Pixie Lighthorse | Self-Healing Writer

Writer: Self-Healing Earth-Centered Books

Lessons In Simplicity & Instinctual Nurture

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Have you ever heard the phrase, “Like water off a duck’s back?” I remember hearing it as a kid and not absorbing the teaching at all. Today I found a duck feather as I was wandering the winding path through the yellowing grasses just as I was thinking about an issue I’ve been rolling around in my mind which seems…complicated. It involves things I can never change, the complexity of human beings and their regrettable actions, the consequences of which continue to play out long beyond their usefulness as teachers.

Duck caught my attention from the ground, the only feather I saw today, apart from a bit of someone’s fluff caught on a dying wand of mullein. The phrase came immediately into my mind and so I started to talk to myself in a duckish voice to see what I might learn from Duck (I intend to look for her in journey, too). Like Alice, I gave myself some Very Good Advice about letting go-the biggest work I have to do in this lifetime, comprised both of challenges and accomplishments. When we set out to release a bothersome regret, we do well to forgive.

Forgiveness, as they say, is for the forgiver and not the forgiven, and so it seems an easy enough self-serving place to begin. It happens in layers, first perhaps with distilled acknowledgment of the issue, and then the rush of feelings which come up when we think about it. The feelings cause distress and so now we’re dealing with two things: the thing that happened and caused so much pain and the feelings coming up which are unresolved and still living in us somewhat parasitically in the form of grief, resentment or anger.

Ungrieved pains and losses cause great trauma on a body, and stiffen us to the point of rigidly and unconsciously clinging to suffering. The ongoing trauma results in stress disorders, affects our sleep and eating patterns, causes depression-all manner of unwanted issues. It is literally lodged in the system, unable to flow out and off…like that water which happens to bead up on Duck’s waxy feathers.

Ducklings first get the special oils which repel water from their mamas, who rubs her bill on a gland which secretes the oil at the base of her tail . She preens them like she preens herself, spreading the oil all over their downy fluff until they are a few weeks old and begin producing it themselves. She nurtures her babies instinctually, and teaches them the habit of caring for themselves in a way which will insulate them. This habit, if you’ve ever stood at a pond’s edge with a bag of bread in your hand, happens many times in an hour when a duck isn’t searching for food. They care for themselves, constantly maintaining their ability to repel that which will cause them to live non-optimally. Duck doesn’t ask why it must do this oiling of her feathers so often, she does it because something gene-deep in her knows that it’s necessary.

Forgiveness, grieving and letting go are often a chore because of the broken-down system of care which we complex thinking/feeling creatures have created. Instinctual care and tending of thoughts and emotions are not made a priority by those who nurture us in our early development.

Duck teaches simplicity by reminding us to refer back to rituals which build our repellency and insulation, not from fear or avoidance, or once the symptoms of neglect are screaming. It’s our instinct to care for ourselves, too-our bright spirits, our thinky minds, our precious, fleshy bodies. Culturally, real health and well-being are something we seek later in life when the broken-down systems begin to show graphic signs of neglect. Priorities which are not aligned with health and well-being are not valued in a time when we’re consumed by racing to nowhere. It’s not about working out obsessively, or obsessively wearing the body down, but deeply caring for it’s natural form and what it is designed to do well.

Many did not have instinctual care nurtured into them to help cope with emotional and situational challenges. Letting go is a healthy coping mechanism. Forgiveness is the choice to find no more value in anger, and an act of self-care. Grace is the freedom to make mistakes and move forward fluidly. All are exhibited by Duck’s effortless glide and ritual for self-preservation.

I’m going to take a lesson from Duck and create some hourly maintenance habits that go beyond my usual fixers. The creatures who leave clues about living instinctually are all around us, showing us how they live not having had to adapt to this very fast-paced, misaligned modern programming.

Please share your stories about how you’ve reconnected to your instincts of health-building protection and created efficient means for coping with stress and modern life!

Second Marriage Jitters & Doing It Anyway

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If you’ve ever been divorced, you may have had the thought that you would never go down THAT road again. The post-divorce path is riddled with self-doubt no matter how consciously you uncoupled and fantastically you’ve come to co-parent and accept all that comes with total life change for everyone you love most dearly.

The mere thought of getting remarried has left me feeling frozen-footed and anxious, afraid not only of commitment, but terrified of stepping into a contract in front of my children and modeling my humanness again should I find that it isn’t working out to my (or anyone’s) benefit.

I took a Virgoan approach when the conversations began, finding out why in the heck folks get married in the first place. I was freshly twenty-six when I got hitched the first time, Miles was born eight years later. The process of separation and divorce began when Ivy was still nursing. What the heck did I know about marriage if it could end after seventeen years?

I became a student of reasons to get married: reading every Elephant Journal, Oprah and Huffington Post article on why people take the plunge at all. I was astounded to discover how little I knew about the many purposes for tying the knot: religious, financial, spiritual, medical, taxes, property, for the kids, to please the elders, tradition, convention, mergers, to assuage insecurities, to impress their friends, because it’s what everyone does, to get sober, to “settle down”, to build a life together, to straighten out, and last but not least, for love and commitment.

Through establishing healthy communion with my man (twice divorced himself) and building our story together, it became increasingly apparent that we were in deep, and traveling some very rocky terrain together-our childhood stories, relationship stories, loss and trauma had left us warriors, and at the root level, loners.

Our togetherness is because of our sheer will to experience something beautiful and more significant than we could experience alone. We started constructing our ranch vision with the help of our families, we created parameters for step-parenting, we discussed nonstop what the impact of our union was having on the kids. We had to build in time for each other, and a commitment to valuing that time. He built strong ties with my ex, to my sheer amazement.

What I can see is that I am in awe of Sky. What he tells me is that he is in awe of me, and most often I choose to believe him.

The reason I’m forging through my fears is because when he asked me to marry him, my yes was present, but a bit wobbly. I knew I could, but I didn’t know how-how it would look, how I would feel, how we would overcome the obstacles, how we’d both learn being inside of a container… together. I still have only a small idea of how it will work out if my very biggest fears come true. We have a couple of dealbreakers. We honor each other, including our limits, fiercely protect the babes’ sacred preciousness and he stays sober. We had to create some rules around this thing that didn’t feel like fences, but more like insulation. We had to get inside of one bubble.

I asked him to ask me every day for a year, because I wanted to hear my fragile yes grow more confident, and I wanted him to demonstrate endurance in the face of my paralyzing uncertainty. He did exactly that, and he continues to ask me every night because now it’s a sweet and beautiful habit that we both giggle at and I sometimes pause to answer if he’s pissed me off during the day and I haven’t gotten over it yet. But I always say YES.

My YES grew strong. My faith in our ability to persevere as a unit has expanded as we’ve stewarded this land together and come to see how neither one of us could do it without the others’ care and love. Both of us are essential moving parts in the unfolding, and I’ve been able to see that this person who challenges me in so many ways as the teacher I called in, and it’s his work-worn, tattooed hands I want to be holding when the first of us crosses over into the next dimension.

I’m still afraid because I’m human. I’m still afraid because we both know that people can change, and that we will change. I’m afraid because I don’t know who we will be in twenty years. I’m still afraid because I’ve been down the marriage road before and watched one of us fork off left while the other steered right. I’m afraid because I am still growing my trust in life’s divine processes. And I’m going to do it anyway.

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{Thank you to Stacy de la Rosa for seeing us through her lens}

Offerings from the Wildwood


I read Colin Meloy’s Wildwood before I moved to Oregon. It was a complicated read for me, vocabularic beyond my reach but with a slight hint of Animal Farm-a tenth grade requirement which would inform much of how I see politics and government today.

When I make the drive from Central Oregon to Portland, it is very much a passing between worlds. Mine is high and dry, sagebrush, silver and yellow. Theirs is low and moist, floral, green and dogwood. Just 150 miles apart, The Rose City bears almost no resemblance to the High Desert whatsoever.

The gifts of driving across Mt. Hood from one community of plants and people to another are surprising and immeasurable, especially when big deals are sitting on my heart.

I wonder if Colin had magical, illuminating moments driving through the Wildwood while he was writing his book?

The truth seems to want to reveal itself there, in the absence of all other communication range, oddly enough. The words come staggering and stuttering out of my mouth in an attempt to excitedly translate. The funny thing about what I call the “white light moments” is that there is no language for them. It’s just…knowing.

Knowing that everything will be okay.

Eleven Modern Anxieties

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My goodness, we are living in an anxious world. I’m thinking more and more that we humans are suffering from a collective anxiety disorder. It seems that either we are motivated by sheer will, or we are motivated by fear of what will happen if we do not [fill in the blank]. Also, we must do it yesterday.

Our to-do lists are miles long, our calendars full a year in advance.

As I sought medicine and thought-remedy for these dilemmas, I remembered something a healer said to me recently, which was that when we are in any state other than a relaxed one, our emotions are running our lives. I had the thought that we often are either running away from those emotions or strapping them to us like grenades and running headlong toward whatever comes next. It’s a lot of running either way.

In an attempt to break it all down, I composed this list of modern anxieties and some starter-thought-treatments:

Anxiety: There isn’t enough time.

Treatment: My spirit is infinite. I can do all that I can with my human body and the daylight available until I stop to rest. I will listen for when I need to do that. Rest is equal in importance to doing.

Anxiety: I can’t handle all of these feelings I’m having. I’m so overwhelmed.

Treatment: I can make a choice to face what is coming up for me. I can learn to create a manageable life, even if it means giving myself three times the time, cutting my expenses down to a third of what they are, and cultivating energy by making wise choices. I am able to be responsible. I know how to ask for help when I need it. There is no shame in building a team to help me.

Anxiety: I don’t trust my government or today’s leadership.

Treatment: I alone can make change in my local environment by becoming active. No one in politics is going to rescue me or make it easier. I can create meaningful community and fruitful solution-seeking dialogue in my own backyard. I can put plans into action to take care of myself as best I can under the circumstances.

Anxiety: I’m afraid of World War III.

Treatment: I am not going to live in fear. I am going to be love and be peace, and those cannot exist in a paralyzed or terrified emotional state. Those who would make war have everything they need to make it. I don’t need to make it inside of myself to their model. I am going to tend to and talk about what comes up for me around this and try to create a calm state amidst my questions. I will read Viktor Frankl if I need more relative forms of inspiration and hope.

Anxiety: I am in pain. I am suffering.

Treatment: I am not alone. I must grieve what is not able to be. I cleanse my emotional body by feeling my real feelings, seeking others in my position for support, and admitting the nature and origin of my pain. Healing occurs over time and I can be patient and keep checking in with my soul while making holistic choices on my behalf. I can be open to life while I am in my healing process.

Anxiety: My job is killing me. I am silently wilting in the wrong line of work for me. I am not living my purpose.

Treatment: I know how to seek other work, even if it means I have to scale down my lifestyle. I can take risks. I can make a difference right now wherever I am. I am willing to align with what my spirit wants for my human form.

Anxiety: If I speak the truth, someone will get hurt.

Treatment: If I don’t speak the truth, I will hurt, and likely others will, too. I can find fair language which helps me to be responsible for my health and wellness. I can express from my own heart without blaming and making someone else wrong. I will know what to say and do once I’ve become clear about what is true.

Anxiety: The way things are unfolding makes me so mad. I’m so angry that I want someone to wake up/change/pay for this/suffer/hurt/feel what I feel/see my side/hear my story/do it my way.

Treatment: I have a hand in how things unfold. I can make a choice to be humble and allow healing or I can make a choice to act arrogant and blaming. My voice is my own and what happens from here on is up to me. I may think something is terribly unfair. What can I do with myself to bring things into balance? How can I affect change in me that will naturally affect the change I want to see in the world?

Anxiety: I cannot forgive myself for what I’ve done/caused. I cannot forgive someone else for what they have done/caused.

Treatment: Forgiveness is an act of courageous self-compassion which relieves the body of toxic emotional waste. Without it, I become sick. I need not punish myself any longer, nor anyone else. I need to be free of these bindings and I can better help others who have been through this from my state of freedom from shame. I can acknowledge that what was done was wrong without living in a perpetual shame state and/or sentencing someone else to do so.

Anxiety: I am not enough. I don’t have enough.

Treatment: I only need to be me. I do this well when I am connected/plugged into the Source which fuels me. I can name that Source in my way and find all of the ways which facilitate the recharge I need. It might be easier than I think. When I am enough for me, everything shifts, including how I experience scarcity or abundance, love or rejection.

Anxiety: It is very hard to be on this earth.

Treatment: Maybe the truth is that I am not native here. Perhaps my spirit originated elsewhere. In considering this, I can cultivate my relationship with the place I feel most at home while living my purpose here on earth, where I have for some reason been positioned. What can I look to which will teach me how to be more at ease, and in charge of my life and feelings? I needn’t numb out the discomfort, but seek to understand what my existence is about and find meaning. It is quite possible that many people do not feel at home here and perhaps that is why we are often chasing our tails trying all the wrong roads in an attempt to come to peace with who we are not.

Sometimes I see this quandary of anxiety as one of displacement, of an ongoing sense of not belonging…anywhere. Of not being able to relate. The demands of modern life do not sometimes feel in alignment with who we are meant to be as spiritual beings. Think about what the railroad meant to indigenous North Americans. That was not part of the plan!

It is okay. We are here now. We get to be here now. We are seeking to understand what we are meant to do.

More will be revealed. Until then, let the trees, mountains, animals, insects, rivers, oceans, birds, flowers, and wind teach you how they live here. They’re very good models when you think about it.

Kindle Update: Prayers of Honoring

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Kindle is kinda magical.

Thank you to all who have asked for Prayers of Honoring for Kindle. We jumped through the (seemingly impossible) hoops as a two-woman show and pulled it off. It’s now available free through KindleUnlimited and $8.99 for regular price.

Something I love about readers is the saving of paper! As one who loves to hold a book in her hot hands, I’m always torn between using a reader and flipping the pages. I like to write inside of my books, which is why we included blank pages in the first edition and additional lined pages and journal prompts in the second print edition. In print, Prayers of Honoring now functions as a living journal for prayer and meditation and my hope is that it will inspire those who love to write in their books to put down the gadgets and wander out over the Earth and connect. In reader form, it serves as a paper-free alternative which is less expensive and quickly accessible.

Thank you again, sweet relatives, for sharing this magic and medicine. If you share photos or quotes, please be sure to use #prayersofhonoring so I can see them in your Instagram gallery and around the interwebs.

Now get outside and make your medicine!

The Birth of a Book: A Timeline of Self-Publishing

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I’ve been wanting to share what it was like to create Prayers of Honoring, because I know so many of you are talented wordsmiths with incredible, change-making ideas which deserve to be heard by others. The world is hungry for voices and yours is unique, especially when you let the parts of yourself out which you’ve been holding in reserve.

 

Here’s a little chronology of how it all went down:

August 2013: I took a workshop with this brilliant woman to unearth who I was as a writer and understand what I am here to say.

January 2014: Writing the prayers began on the New Year with blog posts I wrote mostly on Sundays. It was my practice of speaking my heart and sharing my quiet voice with the world. It was a vulnerable process inviting people to hear what it sounded like when I talked to Creator, the Earth, the Sky, ancestors and spirits. It became quickly apparent that prayer was something many folks didn’t know how to do in a way which felt real and true. The scars of religious upbringings left some feeling disconnected and avoidant.

Early 2015: Friends and readers became more persistent, asking if I could collect the prayers I’d written into a collection and I felt very resistant. I’d already been through several unfinished processes of proposal and it wasn’t for me: Too many signatures. Too many fears about losing my content. Too many unknowns around the anticipated success and what ifs. Too much to let go of if it didn’t do as well as they needed it to. Too many concerns about where it would be printed, on what, and how much fuel it would take to transport it to it’s destinations. Too many nightmares of my book sitting on the red-line shelf at Barnes and Noble, keeping company with discounted coffee table books and cheap reprints of the classics. I keep writing prayers and waiting for more to be revealed. I took this course to learn about all of my options from someone who is always ahead of the curve.

March 2015: I sat in a circle surrounded by supportive women and asked for help. Any kind of help. My work life teaching courses and holding circles had become unmanageable and it was time to spread out and hire folks to do the things I didn’t do well and no longer wanted to do. My ex-husband had moved out and I was about to move across a new state alone with my children to a place where I knew…not a soul except for my real estate agent. Help raises her hand.

May 2015: With Twozdai’s help and infinite patience, we designed a format. We found a printer, who turned out to be adequate for the first printing and awful for the next two. We approved fonts and titles, and had a cover photo taken by another goddess of a woman willing to help (and who also designed this website).

June 2015: The midwives and I birthed the first edition of Prayers just in time to slip copies into the goodie bags of the attendees of SouLodge Medicine Gathering! It was an exciting week. By the end of the year, we’d sold over twelve hundred copies through Etsy and my website. Readers sent in personal stories of recovering from prayer trauma and Yoga Union integrated the book into their renown Teacher Training Program.

Christmas 2015: Instant Publisher prints murky covers and our holiday orders are delayed because we have to send them all back to be recovered. We strongly dislike them for this, but particularly because they make zero effort to correct or pay for their mistake in good time. Our order is too small to matter much to them. We cry, moan, text all hours and stay up late. We learn that printing and shipping our own books isn’t efficient. Meanwhile, Elena Brower is reading from the book at Wanderlust Festivals and it’s costing that crowd double the price to ship to Australia and U.K. More heartstorming solutions for this little book which is asking for wings.

Why, you might ask, did we wait to buy a new, special, pricier ISBN in order to work with one of Amazon’s printers and jump through their hoops? Because it was a lot of work while balancing a family to pioneer something we’d never done! So it took us a while.

March 2016: We open the Pandora’s box that is Amazon/Kindle. The book is 60 pages long, and in order to print the title on the spine we need 100. In a gust of inspiration I decide in the moment to add 40+ pages and include the 4 directions and journal prompts my online students have loved for years, which I’d been holding back (why do we do this to ourselves?). Prayers of Honoring grew on-screen into what it is today, through a rite of passage which couldn’t have been accomplished without it’s many midwives and supporters. I gave myself the opportunity to add Honoring Grief, the one I’d left out in the first edition. I feel reserved about how personal these prayers are to me, but keep sharing them anyway, knowing that they will find their way into the hearts who need to hear them. Working with CreateSpace  going smoothly.

April 2016: Almost there! We’re still fine-tuning the listing, ordering *one more* sample and making last second tweaks. I am feeling the gravity of maintaining my publishing, knowing that no one else in the world can make a decision on this book’s behalf but me. No one can take it apart, sell it in pieces, change my words, make it a vehicle for their agenda, or in any way defile it. Mystic Mamma graciously shares Honoring Growth at her well-traveled astro-wise site.

May 2016: We press play. We dance. I go back to making dinner instead of putting bowls of random fridge remnants on the counter with a, “Sorry guys… please serve yourselves… mama’s just going to skim this content one more time. Do I sound like Yoda here?”

Late May: The report to date is that Kindle is a bit of a beast. The thing is that if you don’t figure out where to put your book, no one can find it. There are categories which are great fits, but if you self-publish, you don’t have access to all of them (at least we haven’t found them yet). There are keywords and whole books and blogs dedicated to cracking the Amazon code, none of which I’m that interested in reading! There are still hurdles to leap and I’m still practicing various forms of avoidance.

Self-publishing is changing the way we interact with written content, as well as create it. I’ve gone about writing in the same way I ran the lemonade stands of my youth: a grass roots, dirty-knees, learn-by-doing kinda gal. There are sacrifices and choices I’m too stubborn to make. It takes me years to do what others do in months. What I can say is that I’ve done it in my voice on my timeline. The desire to maintain the rights to my words comes from the artist in me. Self-publishing, might mean less money, but it’s far less emotional stress for me, and I can evolve the content when I feel moved to.

On Being Ready

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Prayers of Honoring went to Amazon today. Suffice it to say, I felt all of the following:

  • Anxiety
  • Discomfort
  • Fear
  • Loss of control
  • Unreadiness
  • Ill
  • Lightheaded
  • Sweaty
  • Uncharacteristically humorless
  • Maniacal
  • Restless
  • Fatigued
  • Frustrated
  • Toddlerish

And more. Here’s what I said to myself in response while trying not to have a terribly buck-up tone:

“Anxiety is necessary. You are creative, it comes with the territory. Anxiety is one of those things which plagues every creative you know. It’s one of those pars-for-the-course, showing up in physical and debilitating ways, threatening to derail our serenity and stop us in our tracks. It makes my head throb and my neck feel like it’s on the chopping block. Breathe. Get some oxygen to your brain. Allow the flow of what’s happening to happen without fighting.”

“Comfort is overrated. Even when it feels pinchy and awkwardly tight, and there can be no ease and grace, no rest, no complete satisfaction, you can withstand it. Think about how uncomfortable it must’ve been to be born or to get all of your teeth in. Or braces, remember braces? How you chewed ice nonstop on tightening day? You can do this.”

“What are you afraid is going to happen? Bad reviews?  That’s what it’s really about, that hideous starry review system. Remember hearing friends in theater talking about poor reviews and how it left many of them very sad? It makes all of us feel really vulnerable to hear criticism about what we pour our hearts into. You completely understand that this is a possibility and one you can live with.”

“Our motto (the royal we) is to Be Prepared. And yet we can’t be prepared for what will come which we have zero experience with. All you can do is connect to the eternal within you and seek out (regrettably lacking) language to describe such experiences. And honor what comes. When the eggs begin to crackle under your feathers, hop out of the way and go look for nourishment. They know how to do this.”

There have been a few tantrums, most of which I’ve kept private so as not to leak out on my precious people. Lost paragraphs that have to be re-written, which I find exhausting, hot flashes and sleeplessness. Growing bigger doesn’t at all mean growing wiser. The exposure to new elements is exactly that: experiential.

Here’s what I landed on which served me best moving through this channel:

I am creative. I am generative. This is a good book and it helps people. It was healing for you to write it. Let it be it’s own beautiful bird now.”

And so it is.

Dream Camp

I loved going off to camp when I was a kid. Packing everything I’d need for a week into a duffel and heading off into the woods. My very favorite thing was the smell of the pines upon arrival. Nature just smells good. I also loved setting up my own spaces outside to live in, like in the old doghouse, or a dilapidated shed full of black widow spiders.  When I read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf in college, I’m pretty sure I was shouting “YES!” and  “Exactly!” with every turn of the page. I think we all need our own spaces to wander, dream and be inspired, to recharge and fill up in quiet space.

I had a dream a few weeks ago about driving along a canyon road too quickly, hitting a puddle and flipping my car, which is a recurring dream for me about moving too quickly, and also maybe a reenactment of a car accident I was in as an infant. What it teaches me is to slow down, and being guided by The Chariot in tarot (my maiden name was Carr for crying out loud) this is a lesson I really try to listen to. In the dream I found myself in a little hut in the bottom of the canyon, there was no where else to go but in. I poked around the empty house like Goldilocks, trying the food and admiring the curtains. A little old woman came in and smiled as I touched her many magical, moving plants as I asked her how to get home. In the end, I tracked my way out so that I could find my way back when I needed a quiet recharge.

The next day I created this little space in my back yard with a nod to the East and the Grandmothers with some downed juniper poles from this land and some vintage tablecloths:

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It’s been a quiet little place to take naps, look up at the sky with Miles and Ivy and step back from the hustle inside the house. I saw some clients in there and hosted a Beltane circle inside, too. I found that I wanted to be outside more often than not. Big surprise, right? Winter makes a hearthlover out of me up here!

So I expanded my vision and created a little Dream Camp. It turned out to be a mini version of SouLodge Medicine Gathering because a) it doesn’t happen for another month and I’m too excited to wait, and b)  it gives me a chance to really sink in and honor what we do at SMG, which is make medicine which carries us throughout our lives and keep us on a spirited back in relationship with the Earth body. This little space around the Medicine Wheel has held me all week and I wanted to share it with you knowing that we all need quiet rooms of our own sometimes.

There is a woman coming to SMG who just filled out her form for us and what I loved MOST about it was her note about alllll of the many things she loves, “EXCEPT GOSSIP.” She’s 70 and I love her already. No gossip at SMG, we promise.

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Make Your Medicine

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It’s a cloudy and thunderous day here and promising rain on this beautiful land. Something I think about every single day is how understanding can be delivered to folks in a way which will help them to be more conservative of finite planetary resources. Plant life, indigenous lives, air, water, the children, our own bodies – all are affected tremendously by the amount of consumerism we’re all party to.

Earth Day comes and goes and still restaurants pack leftovers in styrofoam containers which head into a landfill. Mass quantities of plastic packaging from food and products quickly makes its way into the bellies of sea life and into the Earth-body herself and it is heartbreaking. How have we come this far with technological intelligence and moved so far away from our primitive instincts about how to care for ourselves and our home. The children are relying on us to leave them something they can work with and improve. Our reliance on convenience product, oil, plastics, and an attitude of bigger, better, more, is trumping our quiet insistence to do it differently.

I find it empowering to make daily choices which affect change, even changing out your toothbrush to one you can put in the fireplace when it’s time to change it, and buying deodorant and lip balm in paper packaging (or just use coconut oil from the jar!) helps, too. Everything helps! Good reason to learn to ride horses, eh?

Here’s the thing, we feel guilty. And the thing is that it doesn’t go away if we ignore it. So let’s take more action. Make the medicine. Release what isn’t helping or healing. Slim it down. Honor local farmers. Take care of the elders and indigenous in the area. Sponsor the children and animals.

Celebrate your one precious life. There’s so much we can do.

Good Meds to Be Made

As the Earth begins to warm up here in Central Oregon, Team SouLodge is gearing up for SouLodge Medicine Gathering. Celebrating Summer Solstice in June and Lammas in August, our two annual festivals are packed with restorative, nourishing medicine and sacred women to support your spiritual journey and wellness. The healing, sisterhood, and fun we experience together in nature, along with the wildlife present out in the Sacred Meadow will lift and carry you throughout the year.

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What I enjoy most about creating this event are the magnificent WOMEN who I get to see each year. Experiencing the sights, smells, tastes, feels and sounds of SMG is something I look forward to so much. And hello…bringing a group of people to this ranch where beauty reigns fills me up with PURE JOY. After so many years of traveling out to meet others, I now get to bring you HERE. So good.

Sunjay Owen is a longtime sister of mine and will be hosting a workshop at June SMG on the Healing Power of the Drum. Her British humor slays me, she’s deeply involved in music culture for over 40 years (remember the Belle Stars?), and honors the plants and animals in all medicine she makes. Check out this video of her speaking about what she’ll be sharing:

This Saturday, March 12 is ALSO our monthly online gathering with Sisters on a Journey to take shamanic journey and raise our vibrations with the greater world community in mind. We meet for just an hour per month and all journeys are recorded for viewing at your convenience if you can’t make the live time. This month our journey focuses on womb support and understanding what the womb of the Earth can teach us. No prior journey experience required.

Shamanic journey is an effective (and my favorite) tool for self-healing and soul-travel. I’ve been utilizing it for over fifteen years to facilitate healing for myself and others. This form of inward exploration reveals mysteries of the Self which are inextricably tied to the Great Mystery and our place in the cosmos. In journey, we are able to locate lost aspects of soul which we have been searching and yearning for. Many times in journey, we receive answers to the questions we have. Sometimes we receive healings, comfort, support or more questions to dig into.

Journeys can result in feelings of increased connectedness, forgiveness, kindness to oneself, patience and trust with the processes of life and healing, and restoration. It is a practice which nourishes the spiritual traveler and is especially helpful in times of anxiety about the unknown or when welcoming back the pure essence of oneself which was present prior to injury, accident, and trauma.