Clients and Friends,
I have been searching for most of my life for something intangible … for clarity… for insight… to reconcile a shadowy sense of incongruence, ultimately something to help me feel better.
The greatest challenges in life come from within. Hearing this as a teenager suggested to me that searching for meaning or understanding by learning to navigate the inner landscape of my thoughts and feelings, to learn to listen to the ‘still small voice within’, my intuition, could help me navigate my outer life challenges much more than just using logic or reason. This didn’t negate the value of learning, but I found that when I trusted my inner ‘knowing’ there was a fluidity to the unfolding of my life experience. Even daily challenges seemed to go smoothly. When I didn’t trust or my attention wandered, which was often the case, I experienced more discomfort, upheaval and inertia.
Central to a larger shift in the healing of our world is learning to come into right relationship, learning to work with our consciousness and the outer world. In this age of information overload one of the challenges we face is to let go of the data and go deeper… to invest in the effort to integrate our inner and outer experience.
Exploring this inner wisdom leads to the realization that there is an inner universe as great and immense as the outer and that understanding the relationships between things (or the parts of the whole) is more important than knowing the parts themselves. In my almost 40 years of practice and teaching ‘holistic medicine’, the ‘western medical model’ still struggles to see the fundamental relationship between body (and its’ parts), mind and spirit, the inner and the outer.
Seeing through our hearts opens us to the intuitive wisdom of soul. While western culture has offered much ‘knowledge’ and concurrent development to the rest of the world, we are also now beginning to recognize the deep wisdom from the much older eastern philosophies and traditional medicine practices of indigenous cultures. Medicine in this sense is understanding and practicing the intimate relationship between inner and outer, spiritual and physical.
From my studies in native American medicine and the Wisdom Teachings from Eastern traditions I recognize the power in a lineage, or energetic potency passed down from teacher to student, from healer to patient, from generation to generation. Shamanism is a Siberian word for medicine man, doctor AND priest; and is one of the ‘medicine practices’ of indigenous and traditional cultures which models one form of an inner healing journey. Learning how to access inner guidance from helping spirits offers a tangible path to integrate our body/mind/spirit while acknowledging the ONE spirit which unifies all life behind and animating all form. Beyond the experience of prayer and meditation common to all religious traditions, it invites us to go deeper. Using ritual to create sacred space and embrace imagery and sound with a commitment to presence, it opens us to experiencing personal revelation supported by the potency of an ancestral lineage.
Next month, my colleague Lindsey Sadowski and I will be offering The Healing Power of Shamanic Journeying, a program demystifying shamanism and offering an overview and experience of shamanic journeying for those interested in going deeper into their own healing. We’ll explore and experience ritual, other-dimensional reality, the concepts of intention, sacred space, power animal/helping spirits and holding space for integration. Please consider joining us for this unique program in support of your own healing journey.
One of the ways to create a framework for your inner journey is to expand awareness of your history. DNA Repatterning is a tool I offer to support this. It is extremely helpful in identifying and clearing old patterns which have keep us stuck in physical and emotional wounds. Clearing allows us to create a new story and begin to manifest healing or open to a new life direction. Read more here or call to schedule a session.
If you need a break from the outer events of life and all that is happening during this unique time, or are interested in experiencing community support in service, please consider joining us each Friday for a free Community Settling experience. Please register here (via email) and you will receive instructions on how to join the session. If you are unable to join personally, consider listening to the Settling sessions posted in the self-help section of my website as a way to support your own self-healing.
May we all be guided by the wisdom of our hearts and find support in our shared experience.
Namaste,
David
*Namaste*
I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides. I honor that place in you of love, of light, of truth and of peace. I honor that place in you, where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.