The fever pitch of things is so high. Confusion, anger, and outrage are our daily companions. All authorities are liars with some hidden agenda. There seems to be no objective truth, nothing untainted by politics. Pessimism and depression are alluring responses. Under it all is oceanic grief: much of it unconscious, unfelt, and unacknowledged. I have a terror that if I allow myself to touch that grief, it will pull me down and I will be lost. I struggle with all of this, and plead constantly for some beam of light to hold onto. For me, that beam of light comes in the form of working with the spiritual powers of the Earth. What I love about the shamanic path (as I understand it) is that it offers ways to work, not just read and believe. There's much in my daily life that I cannot affect, but I can do my spiritual work and it generates results. Daily life in the body is messy. The spiritual life is messy. For me, the mess of spiritual work is fun. I want to offer few equinox suggestions that I hope can be of help.

• Be careful with your thoughts and words. This is old advice, but in our time it applies to social media. Remember that every social media platform is not concerned with offering you Truth, but with moving you into a small reality bubble that it can monetize. Every time you click, you are giving the algorithm permission to carry you deeper into a bubble. The algorithm has no soul, no glee, and it is not human. It just has a job to do: to carry you into a reality bubble that makes you attractive to a set of advertisers. Be extra careful right now with your shares and comments on Facebook or other platforms. When you feel that great need to obliterate that asshole with wit and facts, or to change someone's mind, ask yourself "Is there a better use for my energy?"
• Place your focus on doing small, doable real-world, positive tasks. Reading that book, fixing that small house project, doing a craft or art project, taking a class (see my class offer below) - do something that you can start, do and finish in a few weeks. Completion of doable tasks is part of the antidote to the ambient ennui of our times.
• Remember that the spirits of nature can help pull you out of the small bubble, and hold you in a larger one, which gives your entire self more room to breathe. Here is a short blessing song I made up this equinox morning that you can listen to, learn, sing, adapt, share. It's a simple icaro that translates as basically: Great sun, mother river, sacred earth, thank you for your wisdom, life, light, and help. The song song ends by asking Spirit to help us all.

I leave you with two poems about working with the spirit of the "shore" - that place between waking and sleeping, between the old and new, the place of equinox (balance of dark and light).

Mary Oliver:
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall --
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Juan Ramón Jiménez:
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

We are in the third night of the full moon tonight and I want to offer you a simple - difficult - prayer and you can do.
 
First, a few thoughts to chew on: We love the imagery of the moon shedding and refilling, because that is what happens from our point of view. We love asking the moon to help us "let go" and "release" and "welcome transformation." These are very helpful, powerful prayers.
 
But it's also good to remember that the moon is never dark or full, or waxing or waning – this is only our perspective of it, from here on the spinning earth, with the moon orbiting "backwards" around us.
 
In truth, she is always fully facing the sun. She always has her eyes fully on this source of light and life. There is this constant intimacy and devotion between the sun and moon. When we see the dark moon, that is a moment of pure intimacy between them that they don't share with us. It's like the parents shutting the bedroom door from the kids on a Saturday afternoon. 
 
At the full moon - especially that moment at sunset and sunrise these few days each month, when the sun and moon are both visible, and both shining in this eternal intimacy – this is like the parents dancing in the living room in full view of the kids, and inviting them to join in the frolic. 
 
So, the image of the moon shedding and refilling is very powerful and useful to us. And so is this idea that the moon knows it will always be going through its phases, because that is the nature of things. But she always keeps her trust and vision pointed toward that never-dimming, never doubting light. This is an image we can also bring into our own lives. In the dark times, when doubt, or anger, or confusion spreads across our face and our life, we can remember that the source of life on earth is still there, always shining, and we can do our best to keep our eyes on it, knowing that we too, will move through our current phase. 
 
It's good to pray under the full moon because she delivers such a sense of magic. So, make any prayer you want, fill them with pure vulnerability, and ask the moon for help.
 
I want to suggest two difficult prayers you can make. You can make these with the full moon tonight, but really they are good any time.
 
First, a prayer that in the biblical tradition is called "praying for your enemies:" Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you.This kind pf prayer is found in many spiritual traditions, and the reason is two-fold. First, making this kind of prayer is designed to release you- the one making the prayer. For any of us to make substantive change in our own life, or in the community or world, we need to act from a place of freedom from hatred. Obviously this is incredibly difficult. But all authentic spiritual work asks us to do hard things. Praying for your enemies involves asking Spirit to heal them of the wounds and energies that weigh them down, that twist their humanity and shrink their spirit. One caveat in making a prayer like this: be vigilant if any arrogance on your part creeps in. If you find yourself praying for your enemies to become a better, kinder, more loving person like you are, maybe double back around and ask Spirit to lift arrogance from you, and show you where you need to do more work.
 
Second: a prayer for optimism. Ask the Moon and Spirit to help open your optimism in this time that is so filled with gloom, discouragement, anger, and vitriol. We can simply not survive well without an optimistic goal to work toward. Allow yourself to envision and fantasize an optimistic future that you want to work toward, and ask Spirit to help you take it in and hold it in the bones of your bones. Nothing has ever come into this world through human hands that didn’t start first in prayer space, otherwise known as the imagination. Work on making your imagination healthy and optimistic and ask Spirit to help you with that.
 
I leave you with my adaptation of an old Scottish Moon Prayer:
 
When I see you, bright moon,
It becomes me to lift my eye,
It becomes me to bend my knee,
It becomes me to bow my head to you
And send my thanks to you,
For coming again to light the dark night.
Beautiful eye of night,
Dear one of the heavens,
Guide on the night-path,
I bless you and thank you.
Many have passed beyond
In the time between the two moons,
But I am still here, enjoying this lovely earth.
Help me to bless this world in my own way
As you do, again and again,
Moon of my Moon,
Beloved of my heart,
Moon of blessings.

​As we pass over the peak of the summer solstice, we are fully embraced by the direction South on the great wheel of the year. In the Celtic tradition, the south carries many powers - joy, love, fullness, sensuality, feasting, music and all that goes with the fullness of life.

I've noticed over the years, as I've taught classes on the medicine wheel, that most people have great trouble fully embracing the powers of the South. We love asking the west for healing of our old wounds, and we love asking the east to bring us the new shape of things, and we even love asking the north to help us have patience and discipline. But we find it difficult to fully ask the south to fill us with joy. There is always some credible inner voice that says it is inappropriate at this time to be joyful. That voice never goes away, because human life is always a disaster in one way or another, so we decide we'd better live without joy, and concentrate on healing or wisdom or increasing our goodness.

Ignoring the south invites spiritual illness. When we are spiritually ill, our protective energy field becomes thinner and more porous, and we can be more easily penetrated by the lower energies of martyrdom, blame, cynicism, disappointment and depression. Our "consumer" culture thrives on a culture weakened by joylessness, because then it can sell us the substitutes for joy – religions based on blind obedience and tribalism, economies founded on buying more things that soothe our joylessness for a moment. A joyless person revels in gossip and micro-dominations and needs constant distraction. She feels overwhelmed by the seriousness of life and he simply cannot believe that simple spiritual practices can be an antidote. A joyless culture shops like crazy to feed its envy and competition, and convinces the populace that joy is wasteful, a Band-Aid, a sign of shallowness or privilege. Joyless people are obsessed with cleanliness, purity and alikeness, and they have a high need for controlling others, which often tips over into violence.

Shamanically speaking, joy is an energy field, a spiritual ally. When we access the field of joy, it helps us remember that we don't need to fill ourselves with the substitutes for joy: status, fame, money, advancement, accomplishment, agreement, the shiny new thing, the shiny new lover.

When I was studying in the seminary, I was the weirdo. We would have chapel services on Tuesdays and we'd do the Eucharist ceremony where people go up and take the cracker and wine. It's so beautiful, the idea that you are taking the actual body of God into your body, to merge. I could not understand how in the world people could be so somber about it. How can you not immediately begin dancing and singing as soon as the wine and cracker touch your wet, waiting tongue? I would stumble dizzily back to my seat, trying not to hum, grin, and shout "Wahoooooo!"

My fellow students were working from a different "model of God" than I was. When they thought "God", they saw in their mind's eye, "loving but stern Father who created a good world which we wrecked immediately, and He's been a bit disappointed in us ever since, and he needs to give us medicine every week to cure the sickness of sin that we are born with." For them, the Eucharist seemed to be about a lifelong diagnosis needing a lifelong prescription drug.

I didn’t know it (it took one of the seminary classes to help me articulate it), but I carried in me the model of "God as Lover." There is an extensive, expansive theology buried in that little phrase, "God as Lover," and it is all contained in the south on the medicine wheel.

The summer is an excellent time to practice with this model of the divine, and if you can get past that inner voice that tells you "Now is no time to be joyful!", the south can offer you profound medicine. Spend some time seeing and feeling the sensuousness of the life force all around you. The summer is one long wooing dance, a long seduction between the father sun and the mother earth. The sun strikes the earth each day, and the earth sighs with flowers and crops and birdsong and glistening sparkles on the skin of the lake; the water licks at the land, the bees dance, zithering, among the yearning petals. As Rumi says, "Seawater water begs the pearl to break its shell." 

Here is practice you can try: Take a walk or stand in your garden, and observe how the divine masculine and feminine woo one another. Observe the wind on the leaves, the sun on the water, the rain on the garden, the dew in the sunrise, the way flowers are lapping up the nutrients from the wet soil. See the wooing and lovemaking everywhere. And remember the great shamanic motto: what happens in nature happens in us. Let this sensuous unfolding happen in you. Let the sun or wind stroke your earth too, and let your sighs burst forth. What is the world like when God is your lover? Are you seeking a new paradigm, are you seeking the radical new way, are you one who says we need to dismantle the old normal and build a new normal? The south is a powerful ally in all of this, if you let it be.

I leave you with a little poem of mine: 
 
How I become hyacinth
How I become daffodil
How I become hosta
How I become sedum
           easily divided easily rooted
How I become the two tone
           whistle chirp in that far off oak
How I become something you never planted
How I green from brown
How I heave up your mulch
           and crawl to you in your winter slumber
How I spring from pruned branches
How I become again the weeds you thought you killed off
come back to deliver that message again
How I emerge out vines you thought were dead
How the longer you know me the bigger I grow
How you think you can cultivate me
How long it takes you to see
How I become you.

I hope this three-minute prayer song will help bring you some peace in the heart and mind. In this time it is important to seek out the elements of water and earth as medicine. This song-prayer form is one of the great gifts I’ve received from my Peruvian teachers and from the plants in the jungle that I’ve built relationship with through ceremony. The songs are improvisational, not scripted, and I didn’t realize until I played it back that the sun (element fire) is the in middle verse - held and contained by the verses to the water and the earth. That’s when it can deliver its proper dose of fire-wisdom and radiant love of life. Some thoughts and suggestions on all of that follow the video below. Please feel free to learn and sing this song, adapt it, make it your own. I hope it helps.

Here is what the water taught me this morning: Our modern world has been built on the power of internal combustion. Western culture is primarily grounded in the element fire, and secondarily in the element air. We devote ourselves to an impatient, heated frenzy of success-hunting, as we climb the ladder to the heights. Like untamed fire, we believe "abundance" means "more, more, more." Untamed air is a tornado that rages along, tearing everything down in its self-absorbed spinning.

For a human to be a fully functioning spiritual being, we need to access all four elements and call them into action inside ourselves, so that they can balance and nurture each other and guard against the destructive potential in each element. The energies of fire and air need to be tempered by water and earth. It’s no coincidence that the most compulsive capitalists are the least willing to grieve (water) and the least able to express intimacy (earth). 

Abstract intellectualizing and philosophizing, inane religious arguments over doctrine, and petty personal arguments on social media are the element air unbalanced by the waters of grief and the earth of interrelatedness. For fire to truly combust, it needs dry air. It needs space between the logs. When we resort to personal insults on social media, we are putting space between one another, and that that creates the environment for a more raging fire. Conspiracy theories are air located not in the head as thoughts but in the belly as primal fears. Unchecked fears in the belly careen into the world as tornadoes of envy, greed, arrogance, and tribalism. In Spanish, spiritual sickness is sometimes called aire malo (bad air). This kind of air can be nurtured, embraced, and healed by water and earth.

Our bellies are being opened right now and very old, primal energies are being spilled out. It’s not just a few decades of stored energy spilling out, but centuries, and not only 400 years, but many centuries of spiritual imbalance that are spilling out right now, in a giant cleansing and correction.

Here are some of the things you can do in your prayer work to help you get through all of this, and to be an agent for long-term healing:

Ask Mother Earth to receive into herself this energy pouring out from the humans. Remember that she is involved in this mass healing and, indeed, is orchestrating it. Ask her to help us open this old wound to the upper air and sunlight, and to take the heavy discharge down into herself, to be composted, to transform it into nourishment for the crops to come. Bless her and thank her. 

Ask Mother Water to wash the old wound - both yours now and in the ancestor realm - and let her and Mother Earth hold you while you grieve. Grieving alone is a terrible thing, and if you’re not grieving together in community, at least ask the mothers of water and earth to hold you and wash you. And this week of the full moon, you can also ask Mother Moon to join in.

Ask the powers of the Spirit of infinity, of the great immensity, the Grandfather who feeds the light to the stars, to fill you with that big wisdom. Open the top of your head and ask Spirit to teach you the New Song. The old song has worn itself out. Ask for the New Song to be downloaded into your body.

If you are stuck in grieving, the medicine is action. Take a simple action in the physical world. Move your body, take a walk, get out in nature, even if it's the front steps. Sit with flowers and listen to birds. Don't intellectualize this, but let it in as medicine. Don’t confuse posting on social media for action. One simple action that summons earth energy is to donate money. It sounds abstract, but it moves energy and connects you to others. If you’re worried about your money, it’s a great time to be generous. For your rage, the medicine is grievi​ng - best done in community. Lay on the earth and ask her to draw the tears out of you and take them down. For your fear, the medicine is sunlight on the belly, and asking it to penetrate down in and cleanse. Sunlight as the song of the first wisdom of the life force, penetrating down into the cave of fear in the belly, reminding your body to love life. The touch of trees, the song of the birds, and each other’s touch – these are all medicines.

If you'd like to go deeper with all of this, please join me for this one-night class on June 9th.

Blessings.

One issue for many of us, in this initiatory period we are in, is that our culture can't hold the ceremonial container for us. Our uninitiated elders can't hold the container because they don't know how. So, one solution is to return to the original elders - the Spirits of Nature - to ask them to hold the container for us. This 8 minute prayer-healing-song tries to provide a little of that for you. I hope you'll take the time to settle in and let it do its work on you. ​

​The shamans see what we are going through as an initiation. Initiations serve a purpose: to move us into the next more mature spiritual state of being. Unconscious initiations take the form of disasters, chaos and terror, and this is what we are largely seeing now. Maybe you are filled with dread and anger, confusion and weariness, and maybe your dreams are off the charts in weird and disturbing. This is part of an unconscious initiation.

It's up to each of us to decide what we do with this time. Much of your fear, confusion and frustration at the assholes all around you comes from trying to grasp what is happening through the lens of the rational mind. But my suggestion for you is different. The rational mind simply does not have the bandwidth to carry you through a spiritual initiation. This is why I highly recommend working with the spirits of nature, your helping spirits, and your higher self. So much of this Covid time period is about our relationship with nature, and that's why the shamanic path is so useful as an anchoring practice.

You are only in charge of your own initiation - you cannot force anyone else's, no matter how loudly you talk or how eloquent your Facebook posts are. The chances are very, very good that you will survive the Covid pandemic. If you do, how do you want to be different? What inner energies do you want to raise up and live with, and what old demons (perspectives, decisions, and behaviors) do you want to be rid of? What will this experience teach you about your relationship with death and with life, and with love and beauty - how you embrace each, or hide from any? What does "true work," "true study," "true rest," and "true play" mean to you? Who are you truly, who are your true people, where are you truly from and where do you really want to go? Who are you pretending to be, and what does the pretense cost your soul? Where - and to whom – are you leaking your power and what is the cost to your soul? What do you love the absolute most? These are classic initiatory questions and now is a great time to work with them.

Unconscious culture will do whatever it can to keep you from making this time a conscious initiation. But you can take any of the above questions with you on a journey to your front steps or back yard, to the woods, or the lake. Ask Spirit to help you learn an answer. You can also carry any of these questions to you to bedtime, and ask the Spirit-in-the-Dream to show you answers. Learn to trust that Spirit's answers come in the gust of wind, in the flight of birds, in images, sudden knowing, and coincidences. Remember Einstein's words: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." Open your true yearning and ask one of those initiatory questions to the Great Spirit-in-Nature. When you ask from your honest yearning, Spirit always answers. Give yourself time to ask, and to receive. Impatience assures unconscious initiation.

We are coming up on May 1 – Beltane in the Celtic tradition, the opening of the South on the medicine wheel. Ask the Great Spirit of the Pure Love of Life to come and teach you how to love this life, and show you what your life would look like with that kind of love.   

I leave you with the words of the John O'Donohue:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

If you want to work with me, take my online shamanic journey class, or prayer class, or schedule an appointment.

I hope this six-minute prayer song to the waters helps lift some anxiety from you. Take time to open yourself and allow it to do its work on you. 

I may think what I'm wrestling with is a scary virus. I may think I'm wrestling with the sudden obliteration of my income, or the interruption of my ordinary life or career goals. I may say I'm feeling trapped, or abandoned, or that I'm wrestling with fear, or death. None of this is untrue. But all of these are on the surface of life.
 
I may think I am longing for success, or love. I may believe I am longing for acceptance, expansion or fulfillment. None of these longings are useless, vain or false. But these, too, are on the surface of life.
 
Below the surface lies a primal power that I fear terribly, and yet is the very core of my belonging to life: the power of uncertainty.
 
The Irish philosopher poet John O'Donohue says, "Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status or money. Real power is the consistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished." (Eternal Echoes, 195). Our truest fear and our truest longing are both centered on the power of uncertainty.

All human beings long for solid ground to stand on. But the core truth is that there is no solid ground, but only temporary ground we construct for ourselves, often calling it, with gleeful relief, solid. The earth is not truly solid ground, as both mysticism and quantum physics seem to agree. And the earth itself is not on solid ground, but afloat in a vast, undulating sea.
 
Celtic shamanism teacher, Tom Cowan, says, "Disasters lead us back to that primordial consciousness out of which shamanism emerged, that consciousness of being small before a grand and frightening Universe…" (Read his lovely current piece on despair at Society for Shamanic Practice.)
 
And here is the hardest thing for me to grasp, yet I truly can glimpse it if I allow myself to: Even my current despair is on the surface of life. Below the despair is what O'Donohue calls "the signature of the divine."
 
It is common in meditation and ritual to advise me to send an imaginary root out from me, deep into the earth for "grounding." This is a very good practice that can provide a channel for anxiety to flow out of the body and into Mother Earth, who is more than willing to help us. But this grounding, too, as helpful as it is, remains part of the surface of life.
 
The taproot of the soul goes not into the earth, but through the earth, beyond the surface of life and into the eternal sea of divine uncertainty.
 
We are culturally trained to strive for bigness and independence. Our "cowboy culture" has embedded an aspirational story into us of independence from, and control over, the powers of nature. My money and machines will keep me safe. Even in my personal world of mysticism, shamanism and New Age woo-wooism, we tell each other that our core identity is as radiant as the sun itself, and that we are as big as Spirit.
 
But the virus has has brought us into our human smallness and vulnerability. If we allow ourselves to fully enter this smallness, it can – can, if we let it – open in us the immensity of the present moment, which is the divine sea, which is always "unsolved and unfinished" or, rather "always becoming." Our thoughts and actions dedicated to the surface of life are almost entirely about the future and the past. But now, we have been given the terrible gift of the mirror of our smallness, and we are filled with the irritation that comes from the rubbing that polishes the mirror. The signature of the divine is found in our vulnerability.

I'd like to offer you three kinds of practices you can do during this time.
 
Practice 1: Classically called "the lament prayer," this is a prayer that expresses powerlessness. (More on lament here.) We want to be good people, so we say "I'm doing okay, and I'm so much luckier than…" (fill in the blank.) Gratitude is nice, but it can also bypass the divine discomfort of the rubbing that polishes the mirror. As Scott Berinato lays out so well in a recent article on grief, one uncomfortable but valuable practice you can do is feel what you feel, honestly. Set a timer for five minutes, remind yourself that all feelings are temporary, let yourself feel whatever rises, and name each one. The fear that you'll be consumed by these feelings is just one of the feelings that is temporary. Then go outside and "ground yourself." Give it all to the Great Mother, who is a happy to digest these energies and compost them into food. Thank her for this gift of healing.
 
Practice 2: Make prayers for the surface of life: protection, healing, and the restoration (or new creation) of normal, prayers of gratitude. Prayers summon beauty, and beauty is the antidote to despair.
 
Practice 3: Imagine your soul's taproot plunging down into the earth, and then beyond all surfaces, and into the eternal –however "the eternal" may appear to you. Draw power up that root and into all the layers of your body: the physical, energetic, and luminous layers. Do this for a few minutes after your lament prayer, and I hope it will help in polishing the mirror. ​​

Stay calm. Love One another. 

Jaime Meyer is president of the Board of Society for Shamanic Practice and a full-time shamanic practitioner in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Check out his upcoming online class on Shamanic Prayer.

Joseph Campbell said the mystic and the psychotic are in the same waters but one is drowning and one is swimming. I tell you this, my sisters and brothers, you do not need a "spiritual life." You already have one. It's called getting out of bed every damned day and putting one foot in front of the other.

If you believe your soul came here to learn something, or to unlearn something from a past life, or to experience life in the body, it's doing that right now, and all day long, whether or not you learn how to call down the infinite light through your crown chakra. You are already "just doing it." If you believe life is an ultimately meaningless conjunction of eukaryotic chemical interactions, it certainly is. You don't have to fix your life, you don’t need New Year's resolutions. The Bhagavad Gita, one of the core sacred scriptures of Hinduism, says each one of us goes to the heaven we imagine while we are alive. So stop worrying!

My teacher says the soul chooses one of seven kinds of humans to become: king/queen, warrior, priest, server, sage, artisan, or scholar. I'm a sage and the core marker of this kind of human is they want to have fun and want to spread fun to others. So it's very like me to say this: Don't make your New Year's Resolution to "work" on your spiritual life. Rather, do it because you want more fun in your life. If your spiritual life doesn’t deliver delight, what use is it?

Martin Luther, the founder of Protestant Christianity, said, “Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!”

Don't get me wrong - "Having fun" doesn’t mean things are easy or without pain. Having fun doesn’t mean all-day masturbation followed by eating chocolate covered cherries (unless, in some way, you have identified that as exactly what your soul came here to learn.) I think about people who play football, or do gymnastics, or devote themselves to the cello. There is great discomfort in all of it. I say to you, brothers and sisters, see the discomfort as part of the fun, not as the shit-covered barrier that you will someday climb over and leave behind. (Because guess what: there is never a point where the spiritual life is without discomfort, and if someone promises you something different, I suggest you do not give them your money or time.)

A spiritual path is for one thing: to allow you see life through a bigger lens, including your own suffering. (By the way, this is the point where many people bump up against that big rock in this stream of thought, the rock that threatens to rip a hole in their canoe of delight: "No, No, No! Spiritual life is about easing my suffering!" So if you've hit that rock, good on you - it means you're on a strong spiritual path.)

Another way of saying the paragraph above: A spiritual life is for one thing: keeping you from being called into the Camp Of Despair, as one of my teachers says. Or as the poet Rilke says, the spiritual life is about revelling in the experience of being defeated, decisively by constantly greater beings.

If you are drawn to building a bigger, deeper, more lovely or interesting spiritual life or practice, it's because your soul made you this way. You are, right now, the way your soul wanted to be. This yearning you feel in you for the kind of fun that spiritual practice delivers – the bigger lens, the re-framing of suffering, the new view of purpose - this is the way your soul wanted to be this time around, as it wends its way through this cotton candy-laughing-puking carnival ride called human life. So let it be joyous, because you're doing it right.

My practical approach to New Year's Resolutions:

• The most practical thing I've learned about "manifesting" is this: Answer to yourself how you want to FEEL. This is different than asking and praying for things to happen to you. For example, when I first did this, I thought I was praying to manifest "money." That's a thing, and it's abstract, really, and it is outside of me. When I re-framed it as "manifesting how I want to feel," I realized I was asking to feel SAFE. That feeling is immediate, right here, and about far more than money.
• So ask yourself this question: how do I want to feel this year? Or: what feeling do I want to manifest this year? What feeling do I want to experience more of, and summon in me more often?  Place your focus on the feeling. Move toward that feeling, by experimenting and daring to try it. Be open to the bigger lens - that your resolution may not be what you first thought it was. 
• And then ask for Spirit's help in bringing it all to you. Spirit helps us when we let it, when we let go of the idea that it's "all up to me" and that my destiny lies only inside my human psychology. When you ask Spirit to help you bring that feeling, look for the doors that appear. They very often look unlike what you imagined they'd look like. 
• And here is a weird little resolution: Ask yourself what you wish people understood about you better that they currently do not understand? Be a little careful about diving into the swirling waters of martyrdom - what we often want is to have people understand better how deeply we suffer.  70% of Facebook exists for this. It's not unimportant, but I think of this question more as "What strength do I have in me, that has always been there, that I want people to see more clearly?" (For more on martyrdom, check out this other piece of mine.)

Wishing you a potent and practical 2020!