​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.
​
I hope some of these ideas are useful to you. 

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.

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.