Part II: A Conversation with Michael Pollan

In this second part of a three-part series with The New York Times bestselling author, Michael Pollan, we explore plant medicine and healing. The topics most relevant today in early Spring, with the plants coming out of hibernation, blossoming; as we leave the darkness of a Covid-19 winter and enter the rebirth of new life and new possibilities, the wisdom of cosmic cycles gifts us with increasing light and a vortex of creative power pouring up from the earth.

Mother Nature asks us, "What seeds do you want to plant in the garden of your life? What do you want to grow and nurture to fullest blossoming and greatest good?” I invite you to watch and listen to these conversations with Michael Pollan, holding these questions as your intention.

All blessings, Tom

Part I: A Conversation with Michael Pollan

I recently had the chance to reconnect with brother MICHAEL POLLAN. I first met Michael when he came to interview me while doing research for his book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

The plant spirits first brought us together and it was a gift to share another conversation with him, this time on Zoom, mid-pandemic, and with my oldest daughter Kimberly, thanks to my youngest daughter Nicole.

In this season of Holy Spring, as we leave the darkness of a Covid-19 winter and enter the rebirth of new life and new possibilities, the wisdom of cosmic cycles gifts us with increasing light and a vortex of creative power pouring up from the earth.

Mother Nature asks us, "What seeds do you want to plant in the garden of your life? What do you want to grow and nurture to fullest blossoming and greatest good?” I invite you to watch and listen to these conversations with Michael Pollan, holding these questions as your intention.

All blessings, Tom

Nierica

The word NIERICA is from the language of the Huichol Indians, the indigenous people of the Sierra Madre region of Mexico. It means sacred or cosmic doorway, a passageway into the numinous, and it represents much of my work

When you walk through a doorway you are passing from one room into another.  Doorways of the material world, the  world our ordinary senses see and interact with, take you from one physical space into another space. Nierica doorways are portals, openings from one state of consciousness  into an expanded awareness that sees into the  underlying ordinarily invisible  reality from which all that we see with our eyes births forth.  Call it cosmic consciousness, transpersonal dimensionality, spirit, the Tao, God, Goddess, Allah, call it mystery since 96% of it our scientists can not figure out, call it whatever you want but it is a totally different state of being than our ordinary state of day to day consciousness.

Sometimes those portals can open through an act of grace which happens spontaneously –  a beautiful sunset that stops you in your tracks, the birth of a child, the birth of a lamb, a puppy,  the unfolding of a simple bud into a magnificently colored and shaped flower moving ever-so lightly in the flow of a soft breeze.

The doorway can also be opened intentionally by those who know how.  Huichol shaman, and other shaman around the world, go through demanding initiatory rites learning how to open and enter the nierica  to  come and go at will.

The many mystical traditions of the world teach their members tools of transformation by which to open the portal to the sacred, as do spiritual practices through meditation,  prayer and ritual.

In the Huichol tradition anything or anyone can be a nierica, an opening into the sacred mystery, it depends upon the relationship you create with it. Below is a picture of a rock served up by the Pacific Ocean. Within its center is an opening, a hole.  See if you can use it as a nierica, a portal opening into another dimension, the deeper underlying reality of the …. mystery.

all blessings, tomás

A New Year's Blessing for 2021

A New Year

A New Beginning

Attune

Commune

Connect with the Light

Grow Stronger

Healthier

Live the Love That We Are

Service to Higher Will

Joy, Peace, Justice, Beauty

Win-Win-World

For All

May it be so through you and me

Ya-Wee

Remembering Jerry Jampolsky

Jerry Jampolsky was my spiritual older brother, a fellow Aquarian, a fellow saxophone player. He crossed over last night. I am sad to no longer be able to see and be with him in physical presence but tremendously grateful for our forty five years of relationship that helped me grow deeper into the love that we are. His wife and partner, Diane V. Cirincione, shared with me this morning that a while back Jerry had a vision that all the children we worked with who crossed over would be there for him as he crossed. This touched me deeply because every morning in my prayers I say the names of these same children, remembering our work together in launching the first Center for Attitudinal Healing. I connect with their spirits and I know they will be there for me as well, along with Jerry, when my time comes.

Until then, and ever after, it’s all about love. To Live Love Now, is the only way to go.

Thank you dear Brother Jerry. I see you in the Infinite Light of Love that you lived so wonderfully while you were with us in physical form and now flows even stronger and brighter in all the millions of hearts you touched around the world.

My heart is filled with warm tears of love and gratitude.

love to all.

Christmas Blessing

All Blessings to you this holy day.  I love how Christmas can trigger an  inward journey beneath the commercialism to exploring what is this day really about?  What does it honor and celebrate on the deeper level?   Beneath whatever might be your thoughts and reactions to whatever meaning you hold about Jesus Christ and Christmas, they are a relatively recent (two thousand years) carrier of an much older, ancient story which appears around the world in different guises but expresses the same truth, universal truth.  

It is possible to birth through us what is given to us by the Greater Powers of the Universe as grace, a place in the heart that is a manifestation of, connected to and At-One With, Infinite Unconditional Light and Love, a level of consciousness that Jesua, manifested under the most demanding of situations being a radical Jewish rabbi who threatened the power structures of the time.  

From a holy book inspired by Jesua, comes this reminder of how we, as the sons and daughters of God, can birth Christ Consciousness through us and out into the world so long as we are alive no matter what religion or spirituality we practice:

"And now faith, hope and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” Corinthians 13:13

Blessings of this Holy Day & thought you might enjoy learning more about the ancient shamanic roots underlying the medicine of Santa Claus. 

Memory Time

Here is a picture of a ceremony Wakan did out at Slide Ranch for my friend Kresser who was to die at a young age which we helped birth him through when the time came.

Decades later his daughter went on vision quest with me and now comes a message from his sister that both his parents, Al and Gretchen (whom I also knew well and who flew me to Aspen to lead a memorial service and release Kresser’s ashes into the Earth and Sky of the Rocky Mountains) are very ill with covid close to crossing. She asks to keep them in our prayers.

A gift for all of us even though most of you do not know the folks I am talking about. Why a gift? Because when we pray we strengthen awareness of our interconnectedness, because it connects our awareness to the divinity we share, the spark of light-filled love that is divinity waiting within us to be polished up and shared which enriches our lives.

Live Love Now Blessings to All and Thank You for your prayers.

love, tomás

Awakening to Wisdom this Thanksgiving

I am thankful for You, I am thankful for Family, Community, Friendships and Ancestors. 

Speaking of Ancestors, on this day that many celebrate Thanksgiving, I offer a prayer for WOKSAPE WOKIKTA - which is Lakota for Awakening to Wisdom, which includes making  Thanksgiving relevant to Native American People still alive today whose Ancestors lived fruitfully here on Turtle Island for tens of thousands of years before the invasion from Europe in the late 1400’s. How?

By heeding the words of the late Native historian Jack Forbes:

"While living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. To address the crimes of settler colonialism that helped build this country’s wealth, the process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous Nations, by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills, and payments of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native Nations.”

May it be so for the healing of historic wounds whose repercussions still impact disastrously today.  

May enough of us show up as spiritual activists to make it be so. 

Thanksgiving Blessings for your Health, Safety and making good lemonade out of lemons.

love, t. 

The Mystery of the Blue Light: Election Day 2020

The day of the 2020 election, I was invited to present on a panel about religious freedom. Other panelists being of Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faith. I represented shamanic indigenous spiritual ways which as I explained is not a religion. It is a way of being in relationship to the creation that existed before there was religion as we know it today. I explained how indigenous people do not have a word for religion since they know all creation is alive, conscious, interwoven in a cosmic web of inter-relationship. They knew that all life is sacred, that we are 100% dependent for our lives on forces of nature that we are not in control of and that those forces are spiritual energies that we need to be in respectful, reciprocal relationship with or else we will not survive. So there is no religion that is separate from how they live their daily lives trying to be in harmonious balance with all the powers that give and sustain our precious lives. Religion came later, much later.

I was the last of five panelists to speak after the others had shared about discrimination their people have and still do experience. I shared how i do not have freedom of “religion” because of the insanity of this country’s laws that make it illegal for me to eat or drink certain plants grown by Mother Earth, something indigenous people have been doing for thousands and thousands of years in socially integral ways that expand and grow consciousness. It is precisely an expansion of consciousness that is needed today shapeshifting from one that believes in separation, that has an economic system that feeds greed, fear and violence, to a consciousness that knows how we are all interconnected and that what we give/do to another we do to our selves, to our children, to our grandchildren. From that expanded consciousness we can work to grow a cooperative planetary consciousness based on love, kindness, caring, justice, equality, peace, beauty and healthy world, a Win-Win World for All. It is possible. I know it. I have seen it.

I closed my sharing with respectfully honoring the diversity of religious beliefs and practices expressed by the panelists with my understanding that beneath the differences real spirituality comes down to a bottom line truth that God is love, and those who love, know God. It seemed to resonate with each speaker as I watched their heads nod in agreement.

It is not so easy living that love consistently when it is so easy to be triggered into fearful reactivity by the dramatically challenging times of so much social unrest and climate change we are living in today. Below is a photograph of a place I have been going to each day to remind myself of the deeper waves of life, the beauty of the natural world, the magnificent creation we are gifted to live in. I call it “Sanity Shores” because the energy there is sane. The rhythms are constant but always changing. Impermanence and continuity. There is wisdom there. There is no ego there. There is what “God hath wrought”.

I share the image caught on camera so you too might take in some of the sanity there to help you through this time of unrest, of unease, of unknown future. There is Father Sun sending down stardust from above. There is the endless sky. The wispy passing clouds. There is the flowing waves of Mother Ocean. Rock People. What indigenous people say are the oldest living people on the planet, the ones who carry the history of what has been.

May the figures on the screen help you connect with a center of strength and peace within you. May they help you connect with the love that is in you, that you are, that we all are. May it help strengthen your knowing that so long as we are alive no matter what is happening, if we choose it, if we clean out any thoughts or beliefs that get in the way, we can Live Love Now remembering love is the most powerful transformational energy in the universe.

One more thing. If you look at the bottom left hand corner of the picture you will see a blue light. On the rational, logical side of understanding it is nothing but a lens flare. Of course. We all know that. We share a cultural understanding that explains its presence. Yet, might there possibly be more to it than that?

In a shamanic perspective it just might be a trickster doorway, a nierica, to/from another dimension, a spiritual dimension using the lens flare of the camera to bring through a transmission of some sort. Maybe it is just Coyote playing one of its tricks. But yet, indigenous people know that Coyote’s tricks carry medicine teachings, wisdom guidance to help people live in a good way with Creator and Creation. I invite you to take a look at that blue light. Open your mind to the possibility that the Sacred Mystery that exists beneath all physical phenomena and from which all that we see with our eyes comes from and returns, just might be trying to communicate something to help us through these dark times.

The Elders say Creation is a great mystery. They counsel to stay open, that there is more going on than what you think you see and what you think you know in your ordinary state of everyday awareness. "Stay open, Stay humble. Stay open to mystery” they say.

I invite you to find your way to open the blue light doorway and see what might come through for you. I welcome hearing from you.

Please keep the light of hope, faith and love alive and shining.

All Blessings.

love, tomás

Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warrior

”If not you and me, then who?  If not now, then when?”  - Hillel

These are testing, challenging times of social and environmental upheaval. With climate change, we live with increasing floods, fires, pandemic illness, droughts, on top of institutional and structural racism, ideology of white supremacy and privilege, economic inequity, rampaging consumer capitalism with its emphasis on materialism, and militarism; There is also rising political  fundamentalism polarizing various populations against one another.

All are calling for a response that is wise, powerful, and transformational. Today’s challenges call for Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warriors. 

• Wisdom Warriors battle whatever enemy/opponents rise up within them trying to close their hearts to the love that lives in us all as the essence of our being.  

• Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warriors are moved by agape love of their fellow beings, by their valuation of justice, peace, equal support and opportunity for all, to bring their love into action in the world. They call on the warrior archetype but fight with the weapons of skillful communicative skills using the transformational energy of love to shape-shift fear to faith, shadow to illumination, injustice to justice, selfishness to selflessness.  

• Wisdom Warriors bring love into the world, into all their relations, all their interactions. They act with love,  They act from love.  

• Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warriors show up to do the best they can to actually keep the heart open for the flow of infinite, unconditional love, agape love that is who and what they truly are, moving through them going where ever it needs to go in the moment that will help open the doorway for fullest blossoming and greatest good for all.  

This is living from spirit.  This is living love. This is walking a spiritual path.  These times call for us to transform  fear-based cultures into love-based, healthy, happy, and just ones. All who claim to be spiritual, all who seek to be spiritual, all who wish to live an integral life of morality and honor, need to act. They need to bring their gifts into the world to do their part in creating the kind of world that is possible for us to create, one that works for all in a good way.  

Towards this end it is vital to recognize the importance of dismantling structural racism build into every institution of our society - educational, healthcare, legal-correctional, banking, and economic, etc. The institutional racism is built on the ideology of white supremacy that has been there since the very beginning of this nation. Overt racist acts are not needed to continue the system that privileges all those of white skin and discriminates and oppresses people of color on a daily basis. The systems work and will continue to work until enough Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warriors step up to make the changes that need to be made recognizing that to do nothing allows the system to continue on benefitting white people and hurting people of color.

The “how” of the action is up to the guidance in each person’s heart. It is not about comparing or measuring our action as good or better or worse than someone else.  It is not a competition  with a winner or loser because we are all losers if we don’t change how we, humanity, are operating at this time for it has brought us into calamitous situations that actually threaten the future existence of our species, as well as many other species that are already dying off at an alarming rate. 

So to all who feel the call of the Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warrior, thank you for the courage it takes to step up and into the fire as a healer, a peace- worker, some one who stands up for justice, for fairness, for the underdog and the oppressed, for the disadvantaged. This is about doing what the Hawaiian expression Hana Pono calls for - “ Do the right thing.”  Do what is righteous,  what your heart and soul call you to do joining a world-wide team I call The Starlight Ohana, meaning an extended family of light-workers, working cooperatively and  supporting each other in polishing up the light we are to shine more love into the world. 

As goes my Starlight Song, “Love is the answer.  Love is the key.  Love is the healer.  Let love flow through me.  Let love flow through thee.  Let love flow through we. Let love flow - Ya-wee!”

Remember,  the only time you can experience  whatever you want to experience is right now.  Spiritual Activist Wisdom Warriors know this and show up to Live Love Now. May it be so for increasing numbers around the world. Remember it always has to start with you, here and now, this day, this holy breath.

May it be so! All Blessings.