Category Archives: Spiritual Sociology

Spiritual Guides and How To's, Spiritual Sociology

Respecting and honoring your spirit teachers, yourself and the spirits

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I try to teach good boundaries. I try to hold good boundaries as well. I expect students to be aware that they are coming to participate in an event which is interdependant. Even if you go through an entire course without getting to know your colleagues, your actions and presence have great effect on everyone else. Please consider the following before attending a Littlelight Ceremony or course.

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Shamanism is about relationship. A spiritual class is an offering of time, space and love, crafted by someone with a deep well of life and spiritual experience they are eager to share with you. Your payment is an exchange of effort and commitment back to this person who is thinking of you in every step of their workshop preparation. If you commit, you are commiting to being in relationship with everyone who attends in some way.

How you approach the class makes an impact on everyone else. Please be aware of how your approach towards your spiritual training affects your teacher and your fellow students. Please do not treat the class like a commodity that you can take or leave.

Sign Up On Time
Please make your decision about a class as timely as you can, so you can sign up. When you wait to sign up until last minute, you are putting stress on the teacher and other students who may be turned down if the class does not fill. Spaces that are rented have cancellation policies which require 2 weeks to a month notice.

Informally telling the teacher you are coming is not signing up. By paying a nonrefundable deposit you are putting an investment in that shows strong intention of your attendance and some compensation towards running the class for other people if you drop out.

Show Up On Time
Spiritual classes are pockets of sacred energy built up for transformational work. They are spaces out of time and place where people hold trust together so that they can do personal work in a public venue. Every person contributes vital energy to the nature of this container when sacred space is created together. Missing this opening alters this energetic pocket. Habitual lateness is disrespectful to everyone, including yourself. It is not being aware of your own value and how you are important to the medicine of the circle.

Teachers will treat those who are late with love and understanding, but no matter what the reason, your lateness has affected the circle.

Show up Prepared
Shamanic classes and circles are strong when we are all focused. You are expected to complete any homework so that we can progress as a circle to the next material. Please bring something to contribute to the altar. This can represent a power animal, a prayer or an offering. When we all add to the altar, the circle is strong. Consider your commute to class as the beginning of circle for you. Perhaps, play music that contributes to a grounded state of mind and consider what your intentions are for the coming session.

Be Present to Sacred Space
Apply your full heart and effort into the calling of the spirits as if you were home doing it alone. Shamanic teachers always create a container for you but you want to be strong with your own spirits when you do your practice. We also want to earnestly call to the spirits for assistance in supporting the work of our colleagues.

Try to notice the things that contain or deplete the potency of the container and support the container. Your awareness will grow, as well as your skill. Keep mundane conversation to a minimum when in the altar room.

Honoring Other’s Boundaries
Spirit speaks to people in their own language, so there is no way any one person can interpret another person’s shamanic journey. We hold space for each other and encourage our colleagues to hear their own wisdom, celebrate with them when the road becomes clear.

Journeying for others without prior and explicit permission is not acceptable in our circles. On rare occasions, we are given information in our journeys that we did not ask for about someone else, but we do not seek it out. Even in this case, we can ask our helping spirits, “Why am I being shown this?” or “What does this have to do with my journey question?”. To deliver messages about others without permission can make people feel violated and unsafe in our circle.

If you are learning great lessons from our journey, please be mindful and speak in the first person, rather than hiding behind “you” language, which feels and sounds preachy to the listeners. Telling others ‘how it is’ creates barriers, whereas sharing our own path creates intimacy, the basic ingredient for deep work, deep love, deep transformation.

We try not to ‘take care’ of each other, but rather support each other in finding our own divine widsom and light. If someone in circle is going through difficulty, we may ask that person what we can do to help. We perhaps may offer ideas but with always with respect for the boundaries of that person, the circle and ourselves.

Do Your Homework
When we are given big messages or blessings in shamanic time, a crucial part of the practice is to bring the medicine home. This means carrying out the message of the journey in our lives. How this manifests depends upon the circumstance and journey. When this work is done between circle meeting times, our spiritual lives become a constant flow. We become practitioners rather than students. When we return to circle after having done this work, we come bearing new wisdom and stronger presence to the circle. In this way by giving to ourselves, we inherently give to our spiritual support network as well.

These are staples of being a spiritual adult.
Being accountable, being prepared, being present, serving our community with care and doing our homework. Honoring ourselves in our path with commitment and in turn, honoring our teachers and community. Thank you for being awake. Thank you for being alive. Thank you for being part of this powerful, powerful web of healing and light.

Tasara

Spiritual Activism, Spiritual Sociology

Happy Martin Luther King Day. May we Be the Change that We want to See.

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Shamanism is a Path of Love and as all in paths of love, it requires the kind of courage that our leader Martin Luther King had. Shamanism is not about how far you can get out there to meet the spirits but what you bring back for your community, how skillfully you can bring it back and how effectively you can deliver the medicine with love. It is a path with concern for the health of community.

This is why I encourage you, even in the rooms where spiritual people go to seek peace, especially there, to speak your truth.

In the alternative spiritual subcultures, spiritual people can sometimes be so afraid of conflict that silence opens the door for the old illnesses of the dominant paradigm to take root in our sacred settings. But believe it or not, conflict is a sign of healthy community. Conflict allows deep passionate differences to be clearly seen. Without it, there is no true growth. In political and spiritual circles alike, it is extra important for people to be aware of the value of conflict because in political and spiritual circles, conflict is inevitable.  Why?  Because in both politics and spirituality, if we are true to our path we are being motivated by our deepest values. When our deepest values are crossed, it causes strong emotional response. It’s kind of like math.

If you have tried to speak your truth and experienced being shut down with words like “you are being negative” or “you create your own reality”, don’t let this push you into a place of self doubt.  Even if you were not entirely correct in your words, that sort of response only means that you are pushing up against people’s fear.

Every movement, whether spiritual or political comes with its rhetoric. When the rhetoric is used without context or insight, it becomes dogma. Dogma is often used to control others. The rhetoric of positive thinking and positive speaking has become dogma in many corners of our subculture and our nation. It is sounding a lot like the old “don’t rock the boat” of other oppressive cultural ribbons of the past.

Conflict is a place where people are outside their comfort zone, in a place of vulnerability and risk. It is when social interactions are not all tied up in a bow over a neat package. It can be scary, a place with high stakes, where bridges are easily burned…or deeper understandings made or where trust and growth can be forged. Without this risk we cannot learn about each other.

This is the practice of love. Love for the self requires speaking one’s truth. The cantankerous process of speaking one’s truth is more healing than the silence of covered wounds. Don’t let anyone pacify you with that “everyone has their own truth” dogma (remember that dogma is good rhetoric used in ungrounded and out of context circumstances, often as a way to wield power). We have a common truth, too. We CO-create our experiences together and in order for us to live together we have to negotiate. Truth is “what is” and if “what is” is not working for all, rather than shut each other down, why not break the box open? What’s the worst that can happen? Burned bridges and the old familiar isolation? Isolation is the prison of the developed countries. It is long due that we break out of that prison.

Have faith. Courage was explained to me as not a circumstantial thing like bravery but a way of living. Take heart. Truth is inevitably more healing than the silence of covered wounds. The courage to be oneself will allow others to do the same.

None of us has this stuff down all perfect. This essay is not perfect. It’s just a draft. Perfection is the enemy of love anyways-we all, so beautifully imperfect. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to wish we were able to say things differently. I do. But better to say something imperfectly than to not say it at all. There is not enough time to worry about being liked. If we are silent we will drown.. as gay activists around the world know too well, silence is death. Death of the soul and for many death all around.

Thank goodness we live in a country where speaking does not mean death. This gives us extra responsibility to speak when so many others cannot.

Let’s co-create our realities for common cause to bring more love and healing in the world for everyone, not just our friends and people like us. Let’s tune in today to the massive power behind the speeches of Martin Luther King and allow ourselves to be infected with that fire, to be inspired to do whatever it is that we are called to do.

much love,

Tasara

Spiritual Sociology

FaceBook: Psychic – Socio – Political Intrusions

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(Written by someone who has real live friends who tease her about the fact that she won’t accept their “Friendship Invitation” on Facebook.)

People have been having a field day lately with Facebook and it practice around violation of privacy.  They are slippery around how they design the UI, ever changing, ever deceptive, hard to find controls..

There is another, even more elusive aspect, which I think also needs to be noted.

The Battle in this Country is for the Mind.
We sit at our computers, seemingly alone, or next a handful of people. This physical reality makes it natural to put our guard down. But we are not alone. We are connected with hundreds, thousands of breathing, living humans on the other ends of their computers. Because everything happens in cyberspace, cyberspace becomes

an extension of our minds. We are quiet, typing away, our bodies unmoving, information and emotions rushing through us like the natural conduits that we are.

It is the last frontier, our minds. Everywhere you go there is some sort of marketing trying to influence your mind. It’s either politics, religion or open your wallet. First, foremost and always, it’s open your wallet.

Facebook is the pop culture of online social networking systems, designed to create and maintain shallow relationships temporal, fleeting messages that one must keep up with in order to not miss a thing. We are addicted.

Facebook is the physical manifestation of Addiction, designed and controlled by people who want something from you. Everything about it designed to hook, hook, hook and keep you there. Mind-numbing games, hope of lost or new love, a platform for attention and countless emails in your box bringing you back, one click away.

Finding the many little preferences that turn off all these various features with hooks takes far more thought and time than most people are willing to spend. That is the whole point. You are not thinking. Actually, you are supposed to be focusing on something else (like your job). You are not thinking, so it is easy to let seemingly unimportant things slide… or slip in. Facebook is not important, we know but then why do we allow it to occupy so much of our minds? It blows me away that there are human beings paid to use their precious passion and creativity to come up with such endless ways of generating community spam.

Never forget. The goal of Facebook is not to create community, to enhance culture, to support the arts ..it is to make money. Never, ever forget that. It is no big brother.

Lack of personal boundaries
One classic aspect of addiction is lack of boundaries – in relationships with addicts or use of mind-numbing operatives.  The entire premise of Facebook is to have lots of people we barely know in our intimate mental space as much as possible.  In some ways it’s like become a psychic overnight and becoming barraged with information that may or may not be meant for us. We are privy to things we don’t want to be privy to, things that may upset us or bore us or make us want to respond. The point is, we are wasing energy on things that are not life sustaining.

We also have access to the movements of people’s activities, events, rsvp’s.it’s kind of like sanctioned open snooping. It’s not really snooping because people are sharing. Some things could not be turned off if we wanted to turn them off. This takes away from our precious energy, time and creativity thinking about things that we truly care about, preventing those good things in life from being able to grow. Like weeds in the garden.

In normal human relationships and daily existence, there are lots and lots of people that we don’t really want or need to think about every day. But on Facebook, there they are. They wanted to “connect” and now they are in our field as often as they post. If there are unresolved issues with that person, there it is. If they narcissistically talk about themselves all the time without commenting on anyone else’s posts, there they are. If they are people best left in the past, the past comes back. We are being encouraged to have unwanted and often inappropriate intimacy.  Why do we keep these people on?, we ask ourselves and go back to our coffee.

The guise of intimacy as a hook.
Those who become enchanted with the specter of real human connection with more people may find themselves over-sharing. They may be over-sharing for other people’s taste but more importantly, they are over-sharing for their own self comfort as well. Over-(self)-exposed creatures tend to go through period of cutting tons of friends out to gain a sense of psychic privacy….which leads to another thing.

“What’s on your mind?”
Is that a question that you ask people you don’t know very well?  They why are we answering it to a platform of hundreds of people? And why that question? What other questions could there be? How would it shape the communication and human interaction that happens up there? How about “What do you love to do?” “How are you going to save the world?” “What are you working with?” “What do you need help with?”

Friend
Words have power. Over history, governments and political parties have misused.. twisted words to change public consciousness and response to those words and ust them in a different way.  During times of war, words are often stolen from the peace movement and redefined and deployed to mean something else. This weakens the original use of the word.  Peace-keeper, friendly fire, collateral damage, preemptive war.

This is not new stuff. This is marketing. Take an image or word that invokes human emotion or attachment to and attach it to something else.. a product. Embed both deeply into the subconscious.

This “Friend” thing is the trophy hook of Facebook. To use the word incorrectly is the first and most powerful way of bending one’s consciousness to being fooled in some subtle way that all these people are actually friends. But deeply, we cannot change the meaning of the word Friend. Which makes these connections seem so .. personal in some hard-to-put-your-finger-on, creepy, subtle way.

Some people have a hard time saying No in real life. This can get out of control with friend invitations on Facebook. For me, if someone has 2000 friends, I’m like – no way. If they look interesting and are in my town, I refuse their friendship but ask them out for tea. I’ve had plenty of people get upset with me but no one has come out for tea.

De-Facing ‘Friends’
The HOOK is the guilt about letting go. We let go of people all the time in our minds but on Facebook it is not silent. It’s public. Eventually the other person knows and even though it’s not personal, it’s personal.  So rather than being honest about who we want in our cyber-consciousness, we let them hang on.

Hence the Hide button. You can hide those annoying people who are constantly on the verge of reporting their next nose picking but they still pop up!  Everytime one of our other friends comments on their post, there they are.

Why don’t we have control over what and who pops up? Why?

There are solutions. Read ahead.

Make your Own Facebook Policies
OK, Facebook is a big sucking psychic octopus…of time, energy, thought, creativity and focus, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It can be used for community building, appreciation of our loved ones and warm regards but only if we take control of how the information flows.

I got a little freaked out with too many connections so I came up with a way to cut them down and do as much I could to not make it personal. I am a community organizer and wanted to push all the wider connections to my Facebook “pages” where the information flow has to be more intentional. Hey, maybe people will actually talk about the things we supposedly have in common with somewhere! Let’s see. I posted a warning that I was cutting community connections. Then after I did, I put on my profile the following:

“HERE’S HOW I PLAY THE FACEBOOK GAME:
If you want to follow my work, thanks! See pages (list of Facebook pages with my public activities). If you want to be my friend, call me, meet me for tea or be a pen pal. Love Is Stronger Than FB.”

Shortly afterwards one person removed themselves from both of my pages, I assume upset that they had been “defaced” but it was only one. That seemed pretty good. Anyone who is really my friend would have called if they were upset.

What else happened? My world instantly gained a mental and psychic peace I had not felt in a while. I am infinitely grateful to myself for taking care of myself and not looking for approval or asking permission first.

I’ve spent a few hours in the FB account settings, too, really thinking about what I want to be public to whom. It’s worth it. I found that we DO have control over which of our own interactions pop up on other people’s walls. Look up Settings>Applications>Wall>Advanced

Behind the Curtain
OK you know this but maybe it’s time to pull out of our subconscious the fact that everything posted IS saved. And don’t fool yourself thinking that the company does not use, sell and lend that information to all sort of parties, including the gov’t.  To delete posts on your wall through history, you have to do it One by One. I am a moderate poster, averaging one a day and it took me an hour or so to wipe my wall.

So if you ever want to cancel your Facebook account (which is a feat of it’s own if you can find the preference), you might want to delete your stuff. If you don’t, they won’t. That’s for sure.

by Tasara

Spiritual Guides and How To's, Spiritual Sociology

A Street Guide to Attending Summer Festivals/The Shadow Side of the 2012 Movement

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This is a multimedia piece, which is why it is in the pdf format.
You can get here: http://www.littlelight.info/FieldGuide.pdf

Please share this freely, but please…pass the link to this page, not the PDF.

There are two sections:

1. Spiritual Checklist for attending the summer festivals
2. The Shadow Side of the 2012 Movement

by Tasara

Spiritual Sociology

There’s No Such Thing as A Muggle

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There is no such thing as a Muggle. It’s a plot device created by a woman who wanted to create an us/them dynamic in her book to make one group seem more special than another.

But it’s a lie. There is no such thing as a Muggle.

We are all so magic.
It is in our blood, this ancient blood that has been passed from womb to womb for thousands of years. There is no muggle, only gorgeous, magical people unfolding to various degrees all around us, all in their own good time.

To be around a rose brings the emanation of rose into our beings.
To be around a moonflower…. around a pixie…. a saint… a lover…a passionate craftsperson.
We are affected by the forces around us and not all of us are living in uplifting environments.

We all have passion whether flowing freely or locked within. We all have love.
We all have the power to make things happen in the world around us.

There is no such thing as a muggle and the word being used in the way I have heard is used is not any better to me than other names people have been called over the centuries in this country. Names that most of us would not stand to hear our friends use.

May we all learn to see the brilliant, beautiful souls of others. May it become it easy to hold others with love and light. To see the barriers, the fear, the anger and not take it on, but rather soften the air around those who are lost in stress…. and beam a little.

I love it when people can do that for me on the days that I need it.

There is no such thing as a Muggle.

by Tasara

Spiritual Sociology

What Goddess Would I Invoke?

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goddessWhat goddess shall I invoke to heighten the goddess in me?
Will I pick a temptress or fine lady like Persephone?
Will I call on a mother to keep me safe and strong?
Will it be the Great Isis who’s led my path for so long?

What if I sing to the water nymphs who love to laugh and play
just like I do when I am in the river for the whole day?
Or the wild tree one with the smile of fun, whose glimpse has become so rare
that no one knows her story or how she came to be at the fair.

No, I think I’ll call on the one I know that has been here since I was born
I’ll call on the Goddess of Me with my silver horn.
She is no aspect of anything, she’s the whole package for sure.
From dark to light, fair to blight, the one that will always endure.

She was born from a human named Judith, who rode horses across the plain
and a Pa named David who could think of nothing but flying his next airplane.
She came from the woods of the great northeast and traveled across to the sea
where the mountains are high, the ravens do fly and there she threw out her TV.

That’s who I will call, it’s nothing at all and bigger than I could expect.
To honor myself, (not a book on the shelf), a mystery too deep to inspect.

by Tasara