A New Vision of Aging

“We crave relationship with that which exceeds us.”

A startling bit of news upon returning from my 39^th year of vision questing in the Yosemite Sierra is that physicists at the Cern laboratory in Italy may have discovered something that actually goes faster than the speed of light, something that according to Einstein is not possible. While time and further investigation of their results may prove them wrong, the mere possibility that something, in this case a subatomic particle called a neutrino, moves faster than 186,000 miles a second, upsets the entire scientific base of our understanding of reality, what it is and how it works.

One of the reflection questions that proved fertile in this year’s quest addresses the ontological realm of what the physicists in Cern are exploring: “What do you believe in, have faith in and trust as truth about reality, from your own direct experience?” Based on the notion that there is wisdom in truth and truth in wisdom, seven others and I dove into the deep waters of nature unfolding from an ocean of infinite mystery.

The quest experience sets up participants as conscious hunters seeking prey, not for the body but prey for the soul: prey of in-sight, vision, understanding, courage, healing, inspiration, guidance, meaning, purpose. Sleeping intimately on the earth, with the Milky Way as ceiling, hearing thunder roar though the sky, feeling its power, rain-soaked cliffs avalanching tons of rock, drinking water from flowing creek w/ quick-darting trout, watching granite boulders grind down into sand, the powers of life and death, of coming and going, seeps slowly but relentlessly into body/mind awareness. What one sees outside is also what one experiences within. Boundaries begin to dissolve.

The physical ardors of hiking with full backpack in challenging terrain, fasting at altitude, sleep deprivation, coupled with meaningful ceremony combine synergistically to break down, exhaust and weaken the organism leading to change in perceptual function. You begin to experience the difference between looking and seeing. Looking is mental, words and thoughts colored by past associations and experience. Seeing is different, it entails waiting with attention using sensory modalities of the body to feel and understand what you are viewing in its wholeness and essence. What we really “see” is light (photon packets traveling on electromagnetic vibratory waves) bouncing off a specific energy constellation made sense of in the mind/brain. Seeing opens connection with the essence of what is actually taking place in the present moment. Instead of looking at a tree, you see a living vibrating, evolving being, conscious and communicating, but not in English or human words.

I choose to return to the same quest site year after year, and in doing so I see more of what is there, what I didn’t notice before. Granite bounders, mountain sides, trees, flowers, glacially-polished sculptures, bubbling stream, howling wind, fantastic cloud-shapes drifting across the heavens, open more, share more of themselves, perhaps in appreciation for respectfully sitting at their feet listening to what they have to reveal. It has been said that one can learn as much by climbing the same mountain 100 times as by climbing a 100 different mountains one time.  You can learn about place, about harmonious relationship with the resident life-forms, about change through time, as boundaries between your ordinary sense of self-in-environment dissolve into a wider sense of who you really are and your connectedness to creation.

I am the ocean, I am the sand

I am the mountain, I am the land

I am the fire, I am the grain,

I am the sky, the light in your eye

I am.

Rejuvenation comes through a dream one night when a car without a motor receives renewed enthusiasm and support to keep going on its journey. Another morning I awake to a 500 pound gorilla sitting on my chest asking – “Why get up and do anything today? Why not do nothing but just be?”

“Damn good question!” I think to myself.

I lie in my sleeping bag watching the light of day creep down from the high cliffs toward my camp by the creek. Gradually a powerful sense of gratitude for all the gifts of my life begins to fill my awareness: Gratitude for a healthy functioning body able to hike into and behold this temple of natural splendor, gratitude for wellness, for healing from major illness and accidents, loving parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren, friends, community, good teachers, a comfortable home, protection, meaningful, gainful work that supports my family and I, the list goes on and on as I lay there on my back watching the day unfold.  Birds singing, chipmunks darting in the high branches of the pine trees rustling in the morning breeze.

“Well, there’s one reason to get up, to give thanks for all those gifts!” I get it.  The grace of abundance and the abundance of grace all around me and throughout my life, even during the hard times. “Get up and give thanks for all that I have been so fortunate to have been the recipient of. I didn’t create those gifts, they were given to me by the Sacred Mystery, by Spirit, by the Tao.  Like my momma taught me long ago, when given something, say “Thank you”!

I climb out of my bag, put on my pants and shirt and stand up to face the sun. I offer tobacco as thank-you to the spirits and powers of above, below, around.  I hear the words of an indigenous elder I heard or read somewhere.  “There’s a really big law that we all have to obey…that law is respect. We have to treat everything with respect.”

My own voice speaks  – “Show respect for the earth that you have been living on these past several days, for the trees giving you oxygen and shelter, for the wood in the fire, the fish in the stream, the clear sky at night and the light of the full moon, say ‘Thank you’.  These beings have been giving to you, allowing you to live in their living room, their home. They are watching you, they are listening to you. Show your respect. Say ‘Thank you’.

So I do. The creative human urge to ritualize takes shape in and through me as I sing praise of thanksgiving. I play my flute, I offer purified corn mean.I dance, I sing. My senses remind remind me, once again, that this is a participative universe offering a co-creative relationship with mystery wherein we are given free choice about what we want to create in our lives. Only I can make conscious choice about what I want to experience, how I want to use the gift of awareness, my intentions for my life. To not get up and focus my attention on my intention is to choose to have my ego-identified, fear-based, socially-programed mind   run its software conditioning. This adds further response-fuel to the morning’s wake-up question of “Why get up and do anything?”

I get up to take advantage of the amplified power field I am in, to connect with it and channel it into my inner work. I get up to consciously align with it, opening my body and mind as a clear channel for its’ power to flow through me so my actions are empowered by their juice, not just my own.

Ok, I am up. I get it. Thank you.

Once up I send out loving energy to each of my fellow spirit-hunters wishing them well on their hunting process. I marvel at how each quester becomes a teacher for me, a mirror, a medicine wheel, helping me explore deeper into myself. I think back to our Give-Away Ceremony sitting around the Sacred Fire a few nights ago. Our last meal and night together before heading out for our individual time of solitude on the land, we go around the around the circle sharing what it is that we seek – our prey, and why.

One man, sixty two years of age, has depended upon others to make the tough decisions for him all his life. He seeks the courage to find and trust his own inner guidance hoping to gain self-confidence that has eluded him thus far.

Another man in his sixties speaks of how he has dropped out of his relationship with spirit for several years and now seeks to return, the Prodigal Son.

Another man in his late fifties seeks to face his fears of inadequacy and failure in front of others.

A feeling-stuck middle-aged woman seeks guidance on how to meet the challenges of her “medicine gifts”, in order to befriend them into helping allies that guide her in how to use those gifts for healing in the world.

A mental health worker seeks to break his life routines to create and live greater presence in the moment, with whomever and wherever he is, whatever he is doing, rather than obsessing about past events or fears of what the future might hold.

An accomplished artist and sound healer and recent grandmother seeks guidance on how to step into a greater sense of Grandmother-hood with a wider channel of service that just to own grand-daughter to become an ‘agent for transformation” in our world.

Each holds up a mirror of inquiry in which I see my own life, my own version of which they speak. We are all different expressions of an underlying reality that holds us together in an invisible web of oneness. Indigenous people who remember their ancestral ways remember this and live this out in their lives. We mainstream westerners live in a culture that has forgotten our interconnectedness and for this the whole planet suffers.

There is an old Hebrew myth that says when a child is born, an angel (an invisible presence, energy-messenger) takes it under their wing and recites the Torah to it. Having done that they put their forefinger on the infant’s lip and says one word, “Forget!”

And we do. Each human being on the planet has that mark of forgetting on their upper lip. Our challenge is to wake up and remember, who we are, what we are, why we are here.

Without remembering, we dream our life away. Maybe it is all a dream on a river that we are both rowing down and being rowed down by larger powers. The vision quest opens a portal to communion with a bigger dream and larger powers than the machinations of ego’s monkey mind, a bigger dream that invites us into a co-creative exploration of what is possible. Why limit our dreaming to old notions of what is or has been when the possibilities are infinite, when we live in an amazing field of “cosmic soup” where the speed of light may no longer be operative factor in what we call reality?

I hope to make it up to quest one more year, Great Spirit willing, my 40^th, in September of 2012. Then I’ll take a year off to write about forty years of experience dancing with the Big Dream.

May it be so!

All Blessings to you for fulfillment of your biggest dreams.  tom

There is great need for a new expression of masculinity today – one infused with a strong spine based on integrity, kindness, soul, generosity, courage and tenderness, living more purposefully, honoring the feminine, the Goddess, and finding ways to serve a cause greater than ego, status and material gain. One that uses our power and gifts as men to protect and sustain life, not destroy it.

The challenges of the times call for men to shape-shift our understanding of the warrior archetype and what it means to be a strong, brave, good man from one based on outer conquest – power over another, to one that recognizes the real battle is an inner one facing our own inner demons that lead to the violence, greed, ignorance and arrogance that so pollutes today’s world.  It’s not about conquest over another, about proving ourselves as real man by overpowering another.  It’s about  engaging with the inner forces that drive us towards reactivity, depression, despair, abandonment of our responsibilities, acting-out, numbing out, and passivity.

Men need to shift awareness from the macho he-man, always in control and in charge, always brave and leading the way, hero-by-domination and victorious in battle against others, nature and the earth. Instead men need to take a conscious and skillful role in the evolutionary process of the “Great Turning” by becoming a spiritual warrior who uses the weapons of conscious, skillful, heart and soul-based mindfulness to wake up and remember our true nature, what we are, why we are here and how to use our masculine gifts  to protect, nurture and celebrate life.

Living as a Spiritual Warrior means taking responsibility for your being, your thoughts and actions, for what you put out into the world. Thoughts produce feelings, specific energies that enter the larger field in which we are all interconnected. Ask yourself in any given moment – “Are you affecting or infecting?”

A Spiritual Warrior takes responsibility for their purpose and intention, for finding, knowing, connecting and attuning with their deepest values and meaning. No one is here by accident. Everyone has a sacred purpose in being here using the gifts you have been granted by grace as a sacred being in a man’s sacred body.  Find out what lives in your soul, your creativity, your power to help make life safe to flower in all its diversity.

Create respectful relationship with the powers of creation based on humility, reverence, receptivity and gratefulness. Real strength entails the ability to be vulnerable, to be kind, to be gentle, along with being courageous in standing up to any forces within us or without that would treat any expression of life in a disrespectful manner recognizing that what we do to another, we do to ourselves, what we do to the earth we do to our children and our grandchildren and to future generations. Stand up for justice, for peace, for generosity, for creativity, for beauty, for celebration of the miracles of life.

Ask how you can be used by Spirit, God, Nature, Creator, the Universe, the Tao, whatever you want to call the creative power of creation, how you can be used in service to the Greatest Good For All.  Ask how you can be used as a channel for bringing more light, love, peace, healing and generosity into the world.  Ask how you can heal the violence, how you can be a protector of life, those weaker and more vulnerable than you, how you can be a conscious activist in the paradigm shift from fear to love.

Nine Spiritual Warrior Practices

1.    Create a Regular Mindfulness Practice .

Track your awareness and strengthen your concentration muscle.   Pay attention to what comes into your awareness, how you deal with it, how you focus your awareness, towards what ends, what you consciously bring into your awareness, what seeds you plant daily in the garden of your mind. Without so doing you are lost to what ever way the strongest current or wind is blowing in the moment – an unconscious, conditioned robot automatically acting our your program in a culturally induced hypnotic state.

2. Befriend and make a sacred marriage with your feminine, Rediscover/Reconnect with the Goddess. End the Violence – against women, girls, the earth, elders, the poor, people of color, animals, and heal the conditions that breed it: ignorance, arrogance, ego identification, greed, lust for power and domination.

Honor your Grief, your pain, your fear, your homophobia. Get educated to what is true. Study Her-Story, not just His-Story.  Find out about the five thousand years of patriarchal atrocities towards women and children, towards the earth, towards indigenous peoples, your own historical indigenous roots that have been ripped away  leading to the alienation we experience through soul-less jobs that feed a metastasizing consumer-based economic system that cares more about profits than people and the earth.

3.  Create a daily Attitude of Gratitude Practice.

A Spiritual Warrior doesn’t just take, but gives back in equal heartfelt measure. Indigenous Peoples around the world and throughout history teach us that reciprocity with the creative sources of life is sacred; we have an obligation to feed and honor these “spirits” as they feed us, and to protect the places they live (power spots).  Greet the morning sun, connect with the light, the evening stars and moon.  Give Thanks. Be fierce in kindness, gentleness, generosity, courage to stand up against injustice, discrimination and whatever doesn’t honor the diversity and sacredness of life.

Pay attention to what you are thankful for and give thanks back to whatever you feel is the source of those gifts in a way that is meaningful to you. Who among us has not been receiving “life-gifts” every second of our lives – air, food, water, sunshine, rain, gravity that keeps us on the earth?  Dance, sing, chant, make offerings, say “Thank You”, create beauty, poetry, objects ‘d arte, thereby addressing the imbalance created when we receive a gift and do not express gratitude for it.

4.  Seek Vision to find your purpose and deepest meaning – your Path of Heart, and then Walk It To Completion.

Ask how you can best serve the greatest good. Write a one sentence statement of your intention – what qualities you want to grow to fullest blossoming and towards what ends.  Put it all in present tense and positive wording.  For example, mine is: “I am a sacred, worthy, luminous being. I am love and my love is for giving.”  Own your intentions.

Do something every morning to juice your intention with positive energy.  If you don’t do this you are choosing to allow your conditioning to run your life and for most of us in this culture that is fear-based insanity based on misperceived notions of separation. Stay vigilant to bust any inner/outer forces that get in the way or try to negate living out your intention.

5.  Befriend your Shadow, Track Your Dreams. It’s not about perfection, it’s about knowing your wholeness, light and dark, strong and weak, etc. Dreams provide a treasure trove of information by showing you parts of yourself that in your waking consciousness you don’t see because of ego defenses. Keep a regular dream journal and enrich your waking life at the same time.

6.  Spend daily time in/ with Mother Earth, w/Nature. Help grow a garden.  Honor  the rising sun and moon cycles. Remember to Surrender, Surrender to Remember.  Attune with the seasons, commune with  the cosmos, with the growth power that brings flowers and fruit and beauty out of bushes and trees, and out of us if we attune with it skillfully and respectfully

8.  Be a daily Love-Finder, a Love-Giver. Love is for giving. Honor your divinity and the divinity of all who have, do and will cross your path. Remember that everyone you meet is opportunity for a sacred encounter.

8. Honor the Ancestors – your own and of All Peoples, including the plant and animal “people”, the stars from which we came, the sacred mystery that births & sustains us for the time of our “life walk”, and that receives us “home” again when our life path is over.

9. Create a Vision of a Win-Win World living in harmony and balance w/ All Beings. Live your legacy. Enjoy your life and leave having done your share to make this a better place.

May it be so!

It is an amazing and challenging time to be alive today.  LIfe itself is up for grabs.  The opportunity to step up to the plate and make a difference sits squarely in all our laps.  The Spring Equnox - half day, half night, reminds us of the importance of balance, something hard to find in these times of dramatic imbalance.  Spring also reminds us of the huge growth-energy that pours forth from the womb of Mother Earth bringing new life, new promise, new possibilities.  It calls each of us to look inward at what we want to grow in our lives, our families, our communities, our world.  What seeds do we want to plant to be empowered by the energy that comes up from the deep belly of “La Tierra”?

Hola Relatives -

I just finished a late-night review of a great read by the anthropologist  Wade Davis – The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. He writes beautifully, interweaving Einstein (“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”) with Buddhism, science, history, cultural anthropology and much more.  His commentary cuts to the bone – “We spend all of our lifetimes trying to live to be a hundred without losing our hair or teeth.  Buddhists spends their lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence.”  Here is another one – “Billboards of modern western society celebrate teenagers in underwear.  The Tibetan billboard is the mani wall, mantras carved into stone, prayers for the well being of all sentient beings. ” KInd of gets to ya doesn’t?

Indigenous wisdom’s understanding of how nature works goes back to the very beginning of human origins in Great Mother Africa  honoring the law of origins, the laws of life.  People who pay attention throughout the world know that we live in a “matrix of connectivity“, (including modern quantum physicists).  They see not just with their eyes but with their hearts and minds.  Minds that are part and parcel of what they observe within their field of existence.

Shamans know how to shapeshift their perceptual faculties  to travel unemcumbered as energy beings of light into different dimensions of reality, time and space.   They know that plants and animals are spirits  too,  like us, but that they are wearing “robes” of  different configurations as we perceive them in this reality under the conditions of ordinary consciousness.

The shamanic practices of Indigenous wisdom-ways reflect a knowing that our lives are totally dependent upon intimate systems of exchange with the powers of nature for our very being.  They remember what we have forgotten, much to the collective dismay of the planet and its  non-human inhabitants,  that we have to “pagar la manda” –   pay the bill, GIVING BACK our  energy through gratitude to the forces of life,  for our life, for life itself in order to maintain balance in the world. Their rituals and ceremonies are all a means by which they do this thus  maintaining the energetic flows of life. Reciprocity is recognized as Sacred.  The various creation stories of indigenous peoples provide the terms of the contract about right-relationship pay-back in exchange for the gifts of life we are given here on Mother Earth.  Mainstream material-based society emphasizes taking, taking and more taking,  without an understanding of the importance of giving back in exchange for our taking, which of course gets us into the troubles we face today.

Reading Davis’s book reminds me that even though we live in the miasma of mainstream culture alienated from nature,  we are still totally dependent upon the creative powers of nature for our life.  When the  sun shone through the rain clouds this morning  I got up to greet it and give thanks – pagar la manda.   Thanksgiving gratitude to the rain as well,  to the the earth, the trees, the worms tilling the ground so new life can come forth in the soon-to-come springtime miracles of rebirth.

The Old People say that one of our most important functions is to “Just say Thank You.”

It doesn’t take a whole lot of time or effort but it sure can open the doorway to conscious awareness of  the preciousness of this fragile life that we share, to its fabulous diversity, to its  magnificent creative intelligence manifesting all around and within us.  Given the social and environmental challenges  of modernity, it certainly  seems like a good idea to reconnect  to this energy- intelligence   seeking its guidance on how to come back into sane  living patterns of relationship that repairs and sustains the wonder of a healthy and happy Mother Earth.

May we all find meaningful ways that work for our integrity and our authenticity to “pagar la manda”  - to Give Back,  and to  Look, Listen, and Learn, using our energy through the matrix of connectivity  to create a  critical mass of consciousness working  towards a win-win scenario for our planet  and all our relations,  .  May it be so.

Life, love and wisdom-learning to all.   tom

“In the game of Life, the One who Loves the Most Wins!”

Years ago when I was first asked by friends to perform their marriage ceremony,  it got me to thinking about the the challenges and gifts of my own experiences in marriage, now going on forty three years with  my wife Andrea.  It has been on-the-job-training and is still a work in progress but what I wrote so long ago has held up over time and grown even stronger with increasing personal experience as well as helping other couples in their relationships.

I believe that the experience of a committed marriage  (or partnership) creates a crucible that can be one of the most powerful and grounded paths to spiritual growth there is. Intimacy in marriage takes us right down into the inside of inside. It gives us opportunity to cultivate our deepest essence, the presence of Great Spirit’s gift of unconditional love within us, while facing and working consciously with the forces that block its’ awareness – the forces of ignorance, ego identity, self-importance, reactivity and attachment. Working with shared intentionality in cooperative partnership towards win-win outcomes, you can ask yourself – ”What is the highest potential in this situation?  As its agent, what role can I play to help actualize and blossom  it to fruition?”

In the process of romantic love we ‘fall” in love with the other, but what is really happening is that the other is helping us open to the love already within us.  Yet we come to identify being in this state with what the other person is doing, how they are showing up.  When they don’t show up the way we want, the love can seemly disappear.  This provides one of the richest opportunities for working intimately towards Spirit.  How?

1.  By taking responsibility for speaking up for your needs in a positive way – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.  Don’t expect your partner to be a mind reader.  Tell them what you need, what you want.

2.  By identifying, facing and owning your shadow forces and projections, your unconscious, reactive patterns of habituation, limitation and negativity.  Your partner will help you immeasurably, as a mirror, a stimulus, and potentially, as a helpful reminder of intentionality.

3. By praying-meditating-doing ceremony together.  Pray for each other, pray for your relationship, for your family.  Give thanks together.  Ask that your partnership be used as a vehicle for awakening and serving Higher Will, and supporting each other in realizing your highest potential.  Cultivate wisdom by going within to access intuitive intelligence from deeper self.

4.  Strengthen faith, trust and “surrendering power” by reminding each other of Spirit’s presence seeking to work for the greatest good no matter what the situation.  Find and create ways that work for both of you to “call in” Spirit’s helping power.

5.  Focus on your partner’s light,  not their lampshade.  Look for the positive that is trying to come through in some way, shape or form.  One example, reframe anger-blasts from your partner from the perception of enemy to that of ally, wherein you use the attacking fire-power to burn away your reactivity, the dross, to realize your own inner gold. Then you can return love instead of anger, for your partner’s anger is but a call for love through the pain of their hurt or fear.

6.  Develop the healing power of forgiveness through releasing judgments and extending unconditional love without attachment to outcome or form, asking for Spirit’s help when stuck in ego.  Ask for Spirit’s love to flow through you to your partner when  hurt has closed your heart and you can’t do it on your own.

7. Cultivate “selfless giving”,  growing love that grows brighter in seeing the happiness of your partner expand.  “As ye give, so shall ye receive”, for truly what we give to another, we give to ourselves.

Working these steps can take you will you into the realm of what Goethe calls, “Higher love making…..    And so long as you haven’t experienced this”, he continues, “to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on this dark earth.”

My hope and prayer is that you will increasingly die to what is not true and so grow stronger in what is true through the intimate sharing of your full beings.

May you be joyous guest on this beautiful, blossoming Earth.

All Blessings.   Tom

In his book BE LOVE NOW spiritual teacher Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert of Harvard Psychedelic fame, speaks about creating a “vibrational field” by chanting a mantra to move from mind to heart.  The idea is to shift from ego,who we think we are and which is always judging, to soul.  Love comes from the soul, where as other emotions come from ego.  Love is a state of being, states Ram Dass, a divine state because if you go deep enough into love it takes you to God/Goddess/Spirit.  “As you dissolve into love, the ego fades. You are not thinking about loving, you are just being love, radiating like the sun.”

“Surrender to love” says RD, let go of the stuff that keeps you feeling separate…go back to the center, the truth of our being…. remember – ‘I am loving awareness’!” He points out that every relationship has the potential to act as a mirror, reflecting where we are in consciousness and the work we need to do to evolve our souls. Any relationship can become the road to the spiritual heart when we hold this as an intention – to consciously use relationships as vehicle to grow us deeper into living our spirituality.  Use the Observing Witness as a rudder to take us to the portal of surrender into love’s presence, which is really going back to the grace of home-base,  “to be love now.”

From the time I first heard Ram Dass back in the 1960’s I have always enjoyed his words, his guidance, his insights and his humor.  What he said always felt intuitively right.  It went down clean, no arguments, no rebuttals.  Living it however has remained a challenge.  Especially when my buttons are pushed and my ego reactivity kicks in with reptilian-brain power. I do find help however in a preventative way (on my good days) and in a treatment way on my not so good days, with following his advice about the efficacy of mantra to move from head to heart and shape-shift my energy state.

Over the years of inner work I have come up with a mantra that sums up what Aldous Huxley referred to as “The Perennial Philosophy”.  It is in the process of growing into a song that I will be recording in the near future with members of what else, my “Love Group”, that has been meeting monthly for over ten years.  I invite you to try out this mantra your self and see how it feels.  See what saying it out loud brings up for you.  Start with the first few lines, the basic bare bones of what it/we, are all about.  Ready?  Let’s go.

Take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly, Soft belly, open heart, peaceful mind.

I AM A SACRED WORTHY LUMINOUS BEING.

I AM LOVE AND MY LOVE IS FOR GIVING.

That wasn’t so hard was it?  Does it ring true for you? If not, why not? Where, what part?

Sacred because we are manifestations of the creative wisdom power of the universe.  Not here by accident.  Worthy, worthy of respect, caring, kindness, honoring, celebrating, enjoying just for the fact of our being. Not having to be earned by doing, just due to the fact of our existence until proven otherwise because of behavior that is not in line with who and what we really are which brings us to Luminousity.  We are luminous because beneath the solid appearing “outerness” of our physical being we are fields of energy powered by the light of the sun.  In fact, we are on fire, heated within to a normal temperature of around 96.8 degrees.  We are light filled-beings.

Keep peeling the layers of physical being, personality, persona, life-history, ego identity, just keep peeling until you get to the core of the luminous worthy sacred beings that we are and what do you get to?  Love!  At our essence we are love.  The purpose of that love?  For hoarding?  No, I don’t think so.  For keeping locked away in fear that we will run out of it?  No, I don’t think so.  It is for giving.  Check it out in your own experience.  Don’t you feel best when your heart is open and love is pouring out from your heart to someone or something else – love as gratitude, love as joy, love as deep soul caring?

Try it again. I AM A SACRED WORTHY LUMINOUS BEING.  I AM LOVE AND MY LOVE IS FOR GIVING.

Try humming it, singing it to what ever tune comes spontaneously out of your mouth.

Then add this – TO YOU, TO ME, TO EVERY BODY.

And  then add – SET IT FREE, LET IT BE, CAN’T YOU SEE, CAN’T YOU SEE?

I AM A SACRED WORTHY LUMINOUS BEING

I AM LOVE AND MY LOVE IS FOR GIVING.

Want to work it a bit more?  After chanting/singing it in the form presented of “I AM’, try singing it with “You Are A….”, then try it with “ WE ARE….”

Give it a whirl.  Stay present to the data of your own experience when you use this as a mantra at various times of the day in various situations. See what you experience, notice what comes up in you, what changes.

Life is an exploration of what is possible.  Give Ram Dass’s advice a try and if my words don’t work for you, no problem, come up with your own.  Share them with me on my Facebook account. Have fun. Play with the process. Enjoy your self.  And hey, if you want me to sing the song the way I do it on your answering machine, send me your number and you got it!

The more of us that are working to transform our consciousness from a culturally conditioned fear-based one based on perceptions of separation and ego identity, towards a love-based consciousness that recognizes that what we give to another we give to ourselves, that recognizes that we are all, to use a term from physics, “quantumly entangled” (connected), and that the only win is a win-win for all of life on our precious planet Mother Earth, the sooner we can reach a critical mass that shape-shifts our planetary paradigm from a me-based one to a we-based one.  Each of us is empowered and has all the gear we need to make this transformational switch in our thinking, our being, our doing.

Thanks for showing up, standing up and making it real.  Chant on!  Sing on!

Un mil gracias.  Aloha to all.  tom

Tom Pinkson

Email: tompinkson@gmail.com

Websites: drtompinkson.com, www.nierica.com

A great man who walked his talk and  lived his values in the very  belly of the hottest fires, whose birthday we celebrate Monday January 17th, Dr. Martin Luther King,  gave us wisdom guidance when he said –  ”The Key that Unlocks the Door to Ultimate Reality is Love”.  Dr. King was not talking about a passive, submissive love.  No, he was talking about something very different. In honoring his life and in support of each of us standing up for the legacy he left us, for the work undone that our increasingly troubled times call for, I share some of his wisdom-words.

I was fortunate to march with my family and a million others that day long ago in Washington D.C. along with with Dr. King to the Lincoln Memorial.  The crowd was so thick I climbed a tree next to the Tidal Pool so I  could see the man as he gave his inspired “I Have A Dream” speech.  To this day I get chills and tears when I think about it.  Please take in as inspiration  the heart and soul of this man who shone such a powerful light on a non-violent way to transform violence, fear and injustice into a peaceful and just world, one that is a win-win for all which ultimately is the only real win.

Dr. King  - “When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response.  I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life….the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality…In the struggle for human dignity,…along the way of life, someone must have sense enough…to cut off the chain of hate.  This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

Listen to the man’s metaphysics of hope in dark times – “I have discovered that the highest good is love.  This principle is at the center of the cosmos.  It is the great unifying force of life. God is love. He  (she) who loves has discovered the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality….I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship”.

In working towards change when our own buttons can be pushed into reactivity and thoughts of violence against the “bad guys”, Dr. King reminded us  that it is important to –  ”Oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the peretrators of the system…the highest good is love….  For -

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy…Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness;  only light can do that.  Hate cnanot drive out hate;  only love can do that.  Hate is rooted in fear, and the only cure for fear-hate is love.”

“The forces that threaten to negate life must be challenged by courage, which is the power of life to affirm itself…This requires the exercise of a creative will that enables us to hew out a stone of hope from a mountain of despair.  Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations…”

Dr. King offered us a positive vision of what is possible if enough of us do the work to create a critical mass in the planetary field for a peaceful paradigm shift , such as happened when the Berlin Wall cam down without a shot being fired.  - ”I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

May it be so.  May we each show up to do our parts in making it be so, birthing a safe, just, healthy and sustainable world honoring the wonderous miracle of life that we are gifted to know with each breathe of grace that we are given.

It was a long cold night many years ago when I sat on the slopes of Mt. Shasta wrapped but still shivering in my sleeping bag, waiting for the sun to rise.  1982. Vision Quest.  I faced east in eager anticipation of the promised warmth of a soon-to-be-rising sun.  Gradually the dark of night faded away, the stars grew dimmer. I stood up to greet the Old One who daily cuts through the darkness reminding us of the power of light to animate life, bringing illumination and the start of a new day.

Holding my medicine bag to my heart I stood ready to sing a Welcome Song when suddenly a majestic eagle came soaring over the eastern ridge, its tail feathers streaming the first rays of light from the rising sun. The Sacred Eagle, the One Who Flies Highest in the sky, closest to the Great Spirit, seemingly pulling the Sun in from the dark of night. “Thank You Holy One for your work. You truly are the Medicine Elder of the East.  Thank you for the Power of Light. I open to you. May I be a good channel for your light, your love, your warmth, your wisdom and power into and through my body, to my family, my ancestors, my community, to All My Relations”.

Since that day, supported in my practice by the encouragement of my shamanic Huichol wisdom elders,  upon awakening I face the eastern doorway taking in that healing mojo while giving thanks for its blessings.  For the Huichol the Hawks are considered  members of the Eagle Family to be equally respected and honored. Hummingbirds are also part of what another shamanic people, the Lakota, call  ”Zintkala Oyate” – the Bird Nation.  These  ”Sky Visitors” have been been showing on a regular  basis ever since this Mt. Shasta quest long ago, but these past several years, especially since my mother’s death this past August, they have been doing double-time.

Hummingbirds announce their presence with a loud drum-beat of their hard-working wings, when I am out in the garden working, when I am doing my morning prayers, when I relax outdoors with nature’s splendor.  They always seem to arrive when I am thinking about faith, or when my faith is wobbling and I need  a reminder.  Gifts of Grace, the Hummingbird flies into my presence, hovering above or in front of me, each wing beat bringing its medicine – “You are not alone Tomás.  All is well.  Keep your faith strong in this great invisible mystery sea that is alive, in which all is connected, in which love and light is the essence of all being beneath surface appearance.”

The Hawks came to me for five straight days during the time of my back injury three years ago when I could only crawl on hands and knees out to our front deck to lie in pain.  They brought me hope, company, encouragement, courage, power, joy, relief (see article I wrote about this amazing healing time – THE WEEK OF THE CIRCLING HAWKS).  The sixth day, in addition to the Hawks, a Falcon flew directly over my head as I lay there praying for release from the excruciating pain that had taken me previously to the emergency room for methadone injections.

Most recently on the occasion of my thirty-eighth year of vision questing in the High Sierra Of Yosemite, the “Zintkala Oyate”, was out in full force.  Just as people were leaving base camp heading out to their time of solitude, a large Hawk soared over our heads in a north-south line, the Good Red Road, sending us on our way.

Days later after our time alone fasting, we hiked up onto a high ridge heading towards a “Shrine Tree” we had discovered the previous year – a tree whose branches were decorated with gifts honoring the lives of people who had died. Under a nearby rock lay a metal box chained to the granite mountain. Inside was a book where visitors had written something about their loved one who had died. It was to this place that I brought my mother Ruth’s ashes, the crumbling remains of her recently cremated ninety-six year old body.  I held the ashes over my heart, thanked my mother for her life, for the gifts of what we had shared in this life, for the gratitude and how blessed I felt to have her as my mother.  Warm, wet tears rolled down my cheeks.  I stood up, slowly releasing the ashes into the hollow of the tree, picked up my drum, singing, crying, chanting, opening to the immensity of the blue sky.  Just then a Hawk appeared, circling before our assembled group.  My mother’s spirit soaring free.

Earlier on the quest while on my time alone I lay at night in my sleeping bag under the panapoly of a star-studded night watching the majestic Milky Way move through the sky.  Suddenly a beam of light softly hit my forehead from another part of the sky. I turned to see what called me. One star shone brighter than all the rest. I knew immediately it was my Mother Ruth’s star, it was her.  ”I’m still watching over you Tommy. I always will be here watching over you just as I did in life.”  I burst into tears, sweet sadness filling my being. Relationships do continue after a loved one’s physical body dies. We just have to be open.

Two days later our quest group gathered at the foot of the formidable steep granite causeway we would have to hike up to gain the trail back to our waiting cars. We took off our packs to fortify ourselves for the challenge ahead.  Sharing high-energy snacks, prayers, encouragement stories, and song, we built up our energy field, picked up our packs and then, just as we were about to head out, who flies up and circles ahead?  An Eagle!  Inspired, we hiked up the mountain smoothly, at a slow but steady comfortable pace with full, happy hearts.

Just before the road-head we stopped by a beautiful mountain lake to do our closing ceremony. When we had finished, just exactly then, a Hawk flew overhead.

Two weeks later standing in a cemetery in the Maryland countryside, I held the rest of my mother’s ashes in a container next to the gravesite of my father Ray.

A hole had been dug to place the ashes so she would be next to my dad, both their wish which they had communicated to my sisters and I before their deaths. Facing the assembled family and friends there before me at the gravesite, I led us through a ceremony honoring  the life of my mother and our shared grief and sadness at the loss of her loving physical  presence in our lives.  I passed the urn around to each person to hold over their hearts for a final goodbye.  When the urn returned to me I led the group in singing an old civil rights song that had meant a lot to my mother who had worked all her life to help make a better world. Who flew up to join us just as i finished the song and was turning to place the ashes in the earth?  A Hawk!

Two days ago I sat outside on a lovely fall day talking with a friend about our shared work with the Recognition Rites for A New Vision of Aging Honoring Elders program that I started a few years ago. When we were complete,  a Hawk sailed overhead.  A Hummingbird hummed by a nearby bed of flowers.

The veil between this world of materiality that we see with our eyes and the invisible world of sacred mystery that underlies it all seems to be growing thinner. The messengers between these worlds, the Winged Flying People – the Spirit Messengers – Hawks, Eagles, Hummingbirds, keep showing up at opportune times.

As we all face into the increasing challenges at this time of great transition I share the Medicine of the Great Bird Nation, the  “Zintkala Oyate”, that we are not alone on this path that we walk.  We are seen, accompanied, loved, supported and guided by a Great Presence, One that has been in existence since before existence as we know it.  One that calls us to open to and listen humbly to the teachings that come to us from the Natural World that is alive, that we are a part of, and offers us teachings on how to transform destructive paradigms of belief and behavior into ones that honor, celebrate, protect, nurture and sustain the precious gifts of life.  It is these very gifts we are priviledged to co-exist with, and hopefully to pass on to our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Speaking of children, do you know what another Lakota word “Wakayaja” means?   It is their word for children.  It means, “Something sacred is growing“.

May it be so!  Thank you Zintkala Oyate!

Life Blessings to All.  Tom