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Eclipse Fever!

8/14/2017

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​Next week's eclipse is inspiring a great deal of conversation. It is said that we are in an "open portal" right now between the lunar and solar eclipses, and that portal that can be used to focus your vision, reevaluate life and to do ceremony to activate intentions. I like the idea, and I want to offer you some practical ideas for using this portal time.

First some cool background: it's said by mystically inclined folks that eclipses magnify and increase the power of the full and new moons, that blocking out the light from either also opens a flow of raw celestial sun or moon energy to be received by us. Science, of course, is dubious on whether eclipses have noticeable physical effects, but it has been observed that whales and dolphins and many birds change their behavior a few moments before a solar eclipse. Whales swim to the surface, hang out through the eclipse and then dive a few moments after it's over. Water birds stop foraging before the solar eclipse. Animals lie down to sleep or roost. According to one observer, the Amazon jungle goes quiet during a solar eclipse -a fairly amazing thing, since the jungle is never quiet. Because humans are part of nature, and because eclipses stir us emotionally and imaginatively, it's obvious that eclipses have observable effects on earth.

So, how can we swim to the surface and use this open portal?

Well, first, there's another bit of background: the Celtic shamanic angle. Besides the eclipses, we are at the time on the medicine wheel known in the Celtic world as Lughnasadh (LOO-nuh-suh) – the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. It's a major spoke on the wheel of the year and is called the time of the first fruits, when the harvest begins to come in. If you feel the revelry of summer and the harvest, and at the same time, feel that gnawing sense of autumn beginning to show its presence - that slight feeling (or growing panic) that summer is beginning to end that’s a Lughnasadh feeling.

Here are a few easy personal ceremonies you can do at this time:

The simplest thing is to merely take some time to imagine the graceful flow of our solar system - visualize the the orbiting planets, each spinning in their own way. Revel in the wonder - the immense distances between our planets and yet the tiny size of our solar system in the big picture. 

First, before any prayer or meditation work like the  below, remember your protection. Say or think: "I am surrounded by Spirit's protection" and really take a moment to feel it. Imagine or visualize that protection any way that works for you.

Sit quietly, imagine that open portal, and ask Spirit to pour down "the new song that is good for me" into the top of your head. That's a sentence full of mythic language, so explore it in whatever way feels right to you. Say to yourself: "I am ready to begin singing this new song…" See what happens.

Use this open portal time to "reset" your energies. Enter into a quiet place, and ask Spirit in whatever form it wants to come to you, to cleanse you of acquired negative energies. You can bump this up by imagining yourself in a place in nature - any place you find powerful, and ask that place to use its power to cleanse you. Example: imagine yourself on a mountain. Let your sacred imagination open and let the mountain cleanse you in whatever way a mountain might. Instruct your body to release its hold on any energy that has been embedded in you that is not useful or that is toxic. If you feel the energy in certain part of your body, talk to that place and ask it to release its hold on that energy.
Move away from the cerebral or analytical and focus on the feeling. Rather than saying "take out my co-dependence" or "release my inability to express myself clearly in relationship" or "Take away my mother issues," just identify the emotion: "Remove this old fear," "belly- release your hold on this resentment," etc. (It can help to take a moment to locate where in the body you most feel the emotion, and ask that part to release it.) 

A more general approach: Appeal to Spirit to remove what it sees as the problem: "Spirit remove whatever embedded energy or pattern is blocking me, limiting me, or wrecking my intention form becoming ever more real."

This portal is a great time to open your forgiveness. Ask Spirit to come and open your forgiveness and make you new again. 

Lughnasadh calls us to into gratitude for the abundance offered to us by mother earth, and to ponder what we are harvesting in our own lives; to consider what seeds we have we planted in life, and what is being harvested from those seeds. Ideally, this pondering can lead us to value our lives, and acknowledge with pride what we have done well, how we have acted with courage against our limit fears, how we have overcome smallness and how we have allowed our curiosity to lead and shape us. And this is a terrific meditation to do right now during this time: make a list of your skills, successes and best moments - things you've worked to learn, skills you've worked to refine. Don't let that negative voice win when it intervenes to say, "You're really not that good at that."

An example for me: My flute playing. I'm not at all a great flute player. But there was time I didn't play at all, and then there was a time that I said I want to learn, and there have been times I've practiced, and now I can play a few simple tunes in front of people, very often without squeaking or missing notes. So it's a skill I've worked at and now have. Another example: in a recent argument with someone, I realized I was wrapped in fear, and that's why I was arguing. That's a success - to see that after so may years of not seeing that at the time its happening. It goes on the "success" list. This exercise can be remarkably challenging in a culture that revels in making us feel small, sick, flawed, and powerless.

Lughnasadh also calls us to ponder sacrifice and gratitude, and the relationship between the two. In the Celtic story, the sun god Lugh established the festival of Lughnasadh to honor Tailtiu, the earth goddess (his foster mother), who delivers the abundant harvest and then perishes. This is how the earth works, and all abundance that we experience springs from the Earth Mother's bestowing her body to us. The festival was a celebratory party honoring the Great Mother's gifts to us, and also a funeral honoring her self-sacrifice. The festival gathered the disparate tribes together to negotiate peace agreements, arrange marriages, worship together and engage in revelry, feast and games.

Gratitude is a very popular topic but I have a shamanic twist on it. See gratitude less as a pleasant thought process – of reminding yourself to be happy - and more like medicine. See gratitude as a physical medicine that you swallow. It pours down into your body, cleansing your arrogance, ignorance and martyrdom, dissolving them. Ask the body (and Spirit) to wash them out of you. Don't delve into self-deprecation. This is not "I'm so full of these shitty energies and it's why things are so hard for me…" Just agree that to be human is to take on negative energies, like dust form the road, and to be human in relationship with Spirit is to have a partner than can help cleanse us.
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I hope some of these ideas are useful to you. 

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Shamanic Soul Retrieval: the Resuscitation of Beauty

8/1/2017

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Soul Retrieval is a powerful topic for people walking the shamanic path. This article is about my experiences learning and conducting soul retrieval, but it is equally about doubt and wonder, because my thirty-plus years on the shamanic path is ever and always about the flow between these two energies. I begin with a description of my training from twenty-five years ago:

Note: This article first appeared in the July 2017 issue of The Journal Of Shamanic Practice, put out by the Society for Shamanic Practice. I'm the president of the board of directors of this wonderful educational organization, and I heartily urge you to become a member by clicking here.
It is 1992. I am in Taos, New Mexico, sitting cross-legged in a dim, wooden-floored room in a comfortable conference center. I am one of thirty people who have traveled from far and wide to be here, to learn how to retrieve lost souls. The shaman is teaching us how to travel to the spirit world, discover where the lost soul has gone (or who has stolen it), and how to coax it back into the person’s body where it belongs. This may require negotiation, or trickery, or a fight with the spirit that stole it. It requires asking the spirit world to teach you a healing song. It requires a large   crystal to light your way in the other world. It is a seven-day course. I'm in the seven-day course because I want this. I can't imagine anything more fascinating and worthwhile in this lifetime than helping someone to retrieve their lost soul. But inside, I'm moaning with doubt and fear.
 
Soul retrieval is a cross-cultural shamanic healing practice, remarkably similar from culture to culture. In shamanism, the soul is not, as it is commonly imagined in western theology, an intact being, trapped inside a prison of debauched flesh. According to the shamanic view, the soul is an energy field. The body is part of this energy field too – the part that is discernible by the five senses, as the nineteenth century visionary artist William Blake said. The soul is the part of the energy body that is not discernible by the five senses. The body is the densest part of the soul – the part that does not survive death. What we perceive as death is only the body's limited, dense perception, and what we fear in death is only the body-based ego's fear of what it does not comprehend. So in order to work with the soul, we need to "see" it using other senses. We need shamanic sight.
 
Soul retrieval acknowledges that, as we move through life, traumatic experiences can cause disruptions or breakage, or even shredding of our soul/energy field. Parts of it can split off and become lost in the other world, leading us to feel a general sense of absence, an un-wholeness, a pervasive feeling of not being all quite “there” — an aching ennui, a steady depression, a darkness (mild or severe) permeating our days and nights.
 
“Trauma” can take many forms. Violence, or accidents, or illness, or shocks to the emotions are traumas. But long periods of common humiliation can do it too – such as junior high school, or many office jobs, living in an addicted family, or living under capitalism. Living a life that you know is wrong for you, but living it for all sorts of very good reasons — like, “just six more years of this shit and I’ll retire with safety,” or "I have to stay in this marriage so my kids/parents/friends won't think ill of me. Any of these sustained traumas can drive chunks of your soul away. Carl Jung said Western culture as a whole suffers from a loss of soul.
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Trauma” is a mythic term, meaning a trauma that seems mild to one person may be felt very deeply by another. The avalanche of internet news coverage, the depravity of politics, the surreal quality of the deadline and spreadsheet workplace – our lives are filled to overflowing with various traumas to the soul.
 
There is a darker side to this too: Parts of our soul can be stolen. Soul is life force — the animating force that makes us alive — and most of us have met people who seem to suck the soul life out of us. In shamanic terms these are soul vampires. Most of the time they are driven by envy, which is cross culturally recognized as the most powerful inducement for people to hire a sorcerer, or perform sorcery in order to shamanically whack someone else.
 
Envy can  take many forms, but another word for envy is hunger. We can find ourselves in relationship with someone who is constantly trying to shave off portions of our energy so they can eat it for themselves, because they are hungry for the soul energy that has gone missing from them. Sometimes, people will try to slice off or steal our soul energy merely to keep us weak so they can control us, and continue to feed off of us.
 
My modern, logical mind wants to scream and run at these ideas, and call them horror movie fantasies. But I think about politicians who play on our fears in order to propel themselves into power, and then translate those fears into policies that suck life out of the people who voted for them. I think about advertisers who tell us a single repeating story: you are lacking power, and our product will restore your lost power. They are promising to return our lost soul, but they don’t really intend to. They want to keep us powerless to sell us the next product. That's vampirism.
 
The 1992 workshop in Taos culminates with students performing our first soul retrieval on each other. I think about cosmetology school, and when the day comes to give each other that first perm or dye job. Everyone glances furtively around the room hoping to get paired with this person, and please God not with that one.
 
I sit with sullen Kaye, who has not spoken a word all week. I drum and tentatively sing my new healing song that I learned by laying in an icy stream for the twenty-five minutes the day before.  I enter the other world with an animal guide close by, directing me.
 
After some difficulty swimming through a thick darkness, I come upon a six-year-old girl in a nightgown, squatting behind a rock, frightened. I ask her if she belongs to Kaye, and would she like to come back to the world where Kaye is waiting to welcome her. She shakes her head “no” and points behind me. I see a tall man with shiny greased-back black hair dressed in a military uniform with many shiny medals pinned on. He stands erect and menacing. I realize that he is guarding her, and will not let me bring her back. I have no idea what to do.
 
So I offer him some food from a bag attached to my belt. He eats it and perks up a little. I ask him if he needs help. He says “yes,” a little in disbelief. We swim together through thick darkness — my crystal lighting the way. We eventually come across a man who looks just like the uniformed man, but with a wild, desperate look. I don’t want to get too close, but I point the uniformed man to him. He goes to — himself, I suppose — and the two men, now somehow one man, vanish into the darkness. I swim back to the girl. She wraps her arms around me, and I am overcome with what will become a marker for me in all of my healing and prayer work: a deep feeling of grief released, of great sadness and weight lifted, a cleansing, like in that icy stream, and replaced by a light and joyous springtime breeze. Now, nearly every time I create a ceremonial space, this feeling sweeps over me, and that is when I know things are moving correctly. The girl and I swim back to Kaye. I complete the ceremony in the way we were instructed — by blowing the soul into the top of Kaye’s head, and then into her back.
 
I describe to Kaye the story of my journey into the other world. She is astounded and slowly tells me that her father was a tall, jet-black-haired ex-marine. She was terrified of him, because he wasn’t all quite “there.” Was it possible that I accomplished the freeing of Kaye's soul piece by performing a soul retrieval on her dead father? My mind spins.
 
When I came back from Taos, I perform about a dozen soul retrievals for people because we are supposed to practice. I don't feel right charging money for this work — an issue that is heavy with vitriol for many people until they decide to get over it. But I ask people to pay me in food and I end up with twelve roasted chickens. People always seem to connect shamanism payment with chickens.
 
After a dozen clients, I quit retrieving souls. Something about this work — about me doing this work — did not seem right. Was I afraid of claiming the role and responsibilities of a soul-retrieving urban shamanist? Did I feel it just was not right for someone trained for a week to be dabbling with other people’s missing souls? Did I believe that I did not have the personal strength, wisdom or power to deal with this powerful work? Did I not believe in any of this new-age crap? Was I afraid that some malevolent soul-eating force would grab hold of me, and that I would become a dead-eyed, stumbling, freak, babbling in the dark corner of the state asylum, the bloody tail of a freshly chewed rat hanging from my cracked lips? Did I believe that being trained in weekend workshops and occasional seven-day retreats made me a suburban shamanic dilettante, a well-intentioned new-age idiot?  Did I believe that struggling with one’s power and how to use it is the core of the shamanic spiritual path — indeed of all paths? Did I believe that struggling against your call happens to every religious person who has ever lived? Did I believe I was called to do this work? Was I afraid of it? Yes. Yes to all.
 
Twelve years pass. I live life, get married, work jobs, and keep studying shamanism. I watch in dizzy, blissful, wondrous horror as my first child comes wriggling squinch-faced out of the cosmos of my wife’s body and into this world. That is still the most terrifying beauty I have ever witnessed, and if you ever need an antidote to male arrogance, merely attend a birth. I establish twice-monthly drumming and ceremonial circles and they thrive. But no soul retrievals. Until one evening Melinda from the drum group asks me if I know anything about this thing called soul retrieval. I swear I open my mouth and say "no," but for some mysterious reason it comes out "yes."
 
A week before Melinda’s ceremony, I had a flash-thought: I had quit soul retrieving because I needed to become a father before I understood life well enough to do this kind of work. Having children — the frustrations, the worries, the duty, the grief-laden weight, the devastating, unearthly love that comes with fatherhood — gave me a bond with the life force that, before then, was rather abstract. I look back before I had children, and what I was afraid of and what I thought I had sacrificed, and what brought me to my knees in wonder and joy, and honestly, it all seems a bit thin, like the difference between seeing a picture of the icy stream and laying down in it for twenty-five minutes until you begin to sing.
 
One of my teachers says we can only learn shamanism through wakan experiences – by coming into direct contact with Holy forces that show you unequivocally how simultaneously small and immense you are. Reading is valuable, and taking classes with teachers is important, but only being opened by the Holy can teach you, only relationship with Spirit can teach you how to work with Spirit, including how to do soul retrieval. Sometimes that opening is ecstatic, and often it is full of fear, grief, pain and confusion.
 
My last task before driving to Melinda’s ceremony is to drop my son off at his grandma's house. As I walk with him along the back sidewalk to the car, I suddenly see an astonishing sight — a white-tail deer standing in the alley, looking at me through the wire gate. This is not a miracle. We live one block up from a creek that runs for miles through the center of the city, it is certainly plausible that a deer would make its way along that creek from some of the wilder areas fifteen miles in either direction, over the highways and rush hour streets and yards, and up our alley, to stop at the wire gate and gaze at me. This is not a miracle (is it?). But I have lived in this house for ten years, and have never before that moment seen a deer in our neighborhood, even while walking along the creek.
 
I turn to my son and stammer: “Deer! Deer! ” My son turns around to see, but it is gone. I dash to the alley, look in both directions. There! A flash of white tail vanishing around the side of the neighbor’s arbor vitae tree. It has gone between two houses to the next block over. We race between the houses and burst onto the front yard on the next block. No deer anywhere. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was a — dare I say it? — a vision. Maybe I’m merely insane. Then a tiny red car appears out of nowhere, and sputters to a stop in front of me. The window rolls down. An old woman with the most gnarled nose I've ever seen, whose frizzy hair seems to fill the entire front seat of her clown car leans out the window, looks deep into my eyes and asks in a sandpaper voice: “Did you see the deer? Did you see it?” It's not a question. It's a test. I'm dizzy.  Is this woman real, or a spirit?
 
Yes, I say, carefully, I saw it. She smiles. “Fukkin’ unbelievable. In the middle of the city. A fukkin’ deer. Bless the everlastin' soul!” She cackles, the window rolls up, and the tiny red car squeals away. My son and I go back home, him complaining bitterly that I’m trying to trick him because he never saw a deer. To this day he claims I made it up.
 
Big Steve, my old friend, the committed rationalist, says it’s just one of those meaningless experiences that my human mind, because it has developed over eons some evolutionary advantage of drawing meaning out of random flukes, has manufactured into a validating, so-called "spiritual" experience.
 
I don’t want to describe exactly what happened in Melinda’s soul retrieval ceremony. But one element fills me with wonder. When I brought back the piece of soul that was missing, I got a distinct feeling that it was not the only thing that needed to come back. I looked around in the other world, and saw a timber wolf wanting to come along. After asking it and considering it for a while, I invited it to come back as a protecting spirit for Melinda. A few days later, she told me a string of odd coincidences: for years she had carried a picture of a howling wolf in her wallet. She had forgotten about it until I mentioned the timber wolf at the ceremony. She had also forgotten that she had a little ceramic figure of a wolf on her home altar. Her partner, Frank, had, given it to her long ago. The next morning after the ceremony, she received in the mail a solicitation to adopt a wolf for Defenders of Wildlife.
 
Coincidences.
 
Melinda wanted a soul retrieval ceremony because she felt that this would break a stagnating barrier that seemed to be holding her in place in life since childhood. A few months after the ceremony she called to tell me she was pregnant. Years later I performed her wedding with Frank as their two children looked on.

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Writing this now, after moving into full time shamanic work for the last several years, I have this to say:
 
I do soul retrievals all the time now in my practice, and they hardly ever look or feel like they did in my week-long training. For example, I don’t use a crystal to light the way in the otherworld. I still think that’s cool, and I suppose I could use it, but I just don't seem to need it. Also, that healing song, given to me by that icy stream, has been with me now for all these years and has never ceased to be powerful and effective. I have many more songs now, but that one will always be special to me. 

Because soul retrieval is such an evocative term, and because we live in the "Web MD" internet world where everyone can self-diagnose, I find that many people contact me saying, "I need a soul retrieval." As I said above, probably everyone in America can benefit from soul retrieval, and there is no doubt that soul retrieval works, in different ways for different people. However, In my work, soul retrieval often accompanies other healing work which must be done first. Doing a soul retrieval without the other healing work is a little like planting a new tree in garden without ammending the soil. You want the soul part to come back into good land, healthy land, so that it wants to stay and thrive. I also find that soul parts come back spontaneously when I'm doing other healing work on people, so soul retrieval itself may not need to be so utterly dramatic. 
 
All ceremony – including soul retrieval – is about the resuscitation of beauty. We live in a culture that doesn’t understand beauty, and is afraid of beauty. Beauty is manifested spiritual power; it is the breath of the divine, almost but not quite made physical and palpable. All shamans are in the business of the resuscitation or nourishment of beauty.
 
In our culture, we confuse money with beauty, and status with beauty, and dominance with beauty, and this has caused immense damage to our souls, and when the soul is damaged, we cause damage to our lives and to the world. Institutional religion confuses beauty with obedience. We feel how this poisons us, but often cannot articulate it for years, decades.
 
Beauty, by its nature, refuses to be tamed by humans. Beauty comes not to obey our small ways, but to shatter the smallness that has been imprinted on us in so many ways. Beauty is a spiritual power, the breath of the Holy, and it does not arise from the senses or the intellect, but comes from beyond both. Beauty is what transforms us, what bends reality anew, what calls the soul back, for the soul does not wish to return to a body devoid of beauty.
 
So, let us be about this business of resuscitating beauty, in ourselves, in others who ask us to, in the world in which we live. It is a task made huge by our many generations of communal soul loss, so let us be about the task with patience and fortitude.


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Jaime Meyer is a shamanic practitioner living in Minneapolis. He has Masters' Degree in Theology and the Arts from United Seminary of the Twin Cities, and is shamanic studies include working with the Shipibo people in Peru, the Power Path, Tom Cowan,  Ailo Gaup, Martin Prechtel and Sandra Ingerman, among others. He is the president of board of directors of the international Society for Shamanic Practice. His book Drumming The Soul Awake is an often funny and touching account of his journey to become an urban shamanic practitioner. His web site is www.drummingthesoulawake.com

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