Twice Blessed

Greetings all,

I hope this weekend finds you well.  I've had a busy ten days.  It's almost like more than a month's activity was packed into those few days.  I once again raised my drum and honored the changing wheel of the season to welcome in the spring.

So at the very gates of spring, it was freakin freezing.  I guess it was in the 40s...barely, but it was also misting rain.  The kind of cold rain that gets into your bones.  It made my hands numb and so my drumming was not as steady as usual.  I worried a bit about this, however I decided that the important thing was that I showed up.  Most spirits understand that our bodies come with some limitations.  If you have guides that don't get that and are demanding unrealistic feats from you, then you need to fire them from your team.

This week I am noticing the longer days.  I am also seeing how erratic the changeover in seasons seems to have become in the past decade.  I recall much smoother transitions from my child hood.  Our first day of spring coincided with 7 inches of snow in the evening.  It was beautiful and thankfully didn't stick to the roads too badly, a rare combination.  Those on my prayer list got the benefit of two prayers this week, one for the equinox and one for the Friday ceremony.  Both were seasonally themed towards renewal.  On top of that my drumming got the extra mojo from the medicine bundle of the local shamanic weather circle.  It's the red one in the picture above.

Mostly what I've been feeling lately is lucky.  I am well fed, sheltered, clothed, in reasonably good health, and I work in fields that I love.  I also have good people around me.  This has been a long process to come into that combination of factors.  It has taken effort, but so much of the credit has been the grace of good fortune.  The chance meetings, information showing up when I needed it, and opportunities landing at the perfect time have all been huge blessings.  Stepping back and noticing these things is important; it is way too easy to focus on what is lacking or imperfect.  Our minds are programmed to scan for problems so it is up to us to reframe our situations.  I've been looking forward to this spring for months.  I've got many things lined up for the coming seasons.  Winter was a turn inwards and now I get to reemerge into the world and share what I've been incubating.  I've had a new healing method go through testing since the fall which should be out in a month, I'll have a Chi Kung video out this summer, and I will be putting together another day long workshop to present locally.  There is a lot of living to be had in the coming months and I am looking forward to it.

So why am I gabbing on about fortune and stuff.  Well the universe gives us some circumstances that we have no control over, but many instances of luck simply require us to show up.  So it is important to show up when we can, in whatever state we are in.  If we show up with a willing heart many wonderful things can happen.  So I challenge you to show up.  I challenge you to recognize where circumstances have served you.  I challenge you to find the perfection that exists in a moment in time.  They are there for the taking I promise.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Deep Mythings

Greetings all,

I know this post is late.  I have had a month's worth of activities packed into one week.  Since the commitment to blog was made to myself, I can on occasion relax my rules about getting a post out exactly on the nose.

After many months of anticipation I had the distinct pleasure of taking a workshop with Justice Bartlett.  I first saw her at a Matrix Energetics Seminar in 2008.  She was dressed as Batgirl.  (It happened to be Halloween weekend).  She became entangled in my first access point into the quantum field of wizardry.  About 2 years ago she was supposed to teach a workshop up in Indianapolis, which I was interested in attending but it fell through.  I toyed with the idea of bringing her to Louisville for over a year, and then finally approached her about it this past fall.  Apparently the timing was just right, so this past weekend she taught a 2 day class at the Louisville Spiritualist Center.

As you can see above we had a good time.  Identity and how we enfold ourselves in the stories we believe about who we are can become rigid.  So we had to make up a new persona, with a story.  My persona was Madame Miseur Locke.  I don't know why but they were bigendered.  While we were on our lunch break though I began to ponder that having both the masculine and feminine represented in this alternate persona was significant.  I have talked before in this blog about my struggles in redefining masculinity in sacred and profane terms.  The women's movement has made great strides in redefining women's roles, but men's roles and identities seem to be stuck in the past.  While discussing a traumatic experience that two other participants had, I was curious as to how it manifested differently for them as one was a man and the other a woman.  The woman had been shamed.

This is not surprising.  We tend to project our shame onto the feminine in this culture.  Well I don't know how I got to the next bit of insight, but I started thinking about the myth of Adam and Eve.  Eve of course was blamed for the fall of humankind banned from the bliss of the garden for listening to the serpent and eating from the tree of knowledge.  I started to play with the story a bit.  The traditional interpretation blames her for staining us with original sin, a shame that can only be washed away by a savior that encourages ritualized cannibalism. I reached a different conclusion.  Eve gave us free will.  She gave us self direction.  Before, we were in our primal animal states only, the act of choosing her own will over an authority's made her and by extension her descendants human.  That's not to say we don't have our animal nature's now, but we also have something else, that human streak of sometimes having a mind of our own.  So instead of the original sinner we have Eve Liberator of Humanity.  She's practically the feminist Prometheus.

So why am I telling you this and promoting heresy (besides it being one of my favorite past times)?  Well it's important to look at the stories that run our lives and our cultures.  Look at them with fresh eyes or maybe with a pair of flower opera glasses like Madame Miseur Locke.  Would I have leapt to this new interpretation without personifying a dual gendered being for an exercise?  It is hard to say for sure, but by unifying two sides of a continuum I got a fresh perspective.

So how about you?  Can you hold the polar sides of the scale simultaneously in your awareness?  How does that change you or your perspective?  What spin does it put on the stories and scripts you've been living by?  Play a bit, stretch your concept of who you are in the moment.  See what insights can arise.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Joyful Limitations

Greetings all,

I hope your week was rewarding.  I was certainly kept on my toes.  It's never a dull moment at the Casa de Mooneagle.

Apparently everybody I know this week was getting hammered (and no I don't mean they were drunk).  I had a lot of people in crisis mode all at the same time.  I'm often found at the eye of the storm.  Not that I never have my own crisis, but I tend to keep that under wraps.  I tend to dance in that space between and lend a hand where I can.  There are times though where I just can't.  There is only so much Mooneagle to go around.

If you have received my voicemail message a bunch this week, I apologize.  The phone has been on airplane mode so that I can recharge and handle what is in front of me.  The troubles of the world will still be there when I turn it back on.  This is something I had to learn.  Before I would just go go go until I crashed.  I mean I still do that a bit, but I am starting to realize it and counter it in small ways.  Yesterday I said no to doing a depossession because with all the events I have in the next ten days I knew I didn't have it.  Well okay I could have squeezed it in, but not without completely exhausting myself.  This has been a hard lesson to learn.  Just because I am put here to be of service, does not mean I can't set up reasonable limits and boundaries on my efforts.

So why am I droning on about this?  Well it is important to set limits with your energy.  Other people won't do it believe you me.  Last week I had 5 sessions in one day plus my weekly ceremony.  That was about my limit.  As my business grows I am having to place limits on myself or I will book myself into a sick bed.  It used to be more the province of the self employed and entrepreneurs, but with mobile technology, employees are getting to the point where they are never out of reach of their work.  I find it quite horrifying that people I know will get calls from work while they are away on vacation.  They will even email work to them.

So how about you?  Are you placing limits on your output?  What about to your loved ones?  What about to those things you think you "should" do?  What about to those people who "need" you?  So many of us try to make ourselves indispensable so that people won't leave us.  When we do that though we trap ourselves in roles of servitude.  Yes we should lend a hand when we can.  Yes we should be valuable to those around us, but we do nobody any service when we make ourselves a savior.  So start setting some limits here and there.  You have my permission.  The world will not fall down if you decide to take the evening off or have a nap.  However you may just fall down if you don't.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Adjusted

Greetings all,

I hope you've had a great week.  I got through the floods we've had here just fine.  I hope those of you on the east coast managed to make it safely through the storm from the last few days.  The full moon came through and was kicking a lot of people in sensitive zones.  I actually feel a bit of relief with this moon, but prior to it I've been getting kicked around too.

In one of my conversations with a good friend about the idea of enlightenment, I came to the conclusion that I just need to let it go.  I need to let go of the idea of being well adjusted.  I don't see myself as particularly well adjusted particularly when it comes to social and personal relationships.  I simply don't fit the recognized societal patterns of interactions, and I'd been beating myself up for it for a long time.  I mean I know I"m weird, hell I like weird things.  You would think I wouldn't have the problem being the weird person in any given situation.  That is sadly not the case.  Our deep seated needs for belonging really get in the way of not caring about conformity.

I am fortunate in that people in my family tend to be long lived.  I still have one living grandparent in her 90s.  It is through the stories my grandmother has told me that I've realized that being normal is a relatively new thing.  She remembers the time before television.  She grew up during the great depression in a rural town.  The stories she tells were often about the different quirks of the people (and of herself too) that she grew up around.  To me it seems like people back then were less concerned about being into "normal" things and more about what they were interested in personally.  There was radio, but they didn't have TV and the internet constantly reinforcing a particular paradigm.

This is not to say there was no concern about what the neighbors thought.  She grew up on a farm in a small town where everybody knew everyone's business.  The difference was they didn't have as many cultural media references telling them what the norms for everyone was.  It was more local.  In sociology there is a study that tracks happiness in the US with bowling.  The more we bowled as a nation the happier we were.  Now when television came along people stayed in more and watched other people do things.  Besides the ads there was the more subtle but also more insidious product placement.  Those TV homes have their couches, appliances, and fashions  for the cast.  TV became our culture, and we started comparing our lives to our fictional counterparts.  Well as you know comparing our lives with others always makes us happier.....not.

So why am I telling you this?  Well for good or ill, in times past people were left more to their own devices.  They had to investigate and find out what worked for them.  They didn't seem to worry about being "well adjusted", they were good if they had a family and a friend or two.  Between social media, movie and films, and the obsession of self improvement it is difficult to just appreciate yourself where you are in this moment.  For that reason I'm letting go of having to be well adjusted.  I don't need it to deserve love and respect.  I don't need it to be worthy of making a good living.  I don't need it to avoid being punished by a jealous deity after my physical form dies.

How about you?  What self improvement treadmill has you running in eternal circles simply to become worthy of self love?  I'm not saying we should never improve, grow, or change. I am saying we shouldn't with hold our self respect and love for ourselves until we reach some obligatory standard (which may be nebulously defined or unhealthy).  Love yourself where you are, not ten pounds from now, not after a promotion, not after you've achieved more.  Honor and care for yourself as you are, and see what happens.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Fall of the Cards

Greetings all,

I hope you have had a pleasant week.  I've been watching the maple trees begin to put out their little blossoms.  I've also worked a psychic fair for the first time in a few years.

It has been about seven years since I had worked a fair.  I'd never done particularly well at them in the past.  Besides that I used to get rather annoyed when I would just sit there knowing I was extra "switched on" that day.  So I stopped doing them (aside from assisting in a friend's booth that is), and only booked private readings.  It is unusual that I do more than one reading in a day.  It is more typical that I do more healing work with a reading peppered in here and there.   It's funny, I started my practice by giving readings.  I thought that is all I would do, but now it is something that has become one of my more occasional services.

It is easy for me to forget how vulnerable it can feel be to be read.  Doing this fair was a good reminder for me.  Holding a space of compassion is probably the most important thing I can do for someone whether they are receiving a reading or a transformational energy session.  People come to me at the crossroads of life.  They are often afraid or desperate.  It is my job to meet them where they are and give aid.  I forget how magical (or scary) this can seem to people.  I often get people who've never had a reading before, or someone will send me their child to read.  I take that as a privilege from Spirit that I would be trusted to usher somebody through their first experience.

Readings often are people's first brush with mystical energies.  For many that may be as deep as they want or need to go.  It's the hint of the pattern that underlies events.  Occasionally I feel a bit of that too as I see the signs come into recognizable shapes.  A reading is just a snapshot of a moment in time that gives you the direction of the currents that are rushing our lives along.  Still it is nice to step back and see the wonder in it.  So I shall do a few fairs here and there just to reach out into the world.

Why am I telling you this?  Well our own patterns and experience can sometimes become so habitual we miss the mystery in them.  We can forget what it is we have to offer the world.  We can cocoon ourselves in our life and stop reaching out.  It is tempting because it feels safe, but by doing so we truly do miss out on becoming part of the larger tapestry  of lives.  So if you've kept your talents hidden or quartered off I invite you to occasionally share them with the world.  Show people what you can do.  You might just hold the answer to the problem someone has been struggling with.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

My way, your way, no way

Greetings all,

It's been another week marred by an all too familiar tragedy here in the States.  Another mass shooting has claimed the lives of children and adults.

I am not going to talk much about gun control or the insanity of our hands off policy towards firearms in this country.  I wrote that post last year.  There is no need to repeat myself.  What I am going to focus on is how we are being manipulated into boxes.  The attempt to frame this issue by vested interests (cough...NRA) is that any action is an attempt to take guns away from everyone.  So it puts any sort of gun control into a defensive crouch having to say no we aren't interested in disarming most of you.  This has actually pushed me into an extreme myself of no guns at all.  Of course that is what the tactic is designed to do, push people to the extremes, especially the other side. That way you can yell, "You see I knew that's what they really wanted the whole time.  I was right!"

As human beings we often fall into the trap of 'either or' thinking.  You are either with me or against me, you are either anti abortion or pro abortion, you are either anti drugs or a junkie, or the tired current model of you're either for no limits on firearms or you're trying to take away everyone's guns. This my way or the highway thinking ends all of us stranded by the side of the road going nowhere.  I have found when faced with a problem there is often a third solution that is neither of the extremes, but better than either approach.  See just like you I want things my way.  That works if I am absolute ruler of reality and all are my subjects and obedient to my will.  This has yet to occur in my lifetime.  Sometimes I do get my way, but often I do not.  However there is more than just my way or your way, there is our way.  Considering how interconnected we are in this digital world we are in dire need of "our way."

I think as a society particularly here in the U.S.  we've forgotten how to listen to one another.  We are so concerned with getting our own way, that there is no collective way.  So here we sit with another fresh tragedy to bring our differences to the forefront.  I don't believe this is inevitable.  What I and all of us must do is to realize that there must be some other way that is neither your way nor my way, but a way that works for all of us.  (Well most of us).  Whenever I've been caught between two unpleasant extremes when it seemed there were only two options I always found a third way.  So I guess this week what I am saying is there is always a third option, that neither side sees until they look for it.

So why am I telling you this?  Well if you live in the States you desperately need to hear it.  If you live elsewhere perhaps you can apply this third way thinking to some personal problem.  Simply start with the conviction that there has to be another way besides these two.  Once you begin to operate under that frame of mind you'll be surprised at what presents itself to you.  Try it out after all, there is no time like the present.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Breath of Magic

Greetings all,

No suggestive pictures or catchphrases this week, alas I know you were waiting to be shocked.  This week was all about noticing the world around me and how I'm interacting on multiple levels.  Weather was the big teacher this week.

About midway through the week we had freezing rain.  It didn't stick to the roads, but it did coat the trees and bushes with a layer of ice.  The forest wore crystal.  I went to visit a loved one who was recovering from a stay in the hospital.  As I stepped out, I noticed the air.  It seemed somehow white, full of something.  It was cold but it brought freshness rather than the cloying bite that winter air usually holds.  The quality of light and sound seemed crisp and invigorating.  In short it smelled of magic.

Now when I talk of magic it makes some people uncomfortable.  People both want to believe in it, but are worried about looking foolish for doing so.  There is also some confusion as to what magic could be.  What people mean when they say it depends as much on who they are, as to what it may actually be.  I associate it with the deep mysteries of life, deeper meanings of the soul, and the power to create.  For me it is about a feeling rather than an idea.  What I had forgotten is that nature creates it.  The turn of the seasons, the weather, and the rising and setting of the sun and moon; all of them generate the deeper currents of our life.  Life will, if we let it, create magic of its own accord.  It is up to us flow with it, and occasionally shape it towards an end that our heart yearns for.

It is easy to forget that true power is in the world and our response to it.  We cordon ourselves off from it, and lead digital lives behind screens.  I've been told time and again that the digital world does not hold the nourishment that my body, mind, or soul needs.  It is the random world of leaf, trunk, and footpath that holds the wonder that I seek.  The breath of magic is the inhalation of forest air, of the mountains' mist, the sea breeze, or the brisk dry air of desert wind.  I must unplug to seek it.

So why am I telling you this?  Well the confusion of the mind can keep us from seeing the magic around us.  How often do you walk while you text?  Do you walk or jog with headphones?  Do you prefer the predictability of a treadmill and a screen rather than the outside air?  Winter is not my season.  It might not be yours either, but there is magic in it.  Every part of nature holds wonder if you can find the right way to see it.  While I was enamored by the super blue blood moon for it's symbolic power, I have come to realize  that the crystalline forest and the first stirrings of the trees around me hold a greater energy.  Nature is magical, the interplay of life and death, and the interdependency of all things as they move together in synchrony.  Go outside, take a deep breath, feel the rhythm of living things and you will breathe in magic.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle