This picture of me was taken more than 30 years ago, when I did a lot of mask-making work. I named the mask “Mr. Doom.” He was the voice constantly chattering in my mind telling me, “everything you think, everything you say and everything you do has always turned out shitty and it always will.” (Notice the broken circle on top of his head - that was a "mistake" in the mask-making that became Mr. Doom's primary symbol.)

I did a masked dance/monologue performance of Mr. Doom at an artsy midnight cabaret where artists could try out their new work. There were three of us performing that night: a sad-faced love-balladeer with his worn guitar, wispy beard and total confidence that tonight's new songs would get him laid, a 16-year old, straight-spined, icy-eyed, not one hair out of place leotard-dancer, and me: naked except for Mr. Doom’s masked face with a few rags hanging down, and a pear-shaped drawstring pouch enfolding Mr. Doom’s…uh…drumstick and rattles. I don't remember the dance I did or the text, but it was mostly frantic swishing accompanied by guttural shouting about the inevitability of doom and the lie of love.

I didn’t realize until years later that I was doing what superstar spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls “distancing yourself from the pain-body,” and what the shamans call “allowing yourself to be danced by spirits.” In fact, it was a type of movement-based exorcism of my family and ancestral patterns, under the guise of "trying out new work." The idea is to move the chattering voices from the inside where they work in secret, to the outside where you can see them, understand what they want from you and what they are trying to teach you, and then send them on their way.
 
Tolle describes the pain-body as an energy field that everyone carries within them, made up of old emotional pain. To be human is to have emotional pain (old and new.) It's a fact of life in the body. The pain-body generates a story for you that defines your actions and decisions. And often the pain body generates what the psychologists call your core belief.
 
The core-belief stories have titles like “No one can be trusted,” “I’m in this all alone,” “I have to fight to survive,” “There is never enough money,” "I am unworthy," “Life will always let you down,” and “I am shitty at everything I think, say and do.” (These are all stories from my personal library that I've worked to release over time.) 

The important thing is that these core beliefs are often unconscious and secret, and we are unaware of them as they run our relationships and decision making. They are like the hacker's virus in our operating system. 

There is some strange evidence that emerged from trauma research: Survivors of childhood sexual trauma are six times more likely to be sexually assaulted as adults. (The Body Keeps The Score, Besel A. van der Kolk, M.D.) This is an example of the pain body at work. The pain body is constructed through those early traumas, and it establishes a core operating system that works unconsciously to design increased chances of being victimized again.

We build a nicer story for ourselves on top of the secret core belief: "I am a love-filled spiritual being, in communion with all creatures." But, as Jesus pointed out, if that that nice house is built on a sandy foundation of the pain-body-inspired core-belief that the world is out to get me, it's a recipe for wackadoodle daily life full of self-sabotage, wrecked relationships and weird, constant, ongoing "bad luck." 

One way to recognize the pain-body is when your “buttons” are pushed-when you overreact to a fairly simple comment or situation, like say, when you open an email from your boss saying you had not included some of her edits in a document so it was a “good thing” she looked it over. Mr. Doom begins dancing wildly, chanting in that guttural croak, “You are found out! You’re shitty! You’re gonna get fired! No one will ever hire you again! It's off to the gold mines in Suriname for you, and that bald one-toothed Dutch foreman with that shiny scar, shouting "Werk! Werk harder! Dig, shtoopid ahnimals, dig fűr ze gold, or no vahter for you!!"
 
That's the pain-body talking, for sure. Any time you're in an argument with a loved one, or complaining to a friend, and you use the word "always" or "never," that's the pain-body talking.
 
Tolle says that the majority of our interactions with one another are interactions between our pain-bodies. That is a powerful statement. Think about your interactions. He goes onto say, hauntingly, “You don’t just marry your spouse; you marry their pain-body.” It is our pain-bodies that first fall in love with one another - with one another's pain, with one another's core beliefs. Eeeegh. That explains a lot of my history, right there.
 
The first and most important thing we can do on our spiritual path is to free ourselves from the delusions of the pain-body’s manufactured, false, tiny, doom-laden reality. The first step in that is to acknowledge the pain-body's existence, and try our best to see it in action. It very much does not want you to do this because simply watching for it, paying attention when you fall into repetitive reactions and repetitive complaint - this is the first powerful step in de-activating the pain body's power. 

When you are stressed, what repetitive pattern do you find yourself doing? Try to see that pattern. In that pattern is buried the core belief. At that moment, stop and address your pain body. Ask it to help you see the core belief that fuels the repetitive pattern when you are under stress. You may be surprised. 

This takes effort and dedication and it's super not-fun. But when we do get a glimpse, and then a grasp on it, we find ourselves opening “A New Earth,” an earth wherein we feel connected to everything, can take great pleasure in the smallest things, can shed ourselves of compulsions to acquire things, and can live in the “now”- an earth in which we are viscerally aware of a blessing Presence.
 
None of what Tolle is saying is new. This idea is as old as human spirituality: that we have a smaller "I" – one that is afraid all the time, and in pain because of that fear, and makes decisions and takes action out of that small, false identity, and creates situations for us in which we can wallow in fears - or as the shamans say, situations where we feed those spirits of fear to make them stronger.

And we have a true "I" – the one that is immense and in full connection with the powers of creation, knows that physical death is part of the ongoing game of our infinite, many-shaped lives, and this "I" can really never be afraid.

DH Lawrence said it like this:
 
“I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
 
And there's this:
 
I am not I.
                   I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

(Juan Ramón Jiménez, “‘I Am Not I’” from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems. Translation copyright © 1973 by Robert Bly.)
 
Much of the rhetoric in politics, and most marketing, plays on stimulating and strengthening your pain-body - feeding the fear spirits. So, one core way to work is to simply decline to let those forces manipulate you. That sounds simple, but it actually works.
 
Our entire species is in the process of working with the pain-body, and trying to create a New Earth. But that’s too big for each of us to think about. So, we need to come home to or own body, our own pain-body, and work with it. We can work with in therapy, which uses the tools of the intellect, and we can work with it though ceremony like shamanic work, which uses non-rational tools of the Spirit. 

All of this is work with the Spirit of the West on the Medicine wheel – the direction of "releasing." We are in the West right now, and autumn is a great time to do this kind of personal work to release old patterns, which is another way of saying "free ourselves of the pain-body's authoritarian rule over our reactions and decisions."
 
So, besides "paying attention" to our repetitive patterns, especially when stressed, how else can we work with the pain body to help discover the core belief and discharge its power over us?

• Bodywork is excellent at opening these channels. But not the massage for relaxation (referred to in the business as "fluff 'n buff" massage). Seek a bodyworker who can use techniques to open the channels - often not pleasant experience.  (There's nothing wrong with pleasant relaxing massage - it's just not the pathway to working with the pain body.)
• Somatic Therapy is an excellent modality that is all about opening the channels I'm talking about. Google the phrase and your city you'll hopefully find practitioners.  
• Lying face down on the earth is a decent and free practice. Ask mother earth to open your pain body and take its energy. While you do this, once again, pay attention to what images, emotions or thoughts come up. 
• Work with the Spirit of the West. Here is a prayer you can make to the West all through Autumn - this time of year where the Old Woman of the Bones is coming to clean the earth and clear the old earth of its old energies, opening it to the next shape of life. I recommend making a prayer like this every morning from now through early December: 
• Power of West, power of releasing the old songs stuck in my sinews, the old stories stuck in my bones, power that opens the New Earth, help me stand outside of my smaller self, that one who lies to me in order to make me act smaller than I truly am.  Open in me the vision and presence of my larger self: infinite, joyful, powerful. Give me the confidence to trust in my larger self, and live that vision. Thank you, Spirit, for partnering with me to create a New Earth, here inside my body.
• A daily spiritual practice in which you remind yourself of the larger "I" is also very helpful. Asking Spirit to step forward and work with you to build your power and connection with that bigger "I" is helpful.

 
I recommend you go deeper with this work by taking this class which I've offered many times. I also recommend doing this special kind of shamanic healing session that I'm offering this fall.

 ​We are in the time of the dark moon now, as the moon passes through the final shedding of its light, and becomes "empty." For the next two days it's a very good time to make prayers for newness, and your newness begins with cleansing old embedded patterns - with shedding. 

We can cleanse or release old energy patterns embedded in us through meditation and therapy, but I am a fan of prayer. Prayer is not like meditation or therapy. It is a wholly different approach. Good prayer is also a meditation and a kind of therapy. Prayer can gets a bad rap from institutional religion when it urges you to mindlessly spout memorized magic words. Prayer also gets a bad rap from popular scientific culture which sees it as primitive wishful thinking - as pleading with a god who you don't really believe in until you're desperate. But I believe prayer helps the brain hit it's inborn delete button.

Good prayer is honest and it comes from the heart. That's a deceptively simple sentence, so I want to type it again: Good prayer is honest and it comes from the heart. 

Being honest - with others, but even more so with ourselves - is very difficult. If honesty was not difficult, we'd have a completely different human world. So when you get to the phrase in the prayer below, "I've been in the grip of powers," the hard part is actually admitting what powers are grasping you, what powers are filtering your experiences of life for you, what powers are making your decisions for you before you're even aware. 

I hope this can help: it is said that "negative" emotions fit into five main flavors. Here they are:

Sadness • Self-critical thoughts • Pessimistic thoughts • Thoughts of loss or failure
Anxiety • Thoughts of something bad that could happen in the future • Thoughts of threat, risk or danger • What-if thoughts
Anger • “should” thoughts • Thoughts of having been harmed, having been treated unfairly • Thoughts of rules being broken
Guilt • Thoughts of having harmed someone • Thoughts of having done something that goes against your own morals • Sense of responsibility for a negative outcome
Shame/Embarrassment • Thoughts that other will judge flaws or mistakes in a negative way

Being honest with the "flavor" of the power gripping you is a good place to begin your prayer. Delving into the qualities of that "flavor" may help being some insight. For example, if I am honest, I find that I am not truly feeling anxious, as I thought I was - I'm feeling angry.  I don't want to admit to being angry because I don't like to think I'm an angry person. The anger is because the situation I'm in is unfair - it didn't turn out like it "should" have. I can explore that "should" and I probably will find that I can let go of that "should." (And that's what I can ask Mother Moon to help me with.) Emotions often dress up first as other emotions to hide the truer emotion. So you can ask yourself if you really are feeling that particular emotion, or is it another one of the five. Sometimes your answer will be "I'm feeling them all!" But try to narrow down to one, just for the sake of the prayer.  Well, all of this is just to help you be as honest as you can be.  

One counterintuitive thing I've learned about being human that has really helped me: While most of my teaching is about "building your power," we build it by understanding that we can't manage human life on our own. We need bigger help. So we ask Spirit for help. Spirit is not the capricious father in the sky, but the living life force found in everything in nature. The living life force that is infused with wisdom from billions of years of being in the physical plane. How many times has the moon "renewed" itself? It's got this, and it's more than willing to help when the ask comes from the heart.  

Prayer to the Dark Moon for Releasing
Feel free to adapt the prayer below in any way that makes sense to you. I like this way of making the prayer: read the prayer out loud three times. The first time quietly, the second time full voice and the third time silently. Open your heart center before making the prayer. You can actually put one hand over your heart and say "open" to that place before making the prayer. Give yourself time to truly open the heart before making the prayer.
​

I struggle with how to use the world of video and internet to present shamanic practice without having it narrowed and, frankly made silly, by the limits of the media. But let's give it a try.

If you're human, you likely struggle with self-deprecation at times. We live in a mentally ill culture that uses self-deprecation to control your behavior, from voting to worship to shopping. All hierarchical systems, from church to family to the workplace to the elementary schoolroom, relies to some extent on using self-deprecation to control people's behavior. 

So, we're up against great powers in our daily life, and one thing that has helped me is to remember that the voice of self-deprecation is not really you – it's a voice injected into you by family, church, and culture. It's actually a spiritual parasite that feeds on you. When that seemingly powerful voice comes to you, just try to remember that it's not really you. It's a spiritual tapeworm, and it can be excised. 

Self-deprecation is an energy that wants to convince you that you are smaller than you really are. The antidote to self-deprecation is to remember that you are made of pure love - the binding force of the universe, and the substance of Spirit itself. That's who you truly are.

Does that sound silly? Well it is, until you see it as true. When the voice of self-deprecation comes, try this: ask yourself what in this world do you love immensely and intensely. Remember that love, feel it, and summon it into your very bones and synapses - draw its power into you, as medicine against self-deprecation.

One thing I love is the work I've been doing for several years with the plants in the Amazon Jungle. The work is so full of mystery and power, but it's difficult to put into writing much of what the plants and my human teachers there have taught me, partly because the information is so utterly non-rational, like the plants themselves. That non-rationality exerts a great pressure on my western mind, which likes to pretend it is grounded in reason. So my work with plants brings me an ongoing wrestling match against the powers of my own culture, and it has taught me a great deal about the difference between the western and indigenous mind. I can say this: the purpose of working deeply with the plants is to build inner power that goes beyond "belief." And I can say that it has been working. 

Let’s explore tobacco a little. It is considered by the shamans to be a most powerful healing plant – perhaps THE most powerful healer. Some South American shamans only work with tobacco and no other plants. Tobacco is the first plant many shamans work with because it provides a foundation of powerful protection against unfriendly spiritual forces. This kind of protection is mui importante, even more so if you are doing healing work. Tobacco is also a profoundly masculine plant, and it's full of fire energy. Those energies are part of its power to reach out and dispel and cleanse negative energy in someone, or bad air (huiso mayanaheubo in Shipibo), because unfriendly energies are often considered "cold," or infused with death force. So the active, hot, life-energy of tobacco is very good at cooking away bad air attached to, or embedded in someone. 
​
This idea itself - of tobacco as healer - sends my western mind into conniptions since, for us, tobacco is a plague to be eradicated. The shamans say the westerners stole the tobacco without understanding its spirit, and they did what they always do - focused on how to transform nature into money without ever trying to relate to it spiritually. So, we pay the cost, in cancer and other maladies, of not respecting the tobacco plant, a cost we are beginning to pay in so many other ways in our relationship with nature. This counter-intuitive way tobacco works in healing is just one of the many intense conundrums that occupy my mind while working with the plants. So far I've worked deeply with only six plants and each one has, in its own way, built different skills in me.

I've written elsewhere about my journey to merge with the spirit of tobacco and how it came to be such an important part of my healing work. Right now I want to write about a few specific things I love when working with sacred ​tobacco.

​You can get tobacco rolled into fat cigarette-looking things, called a mapacho. I use these in healing work because they are very convenient. But for most of my personal prayer work, I use loose tobacco in my pipe.

Amazonian ceremonial tobacco can also come in a heavy, dense, tightly rolled log, about 18" long and the width of your wrist. The log is just the big tobacco leaves wrapped super tight, still a little moist, and bound around with a strip of plant material. To get the tobacco useable, you need to slice off thin portions of the log, chop them up - which takes some doing - and then let them dry in the sun. This act of chopping up the tobacco to prepare it is something I love. The act of working physically with the plant in this way, asking it to be prepared for prayer work, is powerful for me.

You dry the chopped up tobacco in the sun not only because it works, but because you are also asking the Sky Grandfather of all life on Earth to sing his power song into the tobacco, so that when you use it, it carries not only tobacco's inherent healing powers, but Grandfather Sun's song of life. Tobacco is a fire plant and carries a great deal of fiery, divine masculine energy, and this is boosted more by the sun song.

And, for that matter, when you have the tobacco outside drying in the sun, you are also asking all the powers of mother earth, sky, wind, water, creatures, and the pure love of the life force - all to come into your ceremonial tobacco. You do have to be clear with Grandfather Wind that you want him to sing into the tobacco, but to sing a sweet Feminine song into it, otherwise, Wind will just end up taking all of your tobacco, in which case you laugh, say "you're welcome," and start over with the chopping. That feminine wind song as well as other feminine energies of the life force helps to balance the masculine energies in the tobacco itself and that Sun song.

You may say, "Ah, this is all poetry and myth, this calling in of these energies into the tobacco." And you'd be right if you want to stay lodged in the western mind which is built on distance and arrogance.

If you want to step into the indigenous mind, though, you'd say that all these powers you are asking to come into the tobacco drying on your table are vibrations that inject physical energy in to the tobacco which stores it to be delivered along with whatever prayers you also inject into it when you use it. It's not myth, it's energy.

And there comes the time when the tobacco is ready, and you put it in the pipe.

Three weeks ago, when I was deep in ceremony in Peru, I got two gentle scoldings from the plant spirits. One was a reminder not to forget to bless the pipe. You always bless the tobacco, she said, and the earth and the stars and the waters and the winds and the directions and ancestors and the teachers - but you forget to bless the pipe, and the pipe is Pachamama – the Great Mother that holds all life in her belly that you are calling on right now. The pipe is the womb that cooks the prayers that have been sung into the tobacco, and then births them into the world, so don't forget to bless and thank the pipe.

The other scolding was from the Fire-in-the-Earth Mother who reminded me to thank her, as well as the sun, for the fire that lights the tobacco. The sun is the flashy one, she said, and he dances in the flame that lights the tobacco, and he attracts your attention because he's such a flirt, but I, too, carry fire in my belly, the center of the earth, she said, and I light the tobacco in your pipe before he gets to it with that dancing flame of his, and if I don’t light it from below, his flame won't take and there's no prayer. (I've seen this happen – the tobacco just won't light, and now I know that it's because I need to bless the Fire-in-Earth Mother, and the womb of the pipe).

And of course, all flames are the visible result of the passionate kiss between Matter and Spirit so don't forget to honor that kiss every time you light your pipe. This kiss births the prayer into the world.

See, this is why shamans have a hard time getting anything done, because they have to make all these prayers all the time. It's also why shamans go on and on and on and on and on when you get them going. And we aren’t even talking about the constant care and feeding of one's own power animals and plant spirits and ancestors, and one's students' guides and ancestors, and the land you live on, and the faeries in your garden and the creatures. (That's tongue in cheek, of course, and for clarity's sake here is a little on why I don't call myself a shaman.)
​
So, in the video here, all of these prayers are loaded onto the tobacco before the video starts. And in the video, I load on more prayers to tobacco to come and dissolve and cleanse your self-deprecation, to open new pathways for Spirit to work in your and through you, to open blessing, to open the roads for the new song of power to make its way into you.
​
I hope, even in the limited form of the video, this can be a little help for you. ​​

The first of May – called Beltane in the Celtic tradition - is the first kiss of summer. On the medicine wheel, we pass into the direction South – the direction of fullness and delight, of revelry and sensuality. The Celtic shamanic tradition exuberantly embraces what I call the sensuous divine. Let the well-dressed Sunday sinners sing for mercy from the judging father. We caress the drum with warm hands. The frame drum is the Divine Vulva and the drumstick (or the hand) is the lover who sets her vibrating with the thrill of living in this body, in this earthly life. Erotic energy is bursting out everywhere around us now as that master lover, the sun, caresses his beloved, the beautiful earth, and she cannot help but sigh in delight. The radiant new leaves, the cerulean skies, the first blooms on the crabapples, forsythia, and magnolia, the sparkles on the water, the bird songs – these are all her sighs and moans of delight. What happens in nature happens in us, so I encourage you to let the sun caress you, and the breeze run its fingers across your skin. Behold the emerald leaves emerging and the flittering twitters of the birds. Let your new leaves unfold like a sigh, and let yourself moan in delight along with the earth. You want to change the world? Begin moaning out loud at this sensuous earth unfolding around you – at the lake, on the sidewalk, in parking lot. Yes, try it. Wahoo.

The Song the Sun Sings On the First Of May
Now, Love, at last I come
In fullness rising over you.
Let there be new trembling under the cold-hardened earth
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be the song of unfolding within your hidden petals
At the caress of my warm breath
And undulations in the warming estuaries.
Let the winged ones return to sing
among your greening branches.
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars
and over the newborn land
Your aching, fiery song of
Yes.

​Dear Drummers on the Warm Skin of Human Life,
 
What does it mean to trust Spirit? This question is with me all the time.
 
Trust is not the same as faith. In classic theology, faith is an "intellectual assent," meaning it's really an act on the mind – and often it is a forcing of the intellect to agree to something that feels wrong to it. So there's a constant tension in faith, a wrestling with the intellect. And so there's constant doubt, and we tend to focus a lot on the doubt, which is really a distraction, and it leaks our power. If you're in a religious tradition that shames you for your doubt, then you have a whole toxic soup of repression, veiled rage and bizarre excuses for how your hateful actions match up with your love-based religion.
 
Trust comes from experience. We trust Spirit because Spirit gives us uncountable experiences that are evidence for its ongoing work with us. Most of these experiences are so mundane that our drama-loving western minds miss them. Like the delicious clarity of the air at dawn these last few days. Like the return of the robins and cardinals, and the high-flying geese singing their way home. Trust is really all about feeling the mysterious wonder of life itself. This is what the shamans mean when they say "medicine is everywhere." It's actually all quite simple, but our culture of distraction continually leaks our power out of us while urging us to ignore these simple forms of medicine that actually build our power. So, the simplest thing you can do is stop for moment - on you way to car, as you're standing in line, and feel your way around for the mundane evidence of of the life force, of Spirit working. It's not intellectual, and not psychological. 
 
There's a poem from Antonio Machado, the great Spanish poet from the early 20th century:
 
Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars
And the fear of going down.
 
For me, this is a poem about the trust of Spirit. The four things are the ways we control our ordinary life each day. In order to get food into our mouths and make sure the animals don’t eat our children, yes, we do need to direct our actions with these four things.
 
But when we set sail on the spiritual sea, each of the four items become a kind of mistrust. We try to define our own direction (rudder), we refuse to submit to the pull of wind and tide (anchor), we say we will provide our own (will) power, and we will certainly not hold still in calm waters (oars). And finally, that giant fear of being overwhelmed by mystery, of being “taken” by the Powers.
 
So Machodo's poem becomes a sort of recipe for trusting spirit. You can ask yourself which of the four things has become, for you, a form of mistrust of Spirit.

This leads me to another short poem by Rumi:
 
On a day when the wind is perfect,
the sail just needs to open
and the world is full of beauty.
Today is such a day.
 
And this reminds me of that line from Rilke's poem: “…So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.” (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-walk/)
 
And so springtime unfurls her perfect air, and the hidden life slowly emerges into the new sunshine, and soon the forsythia will spread its arms out, announcing in a chorus of yellow blossoms  - its charming pomposity - that, once again, it is the first in the garden to trust this gorgeous new world emerging. It dares you to join in, to unfurl your sail and let the air take you. 
 
Blessings of the new air of spring be yours,
Blessings of the Forsythia be yours,
Blessings of the trust of Spirit be yours,
Blessing of the the trust of Spirit.

This winter has taken a toll on all of us. Beyond the obvious, I think there's a deeper reason why it's hit us so hard. The wild weather is just one more version of powerlessness pervading our daily life. There are so many things that seem out of our control nowadays. People are getting worn down by the carousel of confusion that we seem to have boarded.
​
What used to be mere annoyances and irritations have crossed over into rage, or its ugly wife, cynicism, or their malformed child, depression. Just to be clear: Rage is the lid we jam on top of our true grieving that comes to call us into our true love. Cynicism is the cold we apply to the fire of anxiety that is calling us back into our true power. And depression is a twisted form of devotion to the infinite.

Well, those are some big statements! I can't really unpack them all the way right now, or this article will suddenly veer to the left and never be seen again. But I'll say this: the paragraph above is about how our sacred power gets twisted - and so is the rest of the article below.

Look around at how much powerlessness is being expressed in every direction. The Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements are about calling those with inherited power into a conscious use of their power. Inherited power most often seduces us into unconsciousness. And when we exercise our power unconsciously, it brings great damage. 

Whenever unconscious forces, whether they are personal or collective, are called into the light of consciousness, they raise a great ruckus. I like to call the forces dragons - the forces that urge us to stay in our lowest consciousness. They wish to remain unconscious because in the dark, they can feed, without our awareness, upon our sacred power – the life force that connects us to all of creation. The result of their feeding is our sacred power is drained, we believe we are smaller and less holy than we really are, and we perpetrate that smallness on the external world through or decisions and actions.

Light kills these dragons. So, when the light begins to shine on them, they get very active in their defense of the dark. So we have the stupid backlash of All lives Matter and we have Trump, and moronic grinning goons with torches in Charlottesville, and we have the cable TV parade of every conceivable form of people competing for the biggest victim prize, and we have the breakdown of truth, because the dragons are masters of confusion. How to transform your dragons.

The literal translation of "the apocalypse" is "the uncovering." So, yes, we are in living in the "uncovering." In tradition, what is uncovered, or opened, is an injection of pure power from creation. This is the time you chose to be born into. Fantastic, yes?  What's more, you were born with the power to do the work that is needed. The dragons tell you every moment that you were born weak, you were born sick, you were born diseased, that your traumas have destroyed you. But if that is true, why do they choose you to live inside? Why are they eating your sacred power?

So we keep pouring light down into the tangled forest of the unconscious. This is one of our main tasks right now as human beings, this is the time we came into and the work we are called to do.

It's important to pour light down into your own forest, first, or you become part of the problem. Unhealed healers bring damage. Undarkened social justice warriors add to the feast for the dragons. They just create new karma. Facebook, by the way, is the playground for the creation of new karma, so be careful, please - your next lives depend on you using social media wisely. 

I've worked with four indigenous shamanic teachers in my life, and each one has said, "First, you must build your power." Every bit of my teaching focuses on this simple sounding idea. What does it mean to build your power?

In essence, there are two approaches. One is to look at what is draining (or blocking) your power, and stop the leak (or unblock the flow). The other is to identify the ways you can call new power into you, and call it in, hold it, and use it. This is an ongoing process – a life-long pursuit, a long journey with unexpected twists, and also with surprises so radiant they cannot be put into small human language. I – like you – like all of us – are working moment by moment on "building my power."

Even the use of that word, power, can be terrifying to people (it has been to me, and to many of my students) because one symptom of the inherited illness that we call Western Culture is that power is misunderstood and used very poorly. Power without sacred love of life brings destruction. (Love without power is mere sentimentality, which happens often in New Age spirituality and smiley Christianity. And love and power without wisdom is just spiritual farting. Wisdom is the breast milk of the Dark Mother of creation that brings you the power to sing healing into this world. Well, that’s another strange phrase that I don't have time to unpack at the moment.)

I hope I never give anyone the impression that I believe I'm oh so powerful and magical because I talk about these things. It's just that, for some reason, I've spent an ill-advised amount of time, money, tears and pain on learning as much as I can about all of this before I pass from this lovely earth, and I've been unbelievably blessed to seek out and meet beautiful teachers who have helped me grasp and use these ideas and practices. Those teachers have included human shaped ones, as well as the teachers shaped as mountains, rivers, crows, and many plants and animals - on and on they go.  My deepest love is working with all of this and teaching it.

Which brings me to the Celtic story, the Coming of Angus and Bride. It seems to be a pleasant little story about the transformation of winter into spring. But that inherited disability we call Reason has, for too many generations, tried to convince us to shrink the power in everything that comes from nature. The shamans know that stories about nature are a form of powerful healing medicine, because they know that what happens in nature happens in us, because we ARE nature.

(Okay, one more digression: Reason is not, in itself, a disability. Reason is a profound gift and tool for human beings. But, reason easily slips into arrogance, and when it does, it becomes a disability. The story of western culture has been like taking a lover with a great body and a full bank account but no heart. The Earth Mother has now become keen on where this relationship has been going.)

The Coming of Angus and Bride is one of the most powerful Celtic stories that exist. However, it's easily overlooked by the western mind because the story invites you into the mythic heart, and the medicine of nature. This is why I've made the story the center point of my online Spring Equinox shamanism class that I just put out a few days ago. The class takes you very deeply into working with the imagery – otherwise called divine forces or High Frequency helping spirits – that inhabit the story. It's a great way to use this Equinox and transition to spring a vehicle for spiritual growth.

rigid is not a giant human, or a human shaped ghost – it is the name we give to the mysterious power inside the first light of dawn, and inside the force of springtime. It is a radiant energy that rises at the beginning of day - the love song of sun and earth sung with every dawn. It is the radiant life force that rises up from the bondage of winter and carries the new life of springtime into the world. It is these natural powers that are being honored as a spirit of poetic inspiration, not because there is a big human who cares about rhyming schemes and iambic pentameter. We call these powers "Brigid," and maybe we imagine her looking a certain way, because it makes it easier to talk to her and about her.

I see it like this: Brigid is the force inside the element fire. What we call "she" is a quality of that fire - a sacred feminine energy, because the Brigid fire is the force that initiates and warms any new creation.  

In some forms, like dawn and early spring, that fire energy is sweet, spacious, gentle, careful, and delightful. In this way, she is the bringer of human inspiration – the Gaelic word is "Imbas" (Gaelic for "fire in the head") – the spark of "aha!" that bursts in all artistic and creative work. This is why the ancient Irish poets, who studied formally for many years, saw Brigid as their lifelong guardian, teacher and patron spirit.
And in this gentler form, she is also seen as goddess of the hearth – the place in the very center of ancient Irish and Scottish huts, where the fire burns constantly and cooks the food. At night, a ritual of keeping the house safe would be performed. The hot coals would be "banked" or "smoored" – separated into three small piles, with peat laid between and ashes spread over the top. This kept the coals from completely going out, and in the moong with a few gentle breaths they would ignite once more. A prayer would be made for protection of the sleeping family. Here is a prayer I wrote that you can use, adapt, change, edit:
 
I smoor this fire as Brigid herself would:
With the power of love
The power of life
And the power of protection
Around this house these powers spread
Like Brigid's cloak
Around the family
Around the herd
Around the land
May we rise tomorrow
Seven times stronger
Seven times more wise
Seven times more loving
Most of us don’t smoor the fire at night, but you can do this prayer to your body as you go to bed. The fire is in you, after all. 
 
In more concentrated form – with more heat – Brigid brings the warmth of springtime to melt the constricting forces of winter inside the land. This is why she is a healer, because she unbinds the death force, she evaporates darkness, and she melts hard, frozen, constricting winter where she finds it - whether in the land, or in the body, or the heart or the mind. She is "warmth" – an elemental energy in nature, and "warmth" underlies healing in many ways.
In even more concentrated form, Brigid is the intense fire of the forge – the fire that transforms something into a different shape. As the goddess of the forge, she is involved in making beautiful and useful metal objects, including weapons.

The heat of the forge needs to be intense because the iron does not want to change. It wants to stay the way is. So, when it is necessary to affect transformation, Brigid turns up the heat. In this way, Brigid is present in any initiatory event in our life, and in those events where we feel great resistance, she may come as a gentle flame first, but if our resistance does not melt away, she may turn up the heat.
Humans cannot bring new daylight to night, cannot melt the ice of winter, and cannot transfigure raw earth, by searing heat, into gleaming objects. So, I urge you to be careful about shrinking Brigid down into a sexpot with a crystal hanging on her forehead. Brigid may not look so sexy and mild to the iron – or to the parts of us in great resistance to the new life that she is bringing forth from our inner earth.

Brigid is spelled and pronounced many ways: Brigit, Bride, Brigh, Bridey, Brighid, Brigit, Briggidda, Brigantia. The name can be pronounced like the common girl's name, Bridgette or Bridget, or in Gaelic it can be pronounced BREE-ya or BREE-ja or Breet. Even the fact there are so many variations and pronunciations of her name give you the idea of how widespread, flexible, welcoming, assimilating and adaptable this figure is.

The root of her name – Brig – is the Gaelic word for "power." Brigid is power, and what is fire if not pure power? That Gaelic root, "Brig" can also be translated as "exalted." That is a great word for us to muse on, because we automatically think of exalted as "high status." But it also means "great joy." One of the most serious illnesses in our time is the inability to summon true joy. One of the most powerful ways to work with Brigid is to ask her to help you with authentic joy – not the distracting and addicting pleasures that dress up messily as joy, but actual joy. One of the best questions you can ask yourself is "What does joy mean to me?" (And do I currently have it in my daily life?) You can ask how you can retrieve lost joy (bring spring out of dead winter, bring new day from night, bring healing to your joylessness). These are prayers you can make to Brigid.

Traditionally, Brigit is the goddess of springtime – the goddess of new life emerging, of rebirth and renewal in all its forms. In this way, she is the premier figure of the east on the Celtic Medicine Wheel – the direction associated with dawn, springtime, new life, starting fresh, forgiveness, abundance and generosity, and with what the Christian tradition calls "grace."

In the Christian tradition Brigid became the midwife at the birth of Jesus. This expands her pre-Christian association with bringing grace into the world, with renewal and fresh starts for the whole world. The Christ beings the power of "Rejoice!" into the world, and Brigid is the one who midwives that power and carries it safely into our world.

In the Irish tradition Brigid is also credited with being the inventor of "keening"- the deep, frightening wailing song of grief, which she introduced after her son was killed in battle. Her song of grief was so powerful that it shook the warriors on the battlefield to their core, and they dropped their weapons. This is part of her story that doesn't make it into the usual categories, because it's not tidy, like the Roman mind wants Goddesses to be. But as a goddess of birthing the new, her keening calls out with great power to the forces that needlessly take life away - like war. And grieving is always a part of starting a new life, is it not? - in order to begin new, we must always let go of the old. In this way Brigid connect the east to the west on the wheel.
February 2nd is the traditional celebration of Brigit. Astronomically, this is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and year by year it can happen anytime in the first few days of February. In this way, Brigid is a solar goddess, and could be described as the Goddess not of the sun, but of light itself - and all the things we associate with light: spiritual wisdom, intelligence, truth, healing. And also justice: Brigid is also the Goddess of physicians and healing, divination and prophecy. One of her most ancient names is Breo-saighead (Pronounced "BREE-o SUH-yed) meaning fiery arrow – an image of divine justice. In the form of Brigantia, she offers big vision of time, and the heroic quest.

In the British Isles, the first signs of spring really do begin to appear at this time – the average low temperature throughout Britain, Wales, Scotland and Ireland is in the low 40's Fahrenheit. The crocus and snowdrops begin to appear, sometimes poking up through the final snow. The udders of cows and sheep begin to swell in anticipation of giving birth.

This is why Brigid is associated with milk – mother's milk of new life. Everything to do with new life, and ordinary, day to day life, is part of Brigid's domain, and this is perhaps the reason why she is so widely known and venerated. Everyone has to churn butter and tend the cows, and everyone is concerned about getting sick and healing from it. In some ways, Brigid can be seen as the goddess of the everyday life. That may not seem as dramatic as a war or death goddess, or the mythic figures that weave betrayal and wild magic. Brigid has a subtlety and gentle beauty to her power.

Is the first snowdrop of spring emerging form the dark less interesting or potent than a sword that guarantees victory or cauldron of rebirth? I say yes, easily as interesting.
 
In Minnesota where I live, the average low does not get above 35 degrees until mid-April. That leaves Brigid-ophiles in the great north needing to tweak the Brigid tradition some. We can't celebrate the visible signs of spring in the land on February 2, but we can celebrate it in the celestial realm. By early February, the angle of the sun begins to soften the ice imperceptibly, making ice skating slower and less smooth. In early February, in the great north, we can just barely begin to feel that the darkness of winter is easing, even if it is 7 degrees outside. Brigid is just beginning her great annual argument with the Cailleach, the goddess of winter.

Brigit's Day may not be a time in the frozen north to watch for crocuses or swelling udders, but it is a time for us to see the "opening of the east" on the medicine wheel. The north is beginning to close, the east opens. This is great day to celebrate!

Empires like Rome and modern America like to have specific dates on the calendar to celebrate deities. So, Christ was born on December 25th, and to deny that is blasphemous. Brigid's Day is February 1, so you better do your ritual.  This adherence to the calendar keeps order in the populace; it tells them how to live by delivering orders from The Authority, and Empires love that. But the indigenous mind goes by signs in nature, moon cycles, and guidance from Spirit. 

So, I like to celebrate the celestial aspect of Brigid in early February - the sun's midpoint between solstice and equinox. In the cold of February I like to do healing ceremonies with Brigid - healing for people, or land, or whole nations and the human  species -  asking for her to breathe her new life into old dead winter - the dead ideas, the dead  beliefs and ways of life that bring death to us and others.  
I like to celebrate the fight between Brigid and the Cailleach - the fight between new spring and late winter - in mid to late March (see the story "The Coming of Angus and Bride). And I like to celebrate The Goddess of Springtime in mid-April when I can see the new flowers emerging (for us it's typically the Siberian Squill, the most beautiful, delicate periwinkle flowers atop dark green stems. I think of these as Brig's Flowers, something that is not at all in Celtic tradition.)

I celebrate Brigid's hot flame of transformation whenever a new idea comes to fruition, into shape in this world. In this way, she can be thought of as a goddess of "manifestation."

Here's a very good overview of Brigit from Sharon Blackie: https://thehedgeschool.org/Blog/the-brigit-phenomenon/thehedgeschool.org/Blog/the-brigit-phenomenon/
Here is an interesting piece about Brigid and the Morrigan (The goddess of war and sex):
https://earthandstarryheaven.com/2016/08/31/brigit-morrigan/
 
Here's a long detailed piece on Brigid: https://www.druidry.org/library/gods-goddesses/brigid-survival-goddess
Here's a short audio telling of her: http://bardmythologies.com/brigid-the-goddess/

Our culture often encourages us to be half-hearted. We are instructed to make money the guide for every decision. We call this the "bottom line." When we follow that instruction, we often find that our heart has been robbed of power. 

The heart is the doorway that Spirit uses to enter the world through us. That doorway needs power to fully open. A heart robbed of power is too small for Spirit to work fully through us, and it doesn't have the ooomph to open the door to Spirit. This is the recipe for how to live in half-heartedness – going through the motions, doing what's "right" or "reasonable" but lacking awe, gratitude, love and wonder.
 
I believe something insane: these times of tumult are the door to the human heart opening wider, so Spirit can come into the world in a new way. The forces that benefit from the closed heart - from people living in listlessness, fear and drained of power - are fighting hard to re-close the heart of humanity. But it's not going to work. (It's clearly insane for me to believe this.) (So: Wahoo.)

We are half-hearted for all kinds of reasons. Maybe we are trying to disprove our unworthiness. Maybe we are competing with something that may not matter that much? Or we are living someone else's vision? Or we are covered over by fear that we don't see. Bring attention, and bring the power of intention to that place in you. "This thing that I have been devoted to for this long - do I truly want to be devoted to this?"
 
The Buddhist teacher Tara Brach approaches this topic in podcast entitled Wholeheartedness. To the question “What allows us to be awake?” she repeats the answer of a famous Buddhist teacher: “Attention and intention.” 
 
The first step in healing half-heartedness in our lives, our jobs, our relationships, in our yearnings for our life, is to simply pay attention to where we are half-hearted, where we approach life with hesitation and lack of vigor. (In shamanic terms this is called tracking our power loss.)
 
We must begin by telling the truth to ourselves. When we don't begin with truth, Spirit will eventually bring the truth to us through disaster (the shamanic term: dismemberment). Truth telling is the single most important starting place for change of consciousness. (So it's no wonder that the forces of anti-heart begin with dismembering the very idea of truth.)
 
After truth telling (attention) comes intention. Brach says: “the antidote to depression is devotion.” That is a great phrase! It is devotion to your spiritual life that realigns and transforms your half-hearted energies, making you more able to negotiate the sorrows, frustrations and joys of this life. Humans are "meaning-making" creatures," and meaning only comes to us through the spiritual – the only thing that help give us transcendental direction, something which we need as much as vitamin C. 
 
And of course it completely matters what you are devoted to. Religious nut-jobs, conspiracy crackpots and greedy muthrfkrs are bursting with what they call devotion. But it only takes a little looking to see the flaw: their devotion is not to the transcendent, it is self-devotion, and it is entirely infused with fear – of death, of intimacy, of beauty.
 
What is devotion from a shamanic perspective? It has everything to do with escaping the presumptions of consumer culture: that things matter more than feelings, that things can cure our inner malaise, that things raise our value as beings, that God cares about our possessions. These presumptions - as old as the human ego - are the insidious mass psychosis of self-devotion, the killer of beauty and annihilator of transcendence, the poisoner of communality, the belittler of compassion, the "'second-rate religion that has programmed a society of ‘cheerful robots.'"
 
So, if you want to work into this, begin by asking "Do I want to live in half-heartedness?" Ask it to yourself several times, outloud. Be honest. If your answer is no, read on.

Ask yourself, "Where am I half hearted?" Bring your attention to the place(s) you feel halfhearted. You may run through a list: My work? My Relationships? My artistic life? My spiritual practice? 

Or you can ask your body, "Where am I half hearted?" Move your awareness throughout your body as you ask that question. Pay attention to sensation or emotions that arise. Locate the place in your body where you are half-hearted. Half-heartedness spreads into the belly and into the head too, into the muscles and blood and breath, and neurons. This is initiative work, so don't worry, don't judge, just be open and follow what comes up. When you locate a place in the body that seems to be responding to the question of half-heartedness, stay there, and sink in. Ask that spot to teach you about your half-heartedness. Open your dreaming eyes and let that place in the body speak to you through through images.
 
After some truth telling and information gathering about where you are half-hearted, then apply intention. Ask yourself what would make you wholehearted in this place. It's a mysterious practice to locate a place in your body, a place that is in pain or tightness, or lacking energy, and ask, "What do you want from me – what form of wholeheartedness can heal you?"
 
Another way of approaching it is asking yourself, "What do I want to be devoted to?" You can ask what kind of devotion you want for your work, from (and for) your relationships, etc. You may find yourself exploring The Nine Needs. Pick the top three and make them your project to fulfill.

These questions and practices may sound simple, but they may turn out to bring you a lot of confusion and angst as you try to tell the truth and bring wholeheartedness in as a healing force.
 
We fear that our devotion may fail – that we won't be able to do it. Or if it we succeed, our devotion will wreck our life. Being comfortable with wholeheartedness is like becoming comfortable with death. Both are a complete commitment to change.
 
If you want to work on wholeheartedness from a shamanic perspective, you can do the same two steps: tell the truth about your half-heartedness, then ask yourself what you really want to be devoted to. Then, you can call out a prayer to the Spirit(s) to come and fill you with vision, with courage, and with strength to act.
 
Alternatively, you can ask the spirits to come and “work” your half-heart. That “working” may mean something different from one person to the next. Being “worked” by the spirits is different from meditating on the question, and for me, it’s very helpful.
 
I wish for you a Holiday season and a 2019 of wholeheartedness.
 
I leave you with this poem from David Whyte:
 
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.
To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.
Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.
Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
 
~David Whyte, River Flow: New and Selected Poems

In many northern hemisphere traditions Halloween is the time to honor the spirits of unseen nature, the powers of destiny, wonder and mystery that surround us and permeate us, and to honor the ancestors,

People ask me how to honor ancestors. Many of us don't know much about our ancestors, and some of us despise our ancestors. How do you honor people you despise or don't know?

One of the keys is that we are not necessarily honoring the behavior of our ancestors. We are honoring that every life that has ever passed across the skin of this Great Mother Earth has been a hard life, full of turmoil, dilemma, joy, grief, wrong choices and bravery.  (This is actually one of the reason we come here to be in the body - we learn lessons faster and more deeply in the body than anywhere else.)

There is that old truism that forgiveness is not about the other person - it's about freeing yourself from a spell that keeps you small, locked in pain, locked in martyrdom. Forgiveness is not at all about forgetting, or pretending or denying reality. Forgiveness is about releasing a curse placed on you by trauma, or in shamanic healing terns, it's about releasing the energy pattern embedded in you. In Spanish this is called susto – the energetic remnants of trauma, embedded din our energy body. Releasing that curse, freeing yourself from that energy, clearing that susto, allows you to make a new world - one that operates very differently from the unhealed one. Forgiveness doesn't change the past; it changes the future. 

I believe that many of us (meaning peachy-moon-colored people of European ancestry) have come here in this life in part to do the healing on our ancestors that has been needed for centuries. If you are searching for a purpose in life, this is a great one. We do this healing on the ancestors in two ways.

One way is through ceremony, like this one. We ceremonially give healing to our unhealthy ancestors - we heal the way the life force had gotten twisted in them, and in this twisting, had blinded them to love, and made them deaf to beauty, and had made them into such hungry creatures that all they could think about was gathering more food to them  - in the form of actual food, but also in the perverted form of all addictions, including the addiction to status that comes from wealth. (I urge you not to do this kind of ancestral healing on your own if you are new to shamanic work, but work with someone who understands the ancestral world. If you do feel compelled to do this on your own, please ask your helping spirits to make you invisible to the unhealthy ancestors.) 

The other way we continue the healing of unhealthy ancestors is to live differently than they did. Change the inner reality from which their lives and actions sprung. This involves doing the very difficult personal work of undoing the patterns in myself that have been handed down, or sung into me. It involves opening my comfortable ignorance.

​There is a tremendous amount of this going on right now! A great deal of discomfort is pouring out of many of us. I believe this is because Spirit is cleansing us. Now that seems like a nice thing to say, but I want to make clear that I'm talking about a scouring, not a warm washing. The scouring is coming to all of us, there is no escaping it. The main questions as I see it, is do I try to run from it, and delay it, or do I jump in and be the first wave to get through it?  I believe those drawn to shamanic practice are part of the early wave to open the new future, a very different future form our current one. Shamanic practice builds the spiritual foundation upon which this new world will stand.

So when we "honor" our ancestors, we are honoring the fact that our ancestors carried the Life Force their entire life and they passed it on to us so that we may carry it, so that we may protect and defend and work with it. Whether we love them or despise them, we stand on their shoulders. For those ancestors who we admire, we ask that they send strength and wisdom up through our bones so that we may work with the life force with as much courage and beauty as they did. 

For those ancestors whose behaviors disappoint, horrify or wound us, we do the hardest and most wonderful act: we send them beauty, medicine and food through ceremony in order to heal what was unhealed in them during their life - and in that unhealed state they perpetrated things that were wrong. We use some of the strength we get from the healthy ancestors, and send it downward to clear susto in unhealthy ancestors, so they no longer need to reach up through our bones, and into our lives, and grasp at our life force to feed themselves. And we commit ourselves to doing a better job wielding the life force than they did.

It is a tenet of shamanic practice that life exists on a circle, and to heal any part of the circle brings healing to other parts of the circle. Here is a secret: When we heal our ancestors we are healing ourselves and our descendants. We cease the repeated generational distribution of spiritual poisons. Here is the other secret: unhealed, we repeat the perpetrations of our ancestors. Healed, we awaken and create waves of different actions in this world. 

The shamans remind us that we have our human ancestors, but we also have our non-human and pre-human ancestors: the fertile earth, the fruitful sea, the rocks, the winds, the stardust, the tides, the lightning, the creatures great and small - all of these are our ancestors and we will honor them and feed them the food of beauty in our ceremony. This is work you absolutely can and should do on your own. Stand outside and say hello to every living thing you lay eyes, ears or skin on. Make prayers of gratitude and send them love and strength for the coming winter. Thank them for the gifts they bring to the web of life. This kind of prayer, done regularly, can change your life. 

I'm wishing you a bountiful and beautiful autumn. 

Because I'm a theology geek, I think a lot about the term teleology: the study of the purpose of everything. What is the purpose of the universe? Where is the universe going? I'm in the universe, so wherever it’s going, I'm going too.

In Celtic shamanic tradition there are three core questions you ask a traveler on the road: Where are you from? Where are you going? What's the purpose of your journey? And there's a fourth question: Who are your people?
​
There's a link between those two paragraphs, and it comes in the form of Albert Einstein's famous quote: “The most important question you can ever ask is if the world is a friendly place.” This is a teleological question, and working a spiritual path begins with wrangling with that "most important" question, and answering it honestly for yourself.

​Einstein's extended quote is valuable here:

Your spiritual maturity (or, if you prefer: soul age) factors deeply into how you answer Einstein's question. Younger souls, or less mature theologies are rooted in the first answer. They tend toward hierarchical spiritual structures that tell people what to believe.

Atheists, agnostics and scientific materialists are grounded in the second answer. They value their own personal inquiry and answers, and they are grounded in one part of the human experience: reason. Mystics and shamans occupy the third answer. They marry reason and poetry, logic and dream, emotion with analysis, tradition with direct personal experience.

I suppose each group believes their answer to the question makes the most sense, and they may think the other groups are naïve, immature or downright stupid.

I do know this: how you answer the question creates the kinds of prayers you make (and I declare that everyone, in each of the three categories of answers prays, even if they don't call it prayer!). How you pray determines the decisions you arrive at, and your decisions are the soil from which all of your actions spring, and your actions create your reality. In the third answer (the universe as a friendly place) our prayers are a co-creation with the universe, and this is the most effective way to pray. 

So, your life depends on how you answer that question!
​
If you want to move out of a victim mentality because you've had enough of what it can show you about life, if you want to move out of pessimism and cynicism, then give a try to standing in the friendly universe and answering those four Celtic questions from that place. This is big work, long work, deep work, and it may not be easy for you, so have some patience with yourself. It also can be lonely work, so  seek out a teacher and community who can help you. (This answers the fourth question: who are your people?) 

Here are two ideas to chew on: maybe the purpose of your life is not about your career or your children or your travels or your "goodness." Maybe your purpose is to become a healthy ancestor - to do your spiritual work now because we have had scores of generations of unhealthy ancestors, and we need healthy ancestors to help us, and all of your spiritual work now, in this life, is preparing you to serve the descendents from the spirit world (or yourself when you come back). 

Or this: maybe your purpose is simply to raise your spiritual maturity level in this life. Maybe you were born into that less mature religious tradition in order for you to grow your way out of it in this life. Stepping from level 5 to level 6 in this life is a great purpose, an achievement!

Well, those are just ideas to chew on. 

Be honest with yourself and with the world. Be patient. Be committed. Go into the fear. Don't be afraid to claim your power when you feel it. Flowers will come. 

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