Cleaning the Wounds to the Soul
Originally published: 9/12/2018 on Weebly blog
There's far too much ridiculous stuff in our daily life. We're constantly lied to and manipulated, and everything is about money. This stream of bulls*** acts as a corrosive on our most important spiritual energy: trust. We cannot advance on our spiritual path – indeed, we cannot move forward on anything meaningful - without first summoning trust, and our trust is under constant assault.
DH Lawrence wrote:
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
That word, "repentance" carries a great power. I read it not in the old Christian sense to feel guilty, but in a broader way: to become open. Guilt, shame – the vibrational patterns of the wounds to the soul – these energies close us off and make us small, hard, brittle. The difficult repentance means to gain clarity on what has made me small and brittle (difficult!), and to apply cleansing to that place by asking the Breath of the Holy to fill me with the original fragrance of the flowering earth (As Martìn Prechtel might say). This repentance is accompanied by new behaviors, of course.
Lame Deer wrote:
Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere - a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up.
So it's good that we are now in the direction West on the Medicine Wheel, because the west is a powerful ally in a world of corrosive bullshit. Actually, I believe the human species is in the west – our species is in an initiatory cleansing. The thing about initiation is that it can come with a formalized structure, which helps it be safer and a little easier, or it can come without safe, sacred containment, which means the same initiation unfolds as disaster. Our species as a whole seems to have chosen the latter, but each of us individually can choose to step into a sacred container to help facilitate the initiation. This is what shamanic healing and shamanic training is for in our modern times.
Our human world is bursting with forces wanting to shrink our natural immensity - forces that try to convince us we are defined by our fears, lusts, insults and wounds. When we stay in those vibrations, our energy leaks out, and then we are more easily controlled. The most dangerous thing to the ruling powers is spiritually alive, energetically protected, shame-free, trust-filled human beings. This is what the West teaches us to become. This is why working with the medicine wheel is so powerful.
Click here for a 27 minute audio ceremony of the meditation below (use headphones).
The West is associated with the element water: that element that travels unceasingly between the three realms - under the earth, across the body earth, and into the sky, known shamanically as the underworld, the middle world and upper world, or energetically as the belly center, the heart center and the head center. Water is an image of humility, for it submits to the shape into which it flows. And yet, water wears away mountains and in this way it is an image of patient power- and trust in patient, measured action that results in tectonic change. Water is an image of faith, for onward it flows – continually falling, actually - toward an unseen sea whose song it hears within itself; flowing over and around countless obstacles, wandering, wending and winding, searching for home, drawn onward by the haunting music of the soul. (Like us!) When we feel the powers of grief, joy, awe and intimacy, they are carried by water out of our body and into the world. Water is an image of transformation, for it shapeshifts into ice and steam, wave crest and whirlpool, droplet and tide.
Here's a simple meditation with the west. You can actually do this meditation at dusk outside, or you can merely visualize it. The image is this: that moment when the blue sky of day begins to fade toward indigo, and the first star appears. Dusk comes to evaporate that illusory blue veil that we love so much, and that comforts us. The blue sky fades away to reveal the truth: there is no sky, no blue shell of day. We are traveling through a sea of immensity, unspeakably beautiful and unfathomably vast. We are sailing on a sea of Mystery. Be present with his image. Breathe the powers of the West into you. With each breath ask the power of the West, the living Spirit of the West, to come into you and cleanse you. Ask it to help you trust yourself, trust Spirit, and trust in love. As the west to help you see where you have been made small by wounds to the soul, and ask it to wash those vibrations from your body. Wash them down into Mother Earth, who gladly accepts them and eats them, and transforms them into compost. All of this may bring up grieving, which is another healing power of the West. Ask the West to evaporate the illusions that make you too small and that keep you from seeing – and participating in – the Immensity of Mystery that is our world's natural state. You have to ask for what you want from Spirit.
I love the west and I hope this can help you work with this wonderful teacher and healer.
Blessings,
Jaime
There's far too much ridiculous stuff in our daily life. We're constantly lied to and manipulated, and everything is about money. This stream of bulls*** acts as a corrosive on our most important spiritual energy: trust. We cannot advance on our spiritual path – indeed, we cannot move forward on anything meaningful - without first summoning trust, and our trust is under constant assault.
DH Lawrence wrote:
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
That word, "repentance" carries a great power. I read it not in the old Christian sense to feel guilty, but in a broader way: to become open. Guilt, shame – the vibrational patterns of the wounds to the soul – these energies close us off and make us small, hard, brittle. The difficult repentance means to gain clarity on what has made me small and brittle (difficult!), and to apply cleansing to that place by asking the Breath of the Holy to fill me with the original fragrance of the flowering earth (As Martìn Prechtel might say). This repentance is accompanied by new behaviors, of course.
Lame Deer wrote:
Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere - a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up.
So it's good that we are now in the direction West on the Medicine Wheel, because the west is a powerful ally in a world of corrosive bullshit. Actually, I believe the human species is in the west – our species is in an initiatory cleansing. The thing about initiation is that it can come with a formalized structure, which helps it be safer and a little easier, or it can come without safe, sacred containment, which means the same initiation unfolds as disaster. Our species as a whole seems to have chosen the latter, but each of us individually can choose to step into a sacred container to help facilitate the initiation. This is what shamanic healing and shamanic training is for in our modern times.
Our human world is bursting with forces wanting to shrink our natural immensity - forces that try to convince us we are defined by our fears, lusts, insults and wounds. When we stay in those vibrations, our energy leaks out, and then we are more easily controlled. The most dangerous thing to the ruling powers is spiritually alive, energetically protected, shame-free, trust-filled human beings. This is what the West teaches us to become. This is why working with the medicine wheel is so powerful.
Click here for a 27 minute audio ceremony of the meditation below (use headphones).
The West is associated with the element water: that element that travels unceasingly between the three realms - under the earth, across the body earth, and into the sky, known shamanically as the underworld, the middle world and upper world, or energetically as the belly center, the heart center and the head center. Water is an image of humility, for it submits to the shape into which it flows. And yet, water wears away mountains and in this way it is an image of patient power- and trust in patient, measured action that results in tectonic change. Water is an image of faith, for onward it flows – continually falling, actually - toward an unseen sea whose song it hears within itself; flowing over and around countless obstacles, wandering, wending and winding, searching for home, drawn onward by the haunting music of the soul. (Like us!) When we feel the powers of grief, joy, awe and intimacy, they are carried by water out of our body and into the world. Water is an image of transformation, for it shapeshifts into ice and steam, wave crest and whirlpool, droplet and tide.
Here's a simple meditation with the west. You can actually do this meditation at dusk outside, or you can merely visualize it. The image is this: that moment when the blue sky of day begins to fade toward indigo, and the first star appears. Dusk comes to evaporate that illusory blue veil that we love so much, and that comforts us. The blue sky fades away to reveal the truth: there is no sky, no blue shell of day. We are traveling through a sea of immensity, unspeakably beautiful and unfathomably vast. We are sailing on a sea of Mystery. Be present with his image. Breathe the powers of the West into you. With each breath ask the power of the West, the living Spirit of the West, to come into you and cleanse you. Ask it to help you trust yourself, trust Spirit, and trust in love. As the west to help you see where you have been made small by wounds to the soul, and ask it to wash those vibrations from your body. Wash them down into Mother Earth, who gladly accepts them and eats them, and transforms them into compost. All of this may bring up grieving, which is another healing power of the West. Ask the West to evaporate the illusions that make you too small and that keep you from seeing – and participating in – the Immensity of Mystery that is our world's natural state. You have to ask for what you want from Spirit.
I love the west and I hope this can help you work with this wonderful teacher and healer.
Blessings,
Jaime
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