Go West..

Each emotion carries its own medicine. Here's a little journey with my own experience of fear.

I recently found myself presented with a ripe opportunity to listen-to, respond-to, understand, and engage more inclusively with the medicine offered through my experience of feeling the emotion of fear; something I am learning is a medicine made by my body, for my body/life; a generous gift offered from what I have come to understand as soul.

Oh what a feeling!

You have likely noticed too that we humans, pretty regularly, inadvertently recapitulate systemic patterns that mine and meter energy in, often, unsustainable and degenerative ways. It's not too challenging to see the collective impact of centuries of old damaging habits we have developed.

And, tragically, we often unconsciously play some of these patterns out similarly in our relationships with one another.

Perhaps you, too, have had the exquisite experience of finding yourself at least several days deep in to a wild place with few, if any, other human companions.

Particularly at night, in a world alive with scent, movement, and sound, maybe with just a thin layer or two of nylon (and prayer) between your small ready-made-meal-of-a-body and the elemental beings, it is here you have come to understand your relational skills in ever-new, but also very ancient and incredibly real ways.

There's listening.. and there's l-i-s-t-e-n-i-n-g.

As the days in the northern hemisphere just begin to lengthen again, and life here on the westerly coast of this continent fervently pushes its way upward and outward, I have a few new creative offerings emerging too.

Can you feel her forces moving you, too?

If she's speaking to you in a way that might want to be explored and expressed through an introductory 4 week, spiraling, mytho-somatic journey into the territory of the soul, carried as well by a small intrepid group of fellow explorers, gentle soulcraft practices, and the beguiling adventures of wild poets and storytellers like Geneen Marie Haugen and Martin Shaw..

...There's only one question:
how to love this world... ~Mary Oliver

When I'm asked what I do for work, depending on who is asking and the larger context the question is being asked in, I sometimes respond that I'm an intuitive health practitioner, an educator, a human-nature guide, or an energy worker. So this offers a description of the fields one might try to locate my work in, but of course doesn't actually describe what I do very easily. My answer often just creates more questions. And despite this usually pushing old tender buttons of mine around feeling invisible, I also like the deeper invitation here.

So especially as the sun was setting six evenings ago, when I felt the still subtle but more obvious 'contractions' begin, I whispered a direct incantation to the creative forces to let them know that I was listening. I had created space. I was ready. This Musing is what has emerged from the process.

With harvest season arriving, this is just a quick note to touch base. Greetings!

Especially in this heat, which has burst onto the scene over the past few weeks here on the pacific north-west coast, I am also taking this moment to express my deep appreciation for the precious cool resilient shady places, and gentle drying breezes. Bless them. And blessings to these indigenous homelands and sacred, wild, forces.

Not fitting in..
Of course I didn't have the understanding or perspective to be able to identify it let alone articulate it as a young person, but growing up in a society structured on a seemingly widening fundamental disconnection between body-mind and human-earth, felt chronically disorienting and disturbing to me. Something just felt 'off' about what many of us humans were up to much of the time. I know I was not alone here.

As our little wild home here in the cosmos has continued to spiral along her evolutionary path over the past couple of years, I have been doing the same along mine.

Like you too perhaps, in your particular way, I have been in the eternal work of deepening intimacy with my own place in this grand mosaic, divining what is mine to do (and what is not) and how my small universal speck of light might humbly serve the unfolding tumble of life on our planet more fully.

I am sunning myself on the edge of a slow river after taking a refreshing dip. I can feel the deliciously cool ache that had moved into my bones during my swim being drawn out by the warm sun on my skin. It's a glorious feeling.

Each night, over the past month, I drift off to sleep to the sound of this incredible chorus of our amphibian friends singing their throaty and lusty little hearts out through my opened window. These primordial spring rituals, which seem to arrive here on the west coast at this latitude/elevation in February/March, signal reassurance to some ancient part of my animal body and lull me into deeper states, journeying me into the dream world each night.

I have come to understand that each of us has a specific authentic self and ecological (including human) place of belonging in the world, and a unique path of unfolding within a much larger collective unfolding. This life-print follows and builds upon the path of our ancestors, but is at its roots, a path that is guided by the deep currents and intelligence of life itself.

In a culture that itself is working through its own confusion about what healthy growth and maturation through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood is, we often struggle between knowing what is good healthy fear and what is too much or not enough fear, what is healthy risk and what is too much or not enough risk, what is eustress (healthy stress) and what is distress.

We are a people...a culture...a planet... in transition and transformation. We are being born. We are growing. We are dying. We are being reborn. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. But we are also collectively being cycled through a much larger process... We are all in another birth canal here on this planet...in the midst of a hard and long labour. We are in a massive mid-life crisis.

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, and Innerlife Health Services - my practice, my business and clinic - was and is my soul's response, not only to my personal need to keep enriching my own inner life, but as I see it, to our cultural need too.
Innerlife Health Services my business, is the space, practice and the art I make and have created, produced, and am stewarding in collaboration with other practitioners, visionaries and artists.