Category: shamanism

Goodbye-ing

January 13, 2019

It turns out I’ve been carrying around a floating divorce of sorts. Terry and I did not say “’til death do us part” in our wedding vows. Now I understand why people include that clause. If the spirits are real to you, tangible in your life, does your marriage really end after death?

Michael Harner 1929-2018

February 19, 2018

What can you give someone at their passing, who, seemingly effortlessly, held open a door for you that led everywhere? If I had every day, for the rest of my life, to walk down the many paths that open door made available to me, I wouldn’t even begin to explore the potential that is there.

Green Offerings

May 4, 2016

When I was making my rounds that fateful day, I was being shown that my work with the Sidhe is always happening. Its really about a quality of presence and relationship to life that never ends. Everything has to fit within that connection.

True Prayer

March 7, 2016

…I journeyed to the spirit of the Slough, finding an ancient woman twisting her yarn at a spinning wheel, weaving out the eons singing to the tap of her wheel. Listening to her spinning song slowly turned me to gunpowder-black dust. She sang, wove and spun until I became a small bird perched on her wheel transformed by her radiance.

Crossroads

February 8, 2016

I’ve been feeling lately, like so many of my friends, that I’m sitting at an important crossroad. I understand that I need to move forward, but have not really been given the direction yet. So I sit with potential, and that can feel oddly frightening, like you’re pausing at a threshold while something ominous and unknown draws closer.

We’re like forest rangers for a forest nobody around us believes exists. We setoff into that world, sometimes stumble into it ourselves waking or dreaming, to work with the spirits there, to heal to bring balance, to remember soul in life. I suppose in a way, thats special. But sometimes I think it shouldn’t be.

Leaving Utah

January 28, 2015

Its funny how water connects us and pulls us apart. He was the one who dragged me out of that lake when I nearly drowned all those years ago, now I’m driving his ashes, my Mom, son, and artifacts that story 45 years of their life in Utah out to the coast.

Dangerous Forests

October 20, 2014

When I find myself in a forest I feel that I am the one being understood, not the other way around. Its as if my spirit is finally free to expand to its biggest size and once there, it finds itself wholly encompassed by something much larger and more mysterious than I can ever fully understand.

Omens

March 21, 2014

I was wide awake at the wheel when the Elk danced into my headlights. He was big, just under 300 lbs from the sheriffs report. I moved to the right to avoid, he dance to the right, I moved back, he jumped back.

Not Wiped Away

February 18, 2014

Death comes into our lives in many different ways. People sometimes think that because we get to work with spirits, and the processes of the psychopomp, that death transforms into something easy, perhaps even palatable.

Persephone Returns!

January 28, 2014

Just two days ago I invoked a number of my deceased friends as part of a ritual performance I had the great honor of performing for the Foundation For Shamanic Studies Council gathering. It was a way of calling out to those who I felt suffered from the lack of any real method of accessing the worlds shamans know so well.

Ripe

December 5, 2013

We are a group that has taken a long time to ripen. Not only did we have to survived the wounding of being deeply inspired in a culture that often rejects or eats alive the inspired, we then had to figure out how to support ourselves and perhaps our families…

The Packa Tree

October 16, 2013

Tadg has always called him “Packa”, a little ones abbreviation of the more difficult “Grandpa”. The Packa tree’s ruby red fruit hung for months, darkening to a cherry-black red.

When Michael Harner began to read selections from his new book, “Cave and Cosmos” at the most recent Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS) Council meeting, I saw spirits surrounding him, supporting him as he read.

Journeying to the River

February 28, 2013

We modern people stumble to the waters edge by chance. We go there in dreams, on fortunate drug trips, when we slip between living and dying, when our hearts are open, our minds are quiet and the Earth reaches out to us.

Agencies, institutions and laws do not heal people, that much is clear. At best they can provide opportunities for transformation, guide books, the names of mentors, directions to journey in. They are not in and of themselves, healing. That is the work of our fellow human beings, and the compassionate spirits who offer their wisdom and support.

Harvest Moon of the Maker

October 2, 2012

I got to make a friend a Shillelagh this past week from an oak in our grove. A special gift, I empowered it using shamanic techniques, some taught by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and some by Tom Cowan.

Dream Healing Time Travel

September 22, 2012

The five of us were crammed in the back of an old Lincoln heading over a cable bridge just past sunrise. The river was low from the long summer, the morning light made perfect diamonds flicker across its surface.

The Journey to Now.

September 11, 2012

I’ve come to see my journeys as a way of moving within the spirit of the Earth more freely, I’ve even been thinking of the spirit world as her consciousness.

Ordinary-Extra

September 5, 2012

I’ve been going through some tremendous healing lately. Almost nightly as I dream, my heart is being mended and remade. Scabs I never thought would come off, turn to dust as I rise for morning chores. This has been going on for weeks now, I don’t want it to stop. Ever.

The suffering that our western culture has wrought in this world is due in part, I believe, to the oppression of our own innate ability to access the spiritual dimension of our world. We perpetuate that distortion of ourselves every day, by denying the presence of the spirits.

The Bump

August 14, 2012

Real change does not feel soft. Its a bump – a big bump, that moves your life ten feet in a direction you never expected.

My Ratatoullie

January 18, 2012

You were born to journey, like some of us were born to cook. One of my favorite Pixar movies, “Ratatouille”, covers this topic well.

Raindrops

November 8, 2011

I want every day to feel like this, maybe you have a time of season and place that feel that way to you. Ever since I was a child this is the time of year that makes me feel like I belong here and now, I feel loved.

Teaching from the Ashes

November 2, 2011

At my Dad’s memorial service a little over a year ago, I learned that his father found his true calling as a high school shop teacher after having graduated with a degree in mathematics during the Great Depression.

True Harvest

October 18, 2011

I’m struck by the feeling of newness+oldness this time of year brings. Life bursts forth while ancient energies abound. Like practicing shamanic techniques in a modern culture, old and new are intimately entwined.

This Autumn is different than any other, I felt it for certain this morning. Usually I don’t notice the spirits of the land speaking this loudly until late in October. The potency of this season catches me off guard time and time again.

Knotted Me

July 5, 2011

Last night I found myself sitting up late again, grateful for the blanket of post-midnight darkness. It seems like every few nights I have new knot in myself to sort through.

Begin

June 14, 2011

Every step holds the potential for a new beginning, that’s one of the things dance taught me. If you’re really dancing, you’re on an edge that can lead you in any direction.

The Santa Solution

December 18, 2010

Shamanism teaches us that any being in our awareness can appear to us as a helping spirit when we journey to the upper or lower worlds of Non-Ordinary Reality (NOR). I’ve found that figures like Santa are especially helpful to journey to.

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