It’s Not Your Fault. | We Are All One, in this together.

Most of us have had trauma. Perhaps you grew up in an abusive family. Perhaps you suffer from depression. Perhaps you’ve a long, long string of dysfunctional relationships. Maybe you drink too much or use marijuana to blanket your true feelings of confusion and despair. Maybe you feel like taking yourself out sometimes. I am beaming out the love of the lioness and I want you to know, it’s not your fault.

helpDon’t let the new-whatever-it-is spiritual movement tell you that you chose this existence. Or that all you need to do is think positive and your life will turn around. Or that only you can heal yourself. Geesh. This is worse than Catholic guilt! Your life is hard enough without putting all that on you as well. Why in the heck do so many cultures have shamans if everyone is supposed to heal themselves?

I’m not saying that you are no longer expected to be responsible for your actions in the present day. Or that your choices have not created the situations you are in right now. Of course there are lessons to learn. That is life. Every life has wisdom being reflected back in our every experience. I’d just like to explain some things to you from a shamanic viewpoint about how our spiritual lineage can affect our mental health as well as our living situation.

We are all connected. Everyone is saying it these days, and it’s exactly true. That means that we are connected to our parents’ wounds and their parents’ mistakes. We are connected to generations of ill behaviors that came before us, the things that wounded humans do when they are in despair: by throwing their rage around, by hurting the ones they love the most. Killing and maiming. Those with the know-how that threw curses. A lot of times, the wounds suffered get passed down with unintentional curses, like “You will always ___.” “You are such a ____.” “You will never ____”” These energetic ley lines of pain, these curses have power that is far greater than ourselves. Most of us do not have the physical/spiritual capacity to undo them on our own. It’s too big. Yes, we are all our own personal gurus, but gurus-in-the-making. Having potential and living potential are not the same thing. Most of us don’t have the time to get to guru status in order to start living our lives clear of chaos before we die.

Shamanic illnesses are pretty common. This is because we live in a culture that does not believe in shamanism, so people don’t get help right when they need it and everything builds up. We also throw energy around like nobody’s business in ways that people in shamanic cultures know way better not to.

Yes, absolutely, it is our responsibility to do our own personal work and break the patterns that bind us, but for the big stuff we usually need help getting started. That is part of learning to be open and receive. Half of the love equation we are all looking for is receiving. We can go to a healer, who, honestly, probably doesn’t have the physical/spiritual capacity do to take on those great powers either, but they do have long-standing relationships with most honorable compassionate spirits that do. Or know how to unravel the situation with pure love, instead of a feat of wonder. Shamanic healers know that there are all kinds of forces and spirits out there that are vastly more powerful than we are. Healing is about skill, love and sometimes convincing and trickiness. Discernment, not typically raw power.

There is the condition of soul loss. It is possible to be in therapy for 20 years, working, working, working but never getting anywhere because well, we just aren’t home in order to do the work. We’ve been disassociated most of our lives, to the point where, though we may hear the phrase all the time, we have no idea what it means to “be in our bodies”. It’s pretty normal to jump out of your body when something awful happens, like a car accident, trauma, rape, abuse, long-standing oppressive environments. Who would want to be home to experience that? The hard part is coming back home. It doesn’t always happen by itself. Sometimes the soul part is just, gone. Sometimes we latch onto outside stimuli and people trying to fill the hole that was left behind or we are afraid to make changes in our lives that would make our bodies a more hospitable place for our precious, delicate souls. Sometimes the soul part has been stolen by someone who doesn’t know how to let us go.

When there is a big hole inside of us, this can turn out to be a nice home for other souls that have nowhere to go. Souls of the dead who didn’t know they died and didn’t get to cross over. Someone whose mother wouldn’t release her after she died. Someone with unfinished business who missed the window. These people can be confused, in despair or angry but always, they are hungry. They drift right in and all of a sudden we have a rider. Someone who needs to be in our body in order to get energy. This is possession. We might hear voices or thoughts in our heads, feel desires and passions we never had before. We might not realize that we are not fighting ourselves. Instead, we have some desperate company that needs help.

So we go to a healer, who can help this soul get in touch with the divine psycho-pomp beings and cross  into the light. These wonderful people can do the soul retrieval journey and bring the soul part back. Being home, we finally have traction in our lives. We can deal with things. We feel restored in personal power and our lives are no longer like movies we watch from a distance.

Why can’t do this ourselves? Why can’t we heal ourselves all the time?

Have you ever tried to make breakfast while talking on the phone with a drama going on in the living room and the dog just knocked a vase off the table with his tail? There’s too much to focus on. The healer has to be super, super grounded and in touch with her spirits, listening to them while taking cues from the forces that need help. The client needs to be very trusting and open, not working, receiving and tracking how this healing is shifting things inside herself. Plus there is this super special elixir that makes every healing session power-packed and exponentially increased in effectiveness called love. Love again! One person caring for another person. This kind of stuff gets the spirits really excited and they come in even stronger. There is something sacred about the power of witnessing, which is a lot of what a healer does. The spirits can’t do the work they do a lot of times without a witness and a conduit to the client. Having a healer/witness who has traveled the lonely roads of healing before us is a very assuring thing. This is for sure.

What is healing anyways? Is it the awareness that keeps you moving forward? Is it the moment that the wound is stitched? Is it the integration afterwards? Is it all of of this? Who does the healing, is the question of the age and it seems so very important to some to figure out who gets the credit. But no one gets the credit, because healing is an inter-relational process, because we are all connected. We don’t create our realities; we co-create them. And when we walk down to the river of healing, there’s lots of people there to show us the way and support us. Some of them have vision, some of them know the ropes and some others are gifted in procedures that are kind of tricky, like surgery. Why would you do your own surgery? Wouldn’t you rather just lie on the table?

If you have felt like you have been going from crisis to crisis for too long, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you never had any role models for what love is, have no idea how to be sure that the people you hang out with are good for you and keep attracting the same situations again and again. It’s ok. You are ok. You are so loved. How are you supposed to know how to get what you want if you don’t even know what love is supposed to feel like? That’s why people get into programs, go to help groups, see therapy.. to get outside input to break up the same old patterns. What is fault anyways? A hammer from which to hit oneself.

In the spirit world, there is no shame or blame, only cause and effect. The spirits are always willing to show us what we did or didn’t do, but it is us that makes it worse with the unnecessary blaming. Your beautiful journey, hard as it is, is filled with messages to guide you, filled with wonder and wisdom that only you can see and hear. It’s your journey and every part of it is yours. You don’t have to stay in the same pain any longer. Maybe there’s more pain ahead, the pain of growing. Or maybe release is right around the corner. Whatever it is, it will be moving forward. What a profound thing, to forgive oneself and reach out for help.

by Tasara

The vast majority of shamanic cultures do NOT USE hallucinogens!!

The vast majority of shamanic cultures do NOT USE hallucinogens!! Get over the current hype and learn the facts. Sonic driving is what brings us outside of time and into the the worlds of the spirits. Partaking in entheogens can interfere with shamanic practices because the spirit of the plant is too strong and can interfere with a clear experience navigated with a myriad of other helping spirits.. shamanism with entheogens is an entirely different technique that bring on information in an entirely different way.

what people see (0;00;26;10)

Michael Harner is a world renowned cultural anthropologist who specializes in shamanism and has done his homework. He did start out with ayahuasca but quickly discovered that the drum, which other anthropologists thought was merely an accoutrement, is actually the main tool of the shaman. Or rattle. Or click sticks. Or bow. Gongs.

About entheogens and shamanism:
“From a shamanic point of view, the spirits of such plants not only have power, but they also have their own personalities and messages, which impinge significantly on the nature of the experience. Auditory drumming in many ways does not carry such influences.”

“… a Russian ethnographer who had spent 28 seasons of fieldwork in Siberia, told me that the real Siberian shamans normally employed only the drum to change their state of consciousness, rather than the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom. The mushroom, Simchenko reported, was mainly used by nonshamans who have been unable to journey successfully with the drum alone. Also, he told me it is usually difficult to maintain the discipline necessary for the shamanic work when the Amanita spirit takes over the body.”

both quotes from Michael Harner’s latest book: Cave and Cosmos

This is the same man who wrote Hallucinogens and Shamanism, (a tract of very dry anthropological accounts.. ).He is well versed in the cultures that do use entheogens as well.

So please, please do not equate shamanism with hallucinogens. It is just not true. Being a shamanic practitioner requires years of training, self-transformation, difficult shadow work, empathic and empathetic skills when working with clients and fore-mostly, deep and long-standing relationships with specific (not general) spirits that help the shaman retrieve healing for others.

And some personal notes, the longer one practices, the more sensitive one’s system becomes, so yeah, I have had quite a few unfortunate hallucinatory experiences where I get pushed into places where I am in fear for my life or my sanity or my spirits can’t reach me or the spirit of the plant won’t leave me alone to do my work. Plant spirits are middle worlds spirits. They have a personality and a WAY, an energetic signature which DOES something. They are not in the class of entirely compassionate upper/lower world spirits that most of us prefer to work with. Yes, they will always “bring stuff up” and often there is a big mess to clean up afterwards but it does not always happen in the most compassionate or healing way. Do I need to cry for 12 hours? Or am I just being retraumatized? Do I need to feel insane to find healing?

Sonic driving is pure power, clean and clear. I have taken part in many, many shamanic ceremonies that kicked my ass and sent me to process my shit for months afterwards. I’ve channeled the divine so strongly that it took me a week to physically recover. This is no small beans over here, with the drum.

It is also potentially dangerous taking such substances in unprotected environments. I regularly have clients (and so do my colleagues) who are people who need extraction healing, depossession or soul retrieval after such experiences. This because when your field is entirely open and you are traveling outside your body, it leaves a space for other spirits to come in. It is no light thing to do, so please, please, do not engage in such practices out of sheer peer pressure because it is what ‘everyone is doing’. “Everyone” is not speaking about their true experiences..only the bliss ones. There are many kinds of personality types and some of them are emotionally/psychically closed down that they are pretty safe using psychoactive substances. Because try as they may, they are just not going to leave their body. But for those of us who are super empathic and open, it is an entirely different ball park.

On a happy note, there are some underground facilitators of hallucinogen experiences who are trained in helping your process in the moment. This can be quite valuable for those under such careful care. But this is not shamanism. Shamanism is the practice of going into an altered state with a clear intention to visit one’s spirit friends for the purpose of bringing back healing/insight for the good of one’s community.

Shamanism is not something you ‘get into’. It is a way of life. It is a world view. It is who some of us are.

by Tasara
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Please see this very relevant video: Michael Harner on Sonic Driving vs. Entheogens

Healthy Bonds or Cords to Cut?

You may have heard of cord-cutting in your travels around the alternative spiritual subcultures. I first heard of it when training as a Witch. What you do is you literally invoke a clothe cord to represent the bonds between yourself and someone that you wish to be parted from, and at some point in the ritual the cord is cut with a very sharp pair of scissors.

This is a powerful act of magic but as the years have flown by I have realized that I don’t want to cut anything. Cutting seems violent and there are so many other ways to free oneself from unhealthy connection with other people.

Fire Dancers
I learned in Reiki how to become a channel of healing energy for another person without using an ounce of my own. This is safety 101 in the healing arts – safety for self and client, as we do not want to be sharing personal energy. I might go home drained. I might literally pick up someone’s illness. I might expose my client to something I am going through.

In my training as a Shamanic Healer, I learned that one should never walk away from a healing session energetically drained. One might be worn from the physical exertion of a larger event but overall, facilitating healing for another person should make one feel filled up. Exuberant. Humming. In tune. Ever so grateful. If it doesn’t feel right, then one should journey to the spirits to find out what went wrong. And ask for a clearing.

We don’t share our personal energy in the healing arts ever. We try to be clean. We try to rid ourselves of unhealthy connections or ‘cords’ with other people. These connections can be like tentacles connected to our power centers where we are being drained or draining others.

Getting deeper into Shamanism, I learned about intrusions, where one person may inadvertently send energy in rage or despair to lodge in someone else’s body. I learned that mainstream culture’s description of love as ‘giving one’s heart’ to someone else (or ‘taking one’s heart) is actually soul stealing and giving. I learned how to return soul parts to others that I had held onto without knowing it.

What I didn’t learn was how to identify healthy bonds. I actually didn’t think of them. I was so concerned with ridding myself of unsavory connections with other people that I stripped myself clean. I had this feeling of aloneness, telling myself that energetic independence was right. I felt…lonely.

One day I was doing a clearing for myself because I was afraid of falling into yet one more dysfunctional relationship when I caught myself ready to cut a heart bond with a friend. Hey, I had to stop.

We humans are social creatures. We are meant to get close to each other, to have empathy and support each other. It’s ok to need someone, if we understand the difference between needing and .. well, needing.

At this point, I was teaching the same methods I had been taught in my classes. I had to open the discussion to my students. What do healthy bonds look like? In a shamanic journey, tears filled my vision of open arms held around another, hands over the shoulders. It was comforting, beautiful and most importantly, there was choice. Either party could step away at any moment.

bondscords

Ah, it’s about choice. Healthy bonds are a choice, not entanglement. Identifying healthy bonds is simple because they feel nurturing and free and open. Unhealthy cords can feel exhilarating in a captive sort of way, like a drug or a high. They can also feel gunky or guilty or obliging, but healthy bonds make us feel right in the world. To know someone loves us wholly, to feel accepted for all our faults. To know that they think well of us, not to wonder. To feel more sane, bigger, fuller.

Now when I ask my guides to do clearings between me and my loved ones (Shouldn’t any person I become close with be a loved one?), I don’t ask them to cut. I ask them to do their work in love for both parties. I ask for healing and ask them to respectfully not enter the other person’s field unless I have been given explicit permission. I watch them clear, unravel, bless, shine light. I ask them to show me where the healthy bonds are and bless them too, so I can learn their beautiful qualities and know how to distinguish them from the other intimate feeling of having someone deep inside me in an addictive way.

Some of us need to learn these things. We didn’t have loving role models when we grew up. There is a difference between clearing the rubble after an argument and pretending that the original problem can be sent away. Clearing lets the light back in and opens up breathing room, so that the problem can be worked on with fresh energy and continued compassion. Joy even. Trust in the process allows us to take space if we need it or enjoy other things together before going back to look at the issue. If we do need to take space, it does not have to mean energetically cutting ourselves from the healthy flow of love and respect that underlies our relationship.

Intimacy is a hard thing to figure out. It is mixed with new openings, knee jerk patterns, complete terror, loving patience and forgiveness. Sometimes what feels like an unhealthy cord is just PTSD. Just, right? Fear that focusing on oneself makes one a mean person or terror that the relationship will be damaged by the act of it, these things can be unlearned. I’m not sure which is harder to have but learning to distinguish between PTSD and unhealthy cording can aid us in figuring what kind of help to get. What form of love to go and get.

Let’s put a touch of love on the topic of cord cutting. Better yet, let’s never cut cords. Let’s love them gently, unravel them with great compassion for all the fears that allowed them to be created in the first place. Let’s return their energy to source and call in the great healing spirits of soothing light to clear the debris and put ourselves to rest, down in nice, warm pillows after a deep salt bath.

It’s ok to love and to be loved. Let’s journey more and more for our beautiful visions of what healthy bonds look like so we can learn them deeply and begin to put our trust in them. They are goodness bridges, these bonds. They are the ones we should be standing on. We’ve come this far, let’s trust that we can keep their channels open and cleared with the kiss of sun streams given to us by the Sacred Ones.

by Tasara

** Thank you to my dearest friend for teaching me some of these wisdoms through your relentless trust in the beautiful mystery of our meeting.

A spiritual path is a one way street. This is a law of energy.

A spiritual path is a one way street. This is a law of energy. You take one step and everything about you and everything about the path changes all at once. Take one more step and you are in. The path itself becomes your tether to this life through an ever-shifting forest and what comes to you, in challenge or exhaltation, comes across the way you are walking. It is specific to you.

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You don’t get to go back. You don’t get to change your mind because, unless you are just tasting around, unless you are just workshop shopping, unless you are just riding the trance high from one cosmic spiritual hipster event to another, when you finally pack your bags and get out on the road, your commitment will have been heard. The silent vow that you made deep in your heart will already have been accepted. If you turn around to go back, the forest will have changed by new awarenesses that you can’t take away. Try as you might, journeying back would only mean moving on, to a home that will never be the same and a knowledge that will never let you rest again in the ignorances of before.

This is why so many people are afraid of letting go and submitting to their spiritual hunger. They can feel the danger. They know that to give up control of what happens in the spiritual practice would invite other forces to participate and for power to be given to the unknown. To accept the quest of wisdom will mean to begin the irrevocable unwinding of avoidance patterns they have set up in order to keep their lives going the way that is most comfortable. Some people are aware that their marriage would not survive a spiritual awakening. Some do not want to face the difficult conflict they see would arise with their job. Even those of us fully committed to the path know that eventually, we all have to contend with, rather than bury the realities of our sick, abusive society.

Stepping onto a spiritual path is a dangerous thing. Dangerous because we are all good people and once we know the truth, we will not abide by what we tolerated before. We will have to change and change means loss.

But it will be so good to let go of what does not serve us anymore.

We will know when we have found our real spiritual path because we will become consumed. Unseen forces from the other side reach over and pull us in. We become enamored, star-struck, empowered, entranced, lured, unstable, dismembered, turned inside out, renewed..but under it all our drive is our hunger for wholeness, for love, for deep communion with the blessed compassionate spirits. For soul food. As we are dragged into the shadow, we are taught ruthlessly about our own imbalances. We are faced with a choice, find our strength and spiritual allies or die. Die a spiritual death, die in our purpose.. die a long death of acceptance or a short one of physical illness. If we are going to die, we might as well die all the way, forget who we are and come out the other side to live in the light of awareness and wisdom of love.

There is no spiritual path without shadow. This wonderfully sticky personal mire that captures us and won’t let go until we have understood it’s every mechanism. With this knowledge we are able to dismantle the patterns that have been and free our vital life energy. Then and only then can we return. Like flowers in the spring we arise and when we resume our lives, it is with more power, more traction, more vision and more consciousness of the assistance we receive from the other side. We are now in the revelatory work of learning new ways of creating, of play, of new constructs of pleasure. We know ourselves in a new way and we are strong. Our ability to love has increased.

And when time has passed and we have known all that we can know, we return to the shadows, delving for more.

by Tasara

Cernunnos

Cernunnos comes into my garden. He is a beauty.
Masculine, with his horns and all browns and greens and gold.
His energy grows out like thick vines.
He sits across from me in my garden and we gaze at each other.
This calm, his sweet strength and musk tempt to send me wild.

But I remain focused, because I am listening.
I can allow it to waft around me and still hold him with attention.
It is not a game. It is a meeting, deep by uncounted fathoms.
We sit in the stillness, the feral contained.

cernunnos
Until we choose for it not to be.

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by Tasara

The Quest for Spiritual “Power” and Spiritual Awareness

What is it about Power?

Power. Power. Lots of people seem to be seeking power in their spiritual, self-evolutionary.. path of power.

Personal power, spiritual power, the power to, to… what?

The power to impress? Who? Oneself?

Ironically, power is all around us. It is in the air. It is in our bones. It runs through our emotional body. Most of us are knocked over, overwhelmed day in and day out by power coming from sources around us. So, there is nothing to look for. As for our personal power, it too is enormous, but often smattered across a myriad of interests, concerns and emotional investments which we may or may not have consciously chosen to engage in. How are we able to truly experience the magnitude of our personal power when it is rarely centered in one place?

The focus we need is not in finding power. It is in removing our precious energy from the activities, people, habits and media that do not serve us. We need to bring it all back to the core. Then we can redirect the power both around us and within us to align with our true values. This way we may become effective channels for powerful change and healing in a good way.

We can lose personal power through trauma, through soul loss, in power-animal disconnection as well as through entanglement with other beings or spiritual systems. When we commit ourselves to the healing journey, over time, personal power returns to us. It returns sometimes in big satchels all at once, through rejuvenating lifestyle changes. It can come in a POW through a major spiritual healing to be wondered at and re-embodied over time. Personal power can also come back to us like the tide, sure and steady, gradual and reawakening, as we grow and learn to root our passions from the center instead of always reaching out.

So, our quest is not in finding power but in reclaiming the power connected to our bodies so we can focus it towards the areas where we do our life work. Then we will naturally experience deep healing, have courage to face up to our fears and then with all our extra energy, lavish the world with our unkempt, beautiful passion. Our raw, wild power has been too long held down by twisted, mangled ideas. It’s time to clean them out.

May our values be our true beacon. Those values which guide us to right action, which the power-filled spirits can get behind and support. May our spiritual training be in learning the secrets of Power-With, as we learn to open ourselves to the vast resources of wisdom and dedication from these spirits willing to be our partners in bringing discordant energies back into balance.

For, we do not do anything alone. We do not create without resources. We do not affect without connection and we do not bridge without other parties. The way to move power is Together. This is more healing, individually and collectively than anything we could attempt to do alone. “Working with” requires that we work through our fear of other to learn discernment and then trust. Trust, fundamentally, in ourselves. Trust, always, in the allies we have met in the other planes. Trust, gradually in the people who we have forged our bonds with, based on the values that we hold in common.

Power is in aligning ourselves to our values so that we may be a clear channel and in learning how to redirect power to align with our clear selves.

So, I ask you, why do you want magical power? What will you do with it? What will you do? What is it for? Are you clear?

If our goal was to gain personal power and we hadn’t sorted out what are values were, what a convoluted message that would be to the spirits!

Would you really want power if you weren’t clear?

And Spiritual Awareness?

What is spiritual awareness? To be aware of stuff that our physical senses do not pick up, right?  Some people find themselves infinitely frustrated in this area, a-liking themselves to a board or a little pea when it comes to spiritual awareness. Before striving to leap into the realm of the ‘claire’s’ (clairvoyant, clairsentient, etc.), it may be helpful to ask oneself how much of the physical senses are really being paid attention to, to begin with. When you listen to your loved ones are you really listening? Are you aware of their posture, the subtleties in their voice, the strain on their face perhaps? Are you using your mind to understand the context and history of the conversation? Can you listen to all of that in addition to the words that are coming through? How is it that you know what someone else is thinking?

When you have revelations or ideas, do you allow them to fill you and flesh out or do you take the information and keep flying? When you have ‘gut feelings’, what part of your body do you feel them in? Do you “see”, do you “feel”, do you just “know” in your heart?

Asking oneself these questions can really help get a scope of what is already there. Spiritual awareness is just an extension of physical senses. The lines can get blurry, so it is easy to discredit something that feels so..natural.

Why do you want to be spiritually aware? Are you not getting the information you need already? Are you following your heart’s desire and your true values or do you need something supernatural to tell you something you already know?

One wonderful thing about developing spiritual senses is that it allows us to know deeply that we are not alone. We can communicate with our spirit guides with lucidity. We can understand the connections between events in our lives more fully (through more senses). We can actively partake in the vast web of energy that we are part of. We can merge and make love with aspects of nature that make us feel passionate.

Just as there are many people who are trying to become spiritually aware, there are many others who are trying to find a way to shut down those senses because they have become overwhelmed.

glossy power copy(overwhelmed)

This ties into the previous section about choosing where to engage our personal power, where we choose what to pay attention to and what not to. This can be very easy or it can seem ever elusive. Spiritual training can help one gain sovereignty over one’s psychic boundaries and be free to choose when and where to be open to the broader energies of the world.

Bless the Boundaries, Preserve the Power.
Healing to Get Us Started.

Because, really, there is a time and a place. In our culture of sensory barrage, our constant exposure to the oppression of choice, we forget that little dark quiet places can be nourishing and that in being open forever, we will inevitably drain out, fade, become less potent, lose power.

Nurturing personal power being the number one priority in life. Sound awful? Sounds healthy. We really, really cannot be of service to anyone when we are depleted and broken. How silly. In order to contribute to this gem of a world we need to be in touch with the gem of ourselves. Too many of us in the developed worlds have become like ghosts of ourselves, passing from day to day, unable to track or get traction or trace the real story of how we got here.

This power stuff. It’s so important. It’s like money; we decide how to spend it. But if our bank has been robbed or the treasure hidden elsewhere than in the chest, then it sure would be the right thing to seek the help of an experienced shamanic healer. Power loss is considered an illness and major power or soul loss is something that we need the big stuff – meaning LOVE – to bring back. Love is two or more people doing for each other or another. So, that is why healers are healers. They become a hollow bone from a place of utter service and love to allow the ultra-super-loving spirits to come in and take care of you.

Let them take care of you. When’s the last time someone took care of you? We are not looking to be bigger or better or special. We are looking to join the Indras web of infinite jewels as the jewel that we are.

Some folks cannot reach their power or awareness because they have such loss. Or because they are blocked by intrusions or a fellow soul taking a ride in their body. Helping these souls release to their heaven, removing the intrusions can get the whole system moving again.

It’s getting complicated, right? That’s what makes it so much fun! We all have our Tolkien maps etched into our bones as we pass from one entry to the next, scratching down our notes and picking up what sustenance and skills we find along the way. Oh, friends! Don’t forget to make friends on this journey. We all might look like freaks to each other but that’s why we love it. Each gem, so unique; each person, doing their very best. Earning due respect just for that – doing our best stuff.

The Trick in the Searching is in Being Present.

If we are seeking power, maybe we are not being aware of where our personal power has been spread out to or how we are letting external powers affect us. If we have no sense of power, then we may need a healer.

If we are seeking spiritual awareness, maybe we have not been still enough to understand the plethora of information that is around us, for the messages of spirit are manifest in every aspect of our experience: in our relationships with people, with the world, in the patterns of the mud splattered on the metro bus ad, in the way that woman walked in front of our car and how we reacted to it, in our own frustrations, in how we treat our bodies…

If we have become completely blocked to any messages but dullness or same-flavor pain or anxiety, perhaps we need to see a healer.

In general, if we are seeking at all, maybe we are trying to make our present match a picture of the past, or of how we think the future is .. “right around the corner”. There is no “right around the corner”. It will never exist here. It is all happening here.

When we are in our power and utilizing all of our senses, physical and metaphysical, the patterns of our world make sense. We understand that there is nothing to do. Nothing to plan for, only to be in the dance, in the present, on the wheel. Trusting in ourselves to do what we feel will align with our true values. For that is all we care about. Staying true, to our values and our word. Staying in integrity and watching the world fall into place.

Knowing that we are not alone.

by Tasara

Hollow Bone

Being a hollow bone is not a concept.

It is availing one’s body to the spirits to be used as a vessel for the healing spirits to come through and do their work for the good of others.

It is dedicating one’s life to the continual retransformation, clarity and care of this vessel so that it may be able to be the purest channel possible.

hollow bone

It is through the disciplined training of the mind that we are able to track energetic patterns, distinguish between the past and future, time and place, emotion and atmospheric pressure, to be able to cut through to the truth, and further to be able to release the mechanism of the mind completely and fall into experience, or stasis–whatever may be needed for the work at hand.

It is the earnestness of the effort of the heart opening and reopening, as boundaries shift and become more seasoned, allowing the right light in, the distracting elements out, in order that we may expand in love and not falter in it.

It is the endless, ever-shifting dance of relationship with every aspect of life and the living, from which there is nothing excluded.

It is the passion and joy of communion with the divine, as manifested on every spectrum from the formless, through to the metaphorical spirits, down to the lusciousness of the corporeal divine.

This being a hollow bone is not a world view.

It is a reality, a station and for many, not a choice.

It is an algorithm that continues to unfold the patterns of love in their multi-layered aspects, reflecting the ever changing state of it’s vessel, one that stretches that vessel to it’s very limits, many times beyond them, creating a symphony of open and closure, of birth, growth, clash, renewal, terror and bliss.

It is life itself, and everything that comes with it in unabashed nakedness.

by Tasara

Will, Wants and Values.

The most powerful thing we have in our lives is our own Will. Our Will gets us out of bed in the morning, causes us to create and destroy. Without a Will we flounder. We can Will ourselves into doing something we don’t want to do or we think we don’t have the ability to do. What directs our Will, what lies beneath is two things, our need for survival and our values.
will
We have lots of values, like chocolate, Starbucks, fast cars or football games but underneath that, we also have values like a stable job, a house with access to nature… and then there are values like kindness, compassion, sharing and honesty.

How these values settle in our being determines the product of our actions. Our Will is deep within our core. The deeper a value falls, the more powerfully our Will will engage with it. It is for this reason that many people do not want to spend extensive time looking at their values. If they do, there is no going back; life will inevitably change. Are we ready to let go?

If we don’t know what we value, how could we possibly know what we truly want? When we make conscious choices about our values, we have more control over our lives. We are happier with ourselves. If we do not, then a myriad of forces around us like the corporate media, social peer pressure and relationships with others may have too much influence about what our values are and where they lie. If we are wounded, have soul loss, lonliness, those forces around us tempt us to align our Will with cheap answers rather than real solutions.

The long haul. This is the core of our spiritual practice.

Alignment of Will and Values harmonizes to create Integrity. A state of consistency throughout. With intentional practice, we also can align our Will and our Wants. Wanting is pulling towards us. Will comes from our core and moves outwards, creates. The stronger our Will, the more our Wants will serve our Will.

Now..Desire is something that is deliciously messy. Out of control. It can come from the deepest passion, borne out of our values, a hunger to fill an empty void or from some mysterious intoxicating place. But at the end of desire, whether momentary or permanent, there is always Pleasure. 🙂

I’ll leave the rest up to you.

by Tasara

Winter Dreaming

– A Time of Dreaming –

dreaminthedark

We have crossed the threshold of Winter Solstice. But, darnit, it is still dark! We called in the light in holy ceremony, but where is the actual light?

The ‘pull’ towards the abyss has ceased. We have had our brush with the great shadow, sat through our lessons with Grandmother Darkness. Some of us have even plummeted into and crossed the Abyss. Those that have plummeted and not returned have passed on to other worlds, to be mourned by those left in this one. What do we do with all these leftovers from the Death feast of the season passed?

To understand this, we can look at the Wheel of the year in a few different ways. Firstly as this big wheel with huge powers on it’s opposite sides, of Sun and Moon, Light and Dark, Life and Oblivion. Creation. Disintegration. The closer we are on the wheel to one of those powers, the more we are under it’s influence. So, it being just post Winter Solstice, we are still heavily under the influence of the great shadow – but in a different way than before.

Different, because the great Wheel is moving. There is a movement. When we are before a pole like the sun or moon, we are being pulled towards it. Once we have crossed it’s center, we have been released. The great event is over and all the ‘making sense of things’, repositioning, realignment, refinding, digesting.. all that after-the-event stuff happens. We are now riding on momentum. The light may be dawning but it won’t be until Spring Equinox, one of the balance points between the poles, before the Sun is able to catch us up in his infectious spell and pull us towards his massive heart.

Back at the time of Samhain, when the great gates to the yawning Abyss opened, it was a time to release, as the great forces of the void pulled us, inescapably in. We went into stasis, the time between Death and Life. During that stasis, under the influence of the sacred darkness, some Thing built up and happened. Some alchemy occurred. An event, which peaked and then made room for a pin hole of light to return and begin to expand.

So now, after the Solstice, there is another release while the light enters. We, tired again from the drama of conception, rest in the unfathomable womb of the angelic mother as our guardian spirits move in to dream with us the dreams of our new incarnate existence. Therein is the gentle complexity of a life’s layers being grown. There is the simplicity of lying fallow under the inexorable, slow dawning of the nurturing sun.

We are preparing for the moment when we nail down our intentions with the naked force of our honest will – or more gently put, plant our seeds. This happens on Imbolc, Feb 1st.

But true intentions cannot come before the dreaming. We are still dreaming.

As we sleep, inspiration touches us, sending reverberations into the bones of who we are. There arises a yearning for what is next in the truth of what we are. More inspiration comes and this yearning, an open space, a ‘need fire’ as they say in the runic alphabet, combined with the love of the inspirational spirits, (this sublime safety we feel with them which gives birth to devotion) this, altogether forms a seed.

A most precious seed of life, dreamt in the most sacred way. For we do not create in this world as humans. We co-create.

Such is the sublime ecstasy of living.

by Tasara

Raven II

black

The Raven, she embodies the hollow night.
She sits in the blindness next to you, quiet, yet unspeakably noticed.

She peers into the spaces between your bones, and she sees everything about you. She sees it all, and then she envelops you with great comfort.

A glow escapes her feathers, whose crevices are unable to keep back her infinite soft light, this compassion, this grace, this calm.

Both powers held in her shape
of daunting yawn of night
of complete and quiet acceptance.

You are known here. You are loved here.
In the silence.

by Tasara

May you break free from the patterns that bind you.