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Eagle Journey
Take a journey with eagle to gain perspective and soar over your obstacles. Eagle resides in the east of the Inka medicine wheel. The place of the sunrise and new beginnings. Once we’ve shed our old stories (serpent), strengthened our emotional center (jaguar) and learned to feed from the sweetness of life (hummingbird), we are ready to soar above it all to a new beginning at the level of eagle. Eagles are the one of highest flying of the birds, some species able to fly up to 20,000 feet. Hey can stretch their great wings and soar above it all gaining perspective not available to those of us at ground…
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Hummingbird Journey
A journey with hummingbird can help you add sweetness to your life. The hummingbird resides in the North quadrant of the Inca medicine wheel. It represents our soul’s journey, living life in trust of our path and taking it from the mundane to the mythic. This hummingbird, known as Siwar Qinti in the Qechua language, is a tiny bird that make a migration of thousands of miles every year from South America to Canada. It does this on tiny wings over open water and not asking why it is going or if it is safe or comfortable, or what will be at the end of the journey. Hummingbirds feed mainly…
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Shamanic Journeying
Shamanic journeying is the process that opens the doors between our waking, ordinary reality, and non-ordinary reality so the soul can dialogue with the spirit energies that dwell there to receive help and guidance. Across cultures the landscape of the journey is similar, generally composed of the upper, middle, and lower worlds. The middle world is considered our ordinary world, where we reside in our day-to-day life. The lower world contains our subconscious, our old wounds, lost soul parts, and helping spirits that can guide us to those parts of ourselves including gifts and abilities that may have been lost to trauma. The upper world is similar to what we…
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Creating Sacred Space
Creating a sacred space in which to work is a core part of shamanic practice. Whether working with a client or alone, having an environment that is energetically safe and protected is essential to allow for deep healing to take place. Safe environments allow clients to release old stories and wounds that have been buried where sometimes the client themselves can’t find them. Calling in the four directions and creating sacred space is also useful in our homes and work environments, consecrating our space and assisting us in maintaining our center and focusing on the highest and best of what we are doing. The Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that…
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Jaguar Journey
A journey with jaguar can help us overcome our fears. This is not a journey we’ll be taking in a beautiful automobile. This is a journey with the great cat that resides in the west of the Inca Medicine Wheel. Once we’ve faced things “the way they are” without emotion in the South with Serpent, we may notice that we have emotions about those “facts”. Often those are emotions of fear, based on doubt and shame. Those emotions result in stories where we can lay responsibility outside ourselves and onto “the other”. These stories become the “reasons” that our life is the way it is and not all that we…
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Journeying with Serpent to Shed the Old
Journeying with serpent to let go of our old “skins”. Each time we enter a new year there are celebrations to mark the passing of the last one and welcome in the new. There are resolutions and the hope that the things we did not like about the last year will be washed away and the new year will bring more of whatever it is we feel we lack: money, love, joy, a sense of purpose, or something else. What we fail to realize is that we are taking our old selves into the new year with our same beliefs and behaviors. Yes, we make resolutions to change behaviors, but…
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Coyote Karma
Coyotes and Karma Recently while pulling oracle cards, which I do each week to find a theme on which to reflect, I pulled coyote. Coyote reminds us to be mindful of where we might be fooling ourselves or may be allowing others to fool us. Are we trying to sell ourselves on something as hard as telemarketer might if they got us on the phone? Word of advice- do not answer calls from unknown numbers, if it is important a message will be left, and government agencies use the US Postal Service. While mulling over what message coyote might have for me, I looked out the window and noticed roadrunner…
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Hope is Foundational
I have read posts recently from some people whom I regard highly, and who are held in high esteem by the public at large, saying that hope is a useless emotion or way of thinking. I respectfully beg to differ. While hope itself is a lousy strategy. It is the foundation for developing one. Most of us may have felt hopeless at some point. That is a very dark place to be. Hopelessness is a predecessor to self-harm and even suicide. It takes hope to get through the darkness. The ability to believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train, can…
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Good Advice From Ferris Bueller
Some really great ideas come from lighthearted movies. Ferris Beuller gives some good advice about “isms”. “It’s not that i support fascism or any ism for that matter. Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Not bad, but then again he was the walrus.” People, the media especially, love “isms”. Like labels, they provide a shorthand to express a point of view. But when we take a closer look at them, they serve to divide people, thereby undermining relationships and creating upset. Consider…
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E Pluribus Unum
E Pluribus Unum. I got to thinking about this great motto on the fourth of July. “Out of many, one.” When this great nation was born it took a lot of individuals with different interests, beliefs, lifestyles and attitudes to set those aside and come together in a common cause. People left their families, farms and businesses to fight for a greater vision of what could be if they could break free from the yolk of a monarch that viewed them mostly as a source of revenue. That independence however, required interdependence upon one another. To recognize and work with people’s strengths while shoring up and forgiving shortcomings. When…
