DatingGod

Dance Exorcist: Shamanics In Motion

Releasing Into the Interior

The posts here get further and further apart. There are lots of stories occurring over here, but the directive around them is clear: not for the blog.

Some get told to clients, as a way to help them see a bigger picture or to show a concept being explained in motion. Others get shared with loved ones, for whatever reason that arises in the moment. Most don't get expressed into the world, at least not to other people. They stay contained inside this body-mind-heart where they appear to be distilling down into something closer to the truth, which is an impossible statement, but again, as close to the truth as can expressed at this time, in this space, for this reason.

I don't experience the telling of a story as a bad thing, that there's anything inherently wrong with the human desire to tell stories from the unfolding of a life. It's just that it's so clear for me at this time: it's about holding the stories, watching the desire to story tell as a way to somehow capture what's flowing, pin it down, make it stay. Which is impossible. And by its very act kills the germinating seed of Yes.

There's a way to tell stories so they become empowering, for both the speaker and the listener, a way to tell a story that includes the listener in such a deep way that the story being told is actually their own story. This blog used to be that, and maybe still is if someone stumbles here and goes back through the nine years of archives. And maybe it'll be that again, maybe the stories occurring over here will request they be posted, let loose on the internet in this form.

But for now, the writing is pouring into two places: the extensive handouts created for the Integral Shamanics Training Program and a private doc and notebook where the words and concepts and stories don't have to be shaped - just flow out fingers and heart and mind and simply exist without further input, from anyone, anyone, no judgment or editing or backlash. Just flow. 

Because the current underlying awareness is around something I've known about for decades, called different names by different teachers I studied and apprenticed with. Grandfather Albert, a Mi'kmaq shaman, who led a four-day total fast in the forest - not even water - because he said at the end of the fourth day, the bad spirits would see you as dead and release you. Fiona, who showed how to disappear from the entities' sensors by repatterning emotional and mental frequencies. Laura and her many tomes about the aliens. And then the gift from The Vine a month ago, where she showed me for five hours, relentlessly, mercilessly, who we are, why we were built, who built us, why, what it all means, what we have to do to be free. Now Paul writes about it in such a straightforward way, calling it wetiko. And David Carse and Jed, who keep saying: further. 

A few months down the line, I'm going to offer up all of the Integral Shamanics training program handouts for you - some sort of free ebook I want to set loose in the world. For today, here's an exerpt from the handout for the first class in the training program:

Participant introductions: telling our Stories of Yes

Transparency is one of the core principles of Integral Shamanics, along with mastery and tribe.  We live in a culture that celebrates two extremes around this flow of energy: perfecting an opaque image and TMI (too much information). Perfecting an image is about creating a physical, emotional and mental mask that fits with cultural norms and usually allows its wearer access to more resources (money, other people’s time & energy, etc.). TMI is an energetic response some people have to the cultural norm of projecting a perfect image, and is also an attempt to clear the mind-body-heart of the tension that results from the tremendous energy it takes to project and maintain an image. Rigidity and withholding is another attempt to deal with the buildup of tension, as a way to tightly control and hide what lies underneath the mask.

Antidote. One antidote to the extremes of image, withholding and TMI is to simply hold the energy, to not release into talking or showing how either happy (positive charge) or sad (negative charge) you are. To hold energy, simply remain silent, breathe, watch the thoughts but don’t express them, let the world swirl around you, only take action you need to take, either for practicality’s sake or because you feel to move/speak. This is different from  withholding in that it’s conscious holding, so that the barrier of control can be felt, the boundary seen and moved when it feels safe and advantageous on a level behind/beyond world and it’s desire to amass resources.

Holding. In this moment, what energy  (emotional feelings, intense thoughts, physical sensation/pain) can you feel pushing at you, either from outside, or inside? Hold it – whatever it is – without trying to change it – to make it better or less or gone. Be with it. Breathe.  Say Yes and Thank you. Allow the vibration of these words, the feelings and sensations that come with them for you to move through you.

Stories of Yes are also powerful antidotes to the energy drain of keeping an image alive that is not Who You Are. They can be joyful or sad,  from this moment, from your recent or distant past, or echoing to you from the future. They can be spoken, sang, danced, drummed, presented as artwork or crafted object to pass around, as silence, or whatever else you feel tells your story.

Who You Are. Whatever story you feel to tell in the first class, let it be something true, something in its revealing that will illuminate Who You Are, how you got here, what place on the map of Aliveness you can feel yourself being drawn toward. Know that the story you share will shift the vibration of all of the folks who’ll be gathered during the first class. Let the story you tell be from your heart, mind, spirit, the organs and vibration, muscles and light, fluid and charge that is you in that moment. If you’re not sure what you want to say, sit with it between now and the first class. Right now, in this moment, be quiet and ask yourself: Who Am I? How did I get here? And when it’s your time to tell your story in the first class, ask yourself again . . .

 

Energy For Energy

So much happening. So much shift and change. It's the Yes. And it's unleashing itself inside of me.

Just to manage the influx of energy flow, I have to get out and walk, and run, and walk, and run, and do pushups. I have to play my new drum, to channel some of that intense humming going on inside of me out into the world. I have to eat protein and greens, take my multi-vite, drink lots of water. I have to say Yes to things that are scary but are the clearest next step when a next step is clearly indicated.

The energy continually looks for release. When I feel the energy damming up inside of me, the pressure that can turn into anxiety or depression or delusion, I find a way to release the energy out into the world beyond exercising and eating well: make or take a phone call or email with someone who needs help, take an action around an issue I handled poorly, to mend it or fix it or make sure it doesn't happen again when faced once more with the situation. And write, do sessions, teach classes, build a Tribe of Yes on facebook where folks can come and tell their stories of Yes.

This all keeps the cycle of energy going, energy in, energy out. And it builds. Doing this builds energy. 

It's about cutting off all of my hair, even though I intellectually know I look prettier with long hair. But I do it anyway because I can feel that my hair needs to be short right now. And it also needs to be purple and pink. And in a whirlwind on top of my head, all day, every day, which means that when I get up in the morning, I submerse my head in a flow of icy water, then shake it like a dog, like a mad grass-roller, and let the spikey ends find their own expression of direction. It doesn't matter what others think about my new headgear. When I look in the mirror, what I see is: Yes. 

It means refining the art of "energy for energy" with the flow of human connection in my world. For too long I gave myself away, for free, to anyone who would take me, until I was drained and in a miserable heap, full of blame and loathing, for self and others. I believed it was my only worth: what I could do for and give people. So I attracted lots of people who liked to take energy and not give anything back.

But then I woke up from that false belief. And in the flow of the bounce back, I stopped giving anything to anyone unless I absolutely had to for survival. Until I saw the false belief of that too. Until I saw that we all depend on each other for survival, that we may enter and leave this life alone, but that while alive, we are truly connected, and that we can choose the web of people that occupy the spaces in the weave closest to us.

In this living of mine, it's now energy for energy. Sometimes it's money, othertimes it's because Grace says to do it. Sometimes it's because they are a loved one and the Yes says: do this now, and then later when it says don't do this now, I listen to that too, with no guilt. When someone gives me something, I find something to give them back, or pass it along to someone who needs it. Keeping the flow going.

I'm learning to get out of the way of the takers, the folks who have refined the survival technique of getting other people to give them things, and not giving anything in return, and not copping to it, and so the cycle goes on and on, as long as they are engaged with. I'm learning the difference between being of service, and of servitude.

It's a hard lesson, and sometimes I feel like a jerk, because the ideal for someone doing the sort of work I do is selfless service. I do as much selfless service as I can, because when I serve, we both benefit.

But when I allow someone to set me up as their spiritual vending machine, we both lose. Using another person as an energy source stunts growth, and servitude isn't any fun at all. A system of taking and no giving will ultimately cave in on itself. And so now I opt out. They often get peeved, I sometimes get squirmy. But within days, hours, minutes, balance makes itself known as they either come back and offer energy, or freed from the negative energy loop, they wander off into the world to find another possible spiritual vending machine to work their pattern with. And again, we both benefit.

Energy for energy. Win plus win. Do what feels true. Watch the results. Identify the energy pattern in motion. Adjust the output and input accordingly. Energy for energy.

Build energy. Plug the holes. Build energy. Find a place, person, situation to flow it into.

This is the flow. This is dancing with the Yes.

John Cleese: A Lecture on Creativity

Well worth the time to watch :)

Outrageous Beauty, One Layer In

Spontaneous Altar For Inner Space Travel

What possessed me to spread out the blanket/rug I crocheted some ten years ago and now use for shamanic sessions with people and then just leave it there? Usually Malcolm chews on it, poking holes in it with his whiskery, fangy love. What then prompted me to go to the bookcase, collect the rocks sitting on the shelves, and begin placing them around the blanket's circumference? Who knows? But it began a process lasting about four hours where I went area to area, room by room, and collected all of the stones, every last stone in the house,and I discovered there were a lot. 

Next came the pieces from the plant world. Pieces of wood, bark, seed pods, dried flowers, fungi large and small. Then came the animals. Feathers, shedded skins, claws, whiskers, bodies of butterfly & bee, squirrel and rabbit tails, discarded nests, the ashes of Jacinta, Hoon and Cass.

Then the human objects. Bells and candles, figurines and painted stones and art created and given to me by friends and barters from clients, boxes containing secret shamanic whatnot, my medicine bag and journeying scarf, a picture of my great grandmother Gigi along with her copy of a 1919 edition of Ibsen's A Doll's House.

When it was done, my home looked pretty sparse and the blanket looked like this:

And for the past several days, I've been hanging out there, right in the center of it. Taking and making phone calls, going on shamanic journeys, drifting, sleeping, breathing.

I had deep insights into what possessions are, why we give meaning to certain things, and the difference between things we love, things we need, and things that are both. It's about connecting the dots inside of us, then making them manifest in the world outside our skin, so that the visual and energetic charge will reflect back inside of us, to remind us (if we choose our stuff wisely) of Who We Are (and as we grow and let go: of who we are not).

Letting go of thinking outside the box, and allowing what's outside the box to engulf me leads to the oddest outcomes, fascinating, healing, surprising flows of living. 

Follow your intuition. It will take you on adventures. 

PS - for the first half hour I was doing all this collecting of stuff, I had no clue what was happening, felt a little dumb and weird. Yet intuition said onward. And who am I to argue with onward?

PPS - I just realized that I created a fort in my bedroom, like I used to do when I was a kid. Hilarious!

Past Life Stories

Since I started consciously diving deeply into things of a spiritual nature some thirty years ago, I began having past life remembrances. Sometimes it was talking with someone and watching as their face changed into another face - a boyfriend, very blond and blue-eyed anglo, morphing for a few moments into a classically korean face, and a flash of the life we lived together in a fishing village. Other times it came out of nowhere, as "downloads" that appeared in a millisecond, fully formed, into my conscious mind as complete remembrances, usually followed by how these lives were impacting my current life - I'm in the middle of the forest and can read the forest as if it were a book, the sounds telling me who was there, what they were doing. The patterns of moss on the bark and light showing me what time of year, what the seasons before had been like. The scent in the air telling me a thousand different things of soil and plant and stone and animal and coming weather. All of it showing me how I've read data streams before, and how in this life I read the psychic and shamanic streams, and that my love and endless fascination with it was born out of mastery in that forest life.

As I've gotten more practical over the past decade, I've filed these memories as a kind of unknown. No way to prove they were real - they could just be imaginings, projections. I was fine with not knowing, because these "memories" always brought some sort of relief, healing. So regardless of "truth", I felt an outpouring of gratefulness for them.

Over the years as I've worked with more and more clients, and so many past lives came up during sessions, I began to see what genuine healing occurred when soul pieces were brought back and integrated into the body. And the stories witnessed while in shamanic reality, when told to the client, often triggered great release and understanding for them, explaining all sorts of things they hadn't grasped the importance of - a love for a specific place or type of work, a hunger for a certain way of being, a fear or illness they hadn't known the basis of.

Witnessing these stories for other people, I felt such connectedness, a sense that these past lives were as real as our current lives, this supposed "reality" we all travel in in the Now. And that by bringing them into the conscious mind, a deeper sense of wholeness came into the living, clearing the way for access to more energy, flow, purpose. Knowledge and wisdom as power. Acceptance that this reality and how its put together is so much more than random.

And so, as I've been doing more soul retrievals on myself, more past life remembrances have been flooding in. Explaining so much. Bringing such healing into this living. Helping me slough off the No that remains. Opening into more Yes. The quiet of Yes. The stillness of the unobstructed flow.

So I thought I'd start telling you lovely Tribe of Yes the stories of some of the past lives I've been remembering. Some are sad, some are weird, some are flashy, some are violent, some are quiet, but they are all entertaining. What's the point of having a life if it can't be a helluva good show? :)

Yes, Go

Zoom and Stillness

It's been a roller coaster couple of weeks inside this brain, body, heart. Nothing going, of course, according to plan.

The plan was to do a deep cleanse for the nine days after leaving the fellowship. Water fast, yoga, walking, lots of sleep. Instead I sort of crash landed into a pile of No, and spent the time mostly resisting the urge to pack up the kitties and flee to some cabin in the middle of nowhere. 

Partial cleanses occurred. Lots of sleep occurred. Days free of burning and fermented and caffeinated plants occurred. Carby snacks found their way into my belly, via a tunnel in my mind. Kitties snuggled the heck out of me, then avoided me when the No got too noisy. Joyful interactions, and less joyful interactions. Stepping up and backing away.

I got a lot of work done. Okay, maybe not a lot, but enough. Over the next couple of months, This is happening, and there's lots to do to build it in a way that's strong, stable.

Part of the last couple of weeks has been questioning whether or not I can pull it off. I've been doing this work for almost three decades. Teaching others how to do it for the past fifteen years. Planning it for over a year. But putting it all together, in three local and global online locations? This is new.

The tagline for the training is: Mastery, Transparency, Tribe. It's technique based - shamanic skills, psychic skills, personal development - a very practical way of learning how to access, translate and utilize the data stream that runs behind, underneath this world. Gold standard methods used worldwide, across all times. Clear, straightforward, easily learnable, like playing the piano, or learning to read.

But a vital aspect of using these skills isn't so head-on and has to do with transparency. It's around how to do healing work without pretending to be sunshine and light, without wearing a mask of "perfect". Because trying to show up in a certain way blocks the flow, actually decreases access, and limits the ability to translate.

And yet sunshine and light is generally what's expected of healers. Being respectful, being kind, is simply about being decent. Whether the healer is a physician or a massage therapist or an energyworker, decency goes a long way in helping clients, patients, relax enough, feel safe enough, to enter into their own space of healing. But the dynamic of healer as perfect, and client as broken, needs to change.

We're all - every single one of us - in various places of aliveness and decay. It's the way of this place, this world. Enlightened people get the flu, die of cancer, go bankrupt. People with abusive tendencies and lots of cash have access to medical treatments that 99% of the world barely knows exists. There is no "fairness", only flow, movement, change.

We take the actions that Life is urging us to take. Or we fight the urge, based on some sort of "should" lodged inside the body-heart-mind of how we believe we're supposed to show up in the world. We find a hole in the wall of resistance, and take action to release the should. Or we sit at the base of the wall, and eat cupcakes and watch tv to pass the time, trying to ignore the drumbeat inside that says: Further.

Facing who we are, and who we're not, takes courage, fortitude, and usually comes packaged with suffering. Grief and mourning are part of it. Anger and depression, too. So is pointless joy, random moments of synchronicitous hilarity and revelations of perfection. And on the other side? Immense gratitude. 

The past couple of weeks have been about asking myself: how dare you step up to take on a tribe of folks, to teach them, be with them as they navigate their own storms? It all just seems too big, so impossible, so foolish to take on. I feel inadequate to the task, afraid that my own patterns and struggles will keep me from being there for folks in the ways that they need, from engaging with them in a way that facilitates Yes for both of us.

But where I keep coming back to is this: it's still about individuals, helping them see the map, teaching them how to read a word, a sentence, a paragraph at a time, showing them how to access their own individual way of translating this for themselves, the people they serve in their living. It's about doing session with them, entering into the landscape inside of them, helping them unweave the No a strand at a time, see the story they surround themselves in. It's about feeling such profound joy whenever Life gives me the opportunity to do this with someone. It's about showing up, over and over, even when fear is present. It's about being still and knowing All Is Well. 

And of course, as usual, Life has shot me through a tube, dumping me out with a thud in a land where only one path is available. I suppose I could listen to the fear that says I'm an idiot for not being in a job with health insurance and 48K a year. But that path disappeared a few months back. I hunted around for it for a while, and still am open to a trail if it happens, if I find it. But for now, there is only this one path, called Tribe of Yes, and the landscape is mostly unknown, and the flow of dark moon and bright sunlight cycle quickly, and the razor's edge between delusion and vision is hard on the feet.

Maybe I'm throwing a party and no one will come. Maybe this is just another emptying out. Or maybe this is when it all comes together - the shamanic, the psychic, the science, the muscles gained from years of mountain climbing - to create something that assists this huge shift in consciousness we're all deep inside.

I want to teach as many folks as possible about the data stream. How it's there for all of us, like an infinite library that contains all times, backwards and forwards, all dimensions. How the library card is our birthright, along with opposable thumbs and highly functioning frontal lobes. How to use that data stream to help connect the global biosphere in a way that sings Yes, that births a global organism that joins in the conscious, universal dance with truth, eyes wide open.

And as it all unfolds, I'll write more about the process. Transparency was taught to me here, in this digital stream that connects humans across vast distances of time and space. And so the word, the vibration, that I'm aligning to match is: courage.

Courage in the face of the No.

Courage in the midst of storms.

Courage in the quiet, the stillness, the Nothing.

Courage.