Drumming The Soul Awake

Originally published: 6/23/2020 on Weebly blog 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 gro...

Originally published: 6/23/2020 on Weebly blog 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 con...

Originally published: 5/6/2020 on Weebly blog One issue for many of us, in this initiatory period we are in, is that our culture can't hold the ceremonial container for us. Our uninitiated elders can't hold the container because they don't know how. So, one solution is to return to the original elders - the Spirits of Nature - to ask them to hold the container for us. This 8 minute prayer-healing-song tries to provide a little of that for you. I hope you'll take the time to settle in and let it do its work on you.

Originally published: 4/2/2020 on Weebly blog I may think what I'm wrestling with is a scary virus. I may think I'm wrestling with the sudden obliteration of my income, or the interruption of my ordinary life or career goals. I may say I'm feeling trapped, or abandoned, or that I'm wrestling with fear, or death. None of this is untrue. But all of these are on the surface of life. I may think I am longing for success, or love. I may believe I am longing for acceptance, expansion or fulfillment. None of these longings are useless, vain or false. But these, too, are on the surface of life. Below the surface lies a primal power that I fear terribly, and yet is the very core of my belonging to life: the power of uncertainty. The Irish philosopher poet John O'Donohue says, "Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status or money. Real power is the consistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished." (Eternal Echoes, 195)....

Originally published: 4/13/2020 on Weebly blog (Video unavailable)

Originally published: 4/21/2020 on Weebly blog I hope this six-minute prayer song to the waters helps lift some anxiety from you. Take time to open yourself and allow it to do its work on you.

Originally published: 4/28/2020 on Weebly blog The shamans see what we are going through as an initiation. Initiations serve a purpose: to move us into the next more mature spiritual state of being. Unconscious initiations take the form of disasters, chaos and terror, and this is what we are largely seeing now. Maybe you are filled with dread and anger, confusion and weariness, and maybe your dreams are off the charts in weird and disturbing. This is part of an unconscious initiation. It's up to each of us to decide what we do with this time. Much of your fear, confusion and frustration at the assholes all around you comes from trying to grasp what is happening through the lens of the rational mind. But my suggestion for you is different. The rational mind simply does not have the bandwidth to carry you through a spiritual initiation. This is why I highly recommend working with the spirits of nature, your helping spirits, and your higher self. So much of this Covid time per...

Originally published: 1/1/20 on Weebly blog Joseph Campbell said the mystic and the psychotic are in the same waters but one is drowning and one is swimming. I tell you this, my sisters and brothers, you do not need a "spiritual life." You already have one. It's called getting out of bed every damned day and putting one foot in front of the other. If you believe your soul came here to learn something, or to unlearn something from a past life, or to experience life in the body, it's doing that right now, and all day long, whether or not you learn how to call down the infinite light through your crown chakra. You are already "just doing it." If you believe life is an ultimately meaningless conjunction of eukaryotic chemical interactions, it certainly is. You don't have to fix your life, you don’t need New Year's resolutions. The Bhagavad Gita, one of the core sacred scriptures of Hinduism, says each one of us goes to the heaven we imagine whil...

Originally published: 12/2/2019 on Weebly blog What do the plant spirits of the Amazon jungle, the 12th Century European "Black Madonna," The Celtic "Old Bone Mother" and the Great White Reindeer Spirit have in common? They are embodiments of the "Dark Divine Feminine." And what they have in common for me is that they are all present in the Winter Solstice Blessing, which opens in two weeks. The "Dark" feminine refers to a type of energy. Life needs both light and dark energy to exist. One driving metaphor of our culture thinks that darkness is lesser, and is tied to evil, and light is greater and tied to purity. This has left us with all kinds of "light pollution," a state in which urbanites literally cannot see the stars because of 24-hour-a-day lights. The Dark Feminine - like, for me, the shamanic path - calls us away in nearly every way from the spiritual assumptions and foundations that have been taught to most of us our...

Originally published: 12/25/2019 on Weebly blog I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life studying God, in many names and costumes. If I’ve only learned one thing- and it is quite possible that I’ve only learned one thing - it is what so many have said: humans are pumped full of fear. The role of God is to move us out of that fear. When fear freezes us in that small place, God makes God’self known, coaxing us out of the fear and encouraging us to remember the bigger truth: that we are made just as much of love as we are of fear. If God ever weeps, it’s because we choose fear again and again and again. If God ever rolls God’s eyes at us, it’s because we spout eloquent words about God and love and yet still live from fear. If God ever angers, it is because we encourage others to act and live in fear and call that faith. If there is a single phrase that I think the teachings of Jesus try to get across to us, it is this: Fear not. On this day that so many people celebrate the teachings of...

Originally published: 11/7/2019 on Weebly blog On the medicine wheel, we are moving from the West into the North. The Celtic tradition often calls the North the direction of "battle" or a somewhat softer version: "rough times." The north is our ally in hard times because it is the direction of the most raw, unfiltered, unsubtle, fierce power. The winter calls forth the death force, the forces of anti-life, and the North is what helps us stand up against it, to fight it, to endure, to stay alive, to survive. As we move into the north on the wheel, you can ask the North for strength and endurance. At this time of year, there is a strong pull to move inward. We may think that’s all about the temperature outside the house. But in shamanic terms, it's also because the North is the womb. ​ In the West – the autumn - the Old Bone Mother moves through the land, collecting all the things that need to be taken down into the womb of the earth to be cooked into th...

Originally published: 10/2/2019 This picture of me was taken more than 30 years ago, when I did a lot of mask-making work. I named the mask “Mr. Doom.” He was the voice constantly chattering in my mind telling me, “everything you think, everything you say and everything you do has always turned out shitty and it always will.” (Notice the broken circle on top of his head - that was a "mistake" in the mask-making that became Mr. Doom's primary symbol.) I did a masked dance/monologue performance of Mr. Doom at an artsy midnight cabaret where artists could try out their new work. There were three of us performing that night: a sad-faced love-balladeer with his worn guitar, wispy beard and total confidence that tonight's new songs would get him laid, a 16-year old, straight-spined, icy-eyed, not one hair out of place leotard-dancer, and me: naked except for Mr. Doom’s masked face with a few rags hanging down, and a pear-shaped drawstring pouch enfolding Mr. Doom’s…...

Originally published: 10/14/2019 on Weebly blog The Hindu mystic Osho urges us not waste our time asking questions unless the answer will change us into a different person. Don’t ask abstract intellectual questions that won’t change your life. Ask only questions upon which your very life depends. Humans are always masked. Persona, from which we get the word personality, is Latin for “the sound that comes from behind the mask.” Every time we speak, it's from behind some kind of mask. Halloween is coming. The common question is: "What mask will you wear this time?"  Make Osho proud by asking that question twenty times a day, as you enter each room. Becoming aware of the mask you are wearing at each moment is the first and most important thing you can do on your spiritual path. Our early life is all about being taught to craft and wear our masks. Then we spend our adult spiritual lives learning to take them off one after another - to find out which ones are false...

Originally published: 7/31/2019 on Weebly blog ​We are in the time of the dark moon now, as the moon passes through the final shedding of its light, and becomes "empty." For the next two days it's a very good time to make prayers for newness, and your newness begins with cleansing old embedded patterns - with shedding. We can cleanse or release old energy patterns embedded in us through meditation and therapy, but I am a fan of prayer. Prayer is not like meditation or therapy. It is a wholly different approach. Good prayer is also a meditation and a kind of therapy. Prayer can gets a bad rap from institutional religion when it urges you to mindlessly spout memorized magic words. Prayer also gets a bad rap from popular scientific culture which sees it as primitive wishful thinking - as pleading with a god who you don't really believe in until you're desperate. But I believe prayer helps the brain hit its inborn delete button. Good prayer is honest and it ...

Originally published: 6/29/2019 on Weebly blog I struggle with how to use the world of video and internet to present shamanic practice without having it narrowed and, frankly made silly, by the limits of the media. But let's give it a try. If you're human, you likely struggle with self-deprecation at times. We live in a mentally ill culture that uses self-deprecation to control your behavior, from voting to worship to shopping. All hierarchical systems, from church to family to the workplace to the elementary schoolroom, relies to some extent on using self-deprecation to control people's behavior. So, we're up against great powers in our daily life, and one thing that has helped me is to remember that the voice of self-deprecation is not really you – it's a voice injected into you by family, church, and culture. It's actually a spiritual parasite that feeds on you. When that seemingly powerful voice comes to you, just try to remember that it's not rea...

Originally published: 5/1/2019 on Weebly blog The first of May – called Beltane in the Celtic tradition - is the first kiss of summer. On the medicine wheel, we pass into the direction South – the direction of fullness and delight, of revelry and sensuality. The Celtic shamanic tradition exuberantly embraces what I call the sensuous divine. Let the well-dressed Sunday sinners sing for mercy from the judging father. We caress the drum with warm hands. The frame drum is the Divine Vulva and the drumstick (or the hand) is the lover who sets her vibrating with the thrill of living in this body, in this earthly life. Erotic energy is bursting out everywhere around us now as that master lover, the sun, caresses his beloved, the beautiful earth, and she cannot help but sigh in delight. The radiant new leaves, the cerulean skies, the first blooms on the crabapples, forsythia, and magnolia, the sparkles on the water, the bird songs – these are all her sighs and moans of delight. What happ...