Your Guide to Presidential Politics . . . No Really

I had a discussion last night with one of my fellow travelers that touched on the topic of “sacred activism”.  We wondered how someone who was on an awakening path might exert change in the collective or on the planet without losing one’s integrity or being sucked into a vortex of destructive energy.   

That brings up thoughts about patriotism and civic duty on the 4^th of July, so here goes:

I don’t know if it matters which of the two major party candidates is elected for US president in November.  Many of my peers have pulled their attention away from the process so they will not feed the energy of or be poisoned by an increasingly toxic and polarizing process. 

Should we just stay out of it and let the whole thing implode, thus hurrying up the inevitable collapse and reconstruction of all our primary institutions?  I’m certainly not going to argue for effecting change from the inside the system using the oh-so-limited tools that have been handed us.

Finally, can I involve myself in this mess without getting dirty?  Is there something here worth being for instead of against, when we have become so acculturated to voting against the one who we believe is the worst of the two?  If that is your only choice, let me make it easy for you, because I have insider information on which one is the worst. 

If this is your calling, you should vote against Mitt Romney.  I don’t even want to go into the reasons and the rationale why; if you can’t see it, there’s no hope for you.

But if you want to vote for something, that’s a longer reach.  Here’s my test.  My teacher, Linda Star Wolf, has made it public on a number of occasions that she would invite President Obama to come in and do a breathwork session with her.  I have no doubt she would offer the same to Governor Romney. 

In a shamanic breathwork journey we go into the core of our being, we release old patterns that have caused us distress and dis-ease, and we reprogram ourselves for greater joy and harmony.  If one of these two men seems to be more likely than the other to accept this generous offer for personal rebirth . . . vote for him.

www.shamanicbreathwork.org

Make All Your Boxes Bio-Degradable

Today I am just back from New Mexico and finding myself again in the red rock and high desert energy of Sedona and Cottonwood.  On these early days of summer the temperature has been in the triple digits for several days.  It’s Hot!

Now there are thunder clouds gathering to the west and I can see the falling of rain in the distance.  We are often teased by these vistas; and in these wide open spaces the thunder heads may fly over or around us and we might receive no respite from the heat.  But today I hear the Hopi’s have done ceremony and called for rain, so now I witness the trees blowing and feel a tangible change in the air pressure and add my hope to their prayers that it will rain.

With or without a change in the weather, I rest in the assurance that our current persistent circumstances are good and exactly what is called for . . . comfortable or not.  At this moment I sit in the air-conditioned comfort of Chai’s coffee house nursing a pomegranate white iced tea – a lovely red pink concoction tinged with just a hint of honey for sweetness.  It is the color of Homer’s “rosy fingered dawn”; morning and the promise of a new beginning.

We are paying attention.  I returned home last night to find that my comfortable and easy living situation is going away at the end of July and I must once again move my wheels and be “on the road to find out”.  I am surprisingly not contracted by this ostensibly “bad” news.  It is clear to me that it is time for me to move – something else and something new is being revealed.  My task is not to make something happen but to be open and receptive and notice when and where the next gift is offered.

I am even more embedded in this posture of “allowing” following our weekend workshop on the topic of “moving out of victim consciousness”.  We had a group of twenty counselors and counseling graduate students at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales.  This is the second time we have taught a for-credit class here framing everything with our shamanic and psycho-spiritual approach.  We do not just bring new information and understanding but a different way to look at ourselves and the universe that precipitates measurable awakening moments in ourselves and our students. 

In other words, “We got our minds blown.” 

We spoke a repeated theme over the weekend that said we do not need to become more self-empowered because we are already powerful.  We do not need to try to change our uncomfortable circumstances; we need to appreciate the now moment in which we find ourselves and then allow the gifts and blessings of a benevolent future to be revealed to us, without our manipulation or planning. 

 We do not need to be more powerful; we need to release the limitations that keep us from the awareness of our true personal power that is ever-present and considerable.  This is consistent with the idea that you are as spiritual as you ever need to be; you do not need to try to be more spiritual.  We want to instead focus our energies on becoming more human which means to more perfectly embody our omnipresent spiritual nature in human form. 

Those who outwardly strive to gain worldly power are like hamsters running on a wheel.  They think the accumulation of material wealth and the subjugation and enslavement of others transfers real power to them.  They are sadly mistaken, and their misguided desires become obsessions and addictions that are like a bottomless dark pit of despair.   

On a less sinister level, trying to control our circumstances and manipulate others (even to save them) is an addiction.  The nature of addiction is that we must ever increase the dosage of the addictive substance or thought form in order to maintain a consistent pleasant feeling or effect.  Being successful in controlling and manipulating persons or circumstances then does not make us a more powerful person.  It is just evidence of our victim status because we can never quite get the circumstances of our world to line up to our satisfaction. 

It is my recurring challenge to not be “against” such souls.  My “against-ness” adds more energy to this toxic vortex and so fans the flames and fuels the fire.  It is possible to notice these pockets of “resistance to awakening” without being in judgment against them.  I still hold that the power of discernment is a gift of spirit.  But I do better to love and bless these pieces of shadow and trust that all are on their own path to awakening however slow, arduous, or twisted the way.

Over the weekend we talked briefly about the tomatoes that are chemically engineered to come out square so they can fit into boxes, and we invoked the songwriter, Dan Bern, who said “some people are chemically engineered; they come out square to fit in boxes”.  http://danbern.com/ 

It is useful to admit to the boxes, the belief systems, we have accepted or constructed around ourselves to give the illusion of safety and security.  We will not entirely become “box-free” today, but we will aim to make all our boxes bio-degradable and pray that as needed . . . they will fall away.

WE ARE RISING TOO FAST!

It’s official.  Now is the final phase of the experiment named:  “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  We hold up the case in point of the Christ in the form of Jesus as a living example.  But the Christ does not say, “Hey look at me.”  He says, “Follow me.  What have you been waiting for?  Now is the time for us all to become fully human.” 

To move into this new imagining, this higher vibration, we must release our hold on every last piece of the past that holds us still.  I am hearing from every direction that all the seemingly external phenomena that are bombarding us at this time have come to nudge us, no jolt us out of our comfortable and numbing patterns of self sabotage. 

In truth, every seeming external force is a mirror of the inner world.  The external universe, however vast, is a limited reflection of the unlimited inner Universe.  Our access point to everything divine is within us – so all our flailing around to get out of our bodies and to find direction and salvation outside of our selves has been pointless.  We have been “playing” at being spiritual, caught in a vicious whirlpool of spiritual bypass, when what spirit has desired from the beginning is to become fully embodied.   

This has always been the case – it is an old pattern that needs to be shifted.  If Jesus was against anything, he was against the lawgivers and church leaders; the hypocrisy and corruption he witnessed within his own culture and epitomized by the church, whose leaders controlled every aspect of life at that time.  He roundly criticized them for polishing the outside of the vessel while inside they were full of rot and filth. 

And the disease of spiritual bypass is rampant in the new age community.  In Sedona I am surrounded by seekers who are mesmerized by the flash and the dazzle of spiritual gymnastics instead of embracing the substantial and unglamorous inner-work of truly awakening. 

It has been said before, and I endorse this message, that the most unlikely place to encounter God is in church.  So imagining that we could save ourselves or others by getting ourselves back into church, and the various substitutes for church, has been an exercise in folly and self-deception.  This is compounded by the fundamental shift that has taken place in our own evolution – we must look to the truth that rests within us, that is eminently accessible by going deeper into the core of our being. 

The time of the shaman, and the teacher, and the guru is passed.  We should not expect another to do for us what we must now do for ourselves.  I see so many of my fellow travelers who are stuck in the old paradigm of trying to find the latest teacher and the ultimate savior – I see folks who still go to the medicine man for a cure.   

But now the true shaman doesn’t claim to be one and he/she always directs the seeker back to the source:  the wellspring of truth and healing that waits to be revealed inside the self.  In this new paradigm we have each become our own shaman, our own healer, our own teacher, our own guru. 

Even Jesus reminded his followers that if they experienced healing, it was something in them that caused the transformation.  Yes, he was ahead of his time, and he got himself executed for saying things that now we can say freely.  However long ago that message was delivered, now is the time that was prophesied:  “A new heaven and a new Earth”.

So we acknowledge the phenomenal cosmic coincidences that are occurring within our awareness; that aim to jolt and accelerate our transformation.  I refer to the latest New Moon; the awe-inspiring full solar eclipse I witnessed yesterday out at the Sanctuary at Sedona; the alignment of the moon, the sun, the galactic center with  the planets Jupiter and Mercury as well as the far star system – the Pleiades.  These indicators have come along at this time to point to the same occurrences that are taking place within us.   

One of my teachers has said that many of us are experiencing the physical symptoms of decompression sickness which come when the diver is resurfacing too fast.  Do you get it?  That is what we are doing.  We have gone deep and now we are rising too fast!  We have no choice in the matter but to get used to and flow with these physical and emotional responses. 

I also keep hearing that now is the time to release the deep and enduring patterns we have carried for a long time, maybe for many life-times.  We call these “core issues” and we can no longer afford the luxury of toting around a heavy load of baggage.  I am in this boat with all of you as I let go, and let go, and then let go of letting go. 

It is time to transcend the old patterns that have limited the full expression of who we are in truth.  It is time for each of us to accept our birthright and our inheritance and to become the full expression of a spiritual being in human form.  We are the Word become flesh.

THE WAYS THAT WE ARE BROKEN

They say a winter storm is blowing into Northern Arizona with over a foot of snow expected in Flagstaff.  This follows a day when we had temperatures in the mid-eighties and some time since we had the first thunderstorm of the season.  It seems the weather is out of whack.  Is everything broken?

A friend spoke to me recently about noticing all the broken people and wanting to be careful about absorbing that energy.  And another told me about being drawn to the most challenged ones who walk into her shop in Uptown Sedona.  Somehow these broken ones touched her heart more and opened her to the profound and mysterious connection we all have with each other.

Jesus talked about our seeing him in the “least of these” not the best.  We are all broken, and lately I am beginning to understand how it is not just our holy intentions but all our mistakes and missteps which have brought us to a place of blessing.  We have to see the sacredness in all things and we have to honor and bless all our wandering in the wilderness.

Spirit already knew perfection before it took form.  It does not need that experience; it needs to feel the sacredness of imperfection.  We are perfectly imperfect.  Think about the red rock formations of Sedona.  Their perfect expression is as compressed clay and sand, lying perfectly flat on the sea floor.  But at some point that red bedrock was thrust upward in jagged shards that became shaped by wind and running water. 

Now all those broken pieces draw visitors from all over the planet who take pictures and gawk and otherwise praise them as one of the natural wonders of the world.  Shouldn’t they also be gawking at you because you and I are such perfect examples of brokenness?

Last weekend, at the writing seminar, it became very clear that just talking about or writing about our light makes for something very boring.  Our light is only interesting when we hold it up against the darkness.  We need the contrast.  Our very lives become our greatest masterpieces, works of art when we witness all the brilliant shades of darkness and light.

We do not need to go out and damage ourselves just to make our lives interesting; we are adept at self injury without much effort at all.  I am thinking of Isis floating down the Nile to retrieve all the dismembered parts of her murdered lover, Osiris.  It is said she built a temple at every point where she found one of the missing parts.

So we should also honor all the places where we are wounded.  In our breathwork journeys we often re-member the source of an old wounding and we go in to have it repaired.  But we are also thankful for the path that brought us to this place and the sacred journey, however torturous.

Now, at the next writing workshop we will set sacred space for our writers to liberate the book that is clamoring for release at the core of their being.  We will record the good, the bad, and the ugly.  And we will honor the holiness of it all.

Birth Your Book!  A two-day retreat for finding your voice and sharing your gifts with the world.  With your facilitator, John Berry Deakyne; author, poet, and writing mid-wife.

Tuesday & Wednesday, April 10-11, 9:00-5:00 daily, Sedona, Arizona. 

Limited to ten writers. 
Pre-registration required: john@earthschoolforsouls.com    phone:  707-799-7662

Dreaming the World Into Being

Am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?  The ancient ones tell us there is little or no difference between our dream life and our waking life; we just think one is more real than the other.  And Edgar Allen Poe, who plumbed the depths of human darkness, asked the question: “Is all that is or seems to be, but a dream within a dream?”

You and I are co-creators of the world and the universe in which we exist.  Whether you see it as an energetic matrix of fields, and lines, and connections or if you see it as a magical golden web of complex interconnectedness; we have contributed to this construction and we continue to program, to deprogram, and to reprogram this energetic structure. 

When I look at the night sky, I do not feel small.  I feel powerful and enormous because I remember, “I was a fine hair on the hand that sat it all in motion.”

We have all programmed and reprogrammed our own brains.  We have changed our minds.  We have adjusted our attitudes so that things or people or circumstances that once bugged us, do so no longer.  We continue to make active choices about the energy we allow into our own energetic circle.  Yes, we likely chose our own biological family for our learning; and we continue to choose our own extended “soul-family”. 

We decide whether we will be infected by toxic messages and ideas.  We decide, moment to moment, whether or not to let the TV drone in the background, or to let ourselves be penetrated by radio waves or pointless conversation or divisive messages that effectively separate us from each other.   Look at all the circles of community you have in your life and ask, “Is this really a club to which I want to belong?”

One of my teachers used to say when you feel good, you are feeling God.  When you do not feel good, you are not feeling God.  Here is a test for God-ness that has served me for a long time.  Anything that, in effect, separates us from any other part of creation is not God.  Anything that facilitates our connection with creation is God.  This is, of course, the principle of Unity.  We are connected to all of humanity and to all of nature.  It feels good when we remember this.

It is time to pay attention.  With all the tremendous waves of change that are washing over every aspect of our lives at this time, our very survival may depend on our ability to pay attention.  Be wary of opinion leaders who preach the gospel of division and separation.  And pay more attention to their works than to their words. 

We need to embrace leadership that boldly moves us forward into a more unified vibration.  Be wary of anyone who aims to “restore” us to an imagined point in the past when all our families where “nuclear”; marriage was between a man and woman; there was a chicken in every pot; Dad had a good job in the factory and Mom stayed home and raised the 2 ½ children.  We cannot afford to go backward at this time.  That is the posture of the turtle retreating into its shell.  That is the posture of the coward and the false prophet. 

We are dreaming the world into being, so dream big, dream bold, and dream consciously.

Pep-Talk to Myself

 I could not conjure up the will this year to write a Holiday blog about the appearance of the light of Christ consciousness in the midst of the “bleak midwinter”.  Not this year, sitting outside of Starbucks in the bright 70º sunshine of Camp Verde, Arizona.  Instead, let me address the importance of steeling ourselves for the coming seismic shifts of the coming year.

Let me be clear.  This is a pep-talk to myself because I am not clear; I am not fully awake at every moment of every day.  But at the onset of a New Year YOU NEED A PEP-TALK and SO DO I!

We have officially run out of time.  In fact, time does not exist for us anymore.  We have entered a new vibration where we stand outside of time.  This is the new earth, and we have to stop talking about its emergence, and start creating our new life here.

I have also run out of patience with folks who want to talk about sports or politics or popular culture.  I’m not interested in hearing about how your neighbor or your family has slighted you or let you down.  I’m not interested in hearing about the ways you limit yourself with your thoughts.  Tell me instead about the ways you have used your mindfulness to liberate you from old patterns and tired traditions.

Tell me how you have stepped out of the boxes that contain you.  Tell me how you plotted after you saw your comfortable surroundings where nothing but a gilded cage – a beautiful prison with over-stuffed couches and wide-screen TV’s.  Tell me how you jumped from your box, or if you slithered out or skipped or crawled.  

Do tell me that you set the box on fire; soaked it with kerosene and set the match with ritual and ceremony.

Why do we hold onto things that no longer serve us?  Why do we stay in jobs that demean us?  Why do we maintain marriages and relationships that diminish our life-force?  Why do we keep trying to fix the broken systems with broken tools? 

Do you really think we should prop up our economic and societal structures at any cost?  Is there an institution that is “too big to fail”, or should we have a little death to make room for a rebirth?  Are you satisfied with choosing between “evils” when you go to the polls?  What would happen if you demanded more and stopped settling for less?

In Chinese astrology, this is the year of the Dragon and we need to embrace this archetype with fervor and adoration!  The Dragon represents the power to Create as well as to Destroy.  These are twin attributes like death and rebirth.  

We are stepping into our highest imagining.  We welcome all the forces of change and we hold tight to and bring new meaning to the idea of riding the dragon.  The dragon represents destruction of the old paradigm and the bold and formidable construction of the New Earth.

We have to deconstruct everything that has worked through its last bit of usefulness – and we will construct new structures, and new relationships, and new thoughts, and patterns, and institutions that honor us and serve us.  

We now surround ourselves with constructs that stem from the recognition of our profound connection with the physical universe as well as our connection with the divine.  We ride the Dragon and we are the Dragon.

To help us ramp up our vibration for creation, the Earth School for Souls is invoking the Year of the Dragon in our first Shamanic Breathwork™ gathering of the New Year.  Join us at our new location in West Sedona.

The Year of the Dragon

A Shamanic Breathwork™ Journey

Saturday, January 7^th  12:45 – 4:30PM

Light Body Pilates & Dance Studio

2050 Yavapai Dr, Sedona, AZ  86336

reduced to $35 a person

Limited Space – Please Pre-Register at john@earthschoolforsouls.com or

www.meetup.com/sedona-shamanic-breathwork-journeys or call 602-625-0082

at the still-point

We all have those moments when we feel deeply contented, at peace, and comfortable in our own skin . . . for no apparent reason except that, without thinking, we know in our bones that everything is alright . . . just as it is.  

They are moments that when we try to figure them out, or try to grasp them, they fly like fleeting gossamer dreams. 

 This is the sacred instant when we are practicing perfect self-love, opening to the constant supply of affirmation that is pouring out upon us.  If we rest in the stillness of these times we can extend them indefinitely.  We find this “still-point” when we rest in the truth of our connection to everybody and to everything.  We often have this experience when we are out on the land, feeling the dirt beneath our feet and the sky gracing our brow.

The Genesis story says that, in the beginning, we were fashioned by the Divine from the clay of the earth, and I imagine the clay was red in color.  It is said that this great creative force made us in the image of him and her-self.  The Old Testament uses the plural:  “we” formed them, “man and woman” in our image, as if our source has always unashamedly embraced the force and power of the masculine and the creativity and nurturing of the feminine.

This clay, this dirt from which we are made (with the help of a little holy spittle) was once a part of a star.  We know that light is born out of darkness; darkness comes first and it is all God – there is only God.  Scientists agree that our Universe began with a “big bang” and this chunk of rock called Earth was thrown into place.  So this dirt was once stardust and that means we are also made of stardust.

So we are intimately connected to the planet; we belong here; we are here on purpose; and perhaps our most important “reason to be” consists of remembering why we are here.  What did we come here for?  When we sometimes feel like “strangers in a strange land” we are aware of our connection to the stars, but have forgotten our profound connection to the earth.  We arrive at the still-point when we know it is not “either – or”; it is “both – and”.   

Our feelings of discontent are often the catalyst for our healing; our remembering.  I want to say that our soul-self is always at peace with our “place in the universe”, but our human-self is often uncomfortable because we may have a constant nagging feeling that we do not belong here.  It is not enough to bring this understanding into our human mind; we must bring this deep knowing into our blood and our bones.  This is why we journey:  to bring many of the things we have known forever with our minds into a body-felt knowing; a visceral understanding.   

In this season of gratitude I am thankful to be hiding out in Portales, New Mexico with my dear friends and soul-family.  I am repeatedly impressed with this unlikely place of portals, this place of doorways, out here on the edge of the prairie, home to dairy farms and acres of peanuts.  Many are taken by what is missing, like trees and hills.  Many do not notice the great expanse of sky that invites us to celebrate our relationship with that living breathing blanket over our heads. 

I am thankful for the amazing group of seekers that showed up last Saturday to experience Shamanic Breathwork™ Journeying.  We had eighteen on the floor (mostly breathwork virgins) and Anne and me walking the floor; holding sacred space.  I guess I am constantly surprised how folks keep showing up to do their inner-work, to find a deeper understanding; to experience that illusive still-point and to begin to step into the reason they were born. 

I will be returning to Sedona to repeat this workshop for our “First Saturday” gathering on December 3^rd.  I am impatient to share this transformative experience with my soul-family there, and I am incredulous that any of my friends and associates have so far resisted my constant harping, “YOU NEED TO BREATHE!”   

My wish for you at Thanksgiving is to recall those moments when, for no apparent reason, you knew that everything was alright.  That feeling is your birthright as sons and daughters of the earth; as sons and daughters of the stars.

Awaken the Shaman Within

A Shamanic Breathwork™ Journey

Saturday, December 3^rd   1:00 – 4:30pm

Unity Church of Sedona, 65 Deer Trail Drive

Sedona, AZ 86336     $50 (discounts available)

Logistics:  Bring a closed bottle of water, a blanket and a pillow to make a comfortable journeying pallet. Wear loose fitting clothes. The workshop will run until about 4:30pm allowing time for a short artwork and process/integration exercise.  Please arrive 15 minutes early to settle in and set up your pallet.

It's the End of the World

The air is full of signs this morning.  A gusting breeze rises and falls, swirling the wind chimes hanging on the front of the Airstream; stirring the branches of the ubiquitous cottonwood tree that guards the front of my campsite.  The ground is littered with little yellow leaves dried up and curling on the gravel drive.

The sky is patches of sunlight framed by clouds that hold expectant rain and lightning and thunder.  Across the treetops I see a flash and then a roll of sound that starts like a low clearing of the throat then crescendos into a crash that reverberates and tumbles past my ears.

A raven glides past, left to right, just before the rain starts to drum my blue and white awning.  Yes . . . drumming . . . and I seem to hear the soft thump of the divine mother’s heart pulsing at the core of the planet.  This is a pause in the quickening that has seized all of existence; like the moments between the beats of your heart.

We are all counting backwards now – all embodying the spirit of the Heyoka – today, tomorrow, then the last day of the calendar – the end of time as we know it – the end of an age, they say – the destruction of the fourth world.  And what do we know of the fifth?  Nothing.  And we are striving to not create the next world in the image of the one which has died. 

I grew up in a family that celebrated the “end times”.  We looked forward to the end of the world as you would the coming of Christmas.  My parents were trapped in a cosmology that envisioned this life as a “veil of tears” that would not be lifted until this life was over. 

My father was literally trapped in a body that was a prison; racked with crippling rheumatoid arthritis.  He had a profound connection to spirit and a rich prayer life, but he misunderstood that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means it is in your hand if you will only close your fingers around it.  His disability brought new meaning and intense struggle to that metaphor.

My father knew that heaven was just a click away, but he and my mother did not accept the mantle of being co-creators of their existence.  They saw “through a glass darkly” and it was not their time for realizing the fullness of their relationship with eternity.  But they live on in their children; they carried us to the mountain top so we could see the Promised Land which lay ahead, but they could not cross over that threshold with us.  That is to be for us alone, like the chosen ones in the Bible story, if we can fasten onto the truth and not be distracted by shiny things. 

I keep hearing, like a mantra, “now we have no choice”.  We have to step up.  We have to claim our birthright, with all its blessings and responsibilities.  We have to step into the reason we were born – we are not here at this time by accident.  We are here on purpose and we have been entrusted with the care of the planet and all its citizens. 

“Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.”  I am quiet and pensive as I wait for the end of the world.  The worst of the rainstorm has passed, which at its peak forced me indoors to be protected . . . cocooned.  I have no fear, though I am also not given to excitement.  It is time to be quiet and mindful – noticing our steps and our words.

Because our every action; our every word creates new life – we spin new universes. 

What will we create today?

Follow John on:  earthschoolforsouls.com

Now is the Time!

Recently, I participated in a workshop where the statement, “Now is the Time!” became a recurring theme.  And in the following weeks the slogan seems to have gotten momentum.  It is THE time for so many things.  We have to ask ourselves, as we transform and reinvent ourselves, what is our responsibility for reinventing and transforming “the collective”?

We know that the collective mindset and vibration are a reflection of our own processes, then at what point do we extend ourselves into the wider world to up-level collective attitudes and behaviors?  I keep hearing:  “Now is the time.”

It has been part of my own awakening during the past two years to move my attention away from the distraction of politics and the insane left versus right dialog.  But I am a child of the sixties so I noticed with interest the grassroots birthing of the Tea Party movement.  I also noticed how quickly they became subsumed and co-opted by party politics, all the while wildly waving the false flag of fierce independence.

Now I notice the Occupy Wall Street movement and the reactions they are spurring in our opinion leaders.  Some on the left are wondering if they can ride the coat tails of this significant voting block without jumping on the bandwagon of radical social disruption.  Many on the right are demonizing the movement as a direct threat to everything we hold dear in this country:  mom, baseball, and apple pie. 

  

Count me as one who is ready to shake things up.  All bets are off.  The Occupy (Your Town’s Name Here) movement is about a fundamental dissatisfaction with the status quo.  We are dissatisfied with the way things do NOT work.  We are way past the point of just trusting the system to correct itself – to find its own center.  There was nothing sacred about our economic system, our political system, or our form of government in the first place.

  

We have been fed countless lies from the day we were born.  But the waking up to the truth of our being includes a concomitant realization that our social constructs and our most revered belief systems are largely arbitrary. 

I have been railing lately about the need to become free of our own personal boxes that keep us from stepping into our highest imagining – but we also need to take a good look at all the larger boxes that keep us from our highest good whether they be family, relationships, country, economic systems, political parties. . . . 

Even if you live in a beautiful golden cage with plush furniture and a wide screen TV, it is still a prison.  And anything can become a box; even the latest cause or your habit of healing yourself.  Take a good look at your Belief Systems, and notice that the initials for that are B.S. 

So part of my awakening is about ripping the mask off the illusion.  We are witness to a radical adjustment in our culture as it must begin to mirror what is happening within us.  We know that we have to die and be reborn on a daily basis – and so must the structures that contain us.

“Occupy Wall Street” is about the death of an outdated and unjust system to control the other 99% of us for the dubious benefit of the few.  Do we have something better to put in its place?  Seriously, how could we do worse?  It is time to eat this sacred cow, and NOW IS THE TIME!

http://occupywallst.org/

The Fool and I will be Just Fine

So much of the journey to awakening is about paying attention.  So much about healing our past woundings is about simply noticing when we are “triggered” and not obsessing or wallowing.

We are sharpening our senses – we are paying more attention to the little things that show up on the wide-screen of our awareness and we are noticing everything.

For several days I have had a flock of western blue jays fluttering around my back door, moving around a clump of scrub oaks, dancing and sometimes confronting each other.  They are beautiful beings with their vibrant blue feathers, their smooth rounded head and graceful long tail feathers.

And I ask myself, what in the heck are they doing?  I do not jump to conclusions, and even though I am challenged at math, I start to put two and two together.  Remember I said they were fluttering in and around a scrub oak tree, not like the mighty oaks of my childhood, so I didn’t notice that even these miniature versions have acorns.

Now I notice that much of the activity is about slipping a mouth-sized white seed out of its husk.  What is the learning here?  We all know the lesson about the tiny acorn and the towering oak tree.  But now I am reminded of Yeshua talking about the mustard seed – a tiny yellow ball in the hollow of my hand.  Yet if my faith is even that large, I might manifest something great - I could move mountains.

The mountains before me today are these:  I want to re-program the unconscious patterns in my brain that keep me short of my highest imagining.  I want the four-year-old that lives in me and makes many of my most important plans and decisions – I want him to grow up.  I want the courage to step out of the boxes of familiarity I have constructed for myself.  I want to stay focused on what is important and what is truly needed and not sweat the small stuff.  Did someone say, “It’s all small stuff”?  

We have just finished our fifth and final week of training with Brad and Star Wolf at the Sanctuary of Sedona.  This year I have received my Shamanic Breathwork Facilitator Certification and have been ordained as a Shamanic Minister.  The Earth School for Souls has been launched and we are about to receive our classification as a congregation of the Venus Rising Association for Transformation.  Meredith and I have decided to move out of the house up by the chapel, and to move independently for a time, testing the waters and stretching our legs.

The air is still this morning and I am in the middle of my waking meditation when suddenly it moves, tossing the vertical-blinds in spirals into the room. Something has come to put an exclamation point on my lesson. Even the air conspires to serve me up some learning for my breakfast. So I am paying attention. I notice what it is that sends a shudder down my spine; what causes the nerve endings in my legs to tingle or makes the hairs of my arm stand on end.

The silver Airstream sits in the driveway, and I don’t know where it will take me next.  My work stretches out before me, and I step first and then look around to see where I have landed.  It would be scary for anyone but a fool.  But if I have the faith of a mustard seed, the fool and I will be just fine.

* * * * * * 

The next offering by the Earth School is a Single Session Intensive Workshop, on Saturday, October 1^st, from 1:00 – 4:30pm.  At the Unity Church of Sedona.  It is called, “Finding Comfort in Being Adrift”, a theme that is current for all of us.  We will have a short teaching, a full hour journey session, an artwork process piece, and time to process your experience, before we release you back into the real world which will be forced to scramble to catch up with your newfound awareness.

If you would like the Silver Bullet to stop in your town, the Earth School for Souls loves to travel.  All we need is a space to lie down and journey and a few seekers who are committed to their own awakening.  Call me – we’ll do lunch!  707-799-7662

The Eyes to See Angels

This is a story about reclaiming something in me that was lost.  The idea of going out in the world in order to find "yourself” is a cliché and frequently scoffed at.  But there is really nothing greater in this life than finding yourself; to waking up to the truth of your being.

For me, this journey of awakening includes pulling out of my unconscious self the pieces that are ready to come forward.  I am talking about the shadow parts that have been suppressed, resisted, and covered over.  I have unconsciously kept them in the dark for a myriad of misguided reasons.

We call this process re – membering; that is putting the pieces back together.  And I had a powerful remembering, lying on the floor in the darkened sanctuary at Isis Cove, in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.

In my journey I re-dreamed a dream I had as a little boy in Quincy, Indiana.  I could not have been more than five or six.   Around that time my family moved to this small town in Southern Indiana and my father took the position of minister to a small town and country church.

We moved into the parsonage across the street.  There were six of us in all; my two parents who took the master bedroom, my two older sisters in the other large bedroom, and my little sister was in the extra small bedroom.  That left me.  There were no more bedrooms so I was put in a baby bed in my father’s study.  Not only was I not upstairs with the rest of my family, but I was in the room downstairs that was as far away from the rest of them as I could possibly be.  I could not have been more separate from my family if they had consciously tried.

And I was afraid.  I was afraid of the dark.  I was afraid of the shadows that seemed to animate and move around my father’s study in the darkness.  My parents tried to console me with the assurance that I was surrounded by hundreds of angels.  But to me, an angel was not a comfort, it was just another disembodied spirit; a spook.

And I had paid enough attention in church to imagine that those angels were in constant conflict with an equal hoard of demons which was hungering to get at me.  My darkened bedroom was alive with dueling spirits, swirling shadows, monsters and unnumbered and unnamed things that go bump in the night.  I could see them, and even on the hottest summer evening I slept with a blanket over my head.  I was well into my adolescence before I ventured to fall asleep with my head uncovered.

That is the backdrop for my dream.  I became that small child again, alone downstairs while the rest of my family slumbered somewhere far away.  I walked into the dining room which also held the stairway to the upper rooms, but my passage was blocked by a large and fierce looking lion.  This was a strong male lion with a full mane, like the ones I had seen on the pages of a children’s Bible storybook.

My fear of the lion was compounded by the presence of a towering masculine angel who seemed to be communing with the beast.  The angel had long flowing blonde hair and his aspect was snow white.   I don’t remember seeing a sword, but he had a strong presence that held the power of artist’s renderings of the arc angel, Michael.

The lion did not attack me or even come toward me, and the angel never faced me with the full force of his presence while I stood frozen in the doorway.  Yet I sensed that they were fully aware of my presence, and now it comes to me that they wanted to make themselves known to me but did not wish to frighten me.  Now I know the lion was there to give me his strength and the angel was there to give me his guidance.

But my scared little boy sensibilities did not let the truth of that vision have its desired effect until now, some fifty years later.  The little boy came forward from that dream and prayed to God that he would never again be confronted with angels – and the spirits complied.  Out of fear, I shut down my ability to see angels.  There really were spirits and beings and entities moving around the nighttime shadows of my father’s study, but they obediently hid themselves from me, at my request.

The piece of soul-retrieval here is a profound remembering of why I moved away from my family in the first place.  I am the only one of us who ever even left the state of Indiana.  It is paradoxical that being separate from my family . . . feels like home.  And if my sisters ever need to understand why I live so far away, they need to remember that little boy who was set so far apart, who tried to make his cries heard through a warm air register in the ceiling, so they would tell his mother who might come down and comfort him.  I can still hear them yelling crossed the hallway, “Mom, John’s crying.”

I have had some deep healing around that remembering, and now I can recognize that urge in me to be separate (in general) from the ones who love me, especially when things get too comfortable. 

And the piece of gold that comes from mining this wound is about my forgotten ability to see angels.  I reclaim that gift now, and since having this journey have put the ability to work.  When I am allowing, and in certain light, I can see the wings of the people around me.  I have practiced this seeing with friends and with people I don’t even know. 

You can try this yourself; look at someone and ask yourself, “What would their wings look like?”  Don’t try to put wings on them, let their own wings appear.  They are there all the time – we just need the eyes to see.

Announcement:  With the kind help of Joyce and Roger at thecomputerspirit.com  we have gotten the early version of our website up; take a look at:   earthschoolforsouls.com

Portals of Transformation

In our first weeks back in Sedona, Meredith and I drove to Portales, New Mexico to facilitate two days of training for a group of students and practitioners at Eastern New Mexico University.  MSR has already blogged about the significance of the name of that small city on the edge of the prairie, but I can’t fail to echo that observation.

The word portales is Spanish for “doors”, and I am struck by how that symbol shows up at this time for the beautiful travelers who took this journey with us, for my dear friends Penny and Carol, and for myself and my partner who are diving headlong into this new venture and roll as teacher and guide.  We are stepping through portals; doors of transformation as we move into new ways of being with ourselves and others; new ways of thinking and new ways of relating to each other, to the planet and to all of existence.

My teacher, Star Wolf, talks often about the usefulness of seeing our movement through existence as a Spiral Dance.  We are not on a linear path.  We are on a circle, the great medicine wheel, but we are also spiraling; coming back over and over to the same places but we are changed, engaging on higher levels. 

I am mindful of so many of my own points repeating at this time, and I am grateful for the grace of encountering these mile markers with new insights.  I first moved to Northern Arizona in the mid 1980’s and just about the first person I met in Flagstaff was my enduring friend, Penny. 

On our first encounter, I sat in her small apartment and told her about my time with the Lakota medicine man some years earlier.  We could have talked about any number of more relevant topics but something compelled me to relate this most intimate piece of my own spiritual journey.  The following spring, the two of us drove down to Sedona on Easter Sunday to hike into Boynton Canyon to have a chanumpa (pipe) ceremony.

At one point we both had our eyes closed, deep in meditation, and I heard a clear voice from higher in the canyon yell, “I am God.”  The voice repeated a few more times and we finished our quietness.  As we walked out, I looked at Penny and said, “Did you hear that?”  We each had a good laugh when we saw the young couple who had hiked in ahead of us.  And though our ceremony was more humble, we could identify with the enthusiasm of the seeker who finds a piece of the divine within himself and just can’t keep still about it.

Over the next twenty years I wandered away from my practice in the shamanic tradition, but those enduring forms stayed with me, and I celebrated their blossoming when I returned to Sedona almost two years ago. 

And on this trip around the spiral I have revisited my childhood and some early woundings I have stuffed down and repressed all my adult life.  But I do not wallow in self-pity or victimhood by bringing my wounded children into the light.  I have not suddenly remembered some forgotten or imagined trauma, I am talking about some little snapshots of my childhood that I have minimized or trivialized or covered over with rationalization or humor.

I have come to see that my shadow is not just one “dirty smelly child” but a crowd of small children who follow me around every day.  And as I come to make peace with them, to honor and to love them, they no longer need to dominate my thoughts and behaviors.  Instead they inform me and keep me company without keeping me from the peace and happiness that is my birthright.

We are all stepping through Portals of Transformation as our lives and our bodies are bombarded and caressed by new moons and eclipses and planets.  Standing still is not an option, so we pass through willingly facing the full strength of the sun in this summer season.