Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The body believes in images.
There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real.
The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.
You are born to fly, and in dreams you remember the soul has wings.
By lighting a candle, you affirm that you are opening a sacred space.
Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection.
I'm in favor of approaching both the night and the day with intention.
In many traditions, crows are messengers and close attention is paid to their actions.
When we travel with a sense of mission, we attract events, people and opportunities toward us.
I have never met anyone who is addicted to alcohol who isn't drinking for a lot of dead spirits!
We are connected, like it or not, to the ancestors of our biological families, and their templates
The first thing to understand about working with children's dreams is that adults need to listen up.
The only time is Now. All other times - past, present, and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.
The role of the animal messenger in the dreams of modern city-dwellers is often to recall us to our wild side, and the natural path of our energy.
Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed - at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.
If you have fairy blood, even in the tiniest degree, you must live close to Fairy Land, and eat a little fairy food, or else you will always be hungry.
The important things usually prove to be very simple. They are also open secrets in the sense that no one is hiding the knowledge from us except ourselves.
What I'm talking about is fun. It's every day, it's high energy, and it gives you guidance and healing for your life. It puts a fizz of magic into the air.
Physics is now saying we might be living in one of an infinite number of parallel universes. We can learn practical and creative things to do with the information.
Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.
Choices are our choices so I am not taking away anyone's personal choice, but we run into difficulty when we're having choices made for us rather than making our own.
We can ask for a dream of guidance on any issue that is facing us, and when we're lucky the dream can take us out of the boxes of the everyday mind's approach to that theme.
Soul recovery, I think, is much richer and more helpful. Instead of having a shaman retrieve our soul for us, we help each other to become the shamans and healers of our own soul.
It is difficult to wrap your mind around this intellectually and until you've had the experience, it can be difficult to understand. I tell people to give it a shot; you have nothing to lose.
When you are gripped by fear in the face of an experience that will take you beyond your comfort zone, you may be at a point of supreme opportunity. You can either break down or break through.
This relates to the concept of time and our ability as dreamers to reach across time to a past or future self and do some good. This is very important as it relates to soul loss and soul recovery.
Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.
When bad things happen, part of us might go away. It's a survival technique. You can't stand to be around when there's so much grief or pain in your life so part of you goes away. Shamans call this soul loss.
In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer - subjective and objective - that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.
The practice of imagination, on an everyday basis, involves clearing unhelpful images that block or misdirect our energies, and choosing to focus on positive, mobilizing imagery that gives us courage and confidence.
When we wake up to the fact that our thoughts touch the people we are thinking about, we are again asked to choose which thoughts we send out. If we send out the thoughts of the heart, we can heal, even if the person who needs healing is far away.
Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.
On a visceral level, most of us know what soul loss means. This is the shaman's diagnosis of the root cause of many of our complaints: our lack of energy, our fatigue, our depression, why our immune systems are blown, why we lack enthusiasm and courage for life.
Suppose you have a parallel self who has made different choices, who is following a different event track since you made certain choices in your life. Maybe you can reach to that self and borrow gifts and lessons from that self and maybe even help them on their road.
There are chemical and other explanations for addictions, but speaking from my own observations (and I am a shamanic type), there is always some sort of disembodied spirit causing some of the addiction, riding your energy field, trying to impose their needs and addictions onto you.
Living by synchronicity isn't merely about getting messages. It is about growing the poetic consciousness that allows us to taste and touch what rhymes and resonates in the world we inhabit, and how the world-behind-th e-world reveals itself by fluttering the veils of our consensual reality.
Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.
I believe that, seven generations beyond us, those who look back on our time will find that it was the cry of the trees that helped to restart the dreaming and foster the understanding that we must dream not only for ourselves but also for our communities and for all that shares life with us in our fragile bubble of air.
People can glum onto all sorts of things. And some might use this in that way instead of taking personal responsibility for their lives. But if you discover the addiction is not all your own, you can ask, "Do I want to drink or smoke on behalf of Uncle Fred? Or do I realize I need to get rid of Uncle Fred and live my own life."
The particular province of the shaman is the province of soul, that which feeds our embodied life, or fails to feed it. From a shamanic point of view, the relationship with animal allies, or animals that show themselves in animal forms, is a vital part of living. We're fully embodied, with full access to our natural soul energy.
I'm not just talking about analyzing symbols from a dream but bringing the dream into life. I'm talking about seeing the world around you as a waking dream where the symbols and synchronicities will speak to you if you pay attention. That's why I call it active dreaming because it's about getting active with all our dreams can be.
Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.
Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is also about retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.
The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.
The struggle inside the cocoon between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that I was still living, one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to — and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more.
What if you could reach back to your four-year old or 14-year-old who's having a difficult time and reassure them, saying it is all going to be okay. What if you could go into her mind and give her courage and mentoring and counseling that she really needs. I believe we can do this for our younger souls. I know I've done it for mine, and I know a lot of others have done it.
We need to consider ancestral cleansing. If we're willing to clear our energy fields of the ancestral energies we don't want, then we are ready to do something really interesting and beautiful which is to claim a connection with the wisdom of the kinds of ancestors we do want to be in contact with. But we can't do this until we've cleaned out the lower stuff that is hindering us.
On a psychic level, we could be carrying energies and entities and cravings and habits and confusion and patterns of behavior from generation to generation that we don't want. We could also have picked up loose energies or entities from places we visit or live, and this could be very confusing. It could reinforce or even produce addictions and cravings that don't really belong to us.
Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.
One should share their dreams with others right away in the morning. One can use my Lightning Dreamwork process. First, the person shares the dream without being interrupted. Then each person shares their thoughts about the dream by saying, "If it were my dream," not presuming to tell the person what the dream means in an objective way. Lastly, the dreamer is helped to make an action plan for embodying the energy and guidance from the dream.