So, once again, we enter the season of Put On A Happy Face! It begins with this week's orders from the Ministry of Culture to celebrate to the thinnest version of the mythical story of this nation's courageous white ancestors making their way to religious freedom in a treacherous land that they slowly dominated and tamed through superior ingenuity (and a little help from friendly natives), and to begin the annual shopping frenzy.

Many of us – an increasing number to be sure – refuse to celebrate the thin version of that myth. Instead, we opt to work with the wider, more complex story, rife with various truths – heavier and thicker, far harder to carry, and filled with grieving.

Of course we value gratitude. True gratitude is a cleansing and empowering force on the mind and spirit. It washes away self-centeredness and martyrdom, it re-centers you in proper humility. And gratitude is the single best antidote to the pandemic of greed infecting our culture. As a consistent practice, gratitude delivers more actual healing than do antidepressants.

But gratitude that stands on gauzy ignorance is not gratitude at all - it is denial, and denial is a corrosive force on the mind and spirit, one that eventually eats its way through a culture's (or individual's) supporting structures until they come crashing down. We see this happening all around us right now - the energies of polarization, accusation and mistrust are the sounds of cracking, snapping and crashing of the old structures.

Under all the anger is the grieving. I despise Tucker Carlson and his ilk on the right and the left – people who care less about truths that can help me make decisions, and more about injecting me with the next jolt of small rage, because that’s what makes money. But under that despising of the 24 hour news cycle, I grieve deeply that Walter Cronkites have gone extinct. To recognize the grief underlying rage is a big step in healing one's life and preparing for a better world to emerge.  

In order for humanity to make the spiritual shift that so many of us are praying and working for, we need to transform two core poisons, and grieving is the antidote for both.

The first poison is arrogance, and it must be cleansed for any substantive change to appear. Every person raised in western culture has had injected into them the arrogance that humans are the apex – and the very point - of creation, and that we are different (and better) than all other creatures. This separation has created a truly unique creature woven through with devastating loneliness, and this may be the only thing that makes humans unique on this planet. So much of what we do in our daily life is an act of keeping that existential loneliness at bay, including the unending seeking for "more," which ties directly to the genocide of Native Peoples and Thanksgiving.

Cleansing our essential loneliness sounds easy but clearly it is not, because it demands that we change our inner structure which is founded on arrogance. The way Spirit works, human arrogance will definitely be cleansed, one way or another. The only question is how much we are willing do on our own, and how much Spirit will need to do for us. If we do the work ourselves, there will be far less need for disaster to rip us apart. Covid-19 has cleansed some arrogance – and also shown us clearly how much resistance there is. Spirit has many more ideas lined up to continue the work if we refuse to learn from these early teachings.

Ohky Simine Forest, a medicine woman of Mohawk descent and also trained and initiated by Mayan elders in Chiapas, Mexico and teachers in Mongolia, says that shedding arrogance is crucial if white people are going to be able to "redden" their hearts. By redden, she means to make more indigenous, to heal the fundamental white perspectives of how life operates that have wrought so much harm.  To me, "reddening" means making the heart fully warm and alive because the cooling air of arrogance freezes the heart and snaps the connections that it naturally forges between all beings. To redden the heart means to set out on a path of resurrecting my own indigenous soul.

​Every teacher I've worked with has said the same thing: we need to move into our heart center. Because it is from there that we re-form connections to all life (not from the intellect, whose job it is to separate and analyze.) The many intense dietas I've done in Peru, fasting and ingesting certain power plants, has really all been an act of asking the plant world to redden my heart. Looking at the larger, more complex truths of white history, as so many are doing now, with such great discomfort, is all about cleansing arrogance and reddening the heart.

The second poison we need to transform is the rules our culture has set out against grieving. For millennia, we have been taught that grieving is weakness, a failure of endurance or verve, a waste of time and energy. If you do fall into this weakness, at least keep it quiet, brief and out of sight.

This is a truly tragic idea. Grieving is one of the clearest and most powerful testaments of the deep connection between things. Grieving is a primary action to redden the heart. The waters of grief wash away our arrogance (and many other psycho-spiritual maladies) and re-open the heart that has been closed off. Spirit has given us access to the medicine of grief specifically so we can wash ourselves regularly. We are told by the activists to repress our grieving and to transform it to anger and put it into action. This sounds right, except grieving is repressed only with great cost to the soul.

Repressed sacred energies are shoved down into the unconscious, where they become deformed, and then they re-emerge into the world as their destructive opposite. True grieving is a testament to the beautiful connections between things, but when it is repressed, it deforms and re-emerges into the world as martyred rage. We see this everywhere around us today – victimized rage instead of the true grieving energy that needs to be let out and cleared. Substantive change will not happen by replacing one martyred rage with another.

The ancient Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching, says that all things that are alive are flexible because they are filled with fluid. All things that are dead are dry and unbending. Grieving fills you with the sap of life, and contrary to what you are so often told, your grief makes you a stronger human being. You are never more beautiful than while grieving, for in grief, your reddened heart is radiantly connected. When you dry yourself of this sap, you become brittle. When I look at the people around me everywhere infected with rage, I see brittleness. Any little thing makes them snap. They need constant injections of martyred rage to give them energy, and the 24 hour news world is happy to offer it up, like the corner heroin dealer.

So, as Thanksgiving comes round again, I decline to participate in the thin, story of white heroes making something of a primitive land. I also decline to play along with the rage machine. I will, instead, grieve the numerous lost opportunities we have had as a culture to redden our heart, beginning with the arrival of the Europeans to this continent. I will ask the spirt of grieving to cleanse me of the old arrogance and also of martyred rage, and I will ask the spirt of new vision to fill me with strength, so that I can participate, in my own way, in building of a new world. I will take my drum and tobacco outside and make offerings of love for the beautiful land, make prayers of forgiveness in all directions, and I will continue to ask Spirit to send us the new dream, and the strength and courage to being that dream into the world. 

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.