I have found myself longing for a text, a spiritual elder in the form of words to help guide, ground, and keep me honest in the crazy whirl of these times.

The Bible is the sacred text handed down to me by all four of my ancestral family lines. The Bible is the spiritual text which shaped and informed me and it is the one in which I am professionally-trained.

But whenever I return to the words of the Bible, I feel imprisoned by a system of thought that orders the world into hierarchies of dominance and has the unfortunate habit of splitting organic wholes into antagonistic polarities such as light vs dark, male vs female, mind vs. body, human vs nature.

For me, reclaiming the value of the dark, the female, the body, and the natural world constitutes a large part of the spiritual and social justice work of this age.

But merely reversing the polarities in our Western worldview isn’t enough. If we are to heal our people and return to our earth-honoring origins, we need to disrupt the linear, conquering, and separating habits of the Western mind.

The practice of drum-based journeywork is a big part of the equation, helping us to remember how to speak the heart-centered language of kinship with soil and soul once again. But this, too, isn’t enough.

We also need to find ways to counter our culture’s tendency to toxic individualism. Spirituality needs to be grounded in shared understandings and communal practice if it is to help us live in ways liberated and liberating.

And so we will anchor our journeys in the teachings of world religions outside the Western canon. These sacred scriptures have much to teach us about the work of cultivating and sustaining Life in ourselves and the world.

This week and for some weeks going forward, I will offer readings from the ancient Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tsu some 2,500 years ago, as the basis for our journeys in the circle.

This week’s passage, titled “Eleven,” in the translation by Gia-Fu Feng:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape the clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes that make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.

You are encouraged to carry these words with you as you go about the days before our meeting. Allow them to work on you. Together, we will journey on this passage and its teaching for our life, individual and collective.

To deepen your journey experience, search these words for their connection to what you are experiencing in your own life and in our common life.

How might you practice the wisdom of this passage?

Offering

This week we will attempt to make the sacred offering of an open heart and mind.

However you wish to symbolize this intention, while putting forth some kind of time or effort, will be what we share at the start of our circle.

Intention

To plumb the wisdom of what it means to become useful to Spirit, self, others, and/or the natural world.

RSVP

You are invited to join Gaia Shamanism for a free online journey circle this Wednesday, November 18 at 4 pm PST. Open to all skill levels. Email anna@gaiashamanism.com for more information.

http://gaiashamanism.com/2020/11/16/becoming-useful/

As the world as we’ve known it continues to unravel all around us, it is of vital importance to get in touch with our core, to feel the still point at our center, and to practice staying connected with that center as we go about our day.

This center, this place of ground and stillness at your core, is a birthright. It can never be lost though we can lose contact with it. The center within you is connected to The Center, the source of all life. All beings, human and non-human alike, alive and dead, are endowed with this indestructible center, also called the eternal soul.

In these times of confusion, when disinformation is regularly cooked up for our consumption, it is especially important to get into contact with your center and to remain in touch with it. Our minds can get lost in words and arguments, but our feeling sense, rooted in our center, is discerning and wise.

For the free online journey circle this Wednesday, May 20 at 4 pm PDT, I propose that we journey to the center within ourselves. What does your center look like? How does it feel? Take your time. Get to know it better. Allow its honeyed energy of love to slowly fill you and seep into your bones.

While you are in touch with your center, ask any questions you have. Perhaps the center has advice for navigating these times? Are there any practices that would help you remain connected to your center? Just stay in this part of the journey if it feels right and good to you.

If you want to explore further, use your journey to compare how it feels to be in contact with your center versus how it feels to encounter untrue, degraded, or self-interested energies. What do you notice? Compare these energies from the inside. How do you react in the presence of each? Take your time with it. Notice and learn.

This is a journey into the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of our beings. We can only gain access to this most interior place of spiritual power with vulnerability, sincere love, and devotion.

Devotion has a scent. And so, before you sign on to Zoom, I suggest that you offer a wonderful fragrance to our circle by preparing the space where you will journey. Offer this scent as a gift to the Divine Center that we all hold in common and offer it with devotion for your own divine center, the soul.

This week is an opportunity to get in contact with the wholeness that dwells always within and outside of us in the center.

Regrets aren’t needed but do email me at anna@gaiashamanism.com if you would like to attend.

http://gaiashamanism.com/2020/05/18/journey-to-the-center/

In the days since the pandemic began, I have been far less “productive” in my chosen work in part because I now spend many hours a week sourcing food and other basic essentials for my parents and my family. Perhaps this has been the case for you as well.

Women and girls worldwide bear the chief responsibility for collecting and carrying water worldwide and often do so at the cost of attending school or earning an income. 3.7 miles is the average daily distance women and children walk for water in the developing world. And don’t forget, water is heavy.

We are calling in our oldest ancestors, the elements, in this time of pandemic to help us awaken to the holy ordinary in our lives. Our last journey planted our attention into the earth as seeds; this week’s journey will explore what it means to have a sacred relationship with water.

Gaia Shamanism’s journey circle this week centers around getting to know Grandmother Water as a kind and beneficent elder and common ancestor.

Journey to give her your thanks, talk, experience, and learn from her. As with our human grandmothers, to give Grandmother Water some of our precious time and attention is to feed her our love, which is the least we can do for the gift of life.

Draw close, offer her your admiration and friendship. Listen to her stories. What does she tell you? Is there anything she wants from you? Is there anything you wish to give her?

This should be a sweet and spiritually-refreshing circle. This weekly journey circle is free, online, and open to all skill levels. I hope you can join us this week.

Kindly email me at anna@gaiashamanism.com if you wish to join the circle this Wednesday, April 15, at 4 pm PDT.

******

I’d like to ask you to join me in a ritual to prepare for this journey circle. Choose a bowl, perhaps special to you, and fill it with water. The source of the water does not have to be of special significance, as all water is sacred.

Before our circle on Wednesday, find a way to “tend” or bless or care for your water.

These many waters, prayed over and consciously loved, will anchor our journey circle in the unity of water and will connect both the spirit world and the material world in our journey circle.

We will be sharing the many ways we blessed our water to begin our time together this week.

http://gaiashamanism.com/2020/04/14/pandemic-series-on-the-holy-ordinary-water/

“Have you ever held a pigeon before?”

“No,” I said, and before I could tell him I didn’t want to hold a pigeon, he grabbed the one next to me with sure hands.

“Now hold it firmly like this,” he instructed me. For a brief moment, I held the bird and felt its rapid heartbeat inside my hands. The bird didn’t seem to mind the experience nearly as much as I would’ve guessed.

When I set my pigeon friend back on the ground, I thought to myself: “Now where in hell am I going to wash my hands?”

I was on a day-long “street retreat” hosted by the Faithful Fools, an organization based in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The concept of the street retreat was a simple one: spend the day walking among the homeless in my hometown of Austin, seeking to be present, have conversations, and learn.

My boyfriend at the time teased me mercilessly for spending $50 for a retreat to go hang out with the homeless. That day on the streets, however, ended up being one of the soundest investments I ever made in my spiritual education.

The pigeon-wrangler, a man whom I will call Michael, had been on the streets for about a year. He was bright, affable, and determined to be my personal escort for the day in order to “keep me safe.”

Safety was a recurring theme I encountered in my time on the streets because, of course, it can be an unsafe place to be as a woman. But homes can be unsafe, too. Just ask any survivor of sexual abuse or domestic violence. We tend to overstate the danger posed by strangers and low-income folks in our culture. With no sense of irony, this homeless stranger felt it was his duty to protect me.

It was with mixed feelings that I accepted Michael’s assertive hospitality on the streets; I was grateful for his sharing, experience, and provision of pigeons to hold, even as I chafed at my lack of freedom to mix more with others that afternoon.

This was the kind of relationship I would seek, or that would seek me, if I wound up on the streets. In just a few hours, I got a taste of the choices, tradeoffs, and difficulties of a life lived with fewer buffers between ourselves and the world-at-large.

However, the walls that keep us “safe,” in metaphorical and actual terms, also impoverish us.

*****

At the time of my participation in the day-long street retreat, I was a campus minister in charge of running the Alternative Spring Break program for a private Catholic University.

A year into coordinating the program, the whole notion of “service” really started to piss me off. It was great to send students to build adobe houses in New Mexico or to teach reading in New York City. Our aim was to get the students hooked on the joy of giving, but I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the ways in which service built a subtle sense of spiritual superiority in the giver, myself included.

An intention was slowly forming deep within me: What about those we serve? Couldn’t they benefit from being the “givers” for a change?

That afternoon spent hanging out with the pigeons and Michael provided an answer by way of a story.

Michael told me about a “game” he played each evening to help him hold on to his dignity and stave off despair as his few days on the streets became weeks, and then those weeks stretched into months.

There are food trucks in Austin run by a local nonprofit, Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which visit local parks around town providing brown bag meals to the homeless every evening of the week.

Michael’s game, or spiritual practice, was that of inviting everyone to get in line ahead of him. He would step back from the truck if he saw someone running in order to make it in time for a meal.

He told me he did it to remind himself that he was no animal, but a man. He told me also that it was his way of remembering the larger truth that there is always “enough.”

This was the testimony of a true spiritual teacher. Michael had found a way to turn his anxiety about going hungry into an engine of growth in himself. This was no idle talk, or weekday reflection on the gospels as I gave each week in chapel, but a large-hearted practice in the face of genuine hunger.

Then one night, it finally happened. When it was Michael’s turn to approach the van, the volunteers told him that they had run out of food.

“I didn’t care about the sandwich, so much,” Michael told me, “but I almost broke down on the spot.” His life suddenly looked impossibly bleak and hopeless. What he was living was no game.

“But do you know what?” Michael asked me, his eyes meeting mine. I shook my head “no.”

“The folks on the truck felt really bad about it. And one of them took me out to dinner that night.”

By choosing the end of the line, by repeatedly aligning his slim and tattered agency with the role of giver, the realization of Michael’s worst fear — that there would not be enough for him — gave way to a spontaneous affirmation of his inherent worth in a gesture of friendship and a hot meal.

Sitting there on the grass with Michael and the pigeons, I had my answer.

Letting go of my social position at the front of the line to join Michael at the back had opened up a new world, a space of mutuality, between us. This homeless man was clearly fed by feeding me.

******

I pitched the idea of having one of our nationwide Alternative Spring Break sites in our backyard, a week-long Urban Plunge on the streets of Austin. Our aim was to meet the homeless as the wise ones in our midst, teachers with a sacred perspective on life to share.

Through some minor miracle, the university’s risk management team signed off on the proposal, provided we did not sleep in homeless shelters due to the risk of contracting tuberculosis. Instead, I arranged for us to sleep on the floors of a local church that served as a cold weather shelter during the winter months. We observed “homeless hours” at our shelter: inside by 7 pm each night and out with our belongings at 5 am each morning.

Our Urban Plunge was modeled on the theme of pilgrimage: a sacred journey to a holy place in search of social healing or transformation. The homeless, if they would even talk to us, were to be the powerful ones, the wise teachers on our journey.

Leaving the walls of home, church, and university behind, we stepped into a powerful liminal space between two worlds: the world of the housed and the world of the unhoused.

There are liminal places where the worlds of spirit and matter meet and more easily converse with each other. These are the holy sites people have recognized for millennia as holding a special potency that helps awaken the latent healing and transformative power in the seeker.

But as I learned out on the streets, there are also liminal moments, times in our lives that render the strange familiar and the familiar strange. This reversal of ground is a defining characteristic of the in-breaking of the sacred through the walls of our ordinary waking consciousness.

The subconscious mind is a shared, not an individual, reality. Down in the depths of our collective being, we possess an inalienable connection to the whole of life and the holiness of existence. Our separate conscious minds are only the tip of a larger, common iceberg, and yet our educational system and culture acknowledge only an isolated fraction of the material we can and do draw upon in creating this shared dream we call “the world.”

Our fractured memory, our distorted view of life, our dogmatic belief that we are separate from the “others” — human, animal, tree — is the root of the collective nightmare we are now living on the planet.

To embody your sacred intention by taking all of your belongings onto your back, to walk everywhere, to allow yourself to become vulnerable and not in control of your immediate environment, to rely on the help of strangers — all of these elements, taken together, focus the attention of the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind, with its power to heal or to cripple us, is our direct connection to greater reality of Spirit. Out on the streets, we employed the ancient recipe of pilgrimage to help us coax the invisible thread of magic, woven throughout the tapestry of material reality, out of the dark and into visible and tangible expression.

We began our Urban Plunge by walking a couple of miles downhill from the university into the city, carrying our sleeping bags, backpacks, cell phones (stowed and turned off), and $20 each.

The highway, IH-35, bisects Austin into an eastern half and a western half. West Austin has historically been the wealthier, whiter side of the city. This was our departure point. The plan was to first eat lunch at Angel House, a soup kitchen, on the East side.

As the seven of us approached a place to cross under the IH-35 overpass, a tall, African American man in his 20s saw us, changed direction, started yelling something unintelligible, and began to walk briskly in our direction. We all stopped in our tracks. I stiffened.

Over our semester of preparation, we had discussed the fact that the unhoused population was under no obligation to welcome our presence in their community. To truly learn from the divine stranger, we had to be ready to accept rejection as a teaching in its own right. Our job on pilgrimage was to remain awake to the ways that sacred revelation was unfolding before our eyes in real time. The Holy would speak through all the happenings of our pilgrimage, not just the pleasant ones.

To cross over a boundary line, like that of IH-35, with sacred intention, is to enter a liminal moment. By crossing over, we were agreeing to meet Life on its own turf and on its own terms. You might say this young fellow was the guardian of the threshold between worlds.

He drew closer to us, voice raised. And I realized — suddenly — that this man did not mean to be frightening, but friendly. He was not in fact yelling, but singing. As improbable as it seemed from our perspective, this young man was making a beeline in our direction in order to welcome us.

And what was this ambassador of Spirit singing to us at the top of his lungs?

He was singing the words, “You say you want a revolution,” by the Beatles. The perfect street blessing for our journey to the back of the line.

******

One constant on the streets, I was surprised to learn, is the free exchange of gifts: pigeons to pet, cigarettes to smoke, lessons in playing chess, experiential workshops on dumpster diving, consultation on the dos and don’ts of “flying a sign,” the lowdown on where the best food can be found each day, and ramen noodles cooked to order out of the sight of cars on the side of the highway.

How often do complete strangers come up and sing to you? That week on the streets, I was serenaded by some seriously talented folks more than a dozen times.

My group never pretended to be anyone other than who we were — students of the street for a week — and we were accepted, if not embraced, by the community. Every so often, someone was upset or agitated by our presence, so we moved along.

One woman started yelling and cussing when a news camera showed up to interview a couple of our students at a local shelter. The student being interviewed agreed with the angry woman, saying to the reporter: “Why are you talking to me? She’s the homeless person here.”

We were sincere in our desire and intention to learn from the folks on the street and they, highly skilled at sizing people up for the sake of personal safety, took note.

While the homeless knew we weren’t homeless with only a cursory glance, I passed for homeless among the housed population rather quickly. After only two days spent outside, wearing the same white t-shirt, forgoing a shower, and developing the tell-tale homeless sunburn, I realized that I was being followed by plainclothes security in the mini mart I entered on the second evening to cool off and find a snack.

At first I was thrilled to pass for homeless. But as the days wore on, the reality of my transformation in the eyes of the world set in. Despite taking care to style my hair (hairspray had made the cut to take up valuable space in my pack), apply makeup, and use deodorant each morning, I still passed as homeless.

The housed population, my people, gave me an extra-wide berth on sidewalks. Their eyes no longer met mine on the street. Folks began yelling obscenities out of car windows and sometimes threw garbage at me.

It took only two days.

******

My intention had been to undertake a fast while I was out on the streets the second time I took a group of college students out for the Urban Plunge. I stocked up on dates, almonds, figs, apricots, and walnuts.

But for some strange reason, I was ravenous, and soon ate all my provisions in addition to the meals at soup kitchens, the dozens of Kit Kats we retrieved from a dumpster, and the brown bag sandwiches provided by Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

Towards the end of my time on the streets, I had worked up the nerve to fly a sign alone on a busy frontage road of IH-35. I wanted my sign to say something true. Because I was so damn hungry, I wrote “HUNGRY” with a red Sharpie pen on a piece of cardboard.

I stood there alone in the Texas sun for only three hours, but my solitary vigil aged me 10 years. Contempt flowed freely from the majority of drivers as I held my sign. I noticed that the nicer the car, the lower the odds of a donation, and the higher the probability the car windows would roll up in my presence.

Standing there that day stripped me of all sense of myself. I felt hateful, loathsome, and dirty. For three hours, I carried the shadow side of those drivers and of our larger society. I almost couldn’t do it; I broke down into tears multiple times.

There were people who reached out to me, and they saved me: the little girl who reached through her back window to hand me a crayon, the man who handed me all the change out of his cigarette tray, and the dozen-or-so other people who affirmed my humanity by smiling or simply saying “hi.”

My three hours were almost up when an obese woman, red-faced yet smiling, made her way to my spot on the side of the road. She had a bread bag with her, and as she approached she proudly presented me with a full loaf of ham sandwiches.

“I was on the bus and I saw you and your sign,” she told me, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. “My pastor at church is always talking about the importance of acting on your faith, and when I saw you I thought ‘I can help her.’” The bus took her home where she made the many sandwiches, and then walked the better part of a mile to deliver them to me.

The whole time this dear woman was talking, I felt awful. All her effort for an imposter: me. I was truly hungry, however, and I didn’t want to blow my own cover for her sake, so I thanked her profusely. By the time I met back up with the students, I had eaten every last sandwich.

“What is going on with me?” I wondered, incredulous. But life on the streets kept me so busy I had no time to reflect. I just continued to devour everything in sight.

******

By the end of the Urban Plunge, homeless folks were waving and calling my name across the street when they saw me. I had once worked in downtown Austin, and had never felt anything but anonymous. Now, a strange yet welcome sense of belonging met me wherever I walked in the city.

Too quickly, the time came for us to say our goodbyes and walk back up the hill. After a week without driving a car or riding in a bus, I had grown accustomed to the new pace. I was grateful to be walking back up the hill to help us begin our long transition back to normal.

Once at the university, we said our goodbyes to one other. I drove home to my enchanted little cottage with impossibly high ceilings, a turquoise porch, and a red door.

When I closed that door behind me, the sound cut right through me. I crumpled to the floor in tears.

******

Less than a week later, on my 37th birthday, I made a wish: to become pregnant. And as I blew out the candles on my cake, I realized that my wish had already been granted.

No wonder I was so hungry. That generous woman with her sandwiches had genuinely helped a woman in need that day; it’s just that I was the last to know.

There was another wish granted me on my birthday, though. The heartbreak I felt when I closed my door to the streets signaled that I had completed crossing the threshold back to my ordinary life. I knew with a new, aching awareness that I was not at home at the front of the line, nor within the walls of social respectability. None of it is humane: the hunger the homeless endure, the hunger we endure.

Unbeknownst to me as I blew out the candles on my cake, in just three months’ time I would lose my job, my career in ministry, and my faith tradition. I, too, would become homeless, but in my own way.

Our job in life is to remain awake to the ways that sacred revelation is unfolding before our eyes in real time. The Holy speaks through all the happenings of life’s pilgrimage, not just in the pleasant moments.

I do not have answers to the problems of these times, nor know how to heal the fractured body of which we are a part, but I do know this: the answers to our deepest longings can only be realized by leaving our walls behind and embarking on the humble, step-by-step journey towards a new reality.

Shamanic journey work is akin to crossing the US-Mexico border. Crossing over to the “other side” and back again, regularly, changes you. You no longer belong completely to one side or the other, but to both at once.

With a regular practice of crossing over between the two worlds, you begin to speak a new language, the language of la frontera, the border.

The spirituality of la frontera is a spirituality of the traveler, a step by step process of becoming, and a gradual letting go of all forms of false security in order to claim the true protection of Spirit.

The point isn’t “getting there” when you live in the borderland, as we all do. The point is engaging in the soul’s process of re-membering, of finding, claiming, and stitching the members of the dismembered Self back together again.

This healing, this process of remembering, requires that we resist the impulse to put up walls and declare that we have “arrived” and are done with the work of becoming whole.

We live sandwiched between two worlds, the world of matter seen by the eyes, and the world of Spirit visible only to the eye of the heart.

The more we practice traveling across divisions of all kinds, the more we extend ourselves to see life through the eyes of the “other,” the more the brick and mortar of the false self begins to crack and fall from our hearts. This is the basis of all inner vision, wisdom, and guidance.

As we travel back and forth between worlds, we are changed. We begin to light up to Spirit, as the sun lights up our skies. Through our efforts to realize justice in this world, through our efforts to connect to Spirit in the inner journey, we stitch ourselves and this broken world back together again.

One cannot achieve healing only through action in this world, nor only through the interior world of spirit. Both are needed.

In crossing back and forth, we learn to speak a new language. We begin to lay claim to our birthright: citizenship in both heaven and earth. Our regular border crossings summon Spirit to bend closer to us, and we begin to discern a larger meaning at work in our small lives.

The sun never rests in his journey across the skies. Neither does the moon in hers. These eternal travelers weave a loving, ever-changing, sublimely balanced rhythm of light and darkness around us.

As we approach the mid point between winter solstice and spring equinox this year, February 1 or Imbolc, we are reminded that we are beloved and that we occupy a prized center in the ceremonial dance of our elders.

Just as the sun and the moon do not circle us without the company of the other, the journey of the spiritual traveler is meant to include others. We travel always with a sacred tribe of seekers, a group defined not by nationality, profession, or creed, but by their commitment to the journey itself. It is helpful to make their acquaintance.

Gaia Shamanism offers free online journey circles every Wednesday at 4 pm PST/7 pm EST should you be interested in establishing your own border-crossing practice.

Shamanic journeys arise from ancient and vast chambers deep within the earth, sharing the same wisdom root that gives rise to dreams, myths, fables, and fairy tales. We have access to these realms, and to stories with timeless truths woven through them, even in these times. These are the dreams of the Great Mother, Gaia.

This story comes from a recent journey that centered on a stag with a solar disc in its horns. This stag was our guide in the Unseen world, and it brought us to a forest so dense and dark that we could barely see though it was still daylight. Here, in the heart of this dark forest, we lost the stag’s trail.

I asked my companion on this journey, let’s call her Astrid, what she wished to do now that we were lost and in the dark. She replied: “Make a fire.” And so we helped Astrid to create a ring of stones and gathered wood for the fire that we found scattered throughout the forest.

Once the fire was built, we stared into the flames together, and Astrid fell asleep. She began to dream that she was in a bar. As she picked her head up off her arm where she had been sleeping, Astrid noticed that the air in the bar was stale and lifeless; she knew that she could stay there no longer.

So Astrid got up from her stool and climbed the stairs to leave the basement bar, which had until now provided her shelter from the world. Out on the city streets, the air was indeed more alive and free, but the city was altogether too much for her: it was jarring, loud, and difficult to navigate without purpose or direction.

As in the dark forest, Astrid was lost. She woke with a start at the campfire.

This theme of “going to sleep” and “waking up” is significant. One consistent message in shamanic journeys is that we are most asleep to Spirit when we’re “awake.” Forgetfulness of Spirit is no biological necessity, but rather a characteristic of our culture’s waking consciousness.

Building the campfire makes visible the invisible ceremony of the shamanic journey: creating a sacred circle of time apart from the demands of the day, gathering inner and outer resources for a specific purpose, and focusing the heart and mind on a question until an inner flame ignites and begins to burn.

Staring into the sacred flames of intention, participating in this inward ceremony of soul, creates the conditions necessary for the shamanic “dream” state to catch fire, the light by which we can discern the hidden truths of our lives.

The Soul, centered in the ancient and dark forest of the mind’s unknowing, is shown here to be a place of refuge from the stale air of the bar, which symbolizes the common gathering places of “spirit” in our age. Inspiration, meaning literally “in spirit,” is shown to be unavailable within the confines of our culture’s sheltering walls of belief.

But outside the walls of spiritual structure and belief, out on the streets if you will, the situation is difficult. The world to a sensitive, or a “feeler,” is loud, confusing, and often overwhelming. Our minds are adept at creating grids, the pattern of thought suggested by city streets, but it is our feeling sense, not our minds, that can help us to chart a course through the maze of life.

Astrid is startled awake by the truth that she is lost. Only once she awakens from the collective dream of bar and city can she realize that she is actually here, safe, in the forest of the soul, her head resting on a pillow of pine needles by the fire. This our existential situation as well.

Until we leave our collective inebriation behind, until we realize our ways of living in this world are gravely limited, until we are startled awake by the realization of just how damn lost we are as individuals and as a people, the goodness of a simple, grounded, and organic way of life remains out of reach.

At this moment in time, we are hopelessly lost in the dark forest of unknowing, and yet every hair on our heads is safe. There is nothing to fear. We are resting on a bed of pine needles safe in the lap of the Mother even as we dream that we are lost and orphaned–indeed, separate–from Ultimate Reality.

I ask Astrid to show me the direction in which she would like to travel. There is no staying at the campfire bathed in the warm light of meditation, forever. Choosing a direction forward, getting up and on with it, is the next chapter of the spiritual journey.

To travel soulfully through life means we first move inward to gain insight, then move outward into the world with inspired action. This living exchange between the inner and outer worlds is meant to be repeated time and again in a rhythm not unlike breathing.

The Winter Solstice, this darkest of days, represents the furthermost point of our collective journey into the dark forest of the soul. Soon we begin the journey of return, a movement from unknowing to illumination.

Now her task, like ours, is to choose a direction in which to travel. A glimmering in one direction catches her eye. Compelled to move forward by a logic larger than her own, she begins to make her way through the dark wood of unknowing.

Intuitive sight can only be developed through practice. This subtle vision is the fruit of an unbroken connection to Spirit. Neither the mind nor the light of reason can guide us safely through life, but instead, the felt sense, a knowing in the dark, a “seeing” born of the heart’s stubborn insistence on remaining connected to Spirit at all times; this is the sure guide. The connection between heart and Spirit is the golden thread that guards against our becoming lost in Life’s labyrinth.

As we walk along led by Astrid, I am gifted a view of the forest from above: the forest, I see, is in the shape of a circle. No matter what direction Astrid chooses, her success–and our own–is assured. But. She has to choose a direction, stick with it, refrain from second-guessing herself or turning back–all this while wrapped tight in the darkness of unknowing.

This is how we come into conscious partnership with our soul in this life. And Life, it seems, is intent on delivering the right climatic conditions for soul growth on our planet right now.

After only about an hour of hiking, we arrive at the place where the forest meets the meadow. Before us stands the stag, regal in power, the golden disk of the sun beaming from its horns.

Just a few days after taking this journey, I came across a video titled “Remembering the Deer Mother”. There is an ancient tale from the northern peoples of Scandinavia and Siberia (where the word “shaman” originates) about a Deer Mother who brings the sun back from the underworld in her horns at the winter solstice.

Mature female reindeer keep their horns in the winter, not the males. In a blessed reversal, the “stag” of our journey was revealed to be none other than the archetype of the Great Mother.

The Great Mother is not met in the stale air of our common watering holes of spirit, nor is Her natural habitat to be found in the busy city streets of the mind. No, the Great Mother leads us into the forest, the dark night of the soul, where we are humbled by our blindness and inability to move forward on our own.

Simply put, we are brought to the dark forest in order to rekindle and tend the inward fire of Spirit.

Even when we don’t know the significance of what we have encountered in a shamanic journey, or a dream, or in life, we are given clues or intuitive flashes to follow forward to future understanding.

With faith in a larger and as-yet unknown purpose to our journey, we strike out in a direction and press onward through the dark of the forest, taking care not to lose our end of the golden thread.

Should we persevere in our efforts, one day our mind’s unknowing will meet illumination in the meadow glen. The Great Mother, Source of Life, awaits our arrival, and our recognition, on the other side.

This year I returned to beekeeping and bought a package of honeybees for the first time. I’ve avoided packaged bees and prefer to catch swarms because in the process of swarming the bees have proven their vigor.

I wanted a sure thing, though, so I shelled out $180 for a package of bees. Two weeks later, I got a call to catch a swarm of honeybees. By the time we arrived to collect the swarm, the bees had already moved on.

But that second hive stood empty only for a day or two. Soon, honeybees were entering both hives with pollen in their saddlebags. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The pollen signaled that each hive had a laying queen inside. What?

Instead of swarming out of their boxes, which is the usual course of things, it seems that an at-large colony of honeybees swarmed into our second hive.

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My formation as a shamanic practitioner has been directed by a female-led community of unlettered elders claiming some 100 million years of experience on our planet. These are my spiritual teachers, my shamanic lineage if you will, and I consider the honeybees to be a rich source of instruction for us all in this time of our collective colony collapse.

With the in-swarming of the honeybees into our empty hive, I understood that the theme of “reversal” was given me to contemplate by my elders, though I had no idea what that reversal might be.

In my work as a farmer, my aim is to raise rewilded, locally-adapted honeybees to sell to others. The process takes several years, includes many colonies lost to cold winters and viral loads and mites, but there are also generations of bees who manage to overcome the season’s challenges, becoming stronger and more resilient in the process.

My hunch, and my hope, has been these honeybees can reclaim their feisty genetic and behavioral resilience when relieved of the pressure of producing an income for me. It’s a bit like saving heritage seeds for future genetic diversity in one’s own backyard, only I’m doing it with honeybees.

We humans, too, are like packaged honeybees at this time of late-stage capitalism. We were raised, bred, and educated up and out of our innate and wildish instincts in order to maximize our efficiency as honey-making, money-making machines. But the problem with heavily-managed colonies, human and honeybee alike, is that they tend to collapse in the winter when life is at its most challenging: barren, dark, and cold.

There is no “saving” the bees any more than one can “save” souls. But feeding the bees when needed, allowing them to keep their honey, encouraging them to swarm, supporting their efforts to rewild themselves — this gives honeybees a fighting chance.

Our work as shamanic practitioners is much the same: feed, allow, encourage, and support souls in their inherently wise and natural process of rewilding.

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An interesting dynamic was created for me to watch in real time: packaged bees side by side with a colony of bees who had swarmed.

The packaged bees stayed in their hive and remained mostly out of sight, somewhat like a person who spends way too much time up in his or her head. As bees go, these weren’t terribly active or busy. The wildish swarm of honeybees, however, was a study in rowdy presence.

They never stung anyone, but the wildish bees commanded a good 10 feet of personal space around their hive; my packaged bees let me sit right at the entrance. In contrast to our shy purchased bees, our wildish bees covered the landing boards of their hive day and night, as if they were hosting a never-ending street party.

Within 6 weeks, our packaged bees succumbed to attack by wasps and the colony collapsed. The wildish bees, however, proved equal to dealing with the wasps from the start. Keeping the landing board covered with bee bodies at all times served to keep predation at bay. Unable to find a place to land, the wasps were unable to enter the hive.

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Until now, I have focused exclusively on teaching others how to journey using a drumbeat. This is an incredibly fruitful meditative practice that helps one become aware of the stinging, honeyed truths within. To journey with the drumbeat is to swarm from the boxes of the mind, and as with the bees, the practice facilitates evolutionary forward leaps in those who undertake it.

But not everyone can journey from the get-go. After many hours logged in shamanic journeying, working with a wonderfully diverse cross-section of people, it has slowly dawned on me that the shamanic trance state is a function of one’s ability to descend into the soma, or body, from the mind.

This is the reversal to which the honeybees were pointing me. Like packaged bees, most of us are held captive by our minds, spending our days focused on our screens, texts, and thought. But this heady orientation comes at a hefty price: separation from the experience of ourselves and our connection to the larger environment.

Up there, high in our heads, we are forgetful of our depths, our roots, and our wildish power. Up there, caught in the packaged mind, we are disconnected from sense and soma. With roots in the sky instead of reaching down into body and soul, we leave our landing boards and entrances unguarded. This cultured separation from our embodied, wildish selves does not serve to keep us safe-or sane.

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Learning to stay in contact with the subtle energy of the body is a powerful practice that can help us reverse, rewild, and root back into the soma. I am indebted to Eckhart Tolle’s teaching of “connecting with the inner body” from his book, The Power of Now, which is the inspiration for the meditation I offer below. (Tolle, 1999)

This rewilding meditation centers upon an image of the honeybees at their most alive and wild:

Imagine that you are a great, hollow tree with a colony of bees residing inside of you.

The living vibration of this colony of honeybees is sounding at all times throughout your being. The energy moving through your soma might be described as feeling like a hum, buzz, or even the universal OM.

Whatever words you would use to describe this ever-present vibration, your task is to feel and experience its animating energy in your being.

Close your eyes if that helps you to locate the feeling. Take your time. Scan your body for the presence of this sacred, humming energy. Know that it is there. Relax into the sensation and enjoy it fully.

Check in with yourself regularly throughout the day to feel the hum of your soma. Endeavor to remain in contact with your inner colony of bees with your eyes open, when walking, sitting, talking.

Remember to root yourself in the resident humming energy of your soma no matter what might be happening in your environment. This is the sound of Life.

By experiencing this sound in your soma, you remain in direct contact with Life itself. With time, this somatic experience will become automatic.

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Gaia is the vast body who lays claim to our own. As we become increasingly skillful at “losing our minds and coming to our senses,” as we learn to appreciate the subtlety and nuance of our somatic intelligence, we deepen in mystical union with the shared soma of our origins: the earth.

To practice the shamanic path suggests that we meditate upon, nurture, and delight in untamed life wherever it is found and in whatever form it takes. As we learn to approach the wildish lands and beings in our midst with devotion, as we seek to apprentice and learn from these, our beloved and wordless elders, the controlling grip of the packaged mind, the ego, is slowly undone.

Moving from egocentrism to ecocentrism is the most pressing spiritual issue of our time, but this shift cannot simply be imposed from the outside. The internal logic of ecocentrism has to take root and grow organically inside each of us, lest we simply repeat the patterns of trauma and alienation that have brought us to this moment.

To move from egocentrism to ecocentrism requires a fierce commitment to the practice of presence and the willingness to awaken and refine our capacity for somatic sensing and feeling.

I’ll be honest with you; it doesn’t always feel good. But once we experience life outside of the mental boxes of thought, word, and text, once we really get a taste of honeyed connection to this ripe, round, gorgeous sphere of Life we call the earth, we’ll be hooked.

Egocentrism is simply a learned state of alienation from our bodies and from the ground under our feet; ecocentrism is our natural state of being. Our collective hope lies in undertaking the journey of rewilding for both honeybees and souls alike.

Originally published at https://shamanicpractice.org.

The Journey of Rewilding was originally published in Wild Women Writers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sound in many spiritual traditions is held to be the creative source of life, be it “the Word” of Christianity or the cosmic sound of the OM chanted in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Similarly, the drumbeat is used in shamanism to enable one to take a journey beneath the surface noise of the mind and follow the lifestream back to its origin in Source.

The whale in the ocean is a picture of the soul at home in the vast waters of spirit. And the relationship of our souls to Source can either be one of collaboration in song or one of antagonism with noise. The song of the whale is both beautiful and purposeful, allowing whales to communicate with one another over long distances, mate, as well as navigate in the dark depths of oceanic oneness.

To listen solely to the chatter of the mind is to remain on the surface of life, immersed in noise, unable to create anything that doesn’t add more noise to the collective environment. Whales beach themselves due to the sound interference of ships, much as souls find themselves separated from the native environment of spirit, hung up on sand bars of man-made noise, chatter, and diversion.

Spirit’s wisdom is upside down and backwards from the reigning viewpoint of the world: you go inward and downward, not up and out, in order to reach the heights and become as light. That our spirit guide was a whale named Stella, meaning “star,” implies that spiritual greatness is a function of learning to sing and move from the vast and watery depths of the heart.

Diving beneath ordinary consciousness to return fed and refreshed to the surface of daily life confers benefits to the individual: “I feel more peaceful and my b.s. detector is a lot stronger” said one participant in our weekly journey circle. Adopting a regular shamanic practice helps to stir up the waters of consciousness, bringing new perspective and fresh insight to life, but might this practice help the collective, too?

The example of the whale suggests so. Here’s a wonderful four-minute video on the ecological benefits the whale confers to the whole of the ocean in her repeated journeys down to the depths and back up to the water’s surface.

You listen to noise, you can only create more noise. If you stay confined in the mind, you remain on the surface of things, never really mixing up the waters of consciousness, never creating anything truly new to feed life at its source. At best, awash in endless chatter, we go in circles. At worst, we get so disoriented by the noise of mind and world that we run aground, which pretty much describes where we are now as a collective.

Like the whale, it is our nature to dive beneath the surface concerns and noise of the world, but we come from a long line of souls beached on the sands of time.

Estranged from our soul’s natural habitat in the oceanic depths, exposed to the sun of ordinary consciousness for far too long, we have grown weak: we no longer believe that once we knew how to swim, we no longer remember how to find our way through the dark waters of eternity with song.

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The above is from the “class taught by spirit” offered by Gaia Shamanism. Each class includes a group shamanic journey with a follow-up journey interpretation like the one excerpted above.

The first class was so much fun, Gaia Shamanism is offering two groups in June:

Introduction to Shamanic Journeying: An Online Experiential Class

$40 for four 90-minute online classes in June. Day and time to be arranged based on participant schedules.

Introduction to shamanism materials included.

A Course Taught by Spirit: An Online Shamanic Journey Series

$30 for four 90-minute online classes in June. Fridays from 9–10:30 AM PDT June 9, June 16, June 23, and June 30.

You will receive journey interpretations from the class each week.

Last month, I taught a course in shamanism. And, as is so often the case when dealing with things spiritual, my plans came completely undone in the first class.

I wrote a piece that centered on the spiritual lessons of the honeybees before we met for our weekly online video conference. Five minutes into our first class, I realized that the prepared materials were extraneous to the matter at hand: getting to know one another, talking a bit about our lives to set the group journey intention, and sharing the experience of going on the journey together afterwards.

And after our first group journey, I was convinced that the best way for me to “teach” was to write journey interpretations of the group journey for each class. The material was damn good, the guidance tailor-made for our lives. A spirit guide in our second group journey congratulated us: “You have embarked on quite the curriculum. You have chosen to participate in a course taught by spirit.”

That first class taught by spirit focused largely on the purpose of our journeying together:

While the city as a place of refuge was a mirage, the dust storm and the advancing storm clouds were real. I suggested that we get to shelter and frog took us to a cave in a rock wall. As we sat inside and the rain, hail, and lightening commenced, it dawned on me that the answer to the problem of our times, represented by this parched and dry land, was provided by the storm.

…The cave itself bears noting. That I suggest we take shelter in the cave seems a strange reversal of roles with our guide. But the decision to “take shelter” in the ancient and ancestral practice of shamanism as the storm clouds advance is our choice to make. We are always left free by spirit to choose our course in life.

Our human guide, Sandra, pointed out that as we three sat together…we enjoyed community in this liminal and sacred space. By meeting and sharing this forgotten spiritual practice, we are helped — and help — far more than we know.

Here is our “safe haven” from the storm. Here, the creations of a new order are incubated and birthed. Here, together, we can better persist in our efforts and have fun while doing so. This, it seems, is the purpose of meeting together: to journey for guidance and begin creating a new dream for the world in the midst of the storm.

Over the course of the month, I came to understand that by sharing the stories of our lives before journeying, visiting the unseen world together, and returning to share these experiences with one another, we were engaged in a larger shamanic work — the healing work of stitching the daily journey of our lives back together with our spiritual pilgrimage as souls.

This group shamanic work holds promise for mending our divided world as well. The active dis-integration of economies, governments, and the natural world that we are now witnessing is a call for radical, to-the-root change that goes much deeper than talk, reform, or even the best technological innovations that we have to offer.

From our second group journey in our course taught by spirit:

To listen solely to the chatter of the mind is to remain on the surface of life, immersed in noise, unable to create anything that doesn’t add more noise to the collective environment. Whales beach themselves due to the sound interference of ships, much as souls find themselves separated from their native waters of spirit, hung up on sand bars of man-made noise, chatter, and diversion.

Spirit’s wisdom is upside down and backwards from the reigning viewpoint of the world: you go inward and downward, not up and out, in order to reach the heights and become as light in these dark and troubled times. That our guide the whale is named Stella, meaning “star,” implies that living our mission as souls in this world is a function of learning to sing and move from the vast watery depths of the heart.

Diving beneath ordinary consciousness to return fed and refreshed to the surface of daily life confers benefits to the individual: “I feel more peaceful and my b.s. detector is a lot stronger” said one participant in our weekly journey circle. Adopting a regular shamanic practice helps to stir up the waters of consciousness, bringing new perspective and fresh insight to life, but might this practice help the collective, too?

The example of the whale suggests so. Here’s a wonderful four-minute video on the ecological benefits the whale confers to the whole of the ocean in her repeated journeys down to the depths and back up to the water’s surface:

https://www.facebook.com/SustainableMan/videos/10154809382637909/?autoplay_reason=all_page_organic_allowed&video_container_type=0&video_creator_product_type=0&app_id=273465416184080&live_video_guests=0

If you only listen to noise, you can only create more noise. If you stay confined in the mind, you remain on the surface of things, never really mixing up the waters of consciousness, never creating anything truly new to feed life at its source. Awash in endless chatter, at best we go in circles. At worst, we get so disoriented by the noise of mind and world that we run aground, which is pretty much describes where we are now as a collective.

Estranged from our soul’s natural habitat in the oceanic depths, exposed to the sun of ordinary consciousness for far too long, we have grown weak and no longer believe that once we knew how to swim, that once we knew how to find our way in the darkness through song.

It is time to embark on a curriculum of the depths with spirit as our guide. It is time to bring down the walls between the seen and unseen worlds, between the mind and heart, between our species and the earth.

With practice and the encouragement of others, we can remember how to navigate in the dark and become as light by learning to sing the soul’s song once again.

Learn more about Gaia Shamanism’s offerings in June:

Introduction to Shamanic Journeying (Online)

A Course Taught by Spirit: A Monthly Series (Online)