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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are under the new moon of January and this is a powerful time to make two linked prayers that can help you in these charged times. (Remember that when I say "prayer," I mean "calling the tangible partnership of Spirit into the physical plane." In shamanism, prayer is energy work and has effects.)
 
One prayer is to the powers of the north and winter, the great mothers of healing and release, to help you let go of the attachments that have held you down and made you smaller than you really are. The other prayer is to ask the mothers of new life (the east on the medicine wheel) to come a fill you with courage, curiosity, vision and verve. January is filled with celebrations for these mothers, and we'll look at this in a moment.
 
There's an old shamanic adage: where you place your attention, there goes your co-creating power. Human beings are prayer-making creatures. We make prayers all the time, though we often call it daydreaming, musing, or being lost-in-thought. One simple way to shift your energies is to put some focused attention on these two prayers.
 
Option 1: Cleansing the attachment to fear
We are swimming in fear, and fear is like a glue that keeps us attached to the things that we need to let go of. It goes very hard on us when we are hypnotized by fear. When we feel "stuck," it is usually because of the old glue of fear. 
 
When I was in second grade, my family moved from the inner city of Denver, out to the gleaming suburbs. My mother frequently found me in the basement swinging a spoon back and forth in front of my eyes, mumbling, "You're back in the old house…you’re back in the old house…"
 
Many people are doing this right now, spurred on by the hypnotists in charge. And it's going to be very hard on them, because there is no going back; there is only going into a fantasy of what things used to be. Conspiracy theories are grounded in abstract fears that harden into bizarre reality for the one walking that ever-darkening road. Conspiracy theories are a twisted form of prayer-making, of asking Spirit to incrementally help you manifest the darkest world you can imagine. 
 
It's easy to stay glued to the news, and to the anger or schadenfreude on social media, like eating  small doses of gloom-sugar all day long.
 
All of this is completely understandable, because we are in a time of great uncertainty and we are all seeking something to help us make sense of things, some kind of solid ground to stand on, and some way we can bring some control back to life. And I'm not claiming to be free of any of this.
 
But there are options, and Spirit can help us. This profound time we are in offers us two opportunities for creativity, and creativity is the antidote to fear.
 
Fear comes from our animal bodies, and it is a natural response to uncertainty. It helps a lot to just remember that - there's no shame in feeling fear because it's wired into us to keep us alive. However, it's good to remember that we are more than our animal body, and we really don't have to let fear hypnotize us.
 
Asking Spirit to "help me release my attachment to fear" is a potent action right now, in this three days of the new moon of January. Note the wording: it's not "Spirit, take my fears away" it's asking to be released from hypnosis. You'll need to do your own part by putting down the spoon you are swinging in front of your eyes.
 
The Old Bone Mother of the Celtic tradition is an ally in the work of releasing, as she comes to gather the energies and structures in the world (inner and outer) that need to be taken away so that space opens up for new life to emerge. You can ask for her to help, in prayers or meditations or visualizations. A word of caution: when the rational mind begins to chatter that this is all a waste of time, remember, that's just a cover to allow the small mind to continue visualizing the looming disaster, reinforcing the fear, and offering us (often false) ways to feel in control. The small mind wants to keep us locked in the hypnosis of fear. So bring some balance to this "negative prayer work" that is already occurring inside you.
 
The spirits in nature are always ready to help. You can ask the cold air of winter to come, or that incredible bright winter sun, or the bare tree branches, or the fire inside the belly of the mother earth, or those sharp winter stars to help you dissolve the glue of fear. What powers do they have? The cold wind can make the fear brittle so it slakes off. The bright sun can evaporate the fears. The bare branches are our teachers in letting go. The stars are like scissors. Ask them in these kinds of words to help release old fear attachments. You have so much help in this. Ask the spirit of cleansing winter to snap loose the calcified energies of fear that hypnotize you and keep you attached to old ways that are no longer useful in the emerging world.

Option 2: Infusing inspiration into the bones
As the doors to the east on the great wheel of life open, this is a potent time to ask the great mothers of new life to help you weave a new way of being. In the pagan European tradition – which can also be called the European shamanic tradition – January is populated with celebrations to ancient mother goddess figures whose job is weave, spin or midwife the new shape of things.
 
In Italy, The grandmother faery queen, La Befana comes to sweep out the old stored energy out of the house, and give candy to the children. In Ireland, St Latiaran of Cuillinn, is celebrated for drawing the hot coal ("seed of new fire") out of the forge to take it home to re-light her hearth. In the Balkans, January 9th is a day to celebrate midwives. In ancient Rome, Carmenta, goddess of prophecy and childbirth was celebrated in January. Goddesses of destiny and fate – the weavers and spinners of the next shape of life - are often celebrated in mid-January (for example, the Scandinavian Norns and the Greek Moirai).Finally, at the end of the month, the super-goddess, Brigid of the Celtic world emerges to infuse us with inspiration. I'll be offering some beautiful work with Brigid soon.
 
The prayer to these Mothers of the New Shape can be as simple as "infuse me with inspiration." That word, inspiration, is shorthand for the delight of the new shape emerging, the regenerative power of the warmth stirring in the belly of the great mother that is always birthing the new into this world. Ask the Mothers of the east to protect you while in labor, and help you replace old attachments with new curiosity and vision.

These two prayers made at this time can shift your underlying energy and feed the emergence of new energies. 

Blessings of the Mothers of Healing and Inspiration be yours. ​

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.