It's said that the difference between pleasure and happiness is that pleasure is momentary and comes from external sources, whereas happiness is long-term, and rises from a deep well inside us, and that well is fed by waters that flow from beyond the human-created world.

We live in a culture that fuels itself on selling ever-changing forms of pleasure to a populace that has forgotten how to be happy. We are promised a pleasure that will momentarily quell the current fear (sometimes by replacing it with a new fear, or with a new rage - yes, rage, which is blame's less nuanced brother, can be a form of addictive pleasure, as we see all around us).

We create pleasures to expel the current fear, and we create ever-new forms of fear that evaporate the current pleasure. So, fear and pleasure are inextricably linked, and they need each other. Both are momentary energies sourced from the external, and both are addictive. An economy that is fueled by addiction to fear and pleasure doesn't actually want the populace to be happy.

The pleasures and fears don't just magically appear; we make them all, we "manifest" them, to use the popular term. On we go, on our self-created merry-go-round of miasma and ennui.

Even in our spiritual seeking, we often lurch between the two: seeking some new spiritual thrill that soon wears off, and underneath, always afraid that we will never truly "connect with spirit." The spiritual marketplace eagerly offers up products and items to keep you bouncing and spinning. But you know in the bones inside your bones that bouncing between fear and pleasure is not your truest life, and that seeking Spirit from fear of cosmic unworthiness or from desire to be thrilled bigly is not going to work.
​
One of my teachers is fond of the phrase, "I am in my knowing." This is one of those simple phrases that, if used regularly, can help unbutton the daily costume woven from fear and pleasure. This is ridiculously simple, and the part of you that refuses to exit the addictive culture will scoff at this: sit quietly every morning before you begin your daily grind, and every evening before you go to bed, for 30 days, and work with the phrase, "I am in my knowing." Say it to yourself quietly. Ask yourself what you mean when you say those words. Wrestle with what comes up. See what happens to you.

We live in a universe in which everything must eat something else. Everything has to eat, everything has to digest. Everything has to defecate.
 
Both science and shamanism affirm that, fundamentally, everything is energy. So, as humans, we eat dense energy like, say, broccoli, and Nutella. And we eat less dense energy that is available to us, like, say, envy, and beauty.
 
Science speaks of the Big Bang as a colossal event that happened at some point backwards on a timeline. Science also speaks of the echo of the Big Bang that is still present, as background radiation, that can be measured now. The Big Bang is still being digested. Shamanism looks at past lives and ancestral energies in a similar way: as human beings, we continue to digest, in present time, the energies of the past that echo into our present.
 
Right now our species is digesting a tremendous amount of old energy - from our own current lives, from past lives and from ancestors' lives - all at the same time. These are all what I'll call "horizontal" energies. Ancestral and past life energies can be seen as horizontally entering our backbone from a distance behind us. The anxiety, fear, anger and grief of daily life can be seen as horizontally entering us from the front and sides.
 
The reason why life is so intense right now is that we've reached a major point of our species' evolution where these things must be digested in order for us to jump up and live in the next form. Spirit has tossed open the energy center where these old energies have been stored undigested for a long time, and they are all now rushing out. Well, no wonder you're exhausted; no wonder your stomach hurts, and your bowels are funkified.
 
We spend almost all of our time trying to control or re-shape these horizontal energies. Complaining and lamenting are small prayers pleading with some power, somewhere, to take control and change things. Judging, pontificating, and predicting are our egos' way of claiming to have some control over things. We spend great energy on social media, sending out energetic pulses of our fear and arrogance into the horizontal world, trying to take control of something that we will never control. We are simply too small. We re only little human beings. The only force that can control  the whirlwind we are in is Spirit. Social media is a great boomerang. Whatever you send out will fly horizontally, collect more of the same energy, and bring it right back to you to eat – more of the same to digest! 
 
So, some will navigate these daily energies by spending energy on lamenting or pontificating. Some will go into hiding in one way or another. Some will turn to various forms of violence. Some will die – they will step back into the echo, to wait things out.
 
If you want to navigate in another way, it requires having spiritual practices that balance the obsession with the horizontal dimension with practices that activate the vertical dimension available to you. The vertical dimension reaches both upwards and downwards, and you may, if you wish, call them the Great Father (or "great immensity" if you have that lingering mistrust of the Masculine than pervades our world) and Great Mother (or, maybe "the great composter of all.").
 
Here is a simple practice that springs from my shamanic training.

• Close your eyes, take a few breaths, and visualize the image I've offered: The echo-energies from past lives and ancestors flowing from a line into your back. (We most often judge this energy as "bad" – the bad karma of past lives and illness of ancestors. But remember that this line also pours the wisdom and strength from past lives and ancestors into your backbone.)
• And then visualize the other horizontal energies of this world – the vitriol, anger, confusion, helplessness, and grief that whirl around you, and that you also send out. This is a picture of what is already happening to each of us. There is also wisdom and strength pouring in from this horizontal world. 
•  Then, visualize the vertical dimension opening, both upward to the great immensity and downward into the great composter. You may see it as a line of energy coming form infinity, down through your head, body, feet, and into the earth.  
• Visualize the ancestral and past life energies pouring into you. The wisdom and strength can stay in your body. The toxic or useless energies flow down through your feet and deep into the compost. 
• Do the same with the horizontal energies of daily life. All forms of fear go down, into the earth-compost, to be gleefully welcomed by the Great Mother, who is so happy to eat and digest this. Why is she happy to receive it? Because it gives her fuel out of which she makes new life.
• Do this part of the exercise for as long as it takes, sending this energy deeply into the earth.

 
When you feel ready, place your attention in the upward direction.

• Give up any desire to control the world and anyone in it. Hand that desire over to the Spirit, the Singer of New Songs, the Immensity, the Quantum Field. Say the words outload:  "Spirit, I give you my desire to control the world, and all the ways I act out that desire. Please take this desire from me." It is the desire to control that generates the fear, confusion, frustration, anger, violence and exhaustion. 
• Ask the Great Father to download new vision, new love, new compassion, new stories into you.
• (You can work with the Great Mother to do this also, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm describing in this way. And in truth, if you resist working with the Great Father out of old pain with men or the patriarchy, this is something to ask to be digested as well. )
• When you feel done with this, visualize yourself inside a radiant cerulean blue octahedron (an eight sided pyramid) which becomes a protective energy field.
• Fill that space with three powerful energies: love, awe and gratitude. Call these energies in, one by one. Visualize them filling this space that surrounds you. They empower the three lines that feed into and out of the human being: the horizontal line from back to front, the horizontal line from side to side, and the vertical line from below to above. Send love, awe and gratitude as energy in each of these directions to feed the world you are standing in.  

 
I hope this practice helps you navigate the world with more strength and less fear.
 
For a deeper dive into the Octahedron, check out this piece by Jose Stevens.
For a deeper exploration of how humans waste energy, check out this brief video by the great Buddhist teacher, Alan Watts.
For an insightful dive into how to move beyond "redemptive violence," check out this piece by Charles Eisenstein.
 
 

We are living together in a time where blame has replaced energy drinks as our daily vitality drink. In New Age terminology, blame is an energy field, like love, confidence, compassion, anger, envy, and hundreds of other fields. For shamans, "energy field" can be replaced by "spirit." Blame is a spirit, one that comes to you, testing to to see if there is an opening in your protective field that it can get through in order to eat your energy.
​
The most common marker of bad spirits is their seductiveness. They tell you that you are the smart one, the good one, the spiritual one, the special one. They intoxicate you with self-inflation and they convince you that your fear is actually a form of clear vision that others don't possess. (They also intoxicate you with negative ideas, but I won't go into that here.)

In my first ayahuasca ceremony in the jungle a few years ago, a few moments after taking the medicine, a nice spirit appeared to me telling me how gifted and wonderful I was, and how I should get up right now, before the medicine came on fully, and take a walk in the jungle with it. I luckily declined and the next day one of the shamans told me that was a common jungle spirit that likes to lead people away to eat them. A bad spirit's only real goal is to eat your energy. Most bad spirits don't show up so clearly. They come as ideas, as emotions. But they work the same way: you're very special, come with me.
​
There are many antidotes to blame. Compassion is a primary one, and also humor, and curiosity. You can ask these energies to come and help you navigate. Asking the powers of creation to raise your perspective out of the immediate short term, and to a larger overview of things helps, and maybe the most powerful one is the advice to "stay in your own lane." By the way, all of these energies also boost your psychic protection. Life is always dangerous in one way or another. Life is always bigger than we can see or understand. People are always more complex and multi-faceted than we may want to believe they are. It is up to each of us to navigate our fears so that we can invite in the energy fields of beauty, love, awe and gratitude. Not everyone navigates their fears the same exact way. If you spend a great amount of time and conversation in blame and also feel exhausted, there may be a connection.

On the Celtic medicine wheel, the direction west is now opening. The land is still bright with summer, but the first of the fall harvest is coming in, and while harvest means bounty and satiation, it also signals the death of the growing season, and the full entrance into the dark half of the year.
 
If there is a single image or idea of the mythic direction west, it may be "dissolution." Everything that comes into form eventually lets go of that form. The tree lets go of its fruit that it has made, then its leaves, and, eventually, its whole self. The body lets go of the soul it has carried (or the soul lets go of the body it has used).  The Mother Earth, who holds every possibility of life on this planet deep in her womb, brings entire species and epochs into form, and eventually takes all of them back into herself, to be reformed into new forms. 

Everything on this earth enters life through the portal of the east, travels west and vanishes over the western horizon to…no one knows. (Plenty of people say they know. But in truth, no one knows.) So, for me, the west brings us into a palpable presence with The Soul more than any other direction.
 
Where goes the sun at dusk?
Where goes the harp's last note?
Where go I when the dark wind blows
To the land beyond?
To the land beyond?

There is a common theme in New Age theology that each of us is an eternal spark of Spirit on a journey through life, learning lessons through self-induced suffering, and clearing the self-induced suffering from previous lives. I go along with this idea, but there is a subtle bias in this that life is about clearing crap and creating new crap to clear later. This comes (unconsciously) close to the common western/Christian notion that the world is mostly an unlikeable place and mostly about suffering.
 
So, I want to urge you to not forget the other aspect of the west: that we also come here to make our soul stronger and healthier, and we actually succeed at that in each life – sometimes a little, sometimes a great deal. With each lifetime, we harvest something. We too easily focus on the west as the One Who Comes to Cleanse the Shit, (certainly an awesome ally!) but a powerful thing you can do for yourself is to spend time recognizing, acknowledging and blessing your gifts, abilities, skills, and the wisdom you've garnered from this life so far. Celebrate your powers, feast on your own harvest. This is a very important part of your healing. An easy way to do this is to simply make a list of 20 things you like about yourself, are naturally good at, have learned to get good at, and have been helpful to the world. These are soul powers that you have made this time around. 

John Keats—the 19th century English romantic poet who died young, ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know") once said in a letter to a friend, "Call the world, if you please, "the Vale (valley) of Soul Making. Then you will find out the use of the world...." We come here to make our souls.
 
Keats, like many today, saw life as a school for the soul. He saw the school as having two rooms. The first room is a mostly stagnant and empty place, and many people remain their whole lives there, unaware that the doorway to the second room is wide open. In New Age terminology, call this first room, if you please, the vale of younger souls, ones with fewer lifetimes under their belt, who are still getting their feet wet in the embodied life, and want mostly to be told how to behave correctly and be successful in the culture. There is a lot of unconscious struggle and confusion in this room, a lot of un-worked ancestral burdens, and a lot of blaming others when things are painful.
 
In Celtic shamanism, there is an old practice of working with the "Three Cauldrons of the Soul," and perhaps Keats was channeling these old Celtic ideas. His first room is very much like the Cauldron of Goiriath (raw, directionless life force acting in the world). This cauldron is located in our belly.
 
For Keats, many people eventually advance into the second room, which is an intoxicating place of delights and also of pain. (We can be just as intoxicated by our pain as by delight, as social media amply demonstrates.) Wrestling with the energies of sorrow and joy sharpen our vision of life and the wrestling that goes on in this second room produces building material to make more Soul. 
 
This second room of Soul School may be the room of more "mature souls" – ones who've been in a body many times and are, as Keats said, "learning to read the world by using the alphabet of the heart." They are aware of the spiritual work that must be done, they commit themselves to it, and they often find themselves in spiritual and emotional turmoil. The work is so big, painstaking, unending and exhausting. They often feel ill equipped and confused, and sometimes fall into a sense of futility. They strive to be compassionate, fail, and try again. They often feel they don’t have the wisdom, power or skill to navigate this immense spiritual work that must be done.
 
This global spiritual transformation that so many of us see happening right now can be seen as "second room Advanced Placement study," and one reason things are so emotionally intense is that more and more people around the world have stepped into the second room, to study the alphabet of the heart. The tragedies and pressures we feel nowadays are second-room work, producing more building material for the soul of the species. It's hard work, as you well know, and it's worth considering that Spirt is offerring us ample "second room" homework in order to help us build soul. It's worth considering that Mother Earth is offerring us advanced second room homework to help her decide if we stay around or get folded back into the magma.
 
In Celtic Shamanism the second room could be the Cauldron of Ernmae (concentrated heart-action in the world). It is located at the heart center, and remarkably, the ancient text says that this cauldron is activated and made more powerful by certain, specific kinds of sorrows and joys.
 
Now we get to the place of great hope, help, and power. Keats said that the second room has a door that leads to innumerable third rooms. This reminds me of Jesus saying, "my Father’s house has many rooms," or the Hindu God Krishna saying that there as many heavens as there are beliefs about heaven. The uncountable third rooms can be seen as the Cauldron of Sois (Spirit-knowledge) in Celtic shamanism. This is the channel through which Spirit pours higher wisdom, awareness, and inspiration into us. That power is known in Irish as Imbas (the "Fire in the Head") or in Welsh as Awen (essence or poetic inspiration).
 
For those in the second room, bouncing frantically between the several kinds of sorrow and joy, trying to do spiritual work, and wondering if they will ever truly connect to Spirit, there is this hopeful tidbit: It is the painstaking work with sorrow and joy in the heart cauldron that activates the flow from the Cauldron of Wisdom - from the upper room. When we do our heart-work, it sends a beacon to the gods that we are ready for that flow of Imbas to be turned on. So, dear wrestler with the heart, your struggle has a bigger purpose, and this lifetime may be the one where you are activating bigger powers on your multi-body journey. 
 
If you are wrestling with sorrow and joy in the heart center, here is a incredibly simple practice in two steps.
 
Step one: simply acknowledge and imagine that there is a doorway from the room of sorrow/joy that leads to innumerable third rooms. Summon this image, and imagine moving to that doorway. Turn around and look back into the "second" room. Ah! It's just one room in the Soul Schoolhouse. There sure is a lot of wind whipping stuff all around in this room, but it is just one room. As simplistic as this sounds, this visualization can be helpful.
 
Step two: Imagine the cauldron of wisdom floating about six inches above your head. As Krishna night say, however this cauldron looks to you is right. It doesn’t even have to be a cauldron – it can be a ball of light, a flower, whatever you see. But using the cauldron image, what might the brew, simmering in that cauldron look like? A brew cooked by Eternal Wisdom itself, by the Great Spirit. Take a moment to imagine that brew. Then turn your attention on your heart center, where that sorrow/joy in the cauldron of the heart is being cooked. What does that cauldron look like, and what does the brew look like? Then, ask the cauldron of wisdom to tip slightly and pour a few drops of Awen down into the cauldron of sorrow/joy. What happens? This simple visualization can be an ongoing (Celtic shamanic) practice. If you like the shamanic journey technique, this can be a powerful journey.
 
I leave you with my very loose adaptation (some might call it a bastardization) of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
 
Sometimes a woman puts down the hammer
And stops smashing at the great boulder in the living room.
She walks outdoors. She begins singing. And keeps singing, wandering away
because somewhere there is a church whose doors are flung open only by song.
 
Her children say blessings on her as though she has died.
 
And another person remains inside her house,
And dies there, among the shards of rock.
And her children must sell the house
And move out into the dusky world.
Some of them use the inheritance to buy a house
with a boulder in the living room.
Others look for a new church.
And maybe they learn to sing. 

​During my morning prayer today, I had one of those simple, but profound, experiences – it came as a voice, actually from above, saying. "God never punishes you. God never punishes you. God never, never punishes you. Your spirit guides never punish you. Mother earth never punishes you." I looked up to see half a dozen swallows circling above me, diving and darting back and forth, chirping and gurgling, as if to hammer the message into me. I'll come back around to this in a moment.

I'm a theologian by academic training, and I'm absolutely fascinated – okay, annoyingly obsessed – with what I see as a theological poison in the heart of western religion. That poison is the idea that God judges and punishes us for what the churchmen call transgressions, but the rest of us call human mistakes. The unresolvable clash between the "God of pure love and forgiveness" and the "smiting God" has created a whole culture that fears and mistrusts the creator of the universe, which spends a great deal of life energy addicted to proving themselves worthy in the eyes of God and others as unworthy. God kicked us out of paradise for using the free will he gave us, now we are born sick with original sin, and our soul falls from grace into a corrupt and disobedient body in a world run by the devil. God loves you unconditionally, except for all those conditions. Why would a loving God send us into such a world?

Capitalism sprang from this poisonous theology – an economy of winners and losers, saved and damned, where the "invisible hand" decides who climbs the ladder to heaven to drink champagne with the other worthies, and who falls into poverty hell with the other lazies.

Whether you grew up religious or not, being born into western culture means having this religious trauma of cosmic unworthiness embedded in you on the energetic level. It's no wonder people are leaving churches, and the young are not knocking on churches' doors, even though the 11 AM service has electric guitars and fog machines. It's no wonder that so many people no longer want to work in the "worthiness factories" offered to them by the capitalist culture.
 
I believe that westerners are attracted to indigenous traditions because they see in them a wildly different theological paradigm about worthiness. The Holy Ones, the Great Spirit, the ancestors, the spirits of nature, our spirit guides – none of them see us as unworthy, as fallen. They want us to be in this world, they helped prepare us for this world, they want us to blossom as true human beings in this world; our soul loves being here, in this body, among all of this vast, awesome creation.
 
Dr. Gábor Máté is a recognized expert in trauma and its effects on the body and psyche. He says that trauma (and I'm including religious trauma) disconnects us from our true self. Addictions and other self-destructive compulsions are the expression of that disconnection. He says the very core of all of our human work is about healing the disconnection we have with our own self. The True Self has no absolutely no sense of unworthiness; we have to be convinced of our unworthiness, by people who fear their own unworthiness. Our task is always, in the end, to come into our own sure sense of worthiness.
 
Worthiness is a feeling, not an intellectual construct. You cannot ultimately heal unworthiness through mental work or language alone. This is why affirmations only go so far, why sermons about unworthiness drop like lead weight in the ears, and frankly it's why therapy is fantastically helpful, but 95% of my clients say the same phrase: "But there's something therapy doesn’t…quite reach." And you cannot heal unworthiness through actions alone - changing laws will do a lot, but won't heal us. Unworthiness can only be healed in the heart center, blossoming out into the intellectual centers and physical (action) centers. All true spiritual practices bring you into felt sense of fundamental worthiness.
 
Back to my morning experience: Spirit never punishes you. That voice went on to say: "Only humans punish. They punish themselves and they punish each other. They can waste whole lives on punishing. Spirit, your spirit guides – they will allow you to enter into the energy field of punishment if you insist, because apparently that is the well of experience you want to drink from. When you are ready to learn in another way, Spirit will be there to assist you in finding a new road."
​
If you want to be part of a huge revolution, there is a ridiculously simple thing you can do. It's so simple, it sounds like total woo-hoo, unicorn-fart fantasy, one that could not possibly work in this terrible world. It's this: Practice seeing every human being – including yourself - as an embodiment of the divine, as filled with God's breath, as a drop of the sacred ocean held inside an animal wineskin in order to explore this beautiful world. If you practice this while driving, while in line at the store, while in conflict with someone, if you practice it when you're judging someone, practice it on someone you utterly despise – it can transform the world, and create a new one – and this is what the Creator does. 

So, we step into the most sensual time on the Wheel of the Year: In the Celtic tradition, the first of May opens the summer, and the direction South on the great wheel. This is the direction of the full exuberance of creation, joy, music, dancing, feasting, and lovemaking. The world is filled with the delight of Creation - the verdant hills, the radiant flowers, the fruits being infused with ripeness. The warm breezes set the hairs on our skin dancing.

According to my Mayan teacher, those bursts of summer light dancing on the rippling waves on the lakes are the sighs of pleasure made by the Old Woman (earth) as the Old Man (sun) kisses her all summer long.  I imagine his wooing words to her:

Now, Love, at last I come
In warm fullness rising over you.
Let there be trembling in the soft hills
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be glimmering of sweet dew
At the caress of my breath
And gleaming in the estuaries.
Let the hundred winged ones burst free
from your greening branches
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars and
over the newborn land
Your aching song of Yes.
​

I like thinking about the Great Spirit as The Divine Vulva: sensitive, pulsing, receptive, hungry, secret, dark, pleasure-seeking, life-birthing, private, pink and shiny with expectation and possibility. It is the South that teaches us to think this way. The cosmic exploration of the Divine Vulva is different from Spirit as a giant Plato murmuring, "know thyself."

My seminary professors taught me, as Plato taught: an unexamined life is not worth living. My shamanic teachers teach me, as the Divine Vulva does: an unlived life is not worth examining.
​
So I send you this day the blessings of the South: May the love of life carry you through the harsh waves of confusion, sorrow and anger. May the emerging chartreuse leaves and fragrant blossoms fill you with the medicine of new joy, for new life, for a new story to live by in a new world. May the South help you summon love for this world, and joy for yourself in it, because joy raises your vibration, and that opens your vision, and that gives you a direction for your actions, and that changes the world.  ​

​There is a daunting idea in shamanism that I have not found articulated as clearly in other spiritual paths. It is the idea that we are always being pursued by Power. Not just pursued: stalked and hunted by Power.

In other spiritual systems, this idea of being pursued by power is expressed far more pleasantly, for example as "God's yearning for communion with us," or as our long journey toward reunion with the divine. I like the sweetness of that language, but I frankly don’t find it that useful on a moment-to-moment basis. I'm glad that we are all heading toward an ultimate reunion, I'm thrilled that we are going through a paradigm shift, a species-wide initiation. But I have problems I have to deal with right now, and I need help.

In shamanic cosmology, the universe is made of power, interacting in a trillion trillion ways, and 99.9999% of those ways are incomprehensible to humans. (Actually physics sees things the same way.) Power takes many forms, many frequencies and shapes. A stink bug is a coagulation of Power, as is Mt. Everest, a palm tree, a virus, and you.
In shamanism, the task of daily life is to become visible or attractive to the Powers that will help you survive and thrive, and help you learn to become a true human being. Our other task is to make ourselves invisible or unattractive to the lower powers that want to kill you or take up residence in you and eat your life energy, without offering you any teaching in how to become a true human.

Every indigenous-trained teacher I've studied with has used the phrase "build your power" in one way or another. A few years ago, an Andean teacher in Cusco Peru, upon our first meeting, took one look at me and said, "You are weak. You need to build power." It was an unpleasant shock to hear it like that, but he was right and he taught me a lot over a short time. Each of us can, and needs to, build our power.

Fear in all its forms (envy, greed, arrogance, self-deprecation, martyrdom, fear of joy, fear of love, fear of life) is what makes you visible and delicious to lower energies which are pursuing you in order to eat your energy. An old fear that’s been with you a long time is evidence that lower energies have taken up residence in you and are eating your energy, and need to be cleared. Therapy can do a lot of this, but healing ceremonies are intended to complete the work that therapy doesn't reach.

One bit of good news is that the Holy Ones (the ancient ancestral spirits of life who prepared us to enter the physical world) are also, in their own way, pursuing us constantly - with protection, advice, and wisdom. They teach us how to make ourselves visible to the greater powers of love, gratitude, forgiveness and joy, and these energies help us become true humans. The ancient Holy Ones are always on our side and cheering for us whenever we overcome the next fear.

The other bit of good news is that Power in even larger forms than the Holy Ones is also pursuing you at each moment, offering you opportunity after opportunity to learn how to be a true human who is inhabited by energies of peace, joy, and forgiveness.

All of this imagery is important and helpful to me because it's how I sense our current times. Tremendous powers are being released in so many ways into the world. Old, unattended to wounds and fears are being released from humans into the general web of energy. We are swimming in these lower energies that want to predate on us. And those powers are being released because a Great Power has stepped forward to work with us, and is clearing out many of those old energies that have been living in people like intestinal worms being passed down through the generations. I had a dream about this Great Power a few nights ago, and it's truly beyond words (or at last beyond my words). That Great Power has also been pursuing us in order to help us open our new vision.
So, we are all living together through a giant electrical storm and all of our hairs are standing on end.

Four years ago, my current teacher said, "We are entering a time where anyone without a spiritual practice to anchor them will get swept away by what's coming." In my view, being "swept away" comes in the form of conspiracy theories, anxiety, blind rage and blind fear, blame, and revenge. There is a great deal of encouragement right now for us to step into all of these – to invite these energies into us to live and eat. We are told that we show our commitment to the cause and our passion, and our deep love of life, by inviting in rage and revenge. But these are predatory powers and they don’t teach us to be true humans; these predators are masters of illusion, deception and enchantment, so they are very good at tempting us to let them in to eat.

We build our power in two ways: by attending to our energy leaks, which are always attached to a fear, and by learning how to call in and work with the Greater Power. If we are to be of service to our own life, to the lives of others, to the descendants, and to the web of life, it's incumbent upon us to anchor ourselves, and that anchor is made of us building our power through a practice that makes us visible to the powers of awe and vision, and less visible to fear in all its forms. 

​You humans have been taught to confuse belief and faith. Belief is a set of ideas that hardens into a shell. You call that shell "my faith," and defend it with your very life. The most devout people believe real faith must be impenetrable and unmovable, and they believe their own immovability is what defines them as faithful. Belief is made of stubbornness. The professional shell polishers see enemies everywhere bent on cracking the shell. They enlist soldiers with the promise of medals. 
 
But faith is made of wonder, which is expansive, extravagant, exuberant, grandiose possibility. Wonder is the very substance of creation, and the the first element. Wonder spreads between all things and connects all things. Wonder wears down and breaks open all shells. When the shell of your body finally opens, it is wonder that will carry you out of this shape,

Belief shrinks and excludes, as a cup can only hold a certain amount of liquid. Wonder flows in and out of all cups.  All arguments – between people, groups, and even between the voices inside you - are made of this: someone's shell is having pressure exerted on it by wonder. Belief has one motto: never surrender the shell.
 
Wonder comes like water wearing down stones, like wind wearing down mountains, like love wearing away fear. The devout run frantically from shell-crack to shell-crack slapping fresh mortar in, cursing the waters. Belief is glued together by fear. The more devoted you are to belief, the more life will need to crack you open to be fed by wonder.

We tell you: You’ve been taught to believe that life is random chance; that there’s little chance of life arising anywhere, including here. They tell you you are spinning on a lonely rock afloat in a lonely sea. Whether you take that story as a recipe for meaninglessness, or as a great blessing, or as polish for your arrogance, you’re living inside their shell of "the great mistake."
 
But their story doesn’t see the space between stars as alive, nor the space between people as song; nor silence as music. Their story doesn’t see the motion of the weaver's hands as a part of the weaving.
 
Once, a great teacher said, “Watch out for all those earth rocks, because each one is groaning to produce new life.” 

A flash of wonder comes to you, and you see yourself as the glint inside the dewdrop at dawn. But their old motto of random chance whispers: “You're just making that up.” Every morning you awake with a feeling that you’ve been somewhere else for a while. But their old motto says, "that's just a regurgitation of psychological flotsam.”  
 
And yet, every spring, the crocus blossoms appear, as they were always going to do. Every summer the lilies dance, as they were always going to do. Every fall, the apples emerge from the tree, as they were always going to do. And if there are no more apples, and if there are no more lilies or crocus, the rocks will groan with other life you cannot yet imagine, fed by the song of the sun that is inside the mother's molten earth womb. 
 
The earth wanted you here or you would not be here. The great weaver wanted you in the design or you would not be here. You wanted to be here or you wouldn't be here. You were always going to arrive here, to be sweetened by wonder. This earth was always going to be alive, and you were always going to join in the dance of life, as a glint inside the dew drop, a sound of water pouring over rocks, a heart beating with its warm drum song of praise. ​

Many traditions affirm that discomfort is our finest teacher. The ego wants a life of comfort, but this is not why we came into this world, in this body. The comfort the ego seeks is a thinner life lacking in wisdom, and wisdom is the flowering of the humility that arises when we make ourselves vulnerable to the Great Mystery. One of my teachers puts it bluntly: Spiritual power comes at a price, and that price is discomfort. This can be a hard lesson to grasp. This is not to say that we should seek discomfort to prove our worthiness or power – that's just another game of the ego. The focus is on learning to be a "true human" - on training our spirit self - not just on acquiring a string of painful experiences to boast about.
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The Dine' (Navajo) people tell about the two heroes who, in the beginning of time in this world, battled and killed many of the monsters left over from the previous world. But they left some of the monsters untouched because these monsters could become our teachers. Lice were left on earth because they teach us to wash ourselves and keep clean. Stupidity was left on earth because we learn best by making mistakes. The cold was left on earth because it teaches us how to survive, make life-affirming decisions, and take care of one another.

Cross-culturally we see stories of the wise beings battling the lower forces of chaos. In my Celtic tradition, it’s the battle between the People of the Earth Goddess Dana, and the misshapen, gluttonous creatures known as the Fomorians. The Fomorians are horrible beings, but they are also the power of fertility and knowledge of farming. In a sense, they are pure passion untempered by Spirit.

We can mistake these teachings of battle for glorifying war and celebrating patriarchy. But these battles take place inside us, as all religious traditions affirm. The indigenous teachers urge us to see the lower forces, and our battle with them, as our teachers on our road to becoming true humans, and the ones who train our true spirit to work in this world. This lens helps me greatly to evaporate my imagined martyrdom – that it's not fair that that life has discomfort, I shouldn't have to experience this, and someone is to blame for it (not me, of course.)

We need cold in the world to teach us endurance, how to be smart with our decisions, to focus on what's important, and to take care of each other. 

If you are in any building right now with heat, it's because, deep in the belly of the building is a little piece of the sun bringing life to you, creating a bubble of safety from the cold. To help us stay alive while while learning from the cold, the Great Sun placed a bit of itself in the belly of the Great Mother (scientists call this the molten core). The Mother delivers that energy to protect us in cold times. So, in cold weather, it's good to thank the Great Sun and the Mother Earth for the way they care for you, and ask the cold what it has to teach you about becoming a true human. (Seriously, I'm saying: make prayer of thanks to the spirit of the furnace. )

The great sun also placed a little bit of itself inside your body – in the upper right chamber of your four-chambered heart. Scientists call this the sinoatrial node. It is a tiny bundle of neurons that deliver a burst of energy about every second, which tells the heart to beat another beat. That energy comes from the other side of the doorway of the heart – the doorway to Spirit. So, inside your heart, about every second, there is day and night, summer and winter, the four seasons, waking and dreaming, and the four sacred directions, all teaching you every second. The cold time is a good time to ask Spirit to open that door and give you a good hint about what you need to learn next on this journey to becoming a true human.
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Dine' (Navajo) elder Wally Brown has a wonderful series of YouTube videos with jewels of wisdom. His story of the two heroes is here. The whole series can be seen here.