Fate and Consequence

Greetings all,

Happy fall to all my friends in the Northern hemisphere.  We've had a lot of turbulent energy in the past few weeks and many of us have felt it.  The equinoxes are gateways in the year from one season to another.  They are also balance points so I am hoping that we will begin to reorient and ground ourselves in the season to come.

I had been feeling under the weather this week, but as Spirit promised me in the early summer things have picked up quite a bit for my healing practise.  Fate, with her sense of humor, timed it for when I was feeling at my lowest energy wise.  This could have been cruel if looked at in one light, but I choose to see it differently.  I have been repeatedly told when I worry about not being good enough for the work I do that I need to remember that I'm not the one doing it.  I am the one allowing it to come through.  My job is to honor my spiritual obligations, prepare my own energies, and keep the space as well as follow directions.  This week that is all I had energy to do.  If I had tried to "run" the sessions I wouldn't have been able to.  My healing sessions this week have been just as powerful (if not more so) then when I have been at full strength.  I think this was to reinforce to me that this is not about personal power and never has been.  This is all about maintaining relationship with Spirit.  I am not the planner of sessions, I'm not even the doer, I am merely the facilitator.  I assist and respond to people's questions and concerns.

None of this was clearer than in Thursday's autumnal equinox drumming ceremony.  I had been fighting off getting sick with only a partially successful effort.  Still I teach and swim on Thursdays.  After my professional and physical training obligations were met I didn't know that I had it to drum.  Still I had a commitment to Spirit that must be honored as well.  So I knew even if it wasn't vigorous drumming I would show up for it.  Once again the power of showing up to honor a promise was demonstrated.  I called a good friend and we met at a local park where I have drummed a few times.  We set up the space and slowly began to drum.  As I sent out the prayers for those on my Mesa prayer list and my Year of Transformation participants, I also asked for healing of my own heart and opening more into the vibration of love.  It was after that when I looked down and noticed for the first time the chalk art that children had left all around the covered pavilion where we had set up.

Again this was completely unplanned.  I had felt so inadequate because I hadn't scheduled everything out nor had I set a place for the drumming ahead of the day.  Yet clearly I ended up in the exact space I was supposed to be in.  Sometimes I think Fate and Coyote make wagers on me.  In this case I'm not sure who won, but I feel like I got the better of the deal.  If this were the end of the story we could just call it coincidence, but wait there is indeed more.  I had started the day teaching my Tai Chi class outside.  During the class a beautiful Monarch butterfly fluttered past towards the west.  As we began the drum ceremony (across town mind you) a Monarch once again flew past headed into the west.  West just happens to be the direction of autumn on the medicine wheel.  I also had an encounter with a cricket who had perched upon my gym bag that morning and I took that as a lucky sign.  Still for the skeptics out there I have the final nail in the coffin for doubt.  Earlier in the week someone shared with me an article on this equinox, it was about the Goddess Kali.  She is a fierce deity that can shake you to your core.  Having felt like I had been shaken past my core the past few months I was not happy.  I actually asked maybe she could do her work this time with love maybe even enjoyably.  Well my doubters check this out.

That's right she was there in chalk in the circle.  I didn't notice until after we began.  Take that myth busters!  Notice that the I is dotted with a heart.  I asked for that two days before.  BLAM!  So despite having zero energy and feeling like I was going to collapse going into ceremony we drummed for a good twenty minutes at least.  It wasn't all just a slow beat either.  The tempo increased on its own and by the end I was dancing.  There might just be something to all this magic stuff.

So at this place and time of power what doubts do you still hold?  What do you not believe you can achieve or receive?  Are you afraid to ask for what you need?  Why not ask anyways the worst that can happen is that you are refused.  However if you don't ask you will never get it.  I admit I was shuffled around by Fate this week, and I am kind of glad.  I couldn't have planned it better if I had tried.  So try asking and trusting a bit just for a little while you can always try something else later.  In the meantime welcome to the next quarter of the year.  I hope that it will bring your heart what you truly need.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Sand Castles

Greetings all,

I hope you've have a good week.  I have been doing better weathering the storm of extreme energy tides.  This is due in great part to the wonderful people who offered support and prayers to help me find my footing.

Illusions surround us every moment of the day.  For the most part we go about our lives without seeing the chaotic swirls that surround our every action.  We as bipedal creatures come very close to falling with every single step we take.  We have literally trillions of chemical reactions taking place within our bodies on a daily basis which all must be perfectly timed and in harmony with each other to keep us alive.  For those of us lucky enough to own homes, we trust that the earth beneath us is stable and the winds of the world will blow gently.  All that we depend upon can be overturned in moments by the forces of nature or the chaotic forces within our own species.

Most of us ignore this fact.  We carry some insurance to shore up the imbalances of fate and circumstance.  I have been lucky.  I am not lucky due to any superior ability with cards or dice.  Fortune doesn't shower me with gold from the heavens.  I am lucky for the most part because of what I haven't had happen.  I was born into a middle class family in a country that is not in a war zone.  I have never gone hungry.  I have not been subject to constant violence.  I have been only a few car accidents and none of those were injury accidents (to which I am continually grateful to my legion of traffic angels).  I have a space to lay my head.  No one tried to abuse me as a child growing up, and my parents are still a couple after several decades of marriage.

As I become older and hopefully wiser, I can see just how lucky I have been.  When I was seriously ill years ago I had the support of family and at the time really good health insurance.  As I see more people in my practice I realize just how fragile the weave of our lives can be.  A simple accident or meeting the wrong person at the wrong time can shake us to our core.  People currently look at me now and think just how strong and sure I seem.  I'm really not.  I am acutely aware that everything I have built in the past decade is a castle built on sand.  The tides could turn at any moment or the earth could shake and all I have built will be just a memory.

When the energies I feel around myself and the world at large start to buck and rock I too am afraid.  I like many Americans have probably less than stellar health insurance, even a minor accident or issue could cause immense destruction in my life and the life of my family.  I rely on the blessings that I have received to continue living and building a better life.  The sands could shift though and I just have to trust that the universe will take care of me.  Trust is not something that comes easy to me.  It is hard for me to open up to others and trust them, or to trust that things will work out alright.  You'd think I would have a different perspective given that my holistic practices are focused on bringing in support for others.  Still I have that trust gap when it comes to my own needs and my own life.  It is something I must grow into, because I am truly in the hands of Fate every hour of every day.

So why do I bring this up?  Well the energies of late have stirred a lot of this primal shadow energy up from the depths, not just for myself but for all of us.  Many of us are feeling very vulnerable right now, especially those of us that practice some form of awareness expansion.  Enlightenment is not for wimps.  It will shake you until you surrender.  It will sometimes make you wish you had pushed the snooze alarm on the cosmic wake up call.  For mine is not the only castle built of sand.  We are all on the shore and the tides of life are coming in.  One day we will be swept out to the great sea into the beyond.  Until that time though we must build our little castles and be grateful for them.  As I have watched the sands of life run out for various loved ones this year, I have felt the bittersweetness of the world.  We are here together and by some miracle we find each other and weave lives all the while knowing that each thread we weave together will one day be ripped from our looms.  It takes great courage to continue our work and our lives.  So for today I will be grateful for what remains to me.  I will work to make my castle wonderful and inviting until the day the surf comes to take it back into the sea.  So for those of you who have watched the castles of your life fall as the sand shifts beneath it, I offer you my love.  That is the only thing that is not sand in this life.  Love endures beyond all form and even its memory continues to move through us into the world.  Honor what you have, and honor those you love.  In another time and another place we may yet sit together building castles of dreams without fear.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Riding the Lightning

Greetings all,

Another week has passed.  It has been in turns both wonderful and terrible.  I've reconnected with some folks I hadn't seen in a long time.  I also had a good week work wise, however my internal weather has been earthquakes and tidal forces pulling on my little fragile self, or what I have previously identified with as the self.

I have often counseled people to move slowly when doing deep inner work.   This goes for both energetic/magical work or more mundane forms of depth work.  There is often a "can do" or "more is better" attitude when it comes to "self improvement".  I'm beginning to think there is no self improvement, just coming into alignment with who we truly are.  Many spiritual traditions point to an all knowing and all powerful Creator who made us.  This idea competes with many societal and religious doctrines which tells us we are intrinsically flawed and must fix or improve ourselves in order to be worthy.  There in lies the success of the multibillion dollar cosmetic and diet industry.  To those of us that subscribe to a belief in a creator deity I pose this question, why do you think an all powerful all knowing being made a mistake when they made you?  To those of us who subscribe to a more scientific materialism model I ask, "Can over a billion years of evolution be wrong?"

I emailed my support group of shamanic practitioners only to find that many of them have also been experiencing this shakiness and feeling of things crumbling.  I had worried that I had moved too fast, and tripped down the lightning path for a bit.  I've done that before, it's been a good five years since I have and it only took about a year or so to recover from the last misstep.  This impatience with ourselves and trying to be more and better can cause us to overload our circuits.  As we remove or replace core belief patterns it can feel like the house of our self is crashing down around us.  Our identity and sense of self is intertwined with both the authentic components of our identity and the false projections we've picked up from our culture, family, and belief systems.  When one thing moves the whole thing moves.  Think of a Jenga tower half way through a game.  Any piece you take out causes the whole tower to sway.  If you are into the game you get nervous, even though it is a false construct. It is the same with our self concepts and belief structures.

All that said right now myself and many others are being called on to embody more of our authentic nature, that which was created at the beginning either by evolution or a deity figure.  The world around us needs us for our innate attributes and not for what society has told us we have to offer.  We are the people we've been waiting for.  We are the light and the dark has been rising.  This sense of unease in myself is from my inner resistance from assuming and embodying more of that.  I like many of us lack faith in myself and doubt my worthiness on many levels.  The more inner resistance I have the worse that anxious feeling becomes.  As a spirit recently told me, "You don't believe in good dreams do you."  She was right I hope for things but don't really expect them.  This is something I must sort through, as power rises in me I must surrender to it.  I mustn't argue that the Universe is mistaken, and I am not fit to embody this.

So how does this apply to you?  Well do you feel lately that you're spinning out of control?  Are you wanting to make a course correction, but can't even get your bearings?  Are you stepping back into the shadows instead of forward into the light that you are?  Have a little patience, be gentle with yourself.  Consider the odds of you even existing in this moment in time, in the space that you do.  If there is a grand pattern to things, might you not be a part of it?  What if you just believe you belong here now in this world for its betterment?  What if you stopped wondering about worthiness and just took your existence as proof that you are?  What if you embraced the awesome power of your spirit?  What if instead of being struck by the lightning, you rode it down to earth?  So to sum up:  you are here, you matter, and you're worthy.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Atlas of Dreams

Greetings all,

I hope this holiday weekend finds you well.  This marks the traditional end of summer for most folks.  Labor day weekend used to be the last bit of summer vacation for school children.  Around here though the kids have been in school since mid August.  Things change.

For most of my life I have kept a record of my dreams.  I became interested in lucid dreaming when I was 13 and the first thing you're told to do is to write down your dreams.  For some this is very difficult, but for me it was easy.  For better or worse I have always had quite vivid dreams.  Fantasies of flying have felt so real and blissful, but on the flip side of that terror invoking visions have shaken me to my core.  Everything has its price.  While I have had a few instances of lucidity over the years it has been sparse, but I continue to write down my dreams to glean information and direction from them.  You'd be surprised of how much the conscious mind misses through the day.

At this point I have filled over half a dozen notebooks and journals with my night time wanderings.  As I look back over the years I can see changing patterns in my dreams.  I used to have a lot more fantasy elements in my teenage years.  I had the hero quest type dreams and escaping from danger and death dreams.  In my twenties I had more prophetic or psychic dreams.  These days the story book nature of my dreams ebbs and flows.  For weeks or months my dreams can be mostly mundane and then out of the blue they will turn once more to the mystic.  Lately I've found myself doing actual magical or healing work while asleep.  When I wake I know a part of it was real, as there is the aftertaste of magic in the air around the bed.  (Magic always has a very distinct feeling/smell to it for me).

As I said above my dream life can be a mixed blessing.  I sometimes awaken almost as tired as when I laid down to sleep.  I can walk very far and see sights that trouble me while I slumber.  The gift in these visions is clarity though.  Dreams have time and again offered me guidance, a nudge, or encouragement to embark on a path in my waking life.

Why am I telling you this?  Well all of us dream, even those that claim they don't.  Dreams and the symbols they use are powerful tools of transformation and self awareness.  They are provided to us free of charge each night, and when we pay attention they can even be used by spirit to reach out to us.  This gift is a common heritage we all share as human beings.  As we move into a new season often times our dream life will pick up.  It is a time of transition and there are power in those spaces.  So if you haven't been doing so keep a pad or notebook by the bed.  When you wake write down your meanderings through the night realms. If you can't remember just write how you feel in that moment of waking.  Over time your record will become a map of your spirit, an atlas of dreams.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle