was there to fear?

As death is our teacher of beauty, love and compassion, fear is our teacher of self-awareness. Fear comes to open us to power - if we take the opportunity.

I frequently receive a frantic message or call from someone who is convinced they have an “attachment” – some kind of malevolent spiritual entity that has attached itself to their energy body. The internet has made everyone an expert in the diagnosis of spiritual illnesses, so you don’t have to be online long before you can be convinced that, if you feel just about any emotional discomfort, you probably have an attachment. The attachment has come to you typically because someone with malevolent energy has sent it to you.

So, the person who can’t stop feeling icky about the ex-boyfriend believes he has sent some kind of attachment. The person who had a frightening experience while taking magic mushrooms in their living room is convinced they have an attachment. A scary person lives down the hall and is sending attachments to me.

This is a difficult topic because any of the above examples could be actual attachments. The shamanic tradition is clear that there are free-floating energies in the world that are looking for a home or looking for food, and they can see us as both. However, just as the Christian tradition has urged people to project their fears outward onto the devil, in neo-pagan-urban shamanism, we often do the same thing – project fears outward onto some “attachment.”

A projection is an internal issue that we project outward, like a movie, onto something external. We are each other’s projection screen all the time. “That person is so arrogant” nearly always means “I am afraid I am arrogant.” Psychologists affirm that the level of passion with which I despise, fear – or admire – something is directly proportional to my fear that I am the actual owner of that energy. So, 99% of “attachments” are likely my own projections.

“How dare you say that? The suffering I feel is real. This thing came to me. I don’t control it! I’ve gone to nine different healers of every modality, and no one can get rid of it!”

Shamanism is a path of taking personal responsibility, of learning from the times we falter. Learning from mistakes is how we build our power. The new age obsession with attachments is rife with what the shamans call the spiritual parasite of martyrdom. It is far, far less likely that something has attached itself to me, and far more likely that it is I who am attached to the drama and the distraction of being a noble victim.

Go back through the examples above of what people call attachments (the ex- boyfriend, etc.) and ask “what fear, inside me might dress up as what I want to call an attachment, in order for me to escape responsibility for my life?”

Attachments can be fairly easily cleared from your field but won’t be if you are attached to the drama of having an attachment, especially if you don’t do the follow up practices required to build your power.

Our world is deep in the throes of martyrdom, which, according to shamans, is one of the classic spiritual parasites that eat our life force. We are all given total permission nowadays to identify our suffering as someone else’s fault, call it evil and work to eradicate it – to force others to stop being evil.

My definition of evil is “unaddressed, human unconscious fear, projected outward.” Evil only comes into this world through human beings, not through any other creature. Evil is a human act of asking someone or something else to carry my unconscious fear, and then giving myself permission to kill them for it, metaphorically or physically. I hope I can kill my fear by killing them.

A year and a half ago, in one of my trainings in Peru, I was at the end of an eight-day dieta with a powerful plant in the sanango family. It’s a “master” plant that you work with after you have already worked deeply with many previous plants that build an inner matrix of power and protection. The plant was utterly cosmic, taking me on many astounding journeys into endless oceans of light I could never imagine on my own, and it showed me, day after day, how I, too, was made of pure light.

But after a few days of glory, it took me to an otherworldly room to meet several beautiful, welcoming beings that I perceived as awesome cosmic teachers. As I talked with them, I began to realize that their intention was to eat me. Their radiant faces became the faces of Piranhas with red Scottish hair, eyes bulging over immense jaws lined with glistening teeth, insatiable for the taste of human flesh. I was flooded with intense fear, and became trapped in that dreamy spirit world, flailing to keep the several piranha people off me, hysterically crying out to the Spirit of Tobacco to rescue me. It took a tremendous struggle to free myself from their jaws and claws as Tobacco pulled me by my legs out of the spirit world and back into my tent in the jungle where I was dreaming.

Utterly distraught, I bolted from my tent, hyperventilating, into the jungle and began smoking myself with tobacco to rid me of that death energy, to put up a hard protective wall between me and those evil beings. I spent the day in a teary haze of fear. And a deep sense of failure – that I hadn’t spotted the truth soon enough, that I had allowed myself to be seduced by their beauty. I was stupid and naïve.

Later, I told my teacher about the experience. He listened with no reaction. I wanted him to give me some magic charm to say, a mantra, or a power song, or some technique to make sure this would never, ever happen again.

He said quietly, “Next time let them eat you to see what happens.”

I didn’t like this answer at all. I was very mad at him. I wanted him to affirm that I had been predated upon by beings from the lower astral plane - hungry ghosts - and that I had triumphed through my solid relationship with the tobacco spirit, and I did a good job getting back alive. That’s a good story that I can tell again and again, and makes me feel pretty special.

Every religious tradition makes room for the “wrathful deities.” In Buddhism, the wrathful deities are manifestations, or the “other face” of the enlightened being, including the Buddha himself. Green Tara of total compassion takes some terrifying wrathful forms as well. On and on it goes across cultures.

The job of the wrathful deities is to destroy the obstacles to enlightenment. They stomp and roar to cleanse the traveler of the obstacles – ignorance, pride, impatience, greed, self-deprecation, and other forms of fear that hide inside our thoughts. Those take form as our unconscious habits that limit us and hold us back. Shamanic language for this could be that fearsome visitors arrive when you are ready to actually make your bid for the next level of power. They shake you loose from old habits, or if you would rather stay attached to them, the wrathful deities protect you from stepping into power that you aren’t ready for.

It's possible our world right now is staring into the bulging eyes of the wrathful deities. The “shift of consciousness” we all talk about cannot come only in beautiful form – it is always accompanied by the wrathful deities who are there to assist in the shaking off of the old structures.

For over a year, I’ve wrested mightily with that experience in Peru with the Piranha people. I’ve concluded that the experience was an opportunity offered to me by the Sanango plant to shed another layer of ego. For the first few days of the dieta, it showed me its face of boundless cosmic wonder. Then, the other face. It was the ego that was terrified of the piranha folk. Maybe what they wanted to eat was my safe thinking, my habitual self-deprecation, my resistance to greater knowing.

I think about the times in my training that I have let the powers eat me or kill me. Particularly, 30 years go, when I had a three-month long nightly terror ride of tormentors in various shapes come to me every night. Finally, I was grabbed from behind by a large man with flaming red hair who held me in choke hold. His arms were thicker than my legs, so there was no getting free. He whispered into my ear in a thick Scottish accent, “Let go, Laddie, just relax into it and let me kill you.” I did. I died. I woke up from the dream. The three-month terror ride ended, and I entered a new stage in my life and shamanic work.

May every person be assisted in shaking off their old ignorance, fear and habits by the wrathful, protecting deities. May the world be renewed with their help.

Magic Mushrooms, The Wild West and Ceremony

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:24:31 GMT

Working Shamanically with Mushrooms

Everyone is doing ‘shrooms. The term “psychedelic wild west” has entered daily lingo. Various cities and states are legalizing them. Medical science sees promise in them and the pharmaceutical industry sees neon dollar signs. The blogosphere sparkles with promises of life radically altered, new connection with Spirit, banishment of old inner woe, and a great inside-the-eyelid-show. Finally, there’s a single cure for everything that bothers me.

So, people are micro dosing, and eating them in the basement or the woods with their friends, and clamoring for new certified psychedelic assisted therapists.

What is forgotten in the wild west is what indigenous people for thousands of years have known: plant medicines like mushrooms are living helping spirits. They aren’t a chemical compound. They aren’t a spiritual fast food menu item. Whenever there is a fervor, there is ego, greed and fear. These energies are antithetical to spiritual work. What nearly all the fervor over mushrooms has missed so far is how to work with them inside sacred ceremony, in prayerful community, guided by people who know how to do ceremony.

This is my simple reminder that mushrooms have been used primarily in ceremony for maybe 9,000 years. It’s not easy to find a competent ceremonialist because they stay mostly invisible. That invisibility helps to protect the work in many ways. A beautiful example of this is my teachers in Peru, who don't have a web site, work only with a few people, and who ask us not to reveal their names or location.

I’ve never used drugs recreationally, and I’m not a therapist. Eight years ago, I started training with Peruvian vegeltalistas and other ayahuasceros steeped in indigenous traditions of plant medicines, travelling several times a year to study in various locations. Every one of my experiences with mind-altering plants has been in a ceremonial environment, so my perspective is limited.

Does one need to see the mushroom as a spirit, and the work as sacred? For some shamans, the answer is: if you aren’t ceremonially careful, the plant spirit will bring you harm. In this case, harm can mean a very uncomfortable experience – a bad trip. Or harm can mean falling into an ego fantasy of which you are unaware. Other shamans look at it more practically: extracting the chemical compound from the plant and skipping over the reverence and the ceremonial energies in the work mean that you are choosing to use only a fraction of the mushroom’s power. So, really, you’re wasting time and energy.

The Shamanic View of Mushrooms

Shamans take the mushroom seriously as a living healing spirit, not as a chemical, as entertainment, or as a bludgeon on the psyche. Taking it seriously as a spirit helper takes a sizeable (and not easy) leap out of the western mind’s naïve and consumerist foundation. A good example: In ceremony, you begin by thanking the plant spirit, and asking its permission (often days in advance) to work with it. You make prayers to the mushroom spirit to help you, teach you and heal you. In ceremony, you also call in the powers of the surrounding land to help. I’m not so sure that many in the psychedelic wild west do any of this.

There’s a lot of excitement about legalizing ‘shrooms. Therapists are eager. Users, patients, growers, and businesspeople are all eager. Psychedelic therapy training programs are popping up like mushrooms on a dewy Oaxaca cow pie.

However, in the polyamorous marriage of Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big State License, and Big Academia, I don’t see the ceremonial approach to the medicine being part of the great new future. The legalized medicine will need to be delivered inside the white-coat, nice-couch-office frame of mind in order for insurance, academia and licensing agencies to say yes to the work. Unscientific, foreign, superstitious, unquantifiable, “primitive” ceremonial practices will not be part of any official training.

Big Mushroom is already branding the work as friendly and safe, as TOTALLY NOT the hippie 1960’s, and as the new panacea against anxiety and depression.

But here is the thing: from the shaman’s point of view – and the mushroom’s – anxiety and depression may not be what needs to be healed in someone. The actual illness may very well be arrogance, which is a common spiritual parasite. Anxiety and depression are the symptoms of the arrogance parasite, which lies to people by telling them that they are all alone in a meaningless world, that they need to take total control, and that they are surrounded by stupid assholes. That’s a recipe for anxiety and depression to be sure. There are many kinds of invisible spiritual parasites recognized by shamans, and these may be what needs to be healed, not just their visible symptoms.

Ceremonial practices like prayers, drumming, singing, rattling, sacred tobacco smoke, the practitioner’s connection to the mushroom spirit and their own helping spirits – these are all essential parts of moving energies so that the mushroom spirit can dispel embedded spiritual parasites.

Grandfather Mushroom: A Praiseworthy Creature!

I use the word creature because mushrooms are not plants. Plants eat light directly from heaven. But fungus, like us, eats things of the earth. And most of the fungus lives in darkness. You and I are, evolutionarily, more closely related to mushrooms than we are to plants.

What we call the mushroom is the fruit of the creature, its fingers reaching up from the dark belly of the great mother to taste the light and air. In truth, the creature you are working with is the mycelial web – a network of fibers that can run for feet, yards or miles under the soil. After it has gathered the wisdom of the underworld, the creature sends up its graceful fruits which burst open ecstatically, singing forth their spores with up to 25,000 times the force of gravity. This is also how the creature works inside human beings.

In the dark under-earth, the creature spreads itself out in a fungal net, reaching between and around the roots of plants. It holds space between the plants, and it also holds space between tiny soil particles so that air and water can flow in and around. This helps to create healthy soil. Spiritual people often speak of “holding space” for others – a loving and protective attitude. The creature holds space everywhere.

Researchers have found, in multiple studies, that psychedelics can increase connections between brain neurons. In theory, this may mean mushrooms help the brain to rewire itself, meaning, literally opening new doors and pathways of perceiving life.

Most magnificently, the fungal creature answers the prayers made by the plants. The plants pray for certain microscopic nutrients, and the fungal creature finds them and delivers them to the plant. The plants repay that gift by delivering sugars to the fungus to eat. Under your feet, wherever you step, there is an unending wooing going on between the masculine fungus and the feminine plants. You stroll atop an ancient love affair, a continuous courting and cavorting. This is one reason the Medicine so often fills people with a sense of huge Love. It’s not just a flood of serotonin.

Billions of years ago, the fungus was one of the very first forms of life along with bacteria. The fungus eats dead things, and, as it does, it creates ever-thicker soil filled with nutrients, where more life can grow. The fungi is called by some mycologists “the grand molecular disassemblers of nature; the soil magicians”. (Paul Stamets)

The medicine does this energetically in the body, too. It digests and composts old, festering, or dead energies, and creates new soil for new life. And because it’s so old, it is impossible for us to lie to it, as we do to ourselves and others. The mushroom has seen it all before, and it sees us more clearly than we see ourselves. When people have rough times with the Medicine, it’s likely because it has to work hard to clear out some old lie lodged in them, some lie that was implanted in them – like “I am not worthy” – a lie that has made many decisions for them in their lives without them even knowing.

The ceremonial environment is not analytical, not rational and not psychological. These are great human tools, but ceremony opens healing from a very different place, from a different mind. The ceremony also creates a bubble of energetic safety and support in which fear has less ability to intervene and twist the experience.

Geologists tell us that there have been several mass extinctions that wiped out 90% of life on earth, including the famous one where one (or two) asteroids hit the earth. They tell us we are in another extinction-cataclysm now, except this time we are, weirdly, both the asteroid and the dinosaurs. After each earlier apocalypse, the fungi inherited a nearly empty earth. Organisms that paired with fungi through these disasters tended to survive, others went extinct. So, maybe it’s a good time to get to know the fungi.

In summary, the Fungus is:

In shamanic language: an underworld ally.
The nervous system of the Great Mother.
Like Hermes/Mercury, the magical communicator between the underworld, middle world and upper world.
The earth’s natural internet.
The deliverer of the medicine.
The Ancient One, our primordial grandparent.
The Spirit of dismemberment – the “Dark Mother,” the ambassador of the West on the Medicine Wheel – the one who comes to clear away what needs to go, and disassemble what has outlived its usefulness, in order to make room for new life, new wonder, and new dreams.
The ever present “yet-to-be manifested” sea of creation under all visible things.
The vast, intelligent network beneath our feet. (Paul Stamets)
The great repairer of traumatized soil.
The one who chews old rocks and spits them out as food for others.
Like the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, the fungi moved into and under the green mounds and hills as the beings with internal stomachs “invaded” the land.
The ones who form partnerships with many other life forms. They are the living embodiment of “all my relations” and “we are all connected.” The rescuer of life after disaster – the one who carries life through the next apocalypse.

Working with psilocybin

People have been using mushrooms in a sacred manner for at least 9,000 years (probably far longer than they’ve used ayahuasca.)

The vast majority of fear we may feel about this medicine has been implanted in us by the paranoia of the 1960’s from a culture that does absolutely nothing about alcohol, tobacco and guns, (revenue producers!) gleefully addicts people to prescription drugs of all kinds (revenue!) and does everything possible to keep people from having direct access to expanded states of connection with the divine (interferes with revenue extracted from sadness and envy!).

Set and Setting

If you’ve read anything about working with this medicine, you’ve come across the phrase “set and setting.” This is a clinical term that mostly refers to making sure people feel safe. When under the influence of medicine, fear can take a participant down a very rough road.

From a shamanic point of view, we can replace “set and setting” with “the ceremonial container.” This is a difficult idea to explain, so I’ll only touch on it. The shamanic view is that the medicine opens your energetic/psychic field, and that makes you more vulnerable to unhelpful energies who see you as food. So there needs to be a solid container to keep these energies outside the of the ceremony.

Shamans don’t see these unhelpful energies as psychological, but as parasitical energies – spirits – from the outside. They can cause a range of problems. It is important to set a protective field around each person, around the ceremonial circle, and around the entire space or building where the work is happening. It is often said that all shamanism involves singing. In the context of a medicine ceremony, shamans sing to solidify the container, to call in helping spirits that aid the work, to raise the vibration of the space, and they sing to the medicine to give it instructions.

It’s not easy to find a competent ceremonialist because they stay fairly invisible. They protect their work from random energies in the same way they hold the container for the ceremony.

How to approach your ceremonial work

There is a mantra: “Set intentions; release expectations.” It’s important to set an intention – some kind of prayer for the healing or wisdom you want to come to you. It’s just as important to release all expectations that your intention will be met in any specific way that you understand rationally. You are not ordering from a menu, and you cannot complain to the manager when you don’t get what you ordered. The medicine will deliver on your truest need, and the secret is that, sometimes, you don’t even see that yourself. You are working with one of the oldest beings on earth. It has literally seen it all, and there is no way you can lie to it. It sees you from a larger perspective than you see yourself. This is why your intention must carry emotion. An intention devoid of emotion is an intellectualized cover over the truer intention – the one you are afraid to claim for yourself. The medicine will have to plow its way through that intellectual defense in order to get at your true intention, and that can be very uncomfortable. Remember that everything that happens in ceremony – beautiful to uncomfortable – is the medicine working with you, teaching, releasing, and re-organizing energies.

Some traditional names for this medicine:

Teonanacatl (Nahua/ Mexico): “Flesh of the Gods”
nti si tho (Mazate/ Mexico) “(Little) Ones Who Leap Forth”
Other Spanish Names:
Pequeño niño – “little child”
Duendes (Spanish/”dwen-dayz”) and “Aluxes” (Mayan/’alushes’): mythical elf-like creatures that play pranks and steal from people at nighttime.
Llas mujercitas (“the little women”)
Las pequeñas mujeres los niños (“the little women children”)
las pequeñas hermanas (“the little sisters”)
niños santos (“holy children”)

A few resources:

"Everything you need to know…" https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics/shrooms/

"About Shrooms": https://tripsafe.org/shrooms/

Psilocybin blunting effects of-SSRI’s and antidepressants: https://www.psychedelicpassage.com/psilocybin-blunting-effects-of-ssris-and-antidepressants

Magic Mushrooms Do The Opposite of Anti-Depressants, But That May Be Why They Work: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discovered-how-magic-mushrooms-alleviate-depression-antidepressants-psilocybin-amygdala

Webinar: hour long, boringly delivered but informative, from the University of Minnesota: https://mncamh.umn.edu/webinar/the-tripping-cure-psychedelic-assisted-therapies-past-present-and-future/

Which came first, plants or fungi?: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=518

Mushrooms and anti-depressants: https://doubleblindmag.com/mushrooms/how-to-take-shrooms/how-psychedelics-contraindicate-with-ssris/

CAN YOU COMBINE PSYCHEDELICS AND ANTIDEPRESSANTS? A DIVE INTO POTENTIAL INTERACTIONS AND SAFETY: https://psychedelicspotlight.com/can-you-combine-psychedelics-and-antidepressants-a-dive-into-potential-interactions-and-safety/

THE EXPLOSION OF INTEREST IN MEDICINE PLANTS: WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW: https://thepowerpath.com/power-path-library/the-explosion-of-interest-in-medicine-plants-what-we-need-to-know/

Can You Take Psychedelics On Antidepressants? (From the Synthesis Institute: https://www.synthesisretreat.com/psilocybin-and-ssri-snri-interactions

About Fear and Prayer

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 16:10:40 GMT

What if the major reason we come into life - into the body - is to experience fear, to learn about it? There seems to be some agreement in every spiritual system that, wherever it is that we came from before we came here, and wherever we go after here, fear doesn’t exist. It is only here. Love and wonder exist here too, but we say that love and wonder exist in the before and after realms as well.

Life in the body offers us unending varieties of fear. So, it seems clear that we are offered this opportunity to learn to overcome it. Not overcome, meaning we will be totally free of fear, because we won’t be. But overcome its ownership of our life, of our decision-making. I see all spiritual paths as united in at least one thing: fear wants to own us, and it does so by remaining hidden in the unconscious, making decisions for us before we are even aware of what it is doing.

Biology tells us fear is our teacher of survival, our antidote to naiveté that will get us killed. In nature, when you become fearful, you enter a tight focus – you stop, fall silent, stare at that shadowy movement or that noise lurking about in the underbrush. Or you forget everything else for a moment – your history, your opinions your dreams - and focus on sending all of your energy into your legs to run, or into your arms to fight.

If we step into fear over money or love, our focus likewise tightens down; and we perseverate all day on that person or that number.

In culture, fear is used to ensure obedience. Obedience thrives on urging you into that same tight perspective and focused awareness. When teachers, governments, priests, lovers, parents, or advertisers use fear as a motivator, it always involves shrinking your awareness down into some kind of tunnel vision, accompanied by some level of fight/flight/freeze energy.

A searing and tragic example of this in religion is the biblical phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10) Countless people have been shrunken by the idea that fear of the creator – the most expansive thing we can imagine – is the entrance to wisdom. This is absolutely true, if your goal is to live a terribly small life of obedience to people who do not want you to live fully.

The western world has several millennia of the Fear of the Lord imprinted in our energy field. When and when I look out at the battle between the two sides who call each other crazy, I see a struggle between those who want everyone to fear the Creator and people who decline to.

It turns out that the $34,000 I spent on that seminary degree does have some benefit: A simple look at the original Hebrew text in Proverbs 9:10 opens the awareness of how so many people have been so sadly duped. I’ll spare you the levels of linguistic investigation and get right to a more accurate translation of that phrase from Proverbs:

“The energy that flows from the belly of the creator is the beginning of intimate relationship with life and the ability to discern what is good for you and what isn’t.” ( Reference ).

The Celtic shamans might put it like this:

The beginning of wisdom:

The eye that sees what is.

The heart that feels what is.

And the boldness that dares to follow them.

As we are taught to shrink the ancient texts through translation, we have also been taught to pray from inside that same shrunkenness.

We are afraid of something, and we cry out for some great power to take away the sensation of fear so that we don’t have to feel it anymore. We plead with the great power to kill the enemy, to withdraw its punishment (I’ll be good from now on, I promise), or to make us rich (money makes all problems go away.) We pray to the great power to make these uncomfortable feelings go away by delivering magic to us. That is prayer-making from a small and powerless place inside us – a place in which, we are taught, good and devout people live. When people think prayer is stupid, fantasy, childish, this is what they are thinking about. They reject all prayer because they been taught only about praying from shrunkenness.

Here is a secret: a teacher interested in your fullness as a human being will not teach you to pray like that. A tyrant will promise to deliver on all of those kinds of prayers (but will rarely or never actually deliver).

When we envision Spirit as a judging king or father (or a judging Mother Earth, for that matter) we are committing ourselves to making small prayers. Shamanism teaches us to, first of all, open our shrunkeness, to step out of it, and step into a vast universe of helping powers.

One of my teachers is fond of saying that Spirit answers every single prayer we make. A second secret, which shamanism teaches: If you pray to have a fear magically removed rather than pray to learn from the fear, you are actually making an unconscious prayer for Spirt to deliver more fear to you. That is a difficult idea, but I have come to see it as true.

This is how shamanism teaches you to work with fear through prayer:

Begin by asking Spirit to make you open, receptive and trusting. Remember that you are not essentially made of fear, but of wonder and curiosity. That’s why you came here – to explore this strange thing called fear. (A digression: a few years ago, in one of my morning astral travels, I went to a place where everyone could fly, but most of them chose to walk. A group of people called me over to talk to them. They sheepishly, with great care, asked me: "Is it true that you come from a place where people actually fear death?” I said yes, and they all burst into gasps of sheer wonder.)

So, begin by remembering that you are made of Spirit, and one definition of Spirit is “boundless wonder and unending possibility.”

Ask “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” to enter into you, in order to expand you out of any shrunkenness, so that you can learn what that current fear has to teach you – in other words to open wisdom (the intimacy with the life force that gives you the ability to discern what is really happening, and what is good for you and what isn’t). As Jesus might say, Spirit doesn’t give you a fish; it teaches you to fish.

Here is a simple prayer to try when are feeling powerless and afraid. (By the way, feeling an ambient sadness is often – not always, but can be - a kind of mis-translation of the feeling of fear.)

“Spirit, I know you will deliver the power to help me sink into this fear with strength and clarity, and learn from it. Deliver that power to me right now.” Imagine what “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” looks like as it flows into you. Open, and bring it in. Let it shimmer throughout your body. Because you need this support (and you always, always have it) in order to do your best work with fear.

After filling yourself with universe-belly-energy, sink into the current fear, and aggressively ask yourself what is the more daunting fear under the lid of this current fear I’m feeling? You may find yourself sinking down layer after layer, always protected and supported by the universe-belly-energy.

In shamanism, the way out of fear is not to plead for the fear to be whisked away by delivering something nice, but to ask the power of the universe to support you as you learn what that fear wants to teach you about life. This kind of work is not easy.

Here is a good little prayer you can make in the morning to support this process:

Spirit, I am ready to work with you

to dissolve my fears ownership over my life.

I am ready to grow my power.

Come, Spirit, and work with me right now.

Pour your shimmering into me.

Help me see you shimmering in every cell.

Help me step into the next level of

love, truth and energy.

Thank you, Spirit.

How do I Manage this Holy Yearning and Holy Grief?

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 03:51:15 GMT

Many people are yearning for a deeper connection to spirit to help guide their lives in a more meaningful way. They want to step off this cruise ship for orphans, as Martin Prechtel might say; they want a way out of the culture of economics that substitutes “more” for “the beyond,” as psychologist James Hillman said. Years ago, social scientists identified loneliness as the main illness of western culture. Maybe that has been replaced by meaningless.

That deep yearning for connection with Spirit often feels like pain. Spiritual yearning has these two ingredients: the awareness of something larger and beautiful that brings meaning to life, and the frustration and grief that we can’t quite touch it or hold it for very long before it evaporates. The poet Rilke said, “So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”

It’s good to recognize that this particular form of grief has always been with humans. It's an integral part of being sentient. It’s not just you, not your personal flaw, or your weakness, or your inability to figure things out. It’s not because of your parenting. It’s not just our time period or culture. It is a fundamental energy of being a human being in a body, and it is a holy grief.

This yearning/grief has inspired all religions and spiritualities, and it is fueling the transformation of consciousness that we are all now part of. Grief opens the door to every shift of consciousness.

It’s also good to allow this grief some room, and not push it aside, as we often want to do. When this holy grief lives in the unconscious, it manifests in two main ways. Pointed inward, it becomes depression or ennui - directionless dispiritedness. Projected outward, it becomes blame placed on others, or it becomes a fantasy that others have some secret magic key to happiness that we don’t have. That’s a recipe for falling into all kinds of go-nowhere spiritual compulsions.

In the early 20th century, for those esoteric teachers that called themselves “The New Age,” the very first rule for initiates was to shed the three human desires that manifest as evil in the world: the desire for status, possessions, and sex. Please don't mistake what I’m saying for "to be authentically spiritual is to live in celibacy and poverty." That's part of the old story. What the sages mean is, when we see those three desires as substitutes for spiritual power, we create suffering for ourselves and for the world. We are beginning to see this more clearly now than ever before.

The good news is this truth: you already have a deep, profound, unbreakable, nourishing relationship with Spirit; you already live in beauty and are made of beauty.

The issue is you’re a human being, so you are constructed in two parts: the eternal essence which knows this connection and has no fear, and the constructed social personality which is made of fear glued together with those three desires mentioned above. The shamans say all of us come from the otherworld but we forget in the first few months of being in a body, because we get dazzled and dazed by this physicality. This inner wrestling match is in the human structure.

So, recognizing and honoring the grief as sacred energy is the first step. Then there is the question of how to create meaning.

Charles Eisenstein wrote a piece called “ What is the Next Story ” that was made into a nice little video . He lays out elegantly the “old story” that we are leaving and “new story” that we are bringing into being. For example:

“Old Story: I am a separate self: a bubble of psychology, a soul encased in flesh, or a biochemical machine.

New Story: I am a holographic mirror of all that is, a nexus point in an infinite web of relationship.”

He goes on and on elegantly.

His article is about gathering meaning to yourself to help give you strength day by day. Even though we spend so much of our life energy wrapped up with status, possessions, and sex, we need a big story - something greater, non-physical and mythic to devote ourselves to, and to help pull us through the daily wrestle of life. The old stories have stopped working for many people, which has opened up a great smoking chasm of anxiety. Even many who fight frantically for the old stories don’t believe them – they just greatly fear that chasm of holy grief, and that doorway to the new story. In truth, the new story has already arrived in this world, and is now solidifying its new body.

All of my indigenous teachers, from the Mayan, to the Amazonian, to the Celtic, have said the same thing: every creature in this world is made of song - of music, of vibration. Quantum physics is remembering this too. Spirit is that living song, or as a Toltec shaman says, the only living being in the universe is life itself, and it constantly sings new songs into existence. Those new songs become birds, ocean sand, black holes, tarantulas, Anjou pears, and you. That one living being, life itself, is the connecting net of everything. We aren’t searching to find anything. We are already in the net, along with everything else.

I have found it helpful to remember that the yearning you feel inside you is the same ancient yearning inside the Spirit of Life. You are an aspect of the “only living being – life itself,” and it is always yearning to bring forth the next new song. That yearning that sometimes feels like pain is hard evidence that you and Spirit are in total communion. This is what the masters mean when they say, “You are perfect, right now. All is perfect, right now.”

Martin Prechtel, who I was lucky to study with many years ago, says that our main task as human beings is to help mend the net of life wherever we see it torn. He calls the mending of the net the shamans’ main job, but each of us are responsible for it in our own way. Look around and ask, “Where do I see the net of life torn, and how can I help mend it?” No single person can mend the whole net And we are past the old story of a messiah coming to do the work for us. But there are so many of us awakening to this grief and yearning, that each of us attending to even the smallest rupture in the net is a great service to life, Spirit, and the future.

So, “mending the net” is a good recipe for summoning daily meaning. And “solidifying the body of the new story” is also helpful.

The shamans know that it is crucial to support our great story with ceremony and prayer. This is how we send energy to the shift that we want to see, to the new song. We send this energy from this world to the otherworld, and it gives the otherworld energy to send its new song to us. Ceremony transmutes grief and yearning into the threads that are woven by Spirit into next shape of the world.

The simplest thing you can do is make offerings of beauty to that grief in you. Sing a prayer onto some flowers, a prayer song that acknowledges your yearning and your grief as holy energies. Sing for the release from the old story. Then ask Spirit to put its compassion, intelligence, and power toward weaving the body of that new story into this world.

Put the prayers on flowers, and give the flowers to mother earth - the energetic matrix that brings all things into physical form; in whose womb all possibilities of life on this planet are stored; upon whose loom all new stories are woven. Include in your prayer song some gratitude to Mystery for making you a human being with this beautiful holy yearning and grief. Then ask Spirit, the otherworld, to send you power to help you navigate this world.

This prayer can be done on your own, but it is especially good to do this kind of work in community. So, gather some people together to do it, and don’t forget to have some laughs too.

May your grief reveal itself to you as a sacred power of your deep love of life. May your yearning reveal itself to you as the best evidence of your complete harmony with the Spirit of life itself. May the new song, filled with the love and wisdom that we never imagined was possible for us, flow into the world.

About the future of humanity, your grinding self-deprecation, and why we kiss under the mistletoe

drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com (Jaime Meyer) — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:51:56 GMT

“We are in a time where the fundamental myth of civilization has collapsed, and a new myth is emerging.” Joseph Campbell says words to this effect in the famous PBS series The Power of Myth, back in 1988. Bill Moyers, leaning forward, wide-eyed, like a school child about to learn a big secret, whispers, “What is the new myth emerging?” Campbell leans in, and with his cherubic cheeks glowing, and says giddily, “Well, that’s just it, Bill! No one knows yet!”

In the 34 years since, I think we’ve gotten a foothold on what that new foundational myth is. The core idea of the old myth is: things are solid, different from one another and separate, and the universe operates on consistent physical rules. Theologians (the good ones, anyway) affirm that the God we imagine is a projection of our current understanding of how the universe works. In other words, any culture’s God is the representative of our fundamental cultural myth. We have an inner shared myth, we create God to run it. So, the God of western culture runs a universe where everything is in separate bits and has consistent rules. We must obey the rules.

We’ve taken the bait that science and religion are enemies, but both agree on this underlying myth: the universe was once not here, and then it separated from the nothingness - the void – and continued to separate into more and more physical bits, like carbon and oxygen, and those bits combined into separate bits like stars and planets, and reindeer, octopi, the covid virus, and us. As reality progresses, it separates again and again into different physical bits, all commanded by physical laws like gravity, time, and space. For both western science and religion, the foundational myth is a consistent flow of separate bits. The laws of physics and of God are the same wherever you go.

But…

A hundred years ago, quantum physicists started to realize that none of the above is true, at all. A totally bizarre, ludicrous, baloney-malarky idea began to appear: electrons were both a particle and a wave – at the same time. They were simultaneously solid matter and pure energy. Electrons could be in more than one place at the same time. They changed form when they were observed by us. They communicate across vast distances faster than the speed of light. Like a child announcing to its parents that they are non-binary, electrons declared that they weren’t going to follow the rules of the universe that we had laid out for them.

So, during this 100 recent years, ungodly relativism has poured forth across the world as science started to reveal a radical truth: that reality is based not on consistency, but on uncertainty, and underneath everything is not a set of unchanging, firm laws, but a field of ever-shifting energy with potential to become anything it seemed to want to become, at any time.

For 100 years, science has reacted to this in the same variety of ways that parents and ministers have to the children, or to anyone who steps outside the foundational myth. Some shouted angrily, “You’re either an electron or you’re not! You’re either matter or a wave. You’re either here or you’re over there! You’re either dead or alive.” But it didn’t matter what they shouted because it wasn’t true. If you want to know why conservative religious people are so upset nowadays, and polishing their guns for the coming holy war, it’s because what they say is true: “God’s” universal order is being threatened by these ideas.

And it goes even further. Not only does the word “either” not exist in the quantum universe, neither does the word “thing.” Quantum physics is telling us – through hundreds of repeated experiments – that, at the fundamental level of reality, there is no thing separate from another thing. Every shape that the field of quantum energy takes only has reality based on its relationship with the whole. Nothing exists separately from anything else. This is an absolute affront to western individualism.

For the past few hundred years, we totally fell in line with Isaac Newton telling us that the universe is made of individual particles governed by gravity, and we totally got on board with philosopher Rene Descartes (standing on the book of Genesis) telling us that the human mind makes us separate from an otherwise lifeless storm of matter. This foundational cultural myth “ripped us from the fabric of the universe,” as writer Danah Zohar said.

So, if you’re feeling confused, frightened, at odds with your fellow humans, filled with rage (which is the last desperate attempt to restore by force the previous universe) just remember: it’s not you. It’s not (only) because of your flaws and your traumas and your inability to cope. The whole bleachers at the game have collapsed, and we are, together, falling into the great sea of transformation. (This is why you might want to be careful with the spiritual marketplace promising you “TRANSFORMATION!”)

And when, as you work your spiritual path, when you plunge into the cold waters of self doubt, where you wonder if you’re being stupid, or if you’re making it all up, when voices, the quiet ones inside, and the eviscerating ones in social media, try to convince you that you are a fool, all ego, just another “(fill in the category) idiot” pretending to be what you aren’t, remember give a chance to the idea that, when the bleachers collapse into the sea, everyone flails, and just do your best to make your flailing as graceful as possible. And as full of love as you can muster.

The future of humanity is the marriage between quantum physics and shamanism. Why? Because they see the same universe. One studies it, the other works with it directly. One is grounded in the logical, analytical, rational mind; the other uses the larger, freer, more fun-oriented, poetic mind. We need both in this marriage.

So what does all of this have to do with kissing under the mistletoe?

Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp, (d. 2018) spent the 20 ^th century making groundbreaking discoveries in the quantum mechanics of biophotons – how cells take in the smallest known particle of light, the photon, how they store light, and radiate it. He came to a conclusion that every living thing is communicating with every other thing, through light. Remember that in this emerging myth, nothing exists on its own. We are “light beings,” yes, but only because we exchange light with the rest of the universe. We are not beings because we “SHINE!” as so many workshops want to teach, which is the western model dressed in new age clothing. We are light beings because we all drink each other’s light. The old joke about heaven and hell comes to mind. Everyone sits around an extravagant banquet table loaded with food. But the forks are five feet long. Hell is where I try and fail to find a way to feed myself with that too-long of a fork. Heaven is where we learn to feed each other.

A fascinating element of Popp’s work is that heathy cells actually radiated less light than unhealthy cells – less, but more coherent light. He found that stress increased cells’ emission and incoherence of light. I know I’m stretching the analogy, but I certainly feel that when I’m stressed – which really means that I’ve fallen into some ego-hole, I’m emitting more energy, but with less coherence.

He found that cancerous cells emit vast and incoherent light. He knew that cells communicated through the exchange of light. In 1923, the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch discovered that plants’ roots could stimulate a neighboring plant's roots through the transfer of UV light if filtered through a crystal glass. So, Popp experimented with many plant extracts to see if the light in the cells of plants could coax the cancerous cell into a normal, healthy radiance. The single success was mistletoe, which was used on a woman volunteer, and within a year her terminal cancer was reversed.

So, when you are standing under that mistletoe, innocently hoping for that kiss, you can expand your inner universe by considering that what you may be asking for is that you and someone else can drink light together, and regulate your own cell’s light, guided by the mistletoe light-spirit, and as full of love as you can muster.

Blessings of light be yours at this solstice time.

For more on Fritz Albert Popp: “ Are humans really beings of light? – Esalq”

Two accessible books on quantum physics:

The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot
The Field, Lynne McTaggart

The Cailleach of Callanish Watches Over Us

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 12:01:11 GMT

In Scotland, at one of my favorite places on earth: the Standing Stones of Callanish. It is a stone circle older than Stonehenge; a massive, wondrous site, vibrating with immense energy, but rather lightly visited by tourists because it’s so far away from anything. I love this place.

In the arial image, I’ve photoshopped out the roads around the site to get a hint at what it may have looked like to ancient people. Most of the stones are about six-foot tall. The ones in the center are much taller. You can see the double lines of standing stones that point to the north. It is along this path that ancient worshippers processed toward the center, actually beginning the ceremonial trek miles away to the north.

Parts of the site line up with celestial events. For example, every 18.6 years, the moon barely rises at all, but passes low over the hills far in the distance - hills that look like a woman’s body reclining or sleeping. Certain stones in the circle line up with the moon’s hours-long caressing of the woman’s body. The entire site is oriented, in many ways, to a goddess called the Cailleach Na Mointeach : The old woman of the moors.

I wonder if the entrance to the site is from the north because the north is the direction on the medicine wheel associated with the Cailleach – she wakes up at summer’s end, enters our world, and begins her job of dis-assembling what summer has built. Her first job is to dis-assemble the current shape of things. The “sleeping woman” hills are to the south of the Callanish stones – and that is the direction of summer, when the Cailleach sleeps, and when she is caressed by the Dreaming Moon. The moon is sometimes seen as a male figure in Celtic culture.

In Scots and Irish (patriarchal) tradition, the Cailleach is usually viewed as a mean goddess of winter who delights in stamping out summer with her giant stone hammer, draining the life from the world and bringing terrible winter. She wakes up about this time of year and starts doing her job of bringing autumn, then winter.

But at the Callanish Stones, the Cailleach is honored in a much broader sense – as the Great Earth Mother. She is the one who assembled all the rocks, hills and mountains of the earth – indeed, of the cosmos - and who continues to shape and reshape, dis-assemble and re-assemble, the world (both outer and inner). This cosmic Cailleach brought the asteroids loaded with water crashing to earth to make it habitable, the nebulas are her wild-eyed flock of goats, and the milky way is the nourishment she pours onto the earth.

The green arrow in the arial picture points to a pile of three large rocks. As you can see, they are aligned with that north-south avenue - the main ceremonial corridor. They are also up a hill, a slow rise of maybe 20 feet. So, these rocks have a sense of overlooking the entire Callanish stone circle. These rocks weren’t moved here - they were present when the circle was built. Here is what they look like from the side that faces the avenue and the worshipers:

Is this also the Cailleach, the great goddess, so often described in (patriarchal) myth as mean, cold, and dangerous? This sweet-faced grandmother? Was the entire Callanish circle situated so that she looked over the whole sacred space, and each and every person who entered? Every time I take a group to these stones, I can’t wait to sit in Her embrace.

My Friends: beyond everything else that the Stones at Callanish may have said to the Ancients and have said to the millions who have pilgrimages there over 50 centuries, I believe they also say this: The Earth Mother is always with you, always watching over you with an open and loving embrace, always wanting you to flourish, always wanting you to blossom. Your life is one long ceremonial procession to the center.

The druids have a saying: death is the center of a well-lived life. For each of us, death is our destination. Every road you take leads to the same place. That destination is not an end, but merely a place of the re-arranging of the stones. At each step, the Great Mother watches over our ceremonial procession – a long, sometimes arduous walk of many miles, much discomfort, much learning, much beauty.

We are in a time of the great re-arranging of the stones – the foundations upon which we’ve built our lives. The stones are shifting; we are climbing over them, learning big lessons about living in the body with each other, and with the powers of nature.

Some people fall into guilt and proclaim the Great Mother is mad at us, and punishing us, but I think that’s just an unhelpful rewrite of the mean patriarchal Cailleach with her smashing hammer. It’s also just another version of the Great Judging Male God that has really gotten us into this mess in the first place. It’s Yahweh in a dress.

For me, there is no punishment in the face of the Cailleach at Callanish – just guidance, as she teaches us our current, difficult lesson about redefining abundance. This is a question you can carry with you into this dark part of the year: what is true abundance?

The Stones at Callanish

drummingthesoulawake@gmail.com (Jaime Meyer) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 20:33:19 GMT

Scotland, Day 5

Scotland, Day 5:

My Peruvian teachers say that, at night, the plants come alive. They work all day transforming sunlight into life. After the sun goes down, they sing night songs and play with the stars and the dark air.

I think the same is true of stone circles. The stones have a completely different energy at night. This is why, when I take a group to the standing stones of Callanish on the windswept, western Isle of Lewis, I like our first visit to be at night.

We are typically the only people there, which is extraordinary. The stones have an openness and receptivity that they don’t have in the daylight. It’s typical for first time night visitors to burst into tears as they approach the stones. Something deep and ancient opens in them, something completely non rational, a portal that is inside us all the time, but is usually held tightly closed by the daylight-mind. The night stones sing open that doorway of the old heart, the heart that is organically connected to everything alive (and which knows that everything is alive), the heart totally at home with Mystery, with no need to explain anything, to put things into categories, to judge worthiness - the primary activities of human beings during daylight.

It’s the easiest environment to make prayers to release your regret and fear, and to ask the Great Powers to put their energy and support under your vision for yourself and the world (which is exactly the prayers we made together).

I ask the travelers to turn off their headlamps just before we round the corner of a hill, and the stones appear in our sight. I had planned our trip to visit the stones on the night of the full moon, and the mostly cloudy skies cooperated by delivering to us a properly coy and flirtatious moon just perfect for prayer-making. I thought of the Wendell Berry poem:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

How to thrive in a declining empire

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 17:46:37 GMT

No one knows the future, so I suppose it’s presumptuous for me to proclaim that we are living in a declining empire. Not one of us, not even that super-smart podcaster or well-coifed talking head, truly knows how the world will be in ten years, much less 100 or 500 years. However, the empire in which I grew up is unravelling, no doubt. So, how do I thrive in this?

If you operate by the empire’s old rules, “thriving” during the decline involves seeing enemies and threats everywhere, and seeking the protection that money and weapons promise. When I’m in my fear, I’m tempted by that. When I get tired of fear, I think “anger is holy,” and I fantasize about training to become a ninja assassin of oil company CEOs and neo-Nazi leaders. But I don’t think an old dude who gently carries spiders out of the house really has that in him.

When empires decline, they begin to “amuse themselves to death,” as Neil Postman wrote of our culture in 1985. Amusing yourself to death takes on the structure of any addiction. At first, it’s fun and feels great. The spirit of addiction dresses up seductively to woo us at first, but after it has us, it doesn’t even bother to put on deodorant, and one day we find ourselves shocked at how we ended up toothless in this rusted out trailer.

Perhaps the most widespread, destructive spirit of addiction operating nowadays is “the algorithm.” This is the technology that social media uses to send us ads and posts relating to the same kind of stuff we’ve already clicked on. Every single one of us lives in a world shaped by this invisible spirit. Not only shaped, but shrunken. The algorithm spirals our reality down into an ever-tighter circle. This is how we get sucked down holes. If you really want to work on a huge, world-changing political level, start working to make the algorithm illegal in social media.

Can I choose not to amuse myself to death? How do I do it? It begins with knowing the difference between beauty and pleasure.

This has been a huge topic in philosophy, theology, and ethics for 5,000 years. Neuroscience tells us that the same brain centers are activated when experiencing profound spiritual beauty, eating a taco, and having sex. So, is beauty pleasure, and pleasure beauty? No – and conflating them or confusing them is the pathway to amusing ourselves to death.

Pleasure connects you to the immediately physical, what Aristotle called hedonia, (where the word hedonism comes from). Pleasure feels good. One of my very wise teachers is fond of saying that our best spiritual life can be simply guided by feeling good. If it feels good, it means you’re on the right track with Spirit. I bristle when he says that, and I wonder if that’s just my old Protestant imprinting: “Work! Work! Only work, not fun, makes you right with God.” So, I’m hoping that my wise teacher is actually talking about beauty, not pleasure, as being the marker of being on the “right path.”

Beauty does two things. First, it holds together the grief of life and the praise of life. Pleasure tries to wipe out the grief of life momentarily and only receive the praise of life. When we seek that all the time, it becomes the addiction. We begin to amuse ourselves to death.

So, we need to work with the grief of life – the uncomfortable and scary – which our addictive culture constantly tells us to ignore. All spiritual bypassing involves a refusal to honestly grieve. But the grief of life must be held together with the praise of life. And our hip, cynical culture tells us that the praise of life makes us shallow. Cynicism and nihilism are a refusal to praise life. This holding together of grief and praise is what Aristotle called Eudaimonia, or “good spirit.”

Many of us are stuck in a place where we are afraid that if we grieve, the floodgates will open, and we will be overwhelmed and die. And we have not been taught how to fully praise life, but we’ve been well-trained in how to analyze our lifelong fear of praising life. So, we float in this liminal space: lost, anxious, depressed, visionless, weak, tired. So: Netflix, wine, and another $29 webinar on how to “manifest.”

The other important thing beauty does is connect us to the larger story of our existence than just the physical level. Declining cultures sink down into a small and ugly cosmic story that shrinks life’s meaning – for example, imagining a Creator of the entire universe as just a bigger version of ourselves, with the same hates and desires we have. Or insisting that the entire universe is a mere chance-cocktail of dead chemicals, as our scientific model often proclaims. Beauty takes us far past those small Creators, those puny gods. Beauty takes us into our “unknowing” as a place of wonder.

Again, neuroscience: it turns out that, when we experience beauty, another area of the brain is activated along with the pleasure center – so beauty is pleasurable, but not merely pleasure. What’s happening in this other brain center?

Mystics and wisdom carriers throughout time have said that our power only comes from the now – the present moment. All addictions sap the energy out of the now and make the now small. Beauty expands the Now. It connects us to a far larger, more spacious present moment. Thriving in the declining empire has to involve coming fully into the most expansive present moment possible.

For me, the way we do that is by opening our huge, sacred imaginations. Everything I’ve mentioned above- addictions, the algorithm, the spiraled-down, compacted, ugly comic stories – all of them rely on shrinking the imagination.

Shamanic practice is a spiritual path of expansive imagination; imagination as the sacred meeting place between the mundane world and the ineffable; imagination as medicine for body and soul, and imagination as the energy field that opens one’s connection to higher purpose.

Not that long ago, humans spent a lot of time telling stories to each other where each person had to imagine the details of each story. As movies, TV, CGI, and super realistic digital animation evolved, we no longer need to imagine anything. Nowadays, when we are asked to imagine, it is by politicians and marketers, which chiefly urge us to imagine fear and greed.

Not really that long ago, the main way the Bible was interpreted was as metaphor. Only in the last few centuries – a fearful reaction to the rise of fact-based science – has the literalistic interpretation become so widespread. Literalism kills imagination, and people with dead imaginations have an easier time bringing literal death into the world.

It is not a mistake or surprise that our declining culture devalues the imagination. (Bad) science says imagination is useless fantasy and logic is the only true, reliable filter for reality. (Bad) religion warns us to only imagine certain, pre-approved images and stories; all others are evil. (Noxious) religion seduces us with a God of love, but we find ourselves shooting up daily with the god of judgment, guilt, and shame. (Thin) spiritual paths placate us with confidence that we are the better ones, smarter ones, the saved, the older souls, the more loving, than those other people. (Bad) education slices the arts from the curriculum. (Bad) amusement feeds us all the images and ideas so we don’t have to summon any of them for ourselves. Amusing ourselves to death happens when we stop imagining life into our life, when we refuse to grieve and when we refuse to praise equally.

So, my recipe for thriving is very simple: find ways to open your imagination and use it. Be aware that the empire’s voice will always try to stop you (“What a waste of time and money,” “Maybe you’re crazy,” “You are courting the devil…”). The empire has always sought to shrink, smash or twist the sacred imagination, and to try to make you live in a small and false universe. Commit yourself to spending time each day imagining just how huge creation is. There are billions of galaxies spinning all around you, right now. What does it feel like to be here, now in this immense creation? Feed the spirit of beauty at least as much as you feed your pleasure, and try to not confuse them as the same exact thing.

Keep playing your drum

Calling, calling. For now, you have been kissed by the Holy -

the touch of Spirit on the body.

The lily opens and the wild darling appears.

Each wave crest dissolves with a sigh into the sea.

The great song rises in the throat

To sing, through you, the terrible and lovely melody of life.

All is now. All. Is now.

Summer Solstice: How to Remove Magic Poison Darts

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 04:54:04 GMT

People have a wide variety of diagnoses for our ill culture. I see two root illnesses at work. One is shame, and the other is shame’s true source, conditional love. We are in a culture that emphasizes conditional love – you are loved IF you act in a certain way, look a certain way, believe a certain way. Religious hypocrisy is always tied to preaching the tenets of unconditional love, but enforcing conditional love. Shame is the weapon of conditional love.

In the Amazon jungle, sorcerers are hired to shoot invisible poison darts at people that lodge in them, fester, and make them sick. The darts are called virotes (vee-RO-tayz). They are typically a form of envidia, which translates as "envy" but it’s a catch-all term for "wishing ill on someone," or wanting to "bring them down." One of the most common healings is for the shaman to remove virotes. Shame is our version of virotes.

Shame becomes the high, cement wall built around the small garden of conditional love. Racism, consumerism, willful ignorance – these take place in this self-created garden. Shame is designed to shrink our inner life, douse our inner fire, and shrink people’s love of life. When it is successful, people become less connected to the Great Spirit, less powerful in their personal life, and are more easily manipulated. I tell you: The creator of everything from black holes to the black puma, from the petunia to the possum, is not interested in you living in that small garden.

As we approach the summer solstice, we are in the center of the south on the Celtic medicine wheel. One power of the south is ebullient, delightful, unconditional love, for everything – life, the body, others, and ourselves. That love-power can help remove virotes.

Here’s a self-healing you can do: Stand under the bright sun, muse on its unconditional love for everything on earth. Then ask the sun to remove the virotes in you. (Virotes are a source of energetic "cold," so the sun is a good healer for this.) Don’t forget to turn around and ask the sun to work on your back, pulling out and burning away these cold intrusions. I find many virotes in people’s backs.

Then choose someone you are angry with, or that you despise, and ask Spirit to remove any virotes in them that It will. Or a more general prayer you can make on their behalf: "Spirit, help them find their way out of any small garden of shame." (Give this job over to Spirit as a prayer and a blessing, please don’t try removing people’s virotes yourself without solid training.)

Unconditional love takes practice, it’s not just a belief or catchphrase. The more you practice it, the more natural it becomes for you. Here is a good short phrase you can use as a prayer or mantra. Look out at the world – the whole world – and say: "All is holy, as am I; All is blessed, as am I; All is loved by God/Spirit/Creator, as am I." (Reference: Paul Selig). This simple phrase can carry a lot of power.

During these solstice days, may you stroll with sunny ebullience in the garden of unconditional love.

How To be an April Fool Under A New Moon

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 12:44:30 GMT

Yes, it's me, age 17, graduating from a year-long clown class. Call me Twinkles. Yes, Twinkles the Clown.

Do you feel like we are living in a never-ending April Fool's day, powered by hoaxes, lies, fake news, insults and pranks? Maybe it's not the intellectual or moral collapse that it seems to be. Maybe we're experiencing a global shift in the "assemblage point."

The idea of the assemblage point is found in the writings of Carlos Castaneda. As explained by his enigmatic Toltec master, Don Juan, the universe is made of an infinite number of energy streams flowing everywhere, all at once. (Quantum mechanics, anyone?) Our physical shape, and our identity, is formed by the confluence of uncountable streams of energy passing through a specific, small point in our egg-shaped energy field. Located in adults about an arm's length behind our shoulder blades, the assemblage point is where cosmic energies condense to become "me."

There is a common story in shamanism, Zen, Yoga, and even Christianity wherein the seeker is clobbered from behind by the teacher, to awaken their enlightenment. My first shamanic teacher said that when he made his way to a Guatemalan village as young man, an old man came running up behind him and whacked him in the back with a heavy stick.

As the young man picked himself up from the dirt, the old man said, "What took you so long? I've been dreaming of you for years!" He became his teacher eventually initiating him as a shaman.

That physical smack shifts the assemblage point so it can move to a different location on one's luminous body, to a place where different energy streams meet and create a different reality for that person. This puts a new spin on being "smacked" by life (physically or emotionally). It may be Spirit's way of shifting your assemblage point to open a new world for you.

Psychology can dilute the assemblage point down to the ego, or to a metaphor for our inner filters and personal bias. But Don Juan was saying that we are able to shift between actual universes by shifting our assemblage point. It's how shamans can have uncanny powers like shapeshifting into, say, a jaguar. This also points to the care that must be taken in our shamanic study and dream life, to make sure we don’t unwittingly stumble into unfriendly universes.

I had one visceral experience in Peru of stumbling naively into a universe in which the seemingly friendly beings there actually wanted to eat me. I met two people from this universe who had also stumbled into that one, and became trapped. It was the Spirit of Tobacco that rescued me from that place - literally pulling me back here by my legs while the Piranha-toothed people were pulling on my head to keep me there. The two trapped people I met did not have tobacco to get them out. Tobacco has proven again and again just how powerful an ally it is, and I bless my teachers for leading me to it and teaching me how to work with it.

We are in a time where our species-wide assemblage point has been loosened by Spirit - primed and readied to be shifted. This is a recipe for global anxiety - to have billions of assemblage points loosened.

Those who self-identify as "conservatives," are, from a shamanic perspective, committed to keeping their current assemblage point in place. Its loosening is seen as a descent into chaos. But, it is actually important to have some "play" in the assemblage point. Keeping it stiff and unmovable sets up a resistance that forces Spirit to shove harder to open new pathways. As the Tao Te Ching says:

Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Comics, tricksters and pranksters fulfill a sacred task – to break open calcified, heavy energies like arrogance and martyrdom. They refresh a universe made stale by self-importance. Laughter is considered by shamans to be high-frequency healing and cleansing energy. Laughter keeps the assemblage point lubricated.

So, how do we navigate this quantum flux, this assemblage point shift, and not stumble into one of those malevolent universes? The key is letting go of self-importance, which drains your green sap. Search your heart, mind and body for rigidity of ideas and old judgement, and ask Spirit to keep you lubricated with wonder.

An ongoing spiritual practice that builds your physical vitality, and opens your compassion and wonder is so important nowadays. Shamanic practice does that for me, as well as Qigong which I am new at, but has already revealed great results.

Plato taught about the four kinds of divine madness that release us from old habits, and I think these are also guides for us, antidotes to sickness, and protection against stumbling into bad universes.

The four kinds of divine madness are:

"Divination" which, for us, can mean seeking messages from nature, or, in shamanic practice, the "drum journey."
"Mystery": entering some kind of contemplation that opens up the wonder of the universe for you.
"Poetry": working with any kind of creativity that opens "enthusiasm and furor."
"The Erotic": placing your attention on what you love with intensity and diving in fully and enjoying it.

Plato said, "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift."

I leave you with this from Lalla, the wandering Kashmiri woman mystic of the 1300's:"

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.
And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.
Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.
My teacher told me one thing,
live in the soul.
When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.

English version by Coleman Barks
Original Language Kashmiri

Putin, Springtime and Liminal Space

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 12:44:32 GMT

We're in the most dangerous time. I'm not really talking about Ukraine, but it's part of the larger picture. In the northern climes, winter is just beginning to release its grasp, and more visible signs of spring are beginning to emerge. But because the days get above freezing and the nights dip down below, this is actually the most dangerous time for slipping and falling, with many patches of smooth ice, often hidden under a thin layer of new snow.

This roller coaster between the melt and the refreeze is where we are on the wheel of weather, and it's also where we are psychically. In Celtic myth, this is the story of Beira, the goddess of winter, fighting against Brigid, the bringer of springtime. It’s the pendulum between the old trying to hold onto its waning power, and the new shape of things inexorably emerging. We know winter is done for, we know spring cannot be held back. in this liminal time, we need to take even greater care in our steps than we had to in the depths of January.

You and I cannot have a direct effect on what's happening in Ukraine. So, where can we put this energy rising up in us – the fear and grief? First, try to expand your view, and have faith, that Ukraine is a very visible form of the melt/refreeze. Putin is a dinosaur, but even the last T-Rex on earth is very dangerous.

The world's reaction to his invasion shows a unity we have not seen in very long time, the kind of unity that must emerge if we will actually attend to the most serious global issues. This is the new world emerging.

Nature moves slowly. We are in a hurry because we are filled with grief and fear, and the new world cannot arrive soon enough for us. But it will take the time it takes. In the meantime, each of us can only do what the Buddhists advise: Take a few moments to consciously NOT numb the sadness or run from it. When we run or numb, we leave our body and we leave the present moment. We have to be in the present moment and in our body to be in a place of useful power for our life. So, take a few moments to formally and prayerfully acknowledge the fear and sadness (or whatever emotion comes up) as teachers. In a roundabout way, by acknowledging them, they teach us not to be controlled by them.

Take a few moments each day to try this practice. I suggest doing each "breath" several times. Take take time to sink into this practice:

Breathing in, I know the sadness is here.
Breathing out, I say hello to the sadness.
Breathing in, I come home to my body
Breathing out, I know I am home in my body.
Breathing in, I welcome the new world
Breathing out, I release the old world.

As you do this, it not only helps to calm your body, it sends this new consciousness into the field of energy to help feed the emergence of the new world.

February 17th, 2022

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 12:44:34 GMT

A friend sent me a lovely piece of writing by Sarah Blondin in which she describes part of a song that the Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh would sing to the dying to bring them comfort. The first lines of the song go like this: "This body is not mine. I am not caught in this body. I am a life without limits. I was never born; I have never died." Today, I've enjoyed singing that to myself.

You and I are always dying and being reborn in each moment. Everything, is, in each moment, dying and being reborn continually. Thay (as many called him) says ( in this video ) that when someone asks you, "What happens after I die?," the best response is, "What is happening right now?" It's the same, always.

There is a palpable sense of things dying right now, and it's more difficult to remember the other side - that the new world is being born, right now. Along these lines, the 15th Century Indian Mystic, Kabir wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. ("conscious and unconscious" can easily be replaced by "birthing/dying"):

Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing:

all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,
and it never winds down.

Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.

~~Kabir (Translated by Robert Bly

I am in my unknowing

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 12:44:36 GMT

I'm thinking about the spiritual catch-phrases, "raise your vibration," "create your own reality," "ascension," and "personal transformation." These are all good things to work on, certainly. But they are also incredibly active. It's worth remembering that our culture has embedded in us some largely unquestioned beliefs that our task is to work, work, work - that our value and identity come from our doing, doing, doing. We can easily apply that same unquestioned belief system to our spiritual life. It's easy for us to summon hope and optimistic vision, and then get caught in a frenzy of manifesting. It doesn't matter if your frenzy is about climbing the corporate ladder, curing the climate crisis, or ascending your spiritual ladder, if you're living in frenzy, it's something to look at.

Hope is important, and so we want to focus on "ways out of this mess." But, as the Buddhists say, hope is the other side of fear, and the two are always connected, like heads and tails on a coin. So, it can be delusional to believe that focusing on manifesting means you have unattached from fear. The Buddhists say we cannot escape fear through hope; we escape fear by abandoning hope .

You don't see many workshops titled, "How to abandon hope," and there are no certified practitioners of it. It's a difficult idea to work with, because the cowboy mentality we have embedded in us equates abandoning hope with "giving up," which only a loser would do. You'll never get rich by giving up, you'll never invent the gizmo or solve a problem by giving up. You'll never reach spiritual perfection by giving up.

When I go out in the dark morning for my daily prayer, I often get wrapped up in prayers for manifesting, ascending, growing, raising, serving, expanding. And so often, what happens is a breeze raises up during my prayer (today, that breeze carried a -18 degree wind chill - argh). The little wind chimes in the garden sing, and a power dances around me reminding me that everything is far bigger than my manifesting, and that I might consider trying to be more like the wind chimes. It might be good for me to stop singing prayers for a minute and try to let the hum of the earth sing its way into me, and hold me - that deep earth song like "TV static slowed down 10,000 times." In that moment, I am reminded that very little on this earth is about me, and it's worth remembering that in the grand scheme, very little is about human beings.

Awhile ago I put put a little piece in which I referred to a nice prayer-mantra, "I am in my knowing." It affirms that the higher self always knows what it wants, regardless of the next dramatic frenzy that the lower self thinks up. In the garden, in the dark morning, with the winter wind telling me to become wind chimes, the other phrase popped up: "I am in my unknowing."

This phrase affirms that 99.999% of everything is beyond my understanding, and I should not forget to travel into that spaciousness, that void, that womb, as often as I work work work on my personal transforming vibration ascension. So, a truly simple practice of abandoning hope and the frenzy of personal growth is to sit quietly in the dark and allow yourself to be in your unknowing. Repeat it out loud for awhile, and let the winter remind you that's okay to not figure it out today, to not solve it right now, to just be.

Medicine for the Great Collasping

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 12:44:40 GMT

We are given two great gifts in life: the gift of being created and the gift of being uncreated. We have been told for centuries that being created is the gift, and being uncreated is an error, a punishment. But if you see both as the same gift, it may make you a servant of the divine for life.

Our entire species is in a time of being uncreated. The old institutions, the old ways and rules, are collapsing, like the way massive blocks of ice sheer off from the glaciers in the arctic, falling to the great sea to float aimlessly, slowly melt, and vanish.

The thing is, even if you have hated, say, the church, or capitalism, or patriarchy, or social structures, and even if a part of you celebrates their collapse, it doesn’t change the fact that you were raised to trust in these old solid foundations – and the collapsing of that trust is very difficult.

Back in the old, old days of 1988, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers did a riveting set of interviews about world myth and the human psyche. One of my favorite parts was when Campbell said something like, "The old myth of western civilization is collapsing, and the new myth that will replace it is emerging." Moyers, like a six-year-old learning his first great secret, leaned forward with fear and awe in his face and asked, "What is the new myth?" Campbell, the oldest cherub on earth, leaned forward, red-cheeked and grinning with mischievous wonder, whispered, "That's just it, Bill – no one knows!"

This is where we are. The structures are collapsing all around us. No one knows what the new structures will be. On the medicine wheel, this is the West – the direction of dissolution, dismemberment, release. In the spiritual blogosphere, we are told again and again to "release what no longer serves us." That’s great, important spiritual advice, but when you're afraid of the void in front of you, it's very daunting to just tear off your old clothes and run naked through the doorway to the new world. That void is the north on the medicine wheel, the direction where pure power of spirit pours into our dreams to fuel the new shape emerging in us.

The collapsing world is frightening, and when animals are frightened, they default to their life-saving animal instincts of flight, fight or freeze. This is what we see happening all around us, and inside each of us. We want to run and hide; we want to blame, subdue and kill; many of us are frozen in place, feeling clueless and powerless. Fear draws us down into our animal bodies. That is not a bad thing, and it's not a failure of your spirit, it's just something that naturally happens because we are inside these animal bodies.

However, we are more than our animal bodies. In times of distress, it's difficult to remember that. You have a connection to a higher self, a higher "vibration," a more expansive perspective than the animal body does, and I want to suggest some simple ways you can activate that.

We have three main energy centers in our body: The intellect, the heart and the belly. Each person is grounded, energetically, in one of these centers – it is their go-to place when under stress. Western culture has tried its best to make each of us an intellectually-centered person, and most of us in the west are. So we try, often desperately, to think our way out of stress. We are told that more information is the medicine for our stress, confusion and grief.

But we are finding that more information is not the answer. And it's not because social media has made objective truth a thing of the past. It's because what is most important to human beings is not facts, but myth. Myth is our true ground, our true reality. This is the source of the fighting we see all around us, and it’s the source of all fighting in history. We never fight over facts, but over the myth that is supported by the facts of our choosing.

This paragraph gets a little esoteric, so hang with me for a moment: Each of the three centers has a higher and lower realm. Myth is born in the higher emotional center, solidified and articulated in the higher intellectual center, and put into action (rituals and ceremonies) using the higher belly center. But as we have seen in all religions, the lower realm of each center intrudes on the myth and draws it down and shrinks it. This is how myth becomes institutionalized religion. Hypocrisy in religion is the tension between higher and lower centers, where rituals become empty, ideas don't make sense, and ecstasy needs to be forced.

The uncomfortable truth is that you are never going to change someone's myth. Not with facts, and not with your better myth. The only source that can change a human's guiding myth is Spirit, and that will happen when the person is ready, and not until. Violence is almost always the manifestation of someone's guiding myth being hammered at. The violence we see emerging is an act of the lower intellectual center fighting to hold onto the dead shell of a myth that has already collapsed. They default to the "fight" animal-body response, or to the "flee" response, where thy tribalize and shut out the world, or the freeze response, where cynicism rules.

The only way to change someone's mind is to help them move into their higher emotional center, which feeds and activates the other higher centers. We see this happen when, for example someone who has long hated a certain group of people, suddenly realizes they are human beings too. The only way to help someone mov e into their higher emotional center is for you to be in your own first.

So here is some simple medicine:

Consider which of the fight, flight or freeze energies is the one working on you with most power. Ask that right now: do I tend most to want to run, to fight, or to freeze and play dead? Activate the belly center as a place of medicine – the belly is the place of physical action. Take one small action to un-create the behavior patterns that you usually operate with. For example, for me, I want to fight all the time. I want to set those assholes straight. So, I decided a while ago that I don’t want the animal-body fight energy to occupy so much room in me, and I want to stop feeding it. The very simple thing I will do is refrain from commenting on people's ludicrously misinformed and chock-full-of-dumbassery posts about Covid. And, I'm not going to make "You're so right!" comments to the people I agree with. Because both actions are about summoning the animal fighting energy that I want to be free of. I want to instruct my animal body to move out of that instinctual place. I've actually vastly reduced my interactions on social media, and I've felt that it has opened space in me. I've written fewer blogs too, and I feel more free.
The "couch potato" syndrome is a part of the animal's "freeze" instinct, and so we can, again, take a small action, even for five minutes, before turning on Netflix and sinking in. That small action needs to be purely physical, like stretching, or sweeping the kitchen, or stepping outside to look at the swaying winter trees. Every small physical action builds power from the belly center, bringing in more support to move you increasingly out of the animal instincts that are calling you down into the fear-based patterns of flight, flight and freeze. The belly center is the medicine for an out-of-control intellectual center. The belly center is also the medicine for an out-of-balance emotional center (anxiety and depression).
Open the higher emotional center as medicine for an out-of-control intellectual center. Ask yourself about two crucial energies: Love and Awe. What is it in this life that you love? What is it in this life that fills you with awe? (Gratitude is a third great heart energy, but there is so much written about it nowadays that I want to focus on Love and Awe.) Again, each time you feel called by the animal instincts of fight, flee or freeze, take 30 seconds to work with these two questions of what fills you with love and what fills you with awe. Tis opens the higher emotional center as medicine for out-of-control animal-body instincts. Then next time, take 60 seconds for love and awe, then five minutes, you get the idea.
Then, ask yourself, what small action you can take to activate that love or awe in the world, to bring that energy to someone else. (A small action that does not involve posting on social media). This will go a long way to helping rebuild your energy.

We are on a long journey together, my fellow holy beings, and it's not going to suddenly get better with a vaccine, or an invention of warp drive, or a war. We are each, in our own way, at our own state of readiness, being matured and refined by Spirit, and as a species, this all adds up to a mass stepping up of our spiritual maturity. The best thing you can do is ask Spirit to step you up in your own maturity, and ask Spirit to help you participate in the emerging new future as best as you can, with your particular skills and loves.

We can each do our part in this world to make it better world, but none of us knows what is being unveiled yet. I take great heart in this: Flowers didn’t arrive on the planet until the dinosaurs were extinct. In the dinosaur era, not a single one could have predicted a world of flowers. But the flowers were stored in the belly of the Great Mother, to be released into the world when the time was right. Everything that will ever happen on the planet is stored right now in the belly of the Great Mother, and in the song wafting down from the Great Immensity. At this winter solstice, try as best as you can to tell your animal body to be quiet, and make prayers to the Great Mother to send the new flowers – whatever form they might take, and ask the Great Immensity to send down the new songs, with the new myth, the new story that will make a new world.

Is it Possible to Be Happy in this World?

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:44:44 GMT

It's said that the difference between pleasure and happiness is that pleasure is momentary and comes from external sources, whereas happiness is long-term, and rises from a deep well inside us, and that well is fed by waters that flow from beyond the human-created world.

We live in a culture that fuels itself on selling ever-changing forms of pleasure to a populace that has forgotten how to be happy. We are promised a pleasure that will momentarily quell the current fear (sometimes by replacing it with a new fear, or with a new rage - yes, rage, which is blame's less nuanced brother, can be a form of addictive pleasure, as we see all around us).

We create pleasures to expel the current fear, and we create ever-new forms of fear that evaporate the current pleasure. So, fear and pleasure are inextricably linked, and they need each other. Both are momentary energies sourced from the external, and both are addictive. An economy that is fueled by addiction to fear and pleasure doesn't actually want the populace to be happy.

The pleasures and fears don't just magically appear; we make them all, we "manifest" them, to use the popular term. On we go, on our self-created merry-go-round of miasma and ennui.

Even in our spiritual seeking, we often lurch between the two: seeking some new spiritual thrill that soon wears off, and underneath, always afraid that we will never truly "connect with spirit." The spiritual marketplace eagerly offers up products and items to keep you bouncing and spinning. But you know in the bones inside your bones that bouncing between fear and pleasure is not your truest life, and that seeking Spirit from fear of cosmic unworthiness or from desire to be thrilled bigly is not going to work.

One of my teachers is fond of the phrase, "I am in my knowing." This is one of those simple phrases that, if used regularly, can help unbutton the daily costume woven from fear and pleasure. This is ridiculously simple, and the part of you that refuses to exit the addictive culture will scoff at this: sit quietly every morning before you begin your daily grind, and every evening before you go to bed, for 30 days, and work with the phrase, "I am in my knowing." Say it to yourself quietly. Ask yourself what you mean when you say those words. Wrestle with what comes up. See what happens to you.

Equinox in a Digesting Universe

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 12:44:47 GMT

LemonDeer (Click the image)

We live in a universe in which everything must eat something else. Everything has to eat, everything has to digest. Everything has to defecate.

Both science and shamanism affirm that, fundamentally, everything is energy. So, as humans, we eat dense energy like, say, broccoli, and Nutella. And we eat less dense energy that is available to us, like, say, envy, and beauty.

Science speaks of the Big Bang as a colossal event that happened at some point backwards on a timeline. Science also speaks of the echo of the Big Bang that is still present, as background radiation, that can be measured now. The Big Bang is still being digested. Shamanism looks at past lives and ancestral energies in a similar way: as human beings, we continue to digest, in present time, the energies of the past that echo into our present.

Right now our species is digesting a tremendous amount of old energy - from our own current lives, from past lives and from ancestors' lives - all at the same time. These are all what I'll call "horizontal" energies. Ancestral and past life energies can be seen as horizontally entering our backbone from a distance behind us. The anxiety, fear, anger and grief of daily life can be seen as horizontally entering us from the front and sides.

The reason why life is so intense right now is that we've reached a major point of our species' evolution where these things must be digested in order for us to jump up and live in the next form. Spirit has tossed open the energy center where these old energies have been stored undigested for a long time, and they are all now rushing out. Well, no wonder you're exhausted; no wonder your stomach hurts, and your bowels are funkified.

We spend almost all of our time trying to control or re-shape these horizontal energies. Complaining and lamenting are small prayers pleading with some power, somewhere, to take control and change things. Judging, pontificating, and predicting are our egos' way of claiming to have some control over things. We spend great energy on social media, sending out energetic pulses of our fear and arrogance into the horizontal world, trying to take control of something that we will never control. We are simply too small. We re only little human beings. The only force that can control the whirlwind we are in is Spirit. Social media is a great boomerang. Whatever you send out will fly horizontally, collect more of the same energy, and bring it right back to you to eat – more of the same to digest!

So, some will navigate these daily energies by spending energy on lamenting or pontificating. Some will go into hiding in one way or another. Some will turn to various forms of violence. Some will die – they will step back into the echo, to wait things out.

If you want to navigate in another way, it requires having spiritual practices that balance the obsession with the horizontal dimension with practices that activate the vertical dimension available to you. The vertical dimension reaches both upwards and downwards, and you may, if you wish, call them the Great Father (or "great immensity" if you have that lingering mistrust of the Masculine than pervades our world) and Great Mother (or, maybe "the great composter of all.").

Here is a simple practice that springs from my shamanic training.

Close your eyes, take a few breaths, and visualize the image I've offered: The echo-energies from past lives and ancestors flowing from a line into your back. (We most often judge this energy as "bad" – the bad karma of past lives and illness of ancestors. But remember that this line also pours the wisdom and strength from past lives and ancestors into your backbone.)
And then visualize the other horizontal energies of this world – the vitriol, anger, confusion, helplessness, and grief that whirl around you, and that you also send out. This is a picture of what is already happening to each of us. There is also wisdom and strength pouring in from this horizontal world.
Then, visualize the vertical dimension opening, both upward to the great immensity and downward into the great composter. You may see it as a line of energy coming form infinity, down through your head, body, feet, and into the earth.
Visualize the ancestral and past life energies pouring into you. The wisdom and strength can stay in your body. The toxic or useless energies flow down through your feet and deep into the compost.
Do the same with the horizontal energies of daily life. All forms of fear go down, into the earth-compost, to be gleefully welcomed by the Great Mother, who is so happy to eat and digest this. Why is she happy to receive it? Because it gives her fuel out of which she makes new life.
Do this part of the exercise for as long as it takes, sending this energy deeply into the earth.

W hen you feel ready, place your attention in the upward direction.

Give up any desire to control the world and anyone in it. Hand that desire over to the Spirit, the Singer of New Songs, the Immensity, the Quantum Field. Say the words outload: "Spirit, I give you my desire to control the world, and all the ways I act out that desire. Please take this desire from me." It is the desire to control that generates the fear, confusion, frustration, anger, violence and exhaustion.
Ask the Great Father to download new vision, new love, new compassion, new stories into you.
(You can work with the Great Mother to do this also, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm describing in this way. And in truth, if you resist working with the Great Father out of old pain with men or the patriarchy, this is something to ask to be digested as well. )
When you feel done with this, visualize yourself inside a radiant cerulean blue octahedron (an eight sided pyramid) which becomes a protective energy field.
Fill that space with three powerful energies: love, awe and gratitude. Call these energies in, one by one. Visualize them filling this space that surrounds you. They empower the three lines that feed into and out of the human being: the horizontal line from back to front, the horizontal line from side to side, and the vertical line from below to above. Send love, awe and gratitude as energy in each of these directions to feed the world you are standing in.

I hope this practice helps you navigate the world with more strength and less fear.

For a deeper dive into the Octahedron, check out this piece by Jose Stevens .
For a deeper exploration of how humans waste energy, check out this brief video by the great Buddhist teacher, Alan Watts.
For an insightful dive into how to move beyond "redemptive violence," check out this piece by Charles Eisenstein.

The Seductiveness of Blame

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 12:44:48 GMT

We are living together in a time where blame has replaced energy drinks as our daily vitality drink. In New Age terminology, blame is an energy field, like love, confidence, compassion, anger, envy, and hundreds of other fields. For shamans, "energy field" can be replaced by "spirit." Blame is a spirit, one that comes to you, testing to to see if there is an opening in your protective field that it can get through in order to eat your energy.

The most common marker of bad spirits is their seductiveness. They tell you that you are the smart one, the good one, the spiritual one, the special one. They intoxicate you with self-inflation and they convince you that your fear is actually a form of clear vision that others don't possess. (They also intoxicate you with negative ideas, but I won't go into that he

In my first ayahuasca ceremony in the jungle a few years ago, a few moments after taking the medicine, a nice spirit appeared to me telling me how gifted and wonderful I was, and how I should get up right now, before the medicine came on fully, and take a walk in the jungle with it. I luckily declined and the next day one of the shamans told me that was a common jungle spirit that likes to lead people away to eat them. A bad spirit's only real goal is to eat your energy. Most bad spirits don't show up so clearly. They come as ideas, as emotions. But they work the same way: you're very special, come with me.

There are many antidotes to blame. Compassion is a primary one, and also humor, and curiosity. You can ask these energies to come and help you navigate. Asking the powers of creation to raise your perspective out of the immediate short term, and to a larger overview of things helps, and maybe the most powerful one is the advice to "stay in your own lane." By the way, all of these energies also boost your psychic protection. Life is always dangerous in one way or another. Life is always bigger than we can see or understand. People are always more complex and multi-faceted than we may want to believe they are. It is up to each of us to navigate our fears so that we can invite in the energy fields of beauty, love, awe and gratitude. Not everyone navigates their fears the same exact way. If you spend a great amount of time and conversation in blame and also feel exhausted, there may be a connection

How We Make our Soul

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 12:45:37 GMT

Ceridwen And Cauldron by Maxine Miller (Click the pic to buy)

On the Celtic medicine wheel, the direction west is now opening. The land is still bright with summer, but the first of the fall harvest is coming in, and while harvest means bounty and satiation, it also signals the death of the growing season, and the full entrance into the dark half of the year.

If there is a single image or idea of the mythic direction west, it may be "dissolution." Everything that comes into form eventually lets go of that form. The tree lets go of its fruit that it has made, then its leaves, and, eventually, its whole self. The body lets go of the soul it has carried (or the soul lets go of the body it has used). The Mother Earth, who holds every possibility of life on this planet deep in her womb, brings entire species and epochs into form, and eventually takes all of them back into herself, to be reformed into new forms.

Everything on this earth enters life through the portal of the east, travels west and vanishes over the western horizon to…no one knows. (Plenty of people say they know. But in truth, no one knows.) So, for me, the west brings us into a palpable presence with The Soul more than any other direction.

Where goes the sun at dusk?

Where goes the harp's last note?
Where go I when the dark wind blows
To the land beyond?
To the land beyond?

There is a common theme in New Age theology that each of us is an eternal spark of Spirit on a journey through life, learning lessons through self-induced suffering, and clearing the self-induced suffering from previous lives. I go along with this idea, but there is a subtle bias in this that life is about clearing crap and creating new crap to clear later. This comes (unconsciously) close to the common western/Christian notion that the world is mostly an unlikeable place and mostly about suffering.

So, I want to urge you to not forget the other aspect of the west: that we also come here to make our soul stronger and healthier, and we actually succeed at that in each life – sometimes a little, sometimes a great deal. With each lifetime, we harvest something. We too easily focus on the west as the One Who Comes to Cleanse the Shit, (certainly an awesome ally!) but a powerful thing you can do for yourself is to spend time recognizing, acknowledging and blessing your gifts, abilities, skills, and the wisdom you've garnered from this life so far. Celebrate your powers, feast on your own harvest. This is a very important part of your healing. An easy way to do this is to simply make a list of 20 things you like about yourself, are naturally good at, have learned to get good at, and have been helpful to the world. These are soul powers that you have made this time around.

John Keats—the 19th century English romantic poet who died young, ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know") once said in a letter to a friend, "Call the world, if you please, "the Vale (valley) of Soul Making. Then you will find out the use of the world...." We come here to make our souls.

Keats, like many today, saw life as a school for the soul. He saw the school as having two rooms. The first room is a mostly stagnant and empty place, and many people remain their whole lives there, unaware that the doorway to the second room is wide open. In New Age terminology, call this first room, if you please, the vale of younger souls, ones with fewer lifetimes under their belt, who are still getting their feet wet in the embodied life, and want mostly to be told how to behave correctly and be successful in the culture. There is a lot of unconscious struggle and confusion in this room, a lot of un-worked ancestral burdens, and a lot of blaming others when things are painful.

In Celtic shamanism, there is an old practice of working with the "Three Cauldrons of the Soul," and perhaps Keats was channeling these old Celtic ideas. His first room is very much like the Cauldron of Goiriath (raw, directionless life force acting in the world). This cauldron is located in our belly.

For Keats, many people eventually advance into the second room, which is an intoxicating place of delights and also of pain. (We can be just as intoxicated by our pain as by delight, as social media amply demonstrates.) Wrestling with the energies of sorrow and joy sharpen our vision of life and the wrestling that goes on in this second room produces building material to make more Soul.

This second room of Soul School may be the room of more "mature souls" – ones who've been in a body many times and are, as Keats said, "learning to read the world by using the alphabet of the heart." They are aware of the spiritual work that must be done, they commit themselves to it, and they often find themselves in spiritual and emotional turmoil. The work is so big, painstaking, unending and exhausting. They often feel ill equipped and confused, and sometimes fall into a sense of futility. They strive to be compassionate, fail, and try again. They often feel they don’t have the wisdom, power or skill to navigate this immense spiritual work that must be done.

This global spiritual transformation that so many of us see happening right now can be seen as "second room Advanced Placement study," and one reason things are so emotionally intense is that more and more people around the world have stepped into the second room, to study the alphabet of the heart. The tragedies and pressures we feel nowadays are second-room work, producing more building material for the soul of the species. It's hard work, as you well know, and it's worth considering that Spirt is offerring us ample "second room" homework in order to help us build soul . It's worth considering that Mother Earth is offerring us advanced second room homework to help her decide if we stay around or get folded back into the magma.

In Celtic Shamanism the second room could be the Cauldron of Ernmae (concentrated heart-action in the world). It is located at the heart center, and remarkably, the ancient text says that this cauldron is activated and made more powerful by certain, specific kinds of sorrows and joys.

Now we get to the place of great hope, help, and power. Keats said that the second room has a door that leads to innumerable third rooms. This reminds me of Jesus saying, "my Father’s house has many rooms," or the Hindu God Krishna saying that there as many heavens as there are beliefs about heaven. The uncountable third rooms can be seen as the Cauldron of Sois (Spirit-knowledge) in Celtic shamanism. This is the channel through which Spirit pours higher wisdom, awareness, and inspiration into us. That power is known in Irish as Imbas (the "Fire in the Head") or in Welsh as Awen (essence or poetic inspiration).

For those in the second room, bouncing frantically between the several kinds of sorrow and joy, trying to do spiritual work, and wondering if they will ever truly connect to Spirit, there is this hopeful tidbit: It is the painstaking work with sorrow and joy in the heart cauldron that activates the flow from the Cauldron of Wisdom - from the upper room . When we do our heart-work, it sends a beacon to the gods that we are ready for that flow of Imbas to be turned on. So, dear wrestler with the heart, your struggle has a bigger purpose, and this lifetime may be the one where you are activating bigger powers on your multi-body journey.

If you are wrestling with sorrow and joy in the heart center, here is a incredibly simple practice in two steps.

Step one: simply acknowledge and imagine that there is a doorway from the room of sorrow/joy that leads to innumerable third rooms. Summon this image, and imagine moving to that doorway. Turn around and look back into the "second" room. Ah! It's just one room in the Soul Schoolhouse. There sure is a lot of wind whipping stuff all around in this room, but it is just one room . As simplistic as this sounds, this visualization can be helpful.

Step two: Imagine the cauldron of wisdom floating about six inches above your head. As Krishna night say, however this cauldron looks to you is right. It doesn’t even have to be a cauldron – it can be a ball of light, a flower, whatever you see. But using the cauldron image, what might the brew, simmering in that cauldron look like? A brew cooked by Eternal Wisdom itself, by the Great Spirit. Take a moment to imagine that brew. Then turn your attention on your heart center, where that sorrow/joy in the cauldron of the heart is being cooked. What does that cauldron look like, and what does the brew look like? Then, ask the cauldron of wisdom to tip slightly and pour a few drops of Awen down into the cauldron of sorrow/joy. What happens? This simple visualization can be an ongoing (Celtic shamanic) practice. If you like the shamanic journey technique, this can be a powerful journey.

I leave you with my very loose adaptation (some might call it a bastardization) of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke .

Sometimes a woman puts down the hammer
And stops smashing at the great boulder in the living room.
She walks outdoors. She begins singing. And keeps singing, wandering away
because somewhere there is a church whose doors are flung open only by song.

Her children say blessings on her as though she has died.

And another person remains inside her house,
And dies there, among the shards of rock.
And her children must sell the house
And move out into the dusky world.
Some of them use the inheritance to buy a house
with a boulder in the living room.
Others look for a new church.
And maybe they learn to sing.

A ridiculously simple way to change the world

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 12:45:38 GMT

During my morning prayer today, I had one of those simple, but profound, experiences – it came as a voice, actually from above, saying. "God never punishes you. God never punishes you. God never, never punishes you. Your spirit guides never punish you. Mother earth never punishes you." I looked up to see half a dozen swallows circling above me, diving and darting back and forth, chirping and gurgling, as if to hammer the message into me. I'll come back around to this in a moment.

I'm a theologian by academic training, and I'm absolutely fascinated – okay, annoyingly obsessed – with what I see as a theological poison in the heart of western religion. That poison is the idea that God judges and punishes us for what the churchmen call transgressions, but the rest of us call human mistakes.

The unresolvable clash between the "God of pure love and forgiveness" and the "smiting God" has created a whole culture that fears and mistrusts the creator of the universe, which spends a great deal of life energy addicted to proving themselves worthy in the eyes of God and others as unworthy. God kicked us out of paradise for using the free will he gave us, now we are born sick with original sin, and our soul falls from grace into a corrupt and disobedient body in a world run by the devil. God loves you unconditionally, except for all those conditions. Why would a loving God send us into such a world?

Capitalism sprang from this poisonous theology – an economy of winners and losers, saved and damned, where the "invisible hand" decides who climbs the ladder to heaven to drink champagne with the other worthies, and who falls into poverty hell with the other lazies.

Whether you grew up religious or not, being born into western culture means having this religious trauma of cosmic unworthiness embedded in you on the energetic level. It's no wonder people are leaving churches, and the young are not knocking on churches' doors, even though the 11 AM service has electric guitars and fog machines. It's no wonder that so many people no longer want to work in the "worthiness factories" offered to them by the capitalist culture.

I believe that westerners are attracted to indigenous traditions because they see in them a wildly different theological paradigm about worthiness. The Holy Ones, the Great Spirit, the ancestors, the spirits of nature, our spirit guides – none of them see us as unworthy, as fallen. They want us to be in this world, they helped prepare us for this world, they want us to blossom as true human beings in this world; our soul loves being here, in this body, among all of this vast, awesome creation.

Dr. Gábor Máté is a recognized expert in trauma and its effects on the body and psyche. He says that trauma (and I'm including religious trauma) disconnects us from our true self. Addictions and other self-destructive compulsions are the expression of that disconnection. He says the very core of all of our human work is about healing the disconnection we have with our own self. The True Self has no absolutely no sense of unworthiness; we have to be convinced of our unworthiness, by people who fear their own unworthiness. Our task is always, in the end, to come into our own sure sense of worthiness.

Worthiness is a feeling, not an intellectual construct. You cannot ultimately heal unworthiness through mental work or language alone. This is why affirmations only go so far, why sermons about unworthiness drop like lead weight in the ears, and frankly it's why therapy is fantastically helpful, but 95% of my clients say the same phrase: "But there's something therapy doesn’t…quite reach." And you cannot heal unworthiness through actions alone - changing laws will do a lot, but won't heal us. Unworthiness can only be healed in the heart center, blossoming out into the intellectual centers and physical (action) centers. All true spiritual practices bring you into felt sense of fundamental worthiness.

Back to my morning experience: Spirit never punishes you. That voice went on to say: "Only humans punish. They punish themselves and they punish each other. They can waste whole lives on punishing. Spirit, your spirit guides – they will allow you to enter into the energy field of punishment if you insist, because apparently that is the well of experience you want to drink from. When you are ready to learn in another way, Spirit will be there to assist you in finding a new road."

If you want to be part of a huge revolution, there is a ridiculously simple thing you can do. It's so simple, it sounds like total woo-hoo, unicorn-fart fantasy, one that could not possibly work in this terrible world. It's this: Practice seeing every human being – including yourself - as an embodiment of the divine, as filled with God's breath, as a drop of the sacred ocean held inside an animal wineskin in order to explore this beautiful world. If you practice this while driving, while in line at the store, while in conflict with someone, if you practice it when you're judging someone, practice it on someone you utterly despise – it can transform the world, and create a new one – and this is what the Creator does.

A love letter to discomfort

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Fri, 28 May 2021 12:45:40 GMT

More than 30 years ago, the wonderful storyteller and teacher, Michael Meade, said to me, "When you go to the edge of anything, you go to edge of everything." This phrase rolls around in my mind as I ready myself for another trip to the Amazon jungle tomorrow, and another plant dieta – an intense eight days of fasting, sweating, prayer, ceremony, and ingesting the next plant in the line of power plants my teachers have assigned me.

The effort you make in your spiritual life is about moving to some edge – and it doesn’t matter what edge you move to, because every edge is connected to all edges. Any door opens to the same Great Mystery.
I love the dietas in the jungle because they teach me through completely non-rational means. As an intellectually centered person filled with skepticism, I need to choose edges that take me out of the comfortable rules created by the intellect, to a place of real discomfort that frustrates my rational mind to the point that it finally gives up on trying to convince me to stay safely "home," and collapses and naps for several days. Then the plants swing the door open and teach me.

Skepticism is a safety zone, frosted with arrogance. ("I'm not one who is easily tricked or manipulated – I stand outside the ridiculousness that weaker people get drawn into.") In its positive expression, skepticism is strong protection against energies that will take you in wasteful circles. But, left unchallenged skepticism is an encircling electric fence that keeps out the transformative energies of life: wonder, awe, joy, gratitude.

It doesn't matter how you approach your own edge. What matters is that you identify an actual edge for you. Your growth as a human being - as a spiritual being - happens when you take the courage to head toward, and play on some edge – the place between old comfort and new structures. You'll know the edge by the discomfort you feel. Discomfort is the price of admission to spiritual power.

We are moved to the edge by our own choice, and also we are shoved to the edge by Spirit. I see the pandemic through this lens – our entire species pushed to an edge, so that we can learn something from the powers of discomfort - learn how to be new beings, how to become true humans.

So, as I embark on my chosen discomfort, I think about you – students, clients, layers of friends in my Facebook feed – each of you making choices of what edge you'll go to next and how you'll gracefully manage the edge that has been foisted upon you. I send you my respect, love and admiration for being human.

Here is a little song I created, adapted from a bit of text from Alan Watts:

You did not come into this world.
You came out of it.
Like the wave crest out of the ocean
Like the purple bloom on the lily.
And you are not a stranger here,
And you are not alone.
No, you are not a stranger here
And you are already home.

The Divine Vulva Rescues Us

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 12:45:42 GMT

So, we step into the most sensual time on the Wheel of the Year: In the Celtic tradition, the first of May opens the summer, and the direction South on the great wheel. This is the direction of the full exuberance of creation, joy, music, dancing, feasting, and lovemaking. The world is filled with the delight of Creation - the verdant hills, the radiant flowers, the fruits being infused with ripeness. The warm breezes set the hairs on our skin dancing.

According to my Mayan teacher, those bursts of summer light dancing on the rippling waves on the lakes are the sighs of pleasure made by the Old Woman (earth) as the Old Man (sun) kisses her all summer long. I imagine his wooing words to her:

Now, Love, at last I come
In warm fullness rising over you.
Let there be trembling in the soft hills
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be glimmering of sweet dew
At the caress of my breath
And gleaming in the estuaries.
Let the hundred winged ones burst free
from your greening branches
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars and
over the newborn land
Your aching song of Yes.

The South reminds us that there is nothing more bursting with wild, exuberant, joy than the Creator. If God really has eyes, imagine how rapturous those eyes must look when creating a spiral galaxy, or a ribbed leaf, or an electron, or a blue ringed octopus. Imagine how ecstatic those eyes must look when the ferns rise up from the fertile loam and begin unfurling – and when you do as well.

In our time of polarizations, passions and projections, you can get skewered for preaching about joy. They will tell you that you are in denial, that you are shielding yourself from feeling the true pain. But as a teacher told me once, the Great Spirit gave us the South so we wouldn’t go insane with too much North flowing through us.

Without the South - without the medicine of openness, the medicine of the love of life, the body, and of joyfully seeing each other – each and every other - through the creator's exuberant eyes, we fall into fanaticism, pessimism and cynicism. These are the negative expressions of the North, which, in its positive expression, is the direction of the battle for justice. Warriors who are without the medicine of the south in them just become killers.

In my theological world, I often hear that all of creation is Spirit manifesting into form in order to get to know itself better. We are a drop of Spirit having our own specific experience as part of Spirit's unimaginably immense game of self-exploration. I like that idea, but the construct is a little too cool, intellectual, and male for me.

I like thinking about the Great Spirit as The Divine Vulva: sensitive, pulsing, receptive, hungry, secret, dark, pleasure-seeking, life-birthing, private, pink and shiny with expectation and possibility. It is the South that teaches us to think this way. The cosmic exploration of the Divine Vulva is different from Spirit as a giant Plato murmuring, "know thyself."

My seminary professors taught me, as Plato taught: an unexamined life is not worth living. My shamanic teachers teach me, as the Divine Vulva does: an unlived life is not worth examining.

So I send you this day the blessings of the South: May the love of life carry you through the harsh waves of confusion, sorrow and anger. May the emerging chartreuse leaves and fragrant blossoms fill you with the medicine of new joy, for new life, for a new story to live by in a new world. May the South help you summon love for this world, and joy for yourself in it, because joy raises your vibration, and that opens your vision, and that gives you a direction for your actions, and that changes the world.

You are being stalked by Power

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 12:45:42 GMT

There is a daunting idea in shamanism that I have not found articulated as clearly in other spiritual paths. It is the idea that we are always being pursued by Power. Not just pursued: stalked and hunted by Power.

In other spiritual systems, this idea of being pursued by power is expressed far more pleasantly, for example as "God's yearning for communion with us," or as our long journey toward reunion with the divine. I like the sweetness of that language, but I frankly don’t find it that useful on a moment-to-moment basis. I'm glad that we are all heading toward an ultimate reunion, I'm thrilled that we are going through a paradigm shift, a species-wide initiation. But I have problems I have to deal with right now, and I need help.

In shamanic cosmology, the universe is made of power, interacting in a trillion trillion ways, and 99.9999% of those ways are incomprehensible to humans. (Actually physics sees things the same way.) Power takes many forms, many frequencies and shapes. A stink bug is a coagulation of Power, as is Mt. Everest, a palm tree, a virus, and you.

In shamanism, the task of daily life is to become visible or attractive to the Powers that will help you survive and thrive, and help you learn to become a true human being. Our other task is to make ourselves invisible or unattractive to the lower powers that want to kill you or take up residence in you and eat your life energy, without offering you any teaching in how to become a true human.

Every indigenous-trained teacher I've studied with has used the phrase "build your power" in one way or another. A few years ago, an Andean teacher in Cusco Peru, upon our first meeting, took one look at me and said, "You are weak. You need to build power." It was an unpleasant shock to hear it like that, but he was right and he taught me a lot over a short time. Each of us can, and needs to, build our power.

Fear in all its forms (envy, greed, arrogance, self-deprecation, martyrdom, fear of joy, fear of love, fear of life) is what makes you visible and delicious to lower energies which are pursuing you in order to eat your energy. An old fear that’s been with you a long time is evidence that lower energies have taken up residence in you and are eating your energy, and need to be cleared. Therapy can do a lot of this, but healing ceremonies are intended to complete the work that therapy doesn't reach.

One bit of good news is that the Holy Ones (the ancient ancestral spirits of life who prepared us to enter the physical world) are also, in their own way, pursuing us constantly - with protection, advice, and wisdom. They teach us how to make ourselves visible to the greater powers of love, gratitude, forgiveness and joy, and these energies help us become true humans. The ancient Holy Ones are always on our side and cheering for us whenever we overcome the next fear.

The other bit of good news is that Power in even larger forms than the Holy Ones is also pursuing you at each moment, offering you opportunity after opportunity to learn how to be a true human who is inhabited by energies of peace, joy, and forgiveness.

All of this imagery is important and helpful to me because it's how I sense our current times. Tremendous powers are being released in so many ways into the world. Old, unattended to wounds and fears are being released from humans into the general web of energy. We are swimming in these lower energies that want to predate on us. And those powers are being released because a Great Power has stepped forward to work with us, and is clearing out many of those old energies that have been living in people like intestinal worms being passed down through the generations. I had a dream about this Great Power a few nights ago, and it's truly beyond words (or at last beyond my words). That Great Power has also been pursuing us in order to help us open our new vision.
So, we are all living together through a giant electrical storm and all of our hairs are standing on end.

Four years ago, my current teacher said, "We are entering a time where anyone without a spiritual practice to anchor them will get swept away by what's coming." In my view, being "swept away" comes in the form of conspiracy theories, anxiety, blind rage and blind fear, blame, and revenge. There is a great deal of encouragement right now for us to step into all of these – to invite these energies into us to live and eat. We are told that we show our commitment to the cause and our passion, and our deep love of life, by inviting in rage and revenge. But these are predatory powers and they don’t teach us to be true humans; these predators are masters of illusion, deception and enchantment, so they are very good at tempting us to let them in to eat.

We build our power in two ways: by attending to our energy leaks, which are always attached to a fear, and by learning how to call in and work with the Greater Power. If we are to be of service to our own life, to the lives of others, to the descendants, and to the web of life, it's incumbent upon us to anchor ourselves, and that anchor is made of us building our power through a practice that makes us visible to the powers of awe and vision, and less visible to fear in all its forms.

Advice from the plant spirits as springtime emerges

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:45:44 GMT

You humans have been taught to confuse belief and faith. Belief is a set of ideas that hardens into a shell. You call that shell "my faith," and defend it with your very life. The most devout people believe real faith must be impenetrable and unmovable, and they believe their own immovability is what defines them as faithful. Belief is made of stubbornness. The professional shell polishers see enemies everywhere bent on cracking the shell. They enlist soldiers with the promise of medals.

But faith is made of wonder, which is expansive, extravagant, exuberant, grandiose possibility. Wonder is the very substance of creation, and the the first element. Wonder spreads between all things and connects all things. Wonder wears down and breaks open all shells. When the shell of your body finally opens, it is wonder that will carry you out of this shape,

Wonder comes like water wearing down stones, like wind wearing down mountains, like love wearing away fear. The devout run frantically from shell-crack to shell-crack slapping fresh mortar in, cursing the waters. Belief is glued together by fear. The more devoted you are to belief, the more life will need to crack you open to be fed by wonder.

We tell you: You’ve been taught to believe that life is random chance; that there’s little chance of life arising anywhere, including here. They tell you you are spinning on a lonely rock afloat in a lonely sea. Whether you take that story as a recipe for meaninglessness, or as a great blessing, or as polish for your arrogance, you’re living inside their shell of "the great mistake."

But their story doesn’t see the space between stars as alive, nor the space between people as song; nor silence as music. Their story doesn’t see the motion of the weaver's hands as a part of the weaving.

Once, a great teacher said, “Watch out for all those earth rocks, because each one is groaning to produce new life.”

And yet, every spring, the crocus blossoms appear, as they were always going to do. Every summer the lilies dance, as they were always going to do. Every fall, the apples emerge from the tree, as they were always going to do. And if there are no more apples, and if there are no more lilies or crocus, the rocks will groan with other life you cannot yet imagine, fed by the song of the sun that is inside the mother's molten earth womb.

The earth wanted you here or you would not be here. The great weaver wanted you in the design or you would not be here. You wanted to be here or you wouldn't be here. You were always going to arrive here, to be sweetened by wonder. This earth was always going to be alive, and you were always going to join in the dance of life, as a glint inside the dew drop, a sound of water pouring over rocks, a heart beating with its warm drum song of praise.

In Praise of the Cold as a Teacher

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 12:45:46 GMT

Many traditions affirm that discomfort is our finest teacher. The ego wants a life of comfort, but this is not why we came into this world, in this body. The comfort the ego seeks is a thinner life lacking in wisdom, and wisdom is the flowering of the humility that arises when we make ourselves vulnerable to the Great Mystery. One of my teachers puts it bluntly: Spiritual power comes at a price, and that price is discomfort. This can be a hard lesson to grasp. This is not to say that we should seek discomfort to prove our worthiness or power – that's just another game of the ego. The focus is on learning to be a "true human" - on training our spirit self - not just on acquiring a string of painful experiences to boast about.

Cross-culturally we see stories of the wise beings battling the lower forces of chaos. In my Celtic tradition, it’s the battle between the People of the Earth Goddess Dana, and the misshapen, gluttonous creatures known as the Fomorians. The Fomorians are horrible beings, but they are also the power of fertility and knowledge of farming. In a sense, they are pure passion untempered by Spirit.

We can mistake these teachings of battle for glorifying war and celebrating patriarchy. But these battles take place inside us, as all religious traditions affirm. The indigenous teachers urge us to see the lower forces, and our battle with them, as our teachers on our road to becoming true humans, and the ones who train our true spirit to work in this world. This lens helps me greatly to evaporate my imagined martyrdom – that it's not fair that that life has discomfort, I shouldn't have to experience this, and someone is to blame for it (not me, of course.)

We need cold in the world to teach us endurance, how to be smart with our decisions, to focus on what's important, and to take care of each other.

If you are in any building right now with heat, it's because, deep in the belly of the building is a little piece of the sun bringing life to you, creating a bubble of safety from the cold. To help us stay alive while while learning from the cold, the Great Sun placed a bit of itself in the belly of the Great Mother (scientists call this the molten core). The Mother delivers that energy to protect us in cold times. So, in cold weather, it's good to thank the Great Sun and the Mother Earth for the way they care for you, and ask the cold what it has to teach you about becoming a true human. (Seriously, I'm saying: make prayer of thanks to the spirit of the furnace. )

The great sun also placed a little bit of itself inside your body – in the upper right chamber of your four-chambered heart. Scientists call this the sinoatrial node. It is a tiny bundle of neurons that deliver a burst of energy about every second, which tells the heart to beat another beat. That energy comes from the other side of the doorway of the heart – the doorway to Spirit. So, inside your heart, about every second, there is day and night, summer and winter, the four seasons, waking and dreaming, and the four sacred directions, all teaching you every second. The cold time is a good time to ask Spirit to open that door and give you a good hint about what you need to learn next on this journey to becoming a true human.

Dine' (Navajo) elder Wally Brown has a wonderful series of YouTube videos with jewels of wisdom. His story of the two heroes is here . The whole series can be seen here .

Breaking the Hypnosis of Fear

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:45:53 GMT

We are under the new moon of January and this is a powerful time to make two linked prayers that can help you in these charged times. (Remember that when I say "prayer," I mean "calling the tangible partnership of Spirit into the physical plane." In shamanism, prayer is energy work and has effects.)

One prayer is to the powers of the north and winter, the great mothers of healing and release, to help you let go of the attachments that have held you down and made you smaller than you really are. The other prayer is to ask the mothers of new life (the east on the medicine wheel) to come a fill you with courage, curiosity, vision and verve. January is filled with celebrations for these mothers, and we'll look at this in a moment.

There's an old shamanic adage: where you place your attention, there goes your co-creating power. Human beings are prayer-making creatures. We make prayers all the time, though we often call it daydreaming, musing, or being lost-in-thought. One simple way to shift your energies is to put some focused attention on these two prayers.

Option 1: Cleansing the attachment to fear
We are swimming in fear, and fear is like a glue that keeps us attached to the things that we need to let go of. It goes very hard on us when we are hypnotized by fear. When we feel "stuck," it is usually because of the old glue of fear.

When I was in second grade, my family moved from the inner city of Denver, out to the gleaming suburbs. My mother frequently found me in the basement swinging a spoon back and forth in front of my eyes, mumbling, "You're back in the old house…you’re back in the old house…"

Many people are doing this right now, spurred on by the hypnotists in charge. And it's going to be very hard on them, because there is no going back; there is only going into a fantasy of what things used to be. Conspiracy theories are grounded in abstract fears that harden into bizarre reality for the one walking that ever-darkening road. Conspiracy theories are a twisted form of prayer-making, of asking Spirit to incrementally help you manifest the darkest world you can imagine.

It's easy to stay glued to the news, and to the anger or schadenfreude on social media, like eating small doses of gloom-sugar all day long.

All of this is completely understandable, because we are in a time of great uncertainty and we are all seeking something to help us make sense of things, some kind of solid ground to stand on, and some way we can bring some control back to life. And I'm not claiming to be free of any of this.

But there are options, and Spirit can help us. This profound time we are in offers us two opportunities for creativity, and creativity is the antidote to fear.

Fear comes from our animal bodies, and it is a natural response to uncertainty. It helps a lot to just remember that - there's no shame in feeling fear because it's wired into us to keep us alive. However, it's good to remember that we are more than our animal body, and we really don't have to let fear hypnotize us.

Asking Spirit to "help me release my attachment to fear" is a potent action right now, in this three days of the new moon of January. Note the wording: it's not "Spirit, take my fears away" it's asking to be released from hypnosis. You'll need to do your own part by putting down the spoon you are swinging in front of your eyes.

The Old Bone Mother of the Celtic tradition is an ally in the work of releasing, as she comes to gather the energies and structures in the world (inner and outer) that need to be taken away so that space opens up for new life to emerge. You can ask for her to help, in prayers or meditations or visualizations. A word of caution: when the rational mind begins to chatter that this is all a waste of time, remember, that's just a cover to allow the small mind to continue visualizing the looming disaster, reinforcing the fear, and offering us (often false) ways to feel in control. The small mind wants to keep us locked in the hypnosis of fear. So bring some balance to this "negative prayer work" that is already occurring inside you.

The spirits in nature are always ready to help. You can ask the cold air of winter to come, or that incredible bright winter sun, or the bare tree branches, or the fire inside the belly of the mother earth, or those sharp winter stars to help you dissolve the glue of fear. What powers do they have? The cold wind can make the fear brittle so it slakes off. The bright sun can evaporate the fears. The bare branches are our teachers in letting go. The stars are like scissors. Ask them in these kinds of words to help release old fear attachments. You have so much help in this. Ask the spirit of cleansing winter to snap loose the calcified energies of fear that hypnotize you and keep you attached to old ways that are no longer useful in the emerging world.

Option 2: Infusing inspiration into the bones

As the doors to the east on the great wheel of life open, this is a potent time to ask the great mothers of new life to help you weave a new way of being. In the pagan European tradition – which can also be called the European shamanic tradition – January is populated with celebrations to ancient mother goddess figures whose job is weave, spin or midwife the new shape of things .

In Italy, The grandmother faery queen, La Befana comes to sweep out the old stored energy out of the house, and give candy to the children. In Ireland, St Latiaran of Cuillinn, is celebrated for drawing the hot coal ("seed of new fire") out of the forge to take it home to re-light her hearth. In the Balkans, January 9th is a day to celebrate midwives. In ancient Rome, Carmenta, goddess of prophecy and childbirth was celebrated in January.

Goddesses of destiny and fate – the weavers and spinners of the next shape of life - are often celebrated in mid-January (for example, the Scandinavian Norns and the Greek Moirai).Finally, at the end of the month, the super-goddess, Brigid of the Celtic world emerges to infuse us with inspiration. I'll be offering some beautiful work with Brigid soon.

The prayer to these Mothers of the New Shape can be as simple as "infuse me with inspiration." That word, inspiration, is shorthand for the delight of the new shape emerging, the regenerative power of the warmth stirring in the belly of the great mother that is always birthing the new into this world. Ask the Mothers of the east to protect you while in labor, and help you replace old attachments with new curiosity and vision.

These two prayers made at this time can shift your underlying energy and feed the emergence of new energies.

Blessings of the Mothers of Healing and Inspiration be yours.

Summoning Trust in a land of Mistrust

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 12:45:47 GMT

We have to find a place to put our trust. It is crucial for human beings to trust something, because we need trust as much as we need food and love. I'll have two practical suggestions for this later in this writing, but, first, a little context.

Maybe you have come across the idea of "Soul Ages" – the notion that each of us progresses through many lifetimes, learning more each time about how to be a human being. The five soul ages are: infant, baby, young, mature and old. The idea is not unlike the life of a single person as they grow and mature. In the ideal, I am wiser at 63 than I was as a toddler. On the flip side, I cannot expect a toddler to understand or behave by the rules of a 63 year old.

(Once I watched two women approach each other walking their dogs. One dog erupted into barking - leaping and jerking on its leash. The woman yanked the leash and grabbed her dog's face, admonishing it: "Gizzy! What's the matter with you?! You're acting like an ANIMAL!")

For purposes of this writing, I'll shrink soul age down like this: Infant and baby souls, having fewer lifetimes in their tool belt, are more focused on survival. Young souls are more focused on success inside the cultural structures into which they have been born. Mature and older souls turn more attention inward, and place more focus on relationships, with all of their subtleties, grey areas, and flexibilities.

There has been a great amount of writing about how conservatives and progressives occupy actual different realities. A different lens on the world can be how people of different soul ages live in different worlds. A baby soul may see danger in the same place that an older soul sees a curiosity.

Soul Age is a complex set of spiritual ideas that can be helpful in navigating your life, and, like all spiritual frameworks, these ideas are subject to misinterpretation for many reasons. Refrain from assuming a younger soul is more stupid or less compassionate than an older soul. Here is a good article on soul age and the many ways this big idea is misinterpreted.

One way to view what is happening on a global scale is that our species is moving from a predominantly younger soul age into an early mature stage. We are in a time where that movement – centuries in the making - is becoming undeniably visible and palpable, largely because for the first time our species' history, it is so clear that national or tribal boundaries simply cannot protect us from the interrelatedness of all life. There are many more older souls incarnating into the world now. This is driving much of the shifting politics, and inspiring much of the backlash and resistance from the prevailing young soul culture. I find this a hopeful idea, and it speaks to why people who are interested in energy work or shamanism should spend some effort blessing. with prayer and ceremony, those who are coming into the world, to give them strength.

As prevailing structures and institutions are challenged or collapse, younger souls can easily feel a passionate desire to get back to "normal." It's easy for them to see enemies all around them, because the main place they put their trust is in "tradition," which seems under assault. For younger souls, different or new often equals bad.

Older souls may see systemic changes as opportunities to improve relationships between one another, and between humans and all other life. They’ve seen structures collapse many times in their previous lives, and they understand that, on a soul level, there's no stopping the re-shaping of the world, because that is how this universe works. Every re-shaping brings about new structures. As the REM song says, it is never the end of the world, only the world as we know it.

Many dinosaurs never saw a flower, because flowers came after the dinosaurs were extinct. If a dinosaur had preached on a street comer about a world covered in flowers, they may have been called insane and locked up. (This idea is hotly debated, but it's such a good image that fills me with such hope in the future that I use it anyway.)

So, you're living in a young soul culture groaning with the pain of stretching and expanding what it puts its trust in.

As I said earlier, humans absolutely need to have trust in something, or they get crazy. Maybe rather than asking how we can change someone's political point of view, we can try to discover if there is any place at all that people of different political stances can both trust. Maybe we can work to build a new common trust in something.

On the personal level of you navigating this wild sea of change, I offer two practical suggestions:

Find the biggest thing about existence that you can imagine and put your trust there.
Identify the most immediate, intimate thing you can trust, and feed it.

Toward the first:
People preach, "Trust in God!" But as every real theologian affirms, the historical problem is that we constantly put our trust in a version of God smaller than the real thing. When people say they’ve had it with religion, or that religion has caused only damage throughout history, what they mean is, religious structures, owned and operated by young souls, have wreaked havoc. This can happen from a huge religion all the way down to an individual teaching workshops.

Young souls are attracted to becoming high-status leaders, and when that happens, the God they talk about tends to get smaller and smaller, and be more and more about status in the culture - about who is pleasing in the eyes of God, and who is not. Shamanism doesn't really have much of this structure in it, and that's one reason I fell in love with this path.

By the way, this is why there is always a conflict between the priests and the prophets, because the prophet's main job is to arrive with a hammer to smash open the institutions that have shrunk God down smaller than God really is in order to serve the culture's self-identity (for example, making Jesus white, or God as loving the rich most). The prophets are always on the losing end in the short term, but ultimately win out as religions crumble.

So, my suggestion is to go as big, and as non-human, as you possibly can in your imagination of Spirit. And using the framework of soul age, think like an older soul: you and Spirit are in a co-creating partnership, not a top-down, judgment-punishment relationship. (I teach about this in my upcoming class on prayer. )

Religions have soul ages, as individuals and cultures do, and if you've left the hierarchical religion of your youth for a more mystical framework, it may be because you no longer resonate with a younger soul religion. (It may also be that the New Age things you gravitated to allow you to activate your young soul with more fun, so be careful about spiritual arrogance. Older soul does not mean more spiritual, it only means a different frame of reference.)

Ask Spirit not to rescue you from fear, but to teach you how to transform your fear that makes you ( and everything around you) smaller than is true. Ask Spirt to continue working with you in this lifetime, slowly cooking you and teaching you how to be human, as it has so many lifetimes before this. Put your trust in that Great Spirit, and if you feel ready, ask Sprit directly and unambiguously to step up the work with you, to open new pathways of vision and wisdom in this life because you are now ready after so much practice in previous lives.

Toward the second place of trust:
Look to the most immediate and intimate places in your life for what you can trust without question. For many indigenous people, the sunrise is one source for this. The sun may not seem intimate, but it is with you every day, unceasingly, never abandoning you. It gives life to everything on this planet and will always rise, always bathe you in life-giving, life-healing and life-transforming love of life itself, even if there are clouds or cold air between the two of you.

A simple prayer to the sun every morning can actually do wonders. Ask the sun to help you trust life, to illuminate your trust in life. Make that prayer before you do anything else – before you begin worrying or planning the day. The same can be done with the plants around your house and all the creatures, as well as the love of your partner, children, pet, or the land you live on. If you work with deities form any tradition, remember that deities are not giant humans with powers, but forces of nature dressed up in human clothing so they don't scare us away.

In the immediate realm, put your trust in Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos’s Five Behaviors of Happiness : get social, give thanks, be in the moment, rest and move, be kind.

May 2021 offer you kindness, rest, movement, presence, gratitude and communion.

ThanksGrieving

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 12:45:49 GMT

So, once again, we enter the season of Put On A Happy Face! It begins with this week's orders from the Ministry of Culture to celebrate to the thinnest version of the mythical story of this nation's courageous white ancestors making their way to religious freedom in a treacherous land that they slowly dominated and tamed through superior ingenuity (and a little help from friendly natives), and to begin the annual shopping frenzy.

Many of us – an increasing number to be sure – refuse to celebrate the thin version of that myth. Instead, we opt to work with the wider, more complex story, rife with various truths – heavier and thicker, far harder to carry, and filled with grieving.

Of course we value gratitude. True gratitude is a cleansing and empowering force on the mind and spirit. It washes away self-centeredness and martyrdom, it re-centers you in proper humility. And gratitude is the single best antidote to the pandemic of greed infecting our culture. As a consistent practice, gratitude delivers more actual healing than do antidepressants.

But gratitude that stands on gauzy ignorance is not gratitude at all - it is denial, and denial is a corrosive force on the mind and spirit, one that eventually eats its way through a culture's (or individual's) supporting structures until they come crashing down. We see this happening all around us right now - the energies of polarization, accusation and mistrust are the sounds of cracking, snapping and crashing of the old structures.

Under all the anger is the grieving. I despise Tucker Carlson and his ilk on the right and the left – people who care less about truths that can help me make decisions, and more about injecting me with the next jolt of small rage, because that’s what makes money. But under that despising of the 24 hour news cycle, I grieve deeply that Walter Cronkites have gone extinct. To recognize the grief underlying rage is a big step in healing one's life and preparing for a better world to emerge.

In order for humanity to make the spiritual shift that so many of us are praying and working for, we need to transform two core poisons, and grieving is the antidote for both.

The first poison is arrogance, and it must be cleansed for any substantive change to appear. Every person raised in western culture has had injected into them the arrogance that humans are the apex – and the very point - of creation, and that we are different (and better) than all other creatures. This separation has created a truly unique creature woven through with devastating loneliness, and this may be the only thing that makes humans unique on this planet. So much of what we do in our daily life is an act of keeping that existential loneliness at bay, including the unending seeking for "more," which ties directly to the genocide of Native Peoples and Thanksgiving.

Cleansing our essential loneliness sounds easy but clearly it is not, because it demands that we change our inner structure which is founded on arrogance. The way Spirit works, human arrogance will definitely be cleansed, one way or another. The only question is how much we are willing do on our own, and how much Spirit will need to do for us. If we do the work ourselves, there will be far less need for disaster to rip us apart. Covid-19 has cleansed some arrogance – and also shown us clearly how much resistance there is. Spirit has many more ideas lined up to continue the work if we refuse to learn from these early teachings.

Ohky Simine Forest , a medicine woman of Mohawk descent and also trained and initiated by Mayan elders in Chiapas, Mexico and teachers in Mongolia, says that shedding arrogance is crucial if white people are going to be able to "redden" their hearts. By redden, she means to make more indigenous, to heal the fundamental white perspectives of how life operates that have wrought so much harm. To me, "reddening" means making the heart fully warm and alive because the cooling air of arrogance freezes the heart and snaps the connections that it naturally forges between all beings. To redden the heart means to set out on a path of resurrecting my own indigenous soul.

Every teacher I've worked with has said the same thing: we need to move into our heart center. Because it is from there that we re-form connections to all life (not from the intellect, whose job it is to separate and analyze.) The many intense dietas I've done in Peru, fasting and ingesting certain power plants, has really all been an act of asking the plant world to redden my heart. Looking at the larger, more complex truths of white history, as so many are doing now, with such great discomfort, is all about cleansing arrogance and reddening the heart.

The second poison we need to transform is the rules our culture has set out against grieving. For millennia, we have been taught that grieving is weakness, a failure of endurance or verve, a waste of time and energy. If you do fall into this weakness, at least keep it quiet, brief and out of sight.

This is a truly tragic idea. Grieving is one of the clearest and most powerful testaments of the deep connection between things. Grieving is a primary action to redden the heart. The waters of grief wash away our arrogance (and many other psycho-spiritual maladies) and re-open the heart that has been closed off. Spirit has given us access to the medicine of grief specifically so we can wash ourselves regularly. We are told by the activists to repress our grieving and to transform it to anger and put it into action. This sounds right, except grieving is repressed only with great cost to the soul.

Repressed sacred energies are shoved down into the unconscious, where they become deformed, and then they re-emerge into the world as their destructive opposite. True grieving is a testament to the beautiful connections between things, but when it is repressed, it deforms and re-emerges into the world as martyred rage. We see this everywhere around us today – victimized rage instead of the true grieving energy that needs to be let out and cleared. Substantive change will not happen by replacing one martyred rage with another.

The ancient Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching, says that all things that are alive are flexible because they are filled with fluid. All things that are dead are dry and unbending. Grieving fills you with the sap of life, and contrary to what you are so often told, your grief makes you a stronger human being. You are never more beautiful than while grieving, for in grief, your reddened heart is radiantly connected. When you dry yourself of this sap, you become brittle. When I look at the people around me everywhere infected with rage, I see brittleness. Any little thing makes them snap. They need constant injections of martyred rage to give them energy, and the 24 hour news world is happy to offer it up, like the corner heroin dealer.

So, as Thanksgiving comes round again, I decline to participate in the thin, story of white heroes making something of a primitive land. I also decline to play along with the rage machine. I will, instead, grieve the numerous lost opportunities we have had as a culture to redden our heart, beginning with the arrival of the Europeans to this continent. I will ask the spirt of grieving to cleanse me of the old arrogance and also of martyred rage, and I will ask the spirt of new vision to fill me with strength, so that I can participate, in my own way, in building of a new world. I will take my drum and tobacco outside and make offerings of love for the beautiful land, make prayers of forgiveness in all directions, and I will continue to ask Spirit to send us the new dream, and the strength and courage to being that dream into the world.

Equinox Message: Excuse me, I have work to do

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 12:45:57 GMT

The fever pitch of things is so high. Confusion, anger, and outrage are our daily companions. All authorities are liars with some hidden agenda. There seems to be no objective truth, nothing untainted by politics. Pessimism and depression are alluring responses. Under it all is oceanic grief: much of it unconscious, unfelt, and unacknowledged. I have a terror that if I allow myself to touch that grief, it will pull me down and I will be lost. I struggle with all of this, and plead constantly for some beam of light to hold onto. For me, that beam of light comes in the form of working with the spiritual powers of the Earth. What I love about the shamanic path (as I understand it) is that it offers ways to work, not just read and believe.

There's much in my daily life that I cannot affect, but I can do my spiritual work and it generates results. Daily life in the body is messy. The spiritual life is messy. For me, the mess of spiritual work is fun. I want to offer few equinox suggestions that I hope can be of help.

Be careful with your thoughts and words. This is old advice, but in our time it applies to social media. Remember that every social media platform is not concerned with offering you Truth, but with moving you into a small reality bubble that it can monetize. Every time you click, you are giving the algorithm permission to carry you deeper into a bubble. The algorithm has no soul, no glee, and it is not human. It just has a job to do: to carry you into a reality bubble that makes you attractive to a set of advertisers. Be extra careful right now with your shares and comments on Facebook or other platforms. When you feel that great need to obliterate that asshole with wit and facts, or to change someone's mind, ask yourself "Is there a better use for my energy?"
Place your focus on doing small, doable real-world, positive tasks. Reading that book, fixing that small house project, doing a craft or art project, taking a class (see my class offer below) - do something that you can start, do and finish in a few weeks. Completion of doable tasks is part of the antidote to the ambient ennui of our times.
Remember that the spirits of nature can help pull you out of the small bubble, and hold you in a larger one, which gives your entire self more room to breathe. Here is a short blessing song I made up this equinox morning that you can listen to, learn, sing, adapt, share. It's a simple icaro that translates as basically: Great sun, mother river, sacred earth, thank you for your wisdom, life, light, and help. The song song ends by asking Spirit to help us all.

I leave you with two poems about working with the spirit of the "shore" - that place between waking and sleeping, between the old and new, the place of equinox (balance of dark and light).

Mary Oliver:
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall --
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Juan Ramón Jiménez :
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Two Difficult Prayers You Can Make

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 12:45:54 GMT

We are in the third night of the full moon tonight and I want to offer you a simple - difficult - prayer and you can do.

First, a few thoughts to chew on: We love the imagery of the moon shedding and refilling, because that is what happens from our point of view. We love asking the moon to help us "let go" and "release" and "welcome transformation." These are very helpful, powerful prayers.

But it's also good to remember that the moon is never dark or full, or waxing or waning – this is only our perspective of it, from here on the spinning earth, with the moon orbiting "backwards" around us.

In truth, she is always fully facing the sun. She always has her eyes fully on this source of light and life. There is this constant intimacy and devotion between the sun and moon. When we see the dark moon, that is a moment of pure intimacy between them that they don't share with us. It's like the parents shutting the bedroom door from the kids on a Saturday afternoon.

At the full moon - especially that moment at sunset and sunrise these few days each month, when the sun and moon are both visible, and both shining in this eternal intimacy – this is like the parents dancing in the living room in full view of the kids, and inviting them to join in the frolic.

So, the image of the moon shedding and refilling is very powerful and useful to us. And so is this idea that the moon knows it will always be going through its phases, because that is the nature of things. But she always keeps her trust and vision pointed toward that never-dimming, never doubting light. This is an image we can also bring into our own lives. In the dark times, when doubt, or anger, or confusion spreads across our face and our life, we can remember that the source of life on earth is still there, always shining, and we can do our best to keep our eyes on it, knowing that we too, will move through our current phase.

It's good to pray under the full moon because she delivers such a sense of magic. So, make any prayer you want, fill them with pure vulnerability, and ask the moon for help.

I want to suggest two difficult prayers you can make. You can make these with the full moon tonight, but really they are good any time.

First, a prayer that in the biblical tradition is called "praying for your enemies:" Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you.This kind pf prayer is found in many spiritual traditions, and the reason is two-fold. First, making this kind of prayer is designed to release you- the one making the prayer. For any of us to make substantive change in our own life, or in the community or world, we need to act from a place of freedom from hatred. Obviously this is incredibly difficult. But all authentic spiritual work asks us to do hard things. Praying for your enemies involves asking Spirit to heal them of the wounds and energies that weigh them down, that twist their humanity and shrink their spirit. One caveat in making a prayer like this: be vigilant if any arrogance on your part creeps in. If you find yourself praying for your enemies to become a better, kinder, more loving person like you are, maybe double back around and ask Spirit to lift arrogance from you, and show you where you need to do more work.

Second: a prayer for optimism. Ask the Moon and Spirit to help open your optimism in this time that is so filled with gloom, discouragement, anger, and vitriol. We can simply not survive well without an optimistic goal to work toward. Allow yourself to envision and fantasize an optimistic future that you want to work toward, and ask Spirit to help you take it in and hold it in the bones of your bones. Nothing has ever come into this world through human hands that didn’t start first in prayer space, otherwise known as the imagination. Work on making your imagination healthy and optimistic and ask Spirit to help you with that.

I leave you with my adaptation of an old Scottish Moon Prayer:

When I see you, bright moon,
It becomes me to lift my eye,
It becomes me to bend my knee,
It becomes me to bow my head to you
And send my thanks to you,
For coming again to light the dark night.
Beautiful eye of night,
Dear one of the heavens,
Guide on the night-path,
I bless you and thank you.
Many have passed beyond
In the time between the two moons,
But I am still here, enjoying this lovely earth.
Help me to bless this world in my own way
As you do, again and again,
Moon of my Moon,
Beloved of my heart,
Moon of blessings.

God as Lover and the Joyless Society

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 12:45:59 GMT

As we pass over the peak of the summer solstice, we are fully embraced by the direction South on the great wheel of the year. In the Celtic tradition, the south carries many powers - joy, love, fullness, sensuality, feasting, music and all that goes with the fullness of life.

I've noticed over the years, as I've taught classes on the medicine wheel, that most people have great trouble fully embracing the powers of the South. We love asking the west for healing of our old wounds, and we love asking the east to bring us the new shape of things, and we even love asking the north to help us have patience and discipline. But we find it difficult to fully ask the south to fill us with joy. There is always some credible inner voice that says it is inappropriate at this time to be joyful. That voice never goes away, because human life is always a disaster in one way or another, so we decide we'd better live without joy, and concentrate on healing or wisdom or increasing our goodness.

Ignoring the south invites spiritual illness. When we are spiritually ill, our protective energy field becomes thinner and more porous, and we can be more easily penetrated by the lower energies of martyrdom, blame, cynicism, disappointment and depression. Our "consumer" culture thrives on a culture weakened by joylessness, because then it can sell us the substitutes for joy – religions based on blind obedience and tribalism, economies founded on buying more things that soothe our joylessness for a moment. A joyless person revels in gossip and micro-dominations and needs constant distraction. She feels overwhelmed by the seriousness of life and he simply cannot believe that simple spiritual practices can be an antidote. A joyless culture shops like crazy to feed its envy and competition, and convinces the populace that joy is wasteful, a Band-Aid, a sign of shallowness or privilege. Joyless people are obsessed with cleanliness, purity and alikeness, and they have a high need for controlling others, which often tips over into violence.

Shamanically speaking, joy is an energy field, a spiritual ally. When we access the field of joy, it helps us remember that we don't need to fill ourselves with the substitutes for joy: status, fame, money, advancement, accomplishment, agreement, the shiny new thing, the shiny new lover.

When I was studying in the seminary, I was the weirdo. We would have chapel services on Tuesdays and we'd do the Eucharist ceremony where people go up and take the cracker and wine. It's so beautiful, the idea that you are taking the actual body of God into your body, to merge. I could not understand how in the world people could be so somber about it. How can you not immediately begin dancing and singing as soon as the wine and cracker touch your wet, waiting tongue? I would stumble dizzily back to my seat, trying not to hum, grin, and shout "Wahoooooo!"

My fellow students were working from a different "model of God" than I was. When they thought "God", they saw in their mind's eye, "loving but stern Father who created a good world which we wrecked immediately, and He's been a bit disappointed in us ever since, and he needs to give us medicine every week to cure the sickness of sin that we are born with." For them, the Eucharist seemed to be about a lifelong diagnosis needing a lifelong prescription drug.

I didn’t know it (it took one of the seminary classes to help me articulate it), but I carried in me the model of "God as Lover." There is an extensive, expansive theology buried in that little phrase, "God as Lover," and it is all contained in the south on the medicine wheel.

The summer is an excellent time to practice with this model of the divine, and if you can get past that inner voice that tells you "Now is no time to be joyful!", the south can offer you profound medicine. Spend some time seeing and feeling the sensuousness of the life force all around you. The summer is one long wooing dance, a long seduction between the father sun and the mother earth. The sun strikes the earth each day, and the earth sighs with flowers and crops and birdsong and glistening sparkles on the skin of the lake; the water licks at the land, the bees dance, zithering, among the yearning petals. As Rumi says, "Seawater water begs the pearl to break its shell."

Here is practice you can try: Take a walk or stand in your garden, and observe how the divine masculine and feminine woo one another. Observe the wind on the leaves, the sun on the water, the rain on the garden, the dew in the sunrise, the way flowers are lapping up the nutrients from the wet soil. See the wooing and lovemaking everywhere. And remember the great shamanic motto: what happens in nature happens in us. Let this sensuous unfolding happen in you. Let the sun or wind stroke your earth too, and let your sighs burst forth. What is the world like when God is your lover? Are you seeking a new paradigm, are you seeking the radical new way, are you one who says we need to dismantle the old normal and build a new normal? The south is a powerful ally in all of this, if you let it be.

I leave you with a little poem of mine:

How I become hyacinth
How I become daffodil
How I become hosta
How I become sedum
easily divided easily rooted
How I become the two tone
whistle chirp in that far off oak
How I become something you never planted
How I green from brown
How I heave up your mulch
and crawl to you in your winter slumber
How I spring from pruned branches
How I become again the weeds you thought you killed off
come back to deliver that message again
How I emerge out vines you thought were dead
How the longer you know me the bigger I grow
How you think you can cultivate me
How long it takes you to see
How I become you.

Working with the internal combustion of the present

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 12:45:58 GMT

I hope this three-minute prayer song will help bring you some peace in the heart and mind. In this time it is important to seek out the elements of water and earth as medicine. This song-prayer form is one of the great gifts I’ve received from my Peruvian teachers and from the plants in the jungle that I’ve built relationship with through ceremony. The songs are improvisational, not scripted, and I didn’t realize until I played it back that the sun (element fire) is the in middle verse - held and contained by the verses to the water and the earth. That’s when it can deliver its proper dose of fire-wisdom and radiant love of life. Some thoughts and suggestions on all of that follow the video below. Please feel free to learn and sing this song, adapt it, make it your own. I hope it helps.

Here is what the water taught me this morning: Our modern world has been built on the power of internal combustion. Western culture is primarily grounded in the element fire, and secondarily in the element air. We devote ourselves to an impatient, heated frenzy of success-hunting, as we climb the ladder to the heights. Like untamed fire, we believe "abundance" means "more, more, more." Untamed air is a tornado that rages along, tearing everything down in its self-absorbed spinning.

For a human to be a fully functioning spiritual being, we need to access all four elements and call them into action inside ourselves, so that they can balance and nurture each other and guard against the destructive potential in each element. The energies of fire and air need to be tempered by water and earth. It’s no coincidence that the most compulsive capitalists are the least willing to grieve (water) and the least able to express intimacy (earth).

Abstract intellectualizing and philosophizing, inane religious arguments over doctrine, and petty personal arguments on social media are the element air unbalanced by the waters of grief and the earth of interrelatedness. For fire to truly combust, it needs dry air. It needs space between the logs. When we resort to personal insults on social media, we are putting space between one another, and that that creates the environment for a more raging fire. Conspiracy theories are air located not in the head as thoughts but in the belly as primal fears. Unchecked fears in the belly careen into the world as tornadoes of envy, greed, arrogance, and tribalism. In Spanish, spiritual sickness is sometimes called aire malo (bad air). This kind of air can be nurtured, embraced, and healed by water and earth.

Our bellies are being opened right now and very old, primal energies are being spilled out. It’s not just a few decades of stored energy spilling out, but centuries, and not only 400 years, but many centuries of spiritual imbalance that are spilling out right now, in a giant cleansing and correction.

Here are some of the things you can do in your prayer work to help you get through all of this, and to be an agent for long-term healing:

Ask Mother Earth to receive into herself this energy pouring out from the humans. Remember that she is involved in this mass healing and, indeed, is orchestrating it. Ask her to help us open this old wound to the upper air and sunlight, and to take the heavy discharge down into herself, to be composted, to transform it into nourishment for the crops to come. Bless her and thank her.

Ask Mother Water to wash the old wound - both yours now and in the ancestor realm - and let her and Mother Earth hold you while you grieve. Grieving alone is a terrible thing, and if you’re not grieving together in community, at least ask the mothers of water and earth to hold you and wash you. And this week of the full moon, you can also ask Mother Moon to join in.

Ask the powers of the Spirit of infinity, of the great immensity, the Grandfather who feeds the light to the stars, to fill you with that big wisdom. Open the top of your head and ask Spirit to teach you the New Song. The old song has worn itself out. Ask for the New Song to be downloaded into your body.

If you are stuck in grieving, the medicine is action. Take a simple action in the physical world. Move your body, take a walk, get out in nature, even if it's the front steps. Sit with flowers and listen to birds. Don't intellectualize this, but let it in as medicine. Don’t confuse posting on social media for action. One simple action that summons earth energy is to donate money. It sounds abstract, but it moves energy and connects you to others. If you’re worried about your money, it’s a great time to be generous. For your rage, the medicine is grieving - best done in community. Lay on the earth and ask her to draw the tears out of you and take them down. For your fear, the medicine is sunlight on the belly, and asking it to penetrate down in and cleanse. Sunlight as the song of the first wisdom of the life force, penetrating down into the cave of fear in the belly, reminding your body to love life. The touch of trees, the song of the birds, and each other’s touch – these are all medicines.

If you'd like to go deeper with all of this, please join me for this one-night class on June 9th.

Blessings.

Asking the Spirits to hold the container

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Wed, 06 May 2020 12:46:01 GMT

One issue for many of us, in this initiatory period we are in, is that our culture can't hold the ceremonial container for us. Our uninitiated elders can't hold the container because they don't know how. So, one solution is to return to the original elders - the Spirits of Nature - to ask them to hold the container for us. This 8 minute prayer-healing-song tries to provide a little of that for you. I hope you'll take the time to settle in and let it do its work on you.

A Conscious Initiation

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 12:46:02 GMT

The shamans see what we are going through as an initiation. Initiations serve a purpose: to move us into the next more mature spiritual state of being. Unconscious initiations take the form of disasters, chaos and terror, and this is what we are largely seeing now. Maybe you are filled with dread and anger, confusion and weariness, and maybe your dreams are off the charts in weird and disturbing. This is part of an unconscious initiation.

It's up to each of us to decide what we do with this time. Much of your fear, confusion and frustration at the assholes all around you comes from trying to grasp what is happening through the lens of the rational mind. But my suggestion for you is different. The rational mind simply does not have the bandwidth to carry you through a spiritual initiation. This is why I highly recommend working with the spirits of nature, your helping spirits, and your higher self. So much of this Covid time period is about our relationship with nature, and that's why the shamanic path is so useful as an anchoring practice.

You are only in charge of your own initiation - you cannot force anyone else's, no matter how loudly you talk or how eloquent your Facebook posts are. The chances are very, very good that you will survive the Covid pandemic. If you do, how do you want to be different? What inner energies do you want to raise up and live with, and what old demons (perspectives, decisions, and behaviors) do you want to be rid of? What will this experience teach you about your relationship with death and with life, and with love and beauty - how you embrace each, or hide from any? What does "true work," "true study," "true rest," and "true play" mean to you? Who are you truly, who are your true people, where are you truly from and where do you really want to go? Who are you pretending to be, and what does the pretense cost your soul? Where - and to whom – are you leaking your power and what is the cost to your soul? What do you love the absolute most? These are classic initiatory questions and now is a great time to work with them.

Unconscious culture will do whatever it can to keep you from making this time a conscious initiation. But you can take any of the above questions with you on a journey to your front steps or back yard, to the woods, or the lake. Ask Spirit to help you learn an answer. You can also carry any of these questions to you to bedtime, and ask the Spirit-in-the-Dream to show you answers. Learn to trust that Spirit's answers come in the gust of wind, in the flight of birds, in images, sudden knowing, and coincidences. Remember Einstein's words: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." Open your true yearning and ask one of those initiatory questions to the Great Spirit-in-Nature. When you ask from your honest yearning, Spirit always answers. Give yourself time to ask, and to receive. Impatience assures unconscious initiation.

We are coming up on May 1 – Beltane in the Celtic tradition, the opening of the South on the medicine wheel. Ask the Great Spirit of the Pure Love of Life to come and teach you how to love this life, and show you what your life would look like with that kind of love.

I leave you with the words of the John O'Donohue:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

If you want to work with me, take my online shamanic journey class , or prayer class , or schedule an appointment .

Prayer Song to the Waters for Help in These Times

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:46:13 GMT

I hope this six-minute prayer song to the waters helps lift some anxiety from you. Take time to open yourself and allow it to do its work on you.

Prayer for help

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 12:46:18 GMT

Prayer for help

Belonging to the power of uncertainty

justin@standoutresults.co (Justin Sturges) — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 10:34:18 GMT

Nan Fe, "Don't Fear The Reaper" (click the pic.)

I may think what I'm wrestling with is a scary virus. I may think I'm wrestling with the sudden obliteration of my income, or the interruption of my ordinary life or career goals. I may say I'm feeling trapped, or abandoned, or that I'm wrestling with fear, or death. None of this is untrue. But all of these are on the surface of life.

I may think I am longing for success, or love. I may believe I am longing for acceptance, expansion or fulfillment. None of these longings are useless, vain or false. But these, too, are on the surface of life.

Below the surface lies a primal power that I fear terribly, and yet is the very core of my belonging to life: the power of uncertainty.

The Irish philosopher poet John O'Donohue says, "Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status or money. Real power is the consistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished." (Eternal Echoes, 195). Our truest fear and our truest longing are both centered on the power of uncertainty.

All human beings long for solid ground to stand on. But the core truth is that there is no solid ground, but only temporary ground we construct for ourselves, often calling it, with gleeful relief, solid. The earth is not truly solid ground, as both mysticism and quantum physics seem to agree. And the earth itself is not on solid ground, but afloat in a vast, undulating sea.

Celtic shamanism teacher, Tom Cowan, says, "Disasters lead us back to that primordial consciousness out of which shamanism emerged, that consciousness of being small before a grand and frightening Universe…" (Read his lovely current piece on despair at Society for Shamanic Practice.)

And here is the hardest thing for me to grasp, yet I truly can glimpse it if I allow myself to: Even my current despair is on the surface of life. Below the despair is what O'Donohue calls "the signature of the divine."

It is common in meditation and ritual to advise me to send an imaginary root out from me, deep into the earth for "grounding." This is a very good practice that can provide a channel for anxiety to flow out of the body and into Mother Earth, who is more than willing to help us. But this grounding, too, as helpful as it is, remains part of the surface of life.

The taproot of the soul goes not into the earth, but through the earth, beyond the surface of life and into the eternal sea of divine uncertainty.

We are culturally trained to strive for bigness and independence. Our "cowboy culture" has embedded an aspirational story into us of independence from, and control over, the powers of nature. My money and machines will keep me safe. Even in my personal world of mysticism, shamanism and New Age woo-wooism, we tell each other that our core identity is as radiant as the sun itself, and that we are as big as Spirit.

But the virus has has brought us into our human smallness and vulnerability. If we allow ourselves to fully enter this smallness, it can – can, if we let it – open in us the immensity of the present moment, which is the divine sea, which is always "unsolved and unfinished" or, rather "always becoming." Our thoughts and actions dedicated to the surface of life are almost entirely about the future and the past. But now, we have been given the terrible gift of the mirror of our smallness, and we are filled with the irritation that comes from the rubbing that polishes the mirror. The signature of the divine is found in our vulnerability.

I'd like to offer you three kinds of practices you can do during this time.

Practice 1: Classically called "the lament prayer," this is a prayer that expresses powerlessness. ( More on lament here .) We want to be good people, so we say "I'm doing okay, and I'm so much luckier than…" (fill in the blank.) Gratitude is nice, but it can also bypass the divine discomfort of the rubbing that polishes the mirror. As Scott Berinato lays out so well in a recent article on grief , one uncomfortable but valuable practice you can do is feel what you feel, honestly. Set a timer for five minutes, remind yourself that all feelings are temporary, let yourself feel whatever rises, and name each one. The fear that you'll be consumed by these feelings is just one of the feelings that is temporary. Then go outside and "ground yourself." Give it all to the Great Mother, who is a happy to digest these energies and compost them into food. Thank her for this gift of healing.

Practice 2: Make prayers for the surface of life: protection, healing, and the restoration (or new creation) of normal, prayers of gratitude. Prayers summon beauty, and beauty is the antidote to despair.

Practice 3: Imagine your soul's taproot plunging down into the earth, and then beyond all surfaces, and into the eternal –however "the eternal" may appear to you. Draw power up that root and into all the layers of your body: the physical, energetic, and luminous layers. Do this for a few minutes after your lament prayer, and I hope it will help in polishing the mirror.

Stay calm. Love One another.

Jaime Meyer is president of the Board of Society for Shamanic Practice and a full-time shamanic practitioner in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Check out his upcoming online class on Shamanic Prayer .