A Vulnerable Story About the Power of Shamanic Journeying

Even though it's happened to me over and over, I'm always amazed. I'll be wrestling with something for hours, days, weeks... or yes, even years. Then I'll finally do a shamanic journey and get my guides' help, and within a few short minutes I get a radically different understanding - and usually a deep emotional shift, too.

Here's an example. A few weeks ago I was having a lot of conflict with the tenants who now live in my Oakland house. As some of you know, it's a sanctuary I created from a gritty fixer-upper canvas. It's still funky, but also full of color, light, spirit and love. Yet it seems as if all these tenants see are its flaws. Although my property manager was addressing their requests, my experience was that they had been venomous toward me since a few days after they moved in. (Of course, I'm sure their experience is different.)

But the hardest thing for me was that I didn't want to emotionally or energetically sever my contact with the property. Even though I no longer live there, I still love the place and still source power, energy and light from it, as well as direct those energies back to it. Yet I couldn't figure out how I could remain energetically connected to the house without opening myself up to what felt like toxic energies.

For several days I spent hours engaged in terse email battles, trying to... what? Defend myself, explain myself, stand up for myself? I should've known better. I was shaking as I wrote the emails, and they only made things worse. (Of course. As my guides always tell me, what we do matters less than the energy with which we do it. I felt defensive, hurt, angry, threatened. My energy wasn't clear, so how could my emails bring about a clearing?)

Finally at about 3 a.m. one night, unable to sleep, I rattled to call in my guides. They promptly chopped me into tiny pieces (some of you know this is a shamanic healing practice known as dismemberment!) and buried me underneath the ground on the hillside slope to the right of the house's driveway. Then they directed me to envision the entire perimeter of the property (which was easy for me, since I know every inch of that place), surround it with an energetic fence of light, and hold the light there with love.

It was amazing. Immediately, I felt a sense of peace and was able to go back to sleep. Even more astounding to me is that now, weeks later, the peace has held. Every now and then I check in with the light-fence, and make sure it's still glowing. (On the physical plane, I've asked the tenants not to be in direct contact with me, since my property manager is better-equipped to address whatever concerns they have.) I wish those tenants well. I hope that they will find ways to enjoy the house - or that if they don't, they will move on to a place that suits them better. But either way, I feel at ease with the situation.

Meanwhile, a few friends tried to "stick up for me" by  suggesting that I respond punitively to the tenants or try to "get them out of there." While I know my friends mean well on the human level, I am deeply grateful that I can access and follow the guidance of my guides. It's so clear to me that their energetic solution is the right one for me - the one that fills me with peace rather than revenge.

Of course, this situation is a microcosm of human life on earth. Every day, all of us face situations in which we must choose how to respond. Will we act from our higher selves, with the energies our planet most needs? Or will we instead fall into the all-too-human ruts that keep our species stuck in wars and violence, both physical and energetic?

Believe me, I've done the latter plenty of times. And I've paid the price for it just as many times. That's part of why I'm so committed to doing it differently now - that, plus the fact that I see that my aggressive responses just add more fuel to the fire the whole world seems to be burning up in at the moment.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't stand up for ourselves, or should let ourselves be abused. Finding right action is tricky - and again, so much of it is about the energies we hold, rather than what we actually do. Gritting our teeth and trying to do what looks like the right thing will get us nowhere. That's why the love, healing and compassion of our guides is so important - because they can actually help us elevate to a higher place in our own beings, rather than just forcing ourselves to act "as if."

I am so grateful to have the tool of shamanic journeying to turn to when things get tough - and even when they don't! On a much happier note, I married my longtime partner Michelle on September 13, and leading up to the wedding, we did a series of journeys together about what our marriage meant to each of us on a soul level. (Thanks, Laila, for urging me to do this - you were so right!)

Since I'm 52 and this is my first marriage, you can imagine I've had some trepidation about the whole institution! Yet with each new marriage journey I've done, I've gained more understanding about what this marriage is really about for me, and how it can support me and the work I'm here in the world to do. I truly feel my heart coming home into this relationship - and I also engage with the ways I am still and will always be a solitary traveler at the same time. There's room for both -- yet I don't know how I'd be able to know or do any of this without my guides' help.

On Regret

Do you ever regret the choices you've made, or the choices you didn't make? (Who doesn't?!)

Recently I found myself indulging in some fantasies about what I might have done if I'd been different in some fundamental ways, or were 25 years younger.  I think it's part of a process of reckoning I'm in (again!), determining what I most want to give, teach, offer, engage in, at this time in my life.  But my flirtation with regret provided a great opportunity for my guides to offer me a teaching on the subject.  Since I figure I might not be the only one who needs it :) I'll share it with you below!

As always, I am so grateful to the guides who speak to me and through me, and offer wisdom so much greater than my own.

On Regret

One human lifetime is such a very short time in which to live out the many and varied longings and possibilities present in each spirit. Of course, it is impossible to do so. Yet there is something in you that chafes against that impossibility, and believes that somehow, if you had only made difference choices, every potential could have been fulfilled – or perhaps that the potentials which now, from your present vantage point, appear most important, could have been more completely fulfilled.

The error in this thinking is that the present perspective emerges from the learning which came about from those potentials you did fulfill! Had you fulfilled others, the learning would have been different, and so too the awareness of those other possibilities not realized.

So it is that the woman who turned right may regret the left-hand paths not taken, while her counterpart who turned left may regret what she missed from the right. She who never had children but has had a rich life in other respects may regret her childlessness, while her counterpart who spent much of her creative energy raising children may regret the other things undone. If these two could swap lives for a moment, they would also swap regrets! So too with the one who built a successful career and the one who devoted more energy to romance, and all of the many other configurations.

This remains true even when much of your time has gone to dealing with circumstances you did not consciously choose, such as disability or illness. It is easy to regret all that you were rendered unable to do, and to long to have had the capacity to do more, or to do differently. Yet it still remains true that had you not been disabled or ill, and had you done those things you wish to have done, you could easily find something else to regret or pine after.

The answer, therefore, to the “problem” of regret – which is a problem only in how it separates you from yourself,  and from the beauty and fulfillment available in your present life, whatever its particulars – is, of course, love. No matter the nature of your regret or grief, you can choose to love it – by which I mean, choose to direct streams of love, acceptance, gratitude and forgiveness toward and around, over and under and through it. In this way regret and grief become translucent, so that light can pass through them. And in the presence of that light, all is changed – even though nothing has changed on the level of form.

You see, while the level of form is terribly important to the human personality, it is not important at all – is essentially irrelevant – to the soul, that part of you which glows at your very core. The soul yearns to experience the interface between itself and life, between itself and the conditions of life in a human body on earth – and that you have no doubt done.  

And when your regret and grief become translucent – when your life becomes translucent, and can let light through – then the light held within it becomes visible, and the light from without becomes able to join with it. Then you may see your life’s true beauty, a beauty that comes not from the specific forms that were created, but from the very (f)act of creation itself.

The opportunity to be, or to perceive oneself as, an individual self, is so astonishingly rich with creative possibility. Yet most of you do not realize how much potential rests in your own hands until you are quite advanced in years. At that point it becomes easy to regret all the years in which you did not know what you now know – even though those were the very years which unfolded in such a way as to allow you to know it! Although you may have lived your life like a painting student imitating the other students’ canvases, or putting paint on your canvas at random rather than by chosen design, this too is beautiful; this too is a life.

And whatever life you have lived – whether or not your choices were consciously made; whether or not they were in concert with your conscious desires; whether or not your past choices match your present desires – in the end nothing matters but your ability to experience each moment. You raised children; they have done well, or they have not; but can you look outside your window and feel pleasure at the sight of leaves moving against the sky? You had no children, but you wrote books, or grew gardens, or balanced accounts, or had lovers, or danced; you lived in a city and dressed in high style, or lived in the country and wore drab clothes; but can you listen to the sound of the creek as it moves over the stones, and let it fill you?

If not, do not despair; the leaves will move against the sky, the water will move over the stones for a very, very long time. If you cannot let them fill you now, there is another moment coming, and many more after that, in which you may become permeable to light and to life.  And even now, within you, the intermingling spaces of regret and acceptance, love and not-love, light and not-light, make a kind of filigree which is yours, which is your beautiful life.

Living a Can't-Fail Life

      Are you ready to awaken, cherish, express and embody yourself - to go beyond fear of failure and live your soul's calling? Then you're ready for a can't-fail life!  

A "can't-fail life" is not a life that avoids any appearance of failure. It is most definitely not a life devoid of grief, tragedy, heartbreak or rage.  

It’s a life in which our most essential qualities of spirit are burnished (and sometimes rubbed raw) until their true beauty is revealed. By contacting and celebrating this spirit, we celebrate life itself - and we change our own lives, and the world.

Why a "can't fail" life?

- Recently, my beloved Michelle attended a workshop at which she was asked, "What would you do if you  knew you could not fail?" Everyone else had plenty of unlived dreams to describe, but Michelle was stumped. Just as I would have, had I been there, she said, "I can't answer the question - I already live that way."

- On the same day, I received an email from a friend who is miserable in his job. Yet, he said, "Everyone tells me not to leave." It got me thinking about all the many times "everyone" has told me not to do what I needed to do.

At 52, I've published 7 books, taught at 6 universities, had 4 major relationships (and a few other heartbreaks and passions along the way), and thrived in 3 careers (and left them behind, or changed their form, when I stopped thriving in them.)  When I left my second tenure-track job to start a private practice in HeartMind Integration, a psychospiritual healing modality incorporating shamanism, hypnotherapy and energy work, I heard a rumor that my colleagues thought I'd joined a cult!  Um - yeah. The cult of listening to my own soul, and acting accordingly. 

I'm happier now than I've ever been. There are still plenty of challenges, but following my own path truly makes them all worthwhile.

A couple of years ago, for instance, I moved not once but twice, got seriously ill with adrenal fatigue (from which I'm now gratefully recovering), and was hit with an unexpected $12K job replacing all my sewage pipes. The former partner to whom I donated my right kidney in 1995 died, so, as some friends pointed out, my kidney died too.

That same year, I published my sixth book, Miraculum: Poems, and my seventh book, Soul on Earth: A Guide to Living & Loving Your Human Life. (That latter book was over six years in the making! Well, actually, I suppose both books were 50 years in the making.)

And my second move was to a house in the country (where I hope to live for a long, long time to come!) with the beautiful Russian River literally in my back yard. I've spent more time floating, swimming, playing in the water - and writing and camping out at its edge - over the past year and a half, than in the entire 50 years before this.

Living a Can't-Fail Life is for all of us.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?