A Suburban Shaman's Survival Guide

A Spring Ritual

At the time of the next new moon, plant something--a shrub, a tree, a seedling, or bulb--whatever you choose.  Give the gift of this planting to the earth in a special way and for a special reason. Spring is the season of rebirth and renewal.  The new moon is always the optimal time to initiate the new: new projects, dreams and creations. Your dreams are an important player in this ritual.

The symbol of your new dreams and creations is a (raw) egg.  The egg has long been a symbol of creation and many creation myths tell the story of how the earth itself came into being from an egg, be it a swan’s or serpent’s egg, spider eggs, or the egg of a raven.  The Egyptians said that the golden egg Ra, the sun, came from a chicken, and all life came from there.  Seems like very humble beginnings for a thing so great as our Earth.  But Nature has taught us many times that great things come in small packages.

In the days leading up to the new moon, you will coddle your dreams of a new and different life.  By dreaming a new life into being, you are playing your part in the dreaming of a new world.  Try and suspend your disbelief a bit here and allow Providence or the Creator, God, the All that is, spirit, the universe--whoever you see directs the process of life and evolution--to have a hand in this dreaming process. 

Experience has no doubt shown you, you don’t always have the recipe for your own happiness, but you do wish—as we all do--for inner peace, for freedom from worry, greater self-knowing, the opportunity to contribute to the world in a meaningful and unique way, and to live with others in a spirit of love and cooperation.  That is a common dream, a universal one.  Since you may not know what components or ingredients will deliver those blessings to you, try not to make your dreams or wishes too specific and therefore limiting.

The egg in this ritual represents pure potential, fertility, and the microcosmic spirit of life itself.  You might want to choose an egg for yourself a few days in advance of the new moon, carry it with you like one of those middle school projects you or your children may have participated in.  You may want to imbue the egg with your dreams by meditating on them as you hold the egg in your hand, or keep it beside your bed to absorb your sleeping dreams.  That part is up to you.

When the new moon comes, dig a hole.  Burn offerings (white sage or tobacco) and crumble them into the soil.  Place your egg in the hole you have dug.  You may want to add the magic of charms, seashells, pretty stones or power objects.  You may wish to write your prayers or dreams on the shell of the egg or on strips of birch bark—a tree also associated with rebirth and renewal—and place that in the cavity.  Again, it is up to you—use your own creativity.  Put your plant into the ground over the egg and cover it.  The egg will act as a fertilizer!

A Mid-Spring Night's Dream

This visual exercise can be done either as a self-guided meditation or as a shamanic journey:

I invite you to step into a dream:  Allow your imagination to follow the prompting of the words.  Take a deep breath.  Let go of your awareness of your room and any present concerns that weigh upon you.  See yourself setting down the worries or fears that burden you this day.  Lay them on the earth at your feet.  You might see yourself dropping your troubles like a tight uniform or a skin that no longer fits and no longer serves you.  Peel it all away and give it to the waiting earth to be transformed and transmuted.  Walk away.

See yourself leaving the world of the ordinary.  The walls of your house fall away as does the road with its traffic and noise.  As you walk, the wildness of nature begins to spring over the cement at your feet, over the shops and houses that line the road.  You are stepping further and further into a world that looks more and more like a primeval forest. 

All around you stand the majestic trees.  You look up at their tall trunks and graceful branches, how they reach with equal measure into both the earth and sky.  You notice how well they know their place.  You see that the trees are your brothers, that they breathe for you and you for them.

Below your feet, the forest floor forms a soft path that leads you forward.  The sky overhead seems to nudge you onward and the wind to pull you along.  Something in the distance calls to you and urges you on.  Within your own heart, you feel excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead.

The wind begins to grow more still now and the air to thicken into a mist that envelopes you.  The mist surrounds the trees and the trees disappear into it.  Now it is only mist that you see, so thick you can’t see your own feet or your hand in front of your face.  But you keep walking forward, seeming to know where to go.

As you walk, you observe without any sense of alarm that your limbs are dissolving into mist, your body and head as well.  Observe how you have become not a body or person, but a consciousness, a consciousness that moves like molecules of mist through the air.  Like the mist that is neither water nor air, you are neither who you once were nor who you will become.

Feel yourself sifting through the air, embracing the trees, hovering over the streams and ponds, gliding through the sky with the birds.  Gradually you become more weighted and feel yourself coming back down to the forest path.  You feel your feet and legs come back into being, your hands and arms take form.  You feel your head and trunk appear.  The mist around you clears.  You are back in the town where you live.

You realize you are on the other side of a great change.  What have you become?  How have you changed?  In what ways do you feel different?  See differently?  How has the world around you changed?

What is your life like in this new world?  How has it shifted? Think for a moment about the things you dream about.  How have they taken or not taken form?  Do those dreams still matter or are there other things that excite and interest you now?

Spend some time exploring this new life, your new self.  Breathe in this new life.  When you feel ready, come back to the presence of your room. 

We all have a place in the dreaming of our new world.  As children of the Earth, we all have that responsibility.  Changing the world for the better starts with our own healing—our own becoming the change we want to see in the world, as Ghandi put it.

The Hopi elders say: if you are not connected to the earth, in alignment with its generous grace and spirit, you will not make it to the other side of the coming changes.  To feel connected to the earth, they say, learn to plant something.  Learn to tend something.  Give the earth your offerings and your gratitude and your gifts. 

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says:  Kiss the earth with your feet.  Give the earth your love and happiness.  The earth will be safe when we feel safe in ourselves.

The message is this: If we begin to assume an active role in the creation of a new world, if we dare to believe we can, our dreams will spawn a better creation to leave our children.  To leave our trees, and oceans, our mountains, and our animal friends.  And in return, the quiet generosity and responsiveness of nature will give birth to our own peace, wisdom and abundance—if we only just let it.

The Days of Miracle and Wonder

This entry is part of a sermon given at the Mattatuck Unitarian Universalist Church in Woodbury, CT during April of 2012:

“The Poet Dreams of the Mountain” by Mary Oliver speaks of the longing—and need—to step out of human time and live according to the time and purpose of the Earth itself.  To emerge from an urgent personal agenda and join a more thoughtful and collective dream.

No part of nature thinks about itself.  It thinks only of the Everything and what it is called upon to do to support it.  It is driven to play its part and contribute its gift and survive against all odds for as long as it can, in order to give all that it can.

Nature has much to teach us about how to live on this planet.  The waxing and waning of the moon demonstrates how to strike a perfect balance between letting go and creating anew.  The spring and winter show us that everything is evanescent—it is either coming into being or falling away in order for the next new thing to come into being.

We live in a human world of trying times—a time of fear and desperation and mistrust.  The state of the planet reflects our distress through its own troubling signs of imbalance—global warming, endangered animal and plant life, ruptured ecosystems, poisoned waters, scarred and contaminated land.

We are frightened by the impending threats we face from weather and pollution and the seeming indiscriminate destruction that Nature metes out on a sporadic and unpredictable basis, ranges of devastation that can run beyond the scope of our imaginations.  Nature IS indiscriminate—it will get on board with whatever the collective thought seems to be—good or bad.  An air of carelessness and disregard, of selfishness and waste invokes the same from Nature, which is and always has been shaped by collective thought and intention.  Which always has and always will seek balance above all else, at any time and at any cost.

We can’t beat Nature—it is more powerful than we will ever be.  But is it a competition really?  Is that the point?  As a shamanic practitioner, I am forever humbled and moved by the generosity and participation of the Nature spirits in my healing work.  Whenever I ask for Nature to lend its power to a client in illness or a dire situation, the spirits will rush forward to assist, to lend themselves to the cause of correcting the imbalance.  They will lay the beauty of their wisdom at our feet.  Lend their power and gifts to the cause at hand.  Readily support any dream or creation as if it were their own.  Why? Because it is their own.

We cannot dream or act or think in isolation.  We are part of an Everything, an All that supports us as we support it.  So, let’s support it.  Let’s live that truth.  Let’s come out of our private shells, come out of the darkness, out of the winter of our discontent, and roll up our sleeves, fire up our imaginations and build a new dream, not a little dream that assuages the panic of our individual egos, but a big dream that recreates a magnificent planet, an Earthly paradise that once was.

Whether we like it or not, we are in a new age.  We are coming to the end of a long and destructive earth cycle, marked by greed and selfishness and terrible, unconscionable waste.  The indigenous elders have been pointedly speaking to the meaning and importance of this time, this year of 2012, in which we now find ourselves.  Here we are in the spring of 2012, a season of rebirth in the year of rebirth. We are on a cusp, a betwixt and between, a passageway between what was and what will be.  We are in a place of great power—the power of pure potential.  As the songwriter Paul Simon puts it: These are the days of miracle and wonder.

Spring is a time of purification and renewal, a time we must be willing--like the moon above us--to let go and become something else.  So, let us begin by dreaming a new dream of ourselves and the planet that is our home and our Mother--our sweet, sweet Earth.

 

Creation is Never Done

We are creators for sure.  We have heard this said in many different ways, but the bottom line is that the world as we know it is our ongoing creation.  Though we are not genies from a bottle—we cannot simply cross our arms and blink things into being—it is probably best that we aren’t capable of instant manifestation.  Folk tales are rife with the catastrophic results of humans becoming unexpectedly bestowed with this sort of power.

 For years now, I have been trying to narrow down the necessary ingredients for manifesting my dreams and visions.  Recently, I picked up a book I read thirty years ago on the subject—Three Magic Words by Uell S. Anderson.  This book was first published in the 1970’s and is a little dated, but is still a good basic primer on the mechanics of creating the life you want.

 There are many tenets of the book that still remain solidly basic to manifestation work, but there are also some pointers I’ve picked up since the early eighties.  (Anderson would say that's because Universal Mind has expanded since then.) Doing this work with a spirit of conviction or faith is very key, as the author of Three Magic Words establishes, but I also think that doing the work with a spirit of joy and ownership is quite crucial.

 Are you ready to accept and fully choose the dreams you have crafted for yourself, or is there some nagging belief that you can’t quite get there from here, perhaps because you  believe you lack the skill, confidence, deserving or power to carry them off.  Free will is obviously a huge factor in creating the life you want—are you actually ready to choose those dreams right now, or do you see them as future developments in your mind’s eye?  If you continue to see them in the future, they will continue to remain just out of your grasp.

 I also favor very strongly the practice of allowing higher self to offer up the vision of what I am creating in this life.  My ego-driven choices have landed me in enough hot water, thank you very much.  Egos are narrow thinkers and can make some extremely limited choices.  While the ego should definitely partner in the manifesting, it really shouldn’t be running the show and making up the laundry list.  Remember all those sad tales of foolish people who ended up doing things like turning their offspring into gold?

 2012 is the year we must finally master giving our life unconditionally to our higher power.  Your spirit has much grander visions than your conscious mind can ever conjure.  Ask what those visions are, give them your yes! vote, your joy, excitement, and conviction.  It’s time to get busy making your dreams a reality!!  Be willing to set aside some time everyday to work on manifesting the kind of world you want to live in.

As Paul Simon, the great songwriter, tells us:  There are galaxies yet to be born.  Creation is never done!

 

And the Beat Goes On

During a recent journey, I had an opportunity to meet and speak with my client's great-great grandmother,  a Cherokee woman who had walked the Trail of Tears.  She told me that the shamanic journey is a way of bringing what is inside us to the outside where we can see it and hear it, and that the drumbeat is an extension of our own heart.  I loved this idea that journeying is a method of making our inner wisdom external and therefore available to us, and felt very grateful for the gift of this insight.

As we enter 2012, many of the channeled works and transmissions from indigenous elders, as well as the journeys of shamanic practitioners the world over, speak of the necessity of a different way of being in the world to come—a way of living through spirit and pledging singular loyalty to the wisdom of the heart and soul, that our survival as an individual and a race depends upon this.  The teachings say we must now more than ever allow ourselves to be guided by an inner wisdom rooted in the Divine, rather than heed the long-established paradigms of our external reality and the steady diet of pressure and fear these schools of thought impose upon us.

On January 1^st, I went on a journey to see what was in store for 2012.  One of the themes, which came forward almost immediately, was the necessary collapse of old structures.  This is a global development that has been repeatedly mentioned to me in my journeys—and has long been evidenced in the world around us.  (Look at what has happened in recent years to the institutions we thought could never be shaken—our political system, the economic superstructure and institutions both religious and secular that are buckling under unprecedented levels of dysfunction.) 

Many of us keep trying to return to these old structures to resolve our present difficulties, but the wells there are dry and broken. The ego-mind reassures us if we just follow the rules and tenets set out by these established institutions, we will find our way out.  But the messages coming from spirit say that everything we see crumbling around us needs to crumble, and that now is the time to protect our personal power (or sovereignty) by turning to inner wisdom, by establishing new sources of nourishment and understanding that come directly from spirit.  The old ways of being can no longer satisfy us or solve our problems.

Another theme of 2012, which has been cropping up in my work over recent months, is the imperative need for ancestral clearing, a going back and restoring the damages and losses to our human family lineage before we, as a race, can move forward with wholeness and strength.  In ancient times, in the wake of war and catastrophe—experiences which can often fragment and misdirect the exiting soul—shamans acted as mediators (psychopomps) in order to ensure that the victims of these cataclysms had a proper passing over and found their way to the spirit world.  Because our consciousness has been so outer-directed in recent millennia, this sacred work has been neglected and the integrity of our genetic and karmic ancestry has suffered.

In my client work these days, it is not uncommon for me to act as a psycopomp for souls that have been caught in the timeline of some historical conflagration or tragedy (eg., the Trail of Tears).  It is as if the unfinished stories of these fragmented or lost souls are recorded in either the DNA the client carries in her physical body or the akashic record she carries in her soul.  These souls (or soul parts) must be plucked from the time-space continuum in which they have become frozen;  they must be allowed to heal their experience and become part of the greater whole.

Becoming whole and finding inner balance is perhaps our greatest imperative in 2012.  We are being prodded and encouraged to do our inner work now more than ever before, because now is the deadline.  Those who commit to the work to restore the integrity of their soul, those who let go of the emotional baggage and the detritus of the past, those who make compassion and unconditional love their guiding principle, will have a smoother ride going forward.

Oftentimes, new clients will ask me: how many times do I need to come and see you? Will one visit be enough?  Unlike traditional medical and therapeutic models, healing through shamanic practice and treatment is not about commitment to a given protocol as much as it is commitment to a different way of being, a personal vow to henceforth serve the urgings of the soul rather than the whims and demands of the ego.  It is the shift we must make—or so the changing times tell us—from honoring mundane priorities to, above all else, manifesting divine visions.  (Look for my next blog posting on the topic of manifestation.)

When in doubt, when in distress, when in fear and confusion, we must learn to go within to spirit for interpretation and guidance, and wean ourselves off our historic reliance on science and the media.  So, isn’t it a blessing that one of the most powerful tools for doing inner work—the shamanic journey—has been preserved for us throughout the many millennia of human existence?  This very accessible practice enables us to bring what is inside outside, so we can see and interpret and understand who we are, what is happening in our experience and what is required of us to move beyond it.

I wish you all many blessings and a grace-filled 2012!

 

Dead Giveaway

These past months have brought unexpected deaths to my family.  Two cousins of mine, both named Joseph, departed suddenly, one from my mother’s side of the family and one from my father’s side.  Both died young by modern standards.  Both departed from large and closely-knit families that still reel from their gaping absence—an absence that does not seem repairable or reconcilable.

“I understand it on some level,” said my cousin’s daughter recently, “and I’m glad he is no longer suffering.  But I can’t accept that he is gone from our lives now.  I don’t want it or like it and I never will. 

In my practice and my personal life, it seems like everyday someone is talking about a near and dear one passing—a father, a little boy, a young co-ed, a colleague, a sister, a husband, a neighbor....a virtual exodus of souls, it seems.

Death feels closer at hand for some reason, though, yes, it is always there.  We feel our losses weigh on us, though, in truth, we are probably more magnified by death than diminished by it—what I like to call the dead giveaway.  Because we are all so connected, the newfound strength, wisdom and grace that has come to our dead loved ones become ours, just as their troubles and triumphs were once shared in life.

Relationships do not end when a loved one passes over, nor do they become dormant or estranged. If anything, these ties and connections become more vibrant.  Because death itself is a transformation, relationships must change correspondingly, and that shift requires that we change too.

In my work, I have gone to the Upper World, met and spoken with many clients’ loved ones over the years.  And, because I am committed to doing ancestral healing for my own family, I communicate regularly with my own dead relatives—some of whom I knew in life and some who died before I was born. 

There is a wealth of healing in these avenues of communication, golden opportunities to say what was left unsaid, solve mysteries that were not understood, hear words that were never spoken, and witness joy and peace that escaped our dear ones during their earth time.

I think it’s unfortunate that most people don’t communicate with their loved ones who have passed on, or feel they can’t, or that it’s wrong or foolish to try.  They view death as a finality that cannot and should not be breached.  That things must now be left unsaid and unhealed.

The ancients communicated with their dead.  Indigenous tribes do as well.  Every culture had a “day of the dead” when souls who had passed over were honored and addressed and sought out for wisdom.  The ancestors knew the history of the people who prayed to them and had insights and blessings to share, as well as an investment in the prosperity of their descendants. 

In the modern expression of shamanism, we follow this practice, and recognize that there is much healing available through these channels.  But shamanism did not teach me the importance or skill of speaking with the dead.  My father did.

When my father died 32 years ago, it felt to me like the earth had shifted on its axis.  I remember looking into his room at the papers on his desk, the made-up bed, his slippers in the corner.  I could not fathom how these things he held and the spaces that held him were still existent if he was not.   I looked at the things my father, who was a builder, had created, and they seemed to speak to me about a continuity I couldn’t see, but could feel. 

I looked forward to my first visit to my dad’s grave—I thought I would be able to have some measure of contact there, to once again feel the strength of his presence.  My mother and I took flowers, and I helped her plant them.  Then, I looked at her and said: “he’s not here, you know.”

I was learning my first lessons about energy, spirit, immortality, the soul, and the interconnectedness of all things.  I was learning them by living them.  In the months that followed I would have conversations with my dad in my head.  I believed it was pretend, something I made up to salve my grief.

Then one day I started thinking about the things I was “hearing” him say.  He was saying things I didn’t know in a voice that wasn’t mine, and I realized: I’m not making this up.  My father was still there, his love for me strong enough to pierce the veil between the worlds.  My schooling in Death 101 began with this lesson: When people die, their love for you doesn’t die with them.

It is never enough time, when someone dear leaves us in death.  Often they seem virtually torn from the ongoing action and fabric of our lives.  It seems senseless and cruel and wrong for this to happen.  We feel so strongly that given the chance their lives could have been more, and that’s true, they could have been.  But we have to believe--if we are to give our dead the honor they deserve--that their lives were enough.  Just as they were.

After my cousin, Joe Hahn, who was an engineer, a tri-athlete, a yoga instructor and a spiritual teacher, passed away at the age of 51, I asked my guide how this could be understood.  It seemed to me he could have done so much more, touched so many more lives.  My guide said that Joe was a catalyst.  He came to start things, not finish them.  I said that wasn’t enough.  My guide smiled at me.  “Jesus was a catalyst,” he said.

The lessons in Death 101 go on.

Crowing Pains

These days, I am often met by crows when I walk from the house to the barn and back again.  I find crow feathers flowering the yard and the walkway.  I bring them in and stick them into the holes of the deer vertebra that graces my altar.  Crows cluster outside the windows of the barn as I work and chatter at me from the trees when I pass underneath.  Sometimes I cannot believe how many of them there are!

I love Crow medicine and am happy when I see it make an appearance in my life.  Ted Andrews, in his classic book Animal Speak, says Crow is “The Secret Magic of Creation Calling.”  He even notes the importance of its black color.  “Black is the maternal color, and thus the black night gives birth to a new day.”

When I first was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago, crows followed me everywhere.  I’m talking legions of them.  One evening during this time, I was attending my older son’s baseball game.  At one point, an enormous crow parked itself on top of the batting cage and began to squawk away.  After a while, one of the other mothers looked at me and said: “Jeez, what’s with this crow?”  I laughed and said: “Oh, he’s with me.”

A common belief folks hold about crows is that they are harbingers of death.  What the presence of Crow says to me is that I am being urged, for the sake of healing, into something new.  I am being called to an initiation of some sort, and in order to proceed, I must let something pass away and die. 

What is “passing away” is usually an outmoded way of being, a rigid belief that is creating an obstruction or is in conflict with a truer and more accurate self-image.  This process is what Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm in their book The Druid Animal Oracle call “the resolution of the opposites.”  It is the opportunity to resolve deep and lasting conflicts that reside in your psyche in order to heal and give birth to something that the soul is urging you toward.

 I see it as the decisive and final victory after a long series of skirmishes between two opposing thoughts, for example:  “I don’t measure up.” vs. “I have a unique gift to bring to the world.”   Within the same person, there can be longstanding emotional history and conviction behind both of those ideas.  Sometimes one side is winning; sometimes the other, and the ongoing tension between them is what produces strife and struggle for that individual.  This is the heart and soul of Crow medicine.

 Think about opposing thoughts that you hold about yourself within your own psyche.  You may well have a whole list of them.  On the one side of that list are all those deep longings in your heart, pipe dreams perhaps, that seem so improbable and yet, when you focus on them, there is a undeniable knowing that these are the things that describe the truest, most quintessential you.  On the other side of the list are all the things you say in order to talk yourself out of simply dropping everything right this minute and rushing forward to live those dreams and recapture your own sovereignty.

 In shamanism it is said that everything has a spirit.  Negative self-talk has a spirit too.  What is the energy resident within those disabling beliefs that keep you from gamely stepping forward into your own initiation, that keep you from just picking up your staff and walking off in your own direction?  That is a journey in which Crow would happily assist.  And it for this reason, crows should be welcomed, not feared. 

I have been letting go of many things over the last several years, and as much as I would like to take a breather and hold still for awhile, Crow urges me forward, saying there is more to let go, more to leave behind.  You’re so close, he says.

I sigh, but nod.  Alright, then, I say.

I remember a day, shortly after I was diagnosed with cancer, when I was lying on a massage table having a Reiki treatment.  Suddenly, I felt the presence of my dead brother come into the room and stand beside me.  He leaned down and waved his finger over me.  “You have to let all this go, kiddo,” he said.  “Let what go?” I asked.  “All of it,” he said, nodding “all of it.”

I smile when I remember that now.  I’m working on it, Don.  I'm still working on it.

 

I’m Going In!

Whenever I find myself in the dark and difficult place of self-doubt, I need to be reminded once more of how imperative it is to be constantly fed and filled by spirit.  Whenever I feel dispirited, it’s because I quite literally am.

I’m not sure why I have to be reminded of this from time to time.  I find myself in a sad and distorted reality, where the future looks dim, and what once seemed possible is now hopelessly out of reach.  I look around and always ask myself the same ridiculous question: how did I end up here? 

Last time, my spirit guide weighed in: You got here under your own steam, he said.  I don’t know why you keep coming down this road; you already know where it leads.

What he is telling me is this: you have a choice. When “the world is too much with you” it is usually because you are seeking a valid reflection of yourself from the world outside.  You are measuring yourself against the achievements of others, rating yourself in their eyes, evaluating your self-worth as you imagine they might. The world is a harsh mistress.  When you rely on the external world to be the mirror of who you are, you are bound to get lost.  You are bound to come up far short of the truth.

If, on the other hand you allow spirit to reflect back to you who you are, your magnificence will come into view.  It might be yet at a distance, but you will begin to see yourself with more clarity and truth, and your sovereignty will gradually be restored.

As committed as I am to my spiritual practice, the world can sometimes take me by storm.  I find myself too much in my head, worrying about bills and family matters, my business or my health...my cats. (Those two can really get me going.)  As soon as I start to entertain my fears, I am always startled by what terrible houseguests they make.  Doubts, misery and regret settle in, and before I know it, my sovereignty has been usurped.  I’m on the outside looking in.

The only thing to do then—and yes, it takes me awhile to figure this out—is pick up the drum and start singing, do ceremony and journey to my helping spirits, lay offerings for them and for the beauty around me, walk in nature and recite poems to the trees and birds.  Slowly, I return to normal.  I come back to my center and think, okay, there I am.

If you focus more on finding yourself than on doubting yourself, you’re already halfway there.  Much of life is just a process of elimination, as you realize again and again: no, this isn’t me.  No, that’s not me.  Life is intended to be a journey of self-discovery—that’s why you’re here. 

But, it is a journey that is not devoid of struggle, as you know.  You will not find yourself easily or immediately.  You are far too complex and splendid for that.  By far, the softer route to self-discovery comes through guidance from the spirit world, through revelation.  It comes through gratitude for all you are given, through seeing the gift in everyone and everything.  It comes through making offerings, performing ritual and ceremony, engaging in creative expression, prayer, poetry, and song.  It comes through the celebration of your own dancing spirit, without comparison or deference to anyone else.  It comes from going within,  standing still, and preparing to be amazed.

Dreaming the World into Being

I have heard it said that the dream world is the real world and our waking world is but a dream.  That’s a strange notion, isn’t it?  Dreamtime was what the Aboriginal tribes called non-ordinary reality—or the journey world.  There is some sense that the ancients saw journeying as another form of dreaming, and they weren’t wrong.  Certainly, there are similarities in these two states of consciousness. 

When you sleep, your brain waves settle down to 1 to 3 cycles per second, compared to waking (the alpha state), when your brain wave cycles can increase anywhere from 8 to 20 cycles per second.  Journeying induces another state of consciousness (theta), which lies between waking and sleeping, but probably is closer to the delta state of sleep, running at about 4 to 7 cycles per second. 

The shamanic journey is sometimes called a “lucid dream” or what Robert Moss likes to calls a “conscious dream.”   The body is not asleep and the mind is tuned into the flow of the unconscious, able to ask questions and decipher meaning as the images arise.  The journeyer engages in active communication with what is happening in a way the sleeper cannot. 

But, if the shaman is doing her job, and is being the “hollow bone”, the evolution of the journey can be as spontaneous as a dream.  The imagery can spill right out the shaman’s own life in an imaginal language perhaps only she can interpret.  And, like dreams, journeys can be prescient and revelatory.

So, what does it mean to say the world of dreamtime is more real?  Well, in shamanic terms, there are a number of ways of thinking about this. First of all, you might consider the fact that when a shaman goes into the spirit world, it is to obtain clarity and understanding about something in the everyday world that is not understood. (e.g., why is my marriage failing?  What am I supposed to be doing with my life?  Why did this accident occur?  Why am I so sad?)  That’s kind of like dream interpretation, and why journeying is called “going to source.”  And I suppose that may make non-ordinary reality more truthful or real. 

The shaman finds the spirit world to be a font of wisdom and power.  It is understood that what takes place in the journey world will follow in ordinary reality. Insights gained there shift thinking and behavior here. Healing which transpires there creates healing here. 

The shaman observes that a regular practice of journeying into the spirit world changes you.  It broadens your viewpoint, helps you to let go of judgment, encourages you to value yourself more, and makes living your life more manageable. It gives you equilibrium.

I have said this before, so bear with me while I say it again: you were not meant to live in ordinary reality 24/7.  To ignore the spiritual aspect of your being.  To make decisions based on fear and need instead of wisdom and compassion.  You were not meant to go it alone.  Or believe that you must.

The truth of who you are and why you are here and why what is happening to you is happening is to you is to be found in the other world, the spirit world, the dreamtime.  Maybe that’s what makes it more real.

It certainly, to my way of thinking, is where the power is—the power to heal, the power to understand, to find yourself, to gain inner peace, direction, and contentment.  And, it is also the place to bring your dreams into reality.

When I have a goal in mind, something I wish to make manifest in my life, I typically journey to my guides and ask for insight into the best way to bring that goal about.  I do not wish to create something that is not for the greatest good, that will distract me from my spiritual path, or ultimately create more karma.  I want to manifest in an informed way. I have grown to see the wisdom in turning over the inner workings of my life to spirit, to simply ask that what is made manifest in my life serve the highest good.

You’ve probably created situations in your own life that didn’t go smoothly and possibly took you years to dig yourself out of.  So, I think you know what I’m talking about here.  It might take a lot of wrong turns for life to convince you that handing over the reigns is probably the best policy.

I can’t dream into being anything so magnificent as spirit can, so I give my guides and helping spirits free reign there.  I ask them to suggest possibilities to me.  And then it is my job to lend my energy and enthusiasm and creativity to those possibilities and make them real. 

It is in this way that the shaman dreams the world into being.

All That Is About to Be Born

I feel like I am coming into being.  The barn, where I will create a new workspace, is almost finished.  Spring has finally taken hold and the flowers are popping—bluebells, lilies of the valley, wisteria, and lilac—all my favorites.  The warm breezy afternoons are a glorious backdrop for gardening and walking in the woods.  A long time of hibernation is coming to an end.

I think it’s strange how when you are transitioning, you sometimes don’t even realize it.  You just feel stuck and not quite yourself, but not quite new or different either.  You may experience a kind of grief, although it is unclear what it is you are grieving.  You may feel longing, but don’t yet know what you long for.  That’s the way I have been feeling for the last couple of months.

John O'Donohue says it this way in his poem for times of transition: May we have the courage to take the step into the unknown that beckons us; trust that a richer life awaits us there, that we will lose nothing but what has already died; feel the deeper knowing in us, sure of all that is about to be born beyond the pale frames where we stay confined, not realizing how such vacant endurance was bleaching our soul's desire.

Like the shamans of olden times, I look to the spirit of nature in order to understand the circumstances in which I find myself.  Shamans did not view the spirit world as a different world so much as the invisible aspect of this one. To gain clarity, they simply looked deeper into the world around them.  Looking at and experiencing nature from the aspect of the unseen dimension brought wisdom and knowing to the shaman and her community.   And one of the ways she accessed the wisdom of nature was through shapeshifting.

Shapeshifting can be a valuable exercise during a time of confusion, stress or sadness.  There is really nothing that you experience in your own individual life that is not reflected in some way within the wider context of nature.  You are the microcosm—nature, the macrocosm.  You are nature, so why would that not be the case?

There are many shamanic boasts or poems that enumerate the shapeshifting experiences of the speaker.  The boasts were a kind of yesteryear “trash-talk,” recited to demonstrate the agility of the shaman’s imagination, but also the extent of his wisdom.  Just as Mohammed Ali once boasted of his ability to “fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” Celtic shamans or bards would brag about their adeptness and skill something like this: “I have been the shape of many things.  I have been the narrow blade of the sword.  I have been a shining star.  I have been a word in a book.  I have been an eagle.  I have been a boat on the sea.  I have been a string on a harp.  I have been a full, enchanted year in the foam of the water.  There is nothing in which I have not been. (Taliesin, Welsh bard.)

When I ask my helping spirits what aspect of the natural world will share its wisdom about times of transition, I am told: go to the eclipse.  Eclipses were uncomfortable events for the ancients, a dark time.  The word itself comes from the Greek word for abandonment and downfall, a ceasing to exist.  When you are in transition, some phase of your life has ended, yet nothing new has stepped in to take its place.  Transition is a void, and it is natural to feel only the loss and what has ceased to exist. 

For me, last winter marked the first time in twenty-four years that both of my children were gone.  I was in a new house and the initial flurry from the move had settled down until only the quiet of an unfamiliar place remained.  The weather was gray and cold.  Like all northeasterners, I was buried inside high walls of snow.  The renovation of the barn edged forward ever so slowly.  Where was I going, I wondered sometimes.  What was I becoming?

Journeying into the eclipse, I feel the tension of what is coming and what is passing away.  I hang in the space between sun and moon and watch them observe one another.  They tell me it is the only time they get to focus on each other, before drifting apart once more.

The sun tells me that eclipse energy is about self-effacement, and it can be a harsh time—a time for taking stock of what has been done and not done, a time when you need to hold the shadow and the light in both hands.

The moon tells me I am moving away from a long period when I needed to be a nurturer, and that I must accept the finishing of this work by creating a bundle to represent all these former responsibilities.  I am to then burn or bury the bundle, asking for the energy I once used in nurturance to be redirected toward expansion into the outer world.  It is a moving away from a moon-directed life into a sun-directed life.

I plan to perform this ritual at the next full moon, a time considered to be one of release by the ancients.  I will call on the elementals present to help me mark the end of one life phase and the beginning of another.  This ritual will create an ending, a line of demarcation that will finally break the long, uncomfortable suspense of this transition.