As part of the One with the Mother digital retreat that I co-stewarded this last week/end, I offered several elemental wisdom talks channeled from the beings I work with in my divination practice. Most of the time, when I do divinations, they are for individuals. This time, however, I came to the beings on behalf of the collective, with the question: What should we know about being in right relationship with the Earth at this time? The following wisdom teaching is what they shared with me. Please note that the following text is transcribed from the live video session.
It deserves mentioning that for the past week I’ve been devouring my beloved teacher Mark Bockley’s new book, Awakening Animism in the West, and I decided to weave in some of his powerful words and quotes in my talk because they amplify and underline so much of what came through, and provide even more richness and context.
(I also highly recommend this book if you are interested in learning more about the Dagara, their lifeways, and this lineage. Because the Dagara are an oral tradition, very few words have been written that share their ancient traditions, and I’m so glad this book exists.)
Earth Wisdom Transmission
Original transcript
I am initiated in the Dagara lineage. This is a group of people that reside in West Africa. Many of us here in the West have never encountered the Dagara and do not know about them or their traditions. They are an oral lineage, so there is not much written about them. But they have been here on this earth for a very long time, and they are one of the oldest animistic traditions, lineages, and people that are alive today.
It is a tremendous blessing to be working with this medicine. While I will spare you my whole story of finding it, I do want to share that I was on a big walkabout in 2019. When people asked me what I was doing, I would say: “I'm following the call of the wild”, because that was truly what I was doing. I was listening very deeply to the calling of my life. And as it happened, it brought me into contact with what is known as wild medicine, which is a colloquialism for this lineage. Because this is a lineage that is rooted in the elemental world, in connection with the ancestors, with the spirits of Earth, and it is one of the most profound traditions I've ever had the true honor and privilege of working with. First as a student, and then as an initiate.
When I started working with my teacher, it was like a lightning bolt of recognition went through my whole being.
Any medicine that we come into contact with, that is here to move us and work with us, there is usually a recognition. It doesn’t need to ‘make sense’. It just is. There is a language that it gives us and provides us, that often helps us make sense of something that we carry, that we walk with.
And when I was wandering and lost, this medicine found me and claimed me and remade me. It returned me to a more real and true version of myself. This medicine gave me the words for this sense of displacement that I have often experienced from a very young age inside of our culture. Maybe you too experience this sense of dislocation, this sense of some identity you have been given that does not fit. It is not enough. This identity is not wholly true for what I feel, what I am.
There's so much that has been given to me through this lineage and through this medicine, this 20,000 year-old spiritual technology.
This lifeway, this way of engaging with life, reanimates the living world, the natural world, and it connects us to a memory that all of our ancestors had, even if they did not come from this cultural group or tradition, because all of our ancestors were animists. I want to talk about animism before we go any further, because that is the substrata that informs everything here that I'm about to share.
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Animism is the belief that everything is alive, and that everything has a soul. Animism believes that everyone on Earth is infused with purpose and intelligence and has some essential medicine, even if we cannot recognize it from the perspective of being human.
So even if something looks drastically different from us, even if we look at the mountain and we're like, how is that alive? How is that have a soul?
The Dagara believe that everything does have a soul and this is a profound, humbling perspective to carry and to walk with.
Animistic cosmology bestows collective consciousness on all beings, all things, and this cosmology shapes the texture of consciousness that we carry. My teacher Mark often talks about the fact that African consciousness is unbounded. It does not have the same armature, the same restrictions, the same colonizations that many of us here in the West were enculturated within. That is not to make our consciousness bad or wrong or less than, but I want to really impart to you the fact that the Dagara have a drastically, wildly different consciousness than we here in the West.
Our ancestral inheritances, our bloodlines, our homelands, our life ways, are all part of what shapes our consciousness. So it is important that we recognize that where we came from creates a texture, a landscape, a territory that might not be understood by others because of those textures, those curvatures, those nuances of place and culture.
The Dagara, like most indigenous cultures, have an understanding and intelligence of the natural world that we will never access fully. We cannot. We did not grow up with that deep sense of place. We left our homelands. We do not have the lived embodied experience of handing down of technologies and wisdom over time, over 20,000 years. We stand to learn so much from these traditions.
This medicine, this lineage, travels. Medicine is a living history. Medicine is a living technology with an agenda that is so far outside of human understanding. This medicine traveled to the West through some elders that came from Dagaraland. You might recognize the name Malidoma Some. He is one of the more well-known people who carried this medicine here. And he is one of my teacher’s teachers, and he is now an ancestor. His story is profound. I invite you to look into it. He has a book called Of Water and the Spirit.
I would like to share a quote now from Mark’s book.
Animism is premised on radical belonging, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Animism is generous in its inclusivity. It invites in a highly diverse array of beings, all of whom belong in the conversation. It does not bypass negative beings, energies, and possibilities. After all, they too are intrinsic to the whole. To create reality from an elite perspective is to court disaster. Animism opens the door to all. Until all are present and engaged, wholeness will not exist.
Mark often talks too about how we in America are some of the most spiritually ignorant people on this planet. I do not share that to shame anyone here, but to recognize that we are young. We are young in our consciousness, we are young in our knowing, and we stand to learn from these ancient cultures and traditions.
So we in America do not have a coherent cosmology that has been handed down from the ancients. We exist in a fractured world, in a fractured cosmology, that is trying to stand itself up and struggling deeply to know itself and to humble itself in the face of some immense crises.
And what I love about the Dagara medicine and tradition is that it is about right relationship with all of life, with everything here, and that is a powerful re-orientation to how we walk on this planet – especially for those in the West.
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When I divine, there are certain pieces that speak. You can think of these pieces as almost energies or spirits in and of themselves. They are forms of medicine, and they carry specific stories. For those who haven’t sat with me, it can be difficult to contextualize how this technology works without visuals.
I will name these beings that have spoken up, because I think the meaning, the story that they come with, is important. Their name offers insight into the kind of medicine they carry, but when we apply this medicine to our life, it takes on a unique texture and personality.
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So the first piece to stand up and speak was WEA, the spirit of the wild.
The spirit of the Wild is the spirit that infuses everything in nature. It's like the oversoul. The one that collects and encircles the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the beings that inhabit all of these spaces. And what it had to say is that there is a tremendous sadness in the earth.
I know we all know this. I am sure on some level, we all feel this. And I would hazard to say that it is very painful to feel, and that some of us do our best not to.
But I want you to imagine that every leaf, every blade of grass, every drop of rain, is an an eyeball looking back at us, and this intelligence is all around us. We are within it. We are not outside of it. It is a mirror, mirroring back our actions, our consequences, waiting for us to see, asking us to look at what we are doing and what is happening.
Because everything in this world that is going on right now is not an accident.
By and large, humans act like a cancer. We are cancerous in our actions. Consuming, contorting, distorting what is already perfect and complete, what was given freely. What Wea said was that the heart of the earth is filled with grief.
We make ourselves so busy in pursuit of so much that at the end of the day does not matter or exists on the surface of something far deeper, something more profound and necessary that we are now being asked to remember.
I have been in the void all year. This experience has been such a fascinating, painful, interesting journey. Because every time I feel myself try to exit this space, and go back into my favorite distractions and my favorite habits and my busyness in order to feel good, to feel successful, to feel satisfied, to feel like I'm doing something, I am tugged back here into this space of nothingness. It seems that I'm being asked to sit in the being, in the non-doing, for a bit.
The knowledge we have in the West does not teach us how to pulse.
The information we receive and exchange does not teach us how to be the heartbeat, to be woven into this web of life. Our busyness, these things that we get so consumed with, is our way of ignoring this compounding devastation, this collective grief that is so painful it hurts to touch. As though we know that to fully surrender to it, to feel it fully, would shatter us; would shatter the lives that we have built.
But it also seems that many of us have been slowed down this year. I know that I am not alone in this because I’ve spoken with a lot of people who are also experiencing this phenomenon. Where nothing is happening in the way that I, we, expected. None of the strategies that got me here seem to work anymore.
The truth is that we are being asked to confront the consequences and impacts of the reality we have created, to be with it, and to hear what is speaking at the center of everything.
Because we are at a point where we can no longer afford to ignore it, and we know that.
Because this is not about fixing. This actually isn't about knowing what to do right now, and this isn't about finding a solution. This slowing down is about looking at the unbearable cost of our own actions across all fronts; where we have participated in ways that are not truly aligned with the greater good.
Perhaps it is only from the depths of this heartbreak, this rupture, this interruption of our daily programming that we can begin to reckon with what is really here. This is where new life, new ideas, new ways of being, can spring forth. But as we all know, the only way out is through, and we must go through that.
We must be remade through this process. We must die to our past, to a way of being that has expired, that has exhausted us and has exhausted the Earth. We have to die to this way of doing reality.
Otherwise, there is no new beginnings. There is no being born again into this new Earth that everyone talks about.
I want to invoke the Daguerre creation story, because it is quite ironic and hilarious. Because when you think about most religious creation stories here in the West, the whole storyline is that man is on top. Humans are God's special favorite.
But in the Dagara creation story, human presence was an unplanned, last-minute fix that ended up situating humankind as misbegotten on our earth. Everything was fine, everything was good – and then humans arrived on the scene. Humans were not part of the initial creation story and vision. As my teacher Mark writes in his book: "They were neither envisioned, desired or necessary.”
Instead, humans are forced to humbly contextualize themselves within this reality where they were unwanted, not needed.
The Dagara call humans “last born”, which means that humans have little to discover, lay claim to, or hope for as they walk the earth. They were created too late and with no clear niche. And while this might feel kind of a bummer, I found a lot of joy hearing this.
What would it mean to our collective, planetary story to decenter the story of humans?
I mean, look at us. No clear niche is right. We have shat the litter box something good, and now here we are, looking around, acting as though we are supposed to be the center of the cosmos – and yet we very clearly haven't found our rightful, respectful place in the greater web. That seems very evident to me by the way that we destroy and abuse and treat our planet. As though it is the afterthought.
When maybe the afterthought is us.
What this creation story gives to the Dagara is a different sense of identity, this unbelonging. This tending to that unhealed wound of, How do we actually earn our place?
They ask themselves, How do we be valid? How do we be useful and beneficial to this world, to gain entrance to what is already perfect, complete, and whole?
That is a profound rearranging of status.
One of the difficult teachings finding me this year has been: How do I decenter myself?
A lot of us, even if it is unconscious, center our selfhood. That is what the West does. It is our individualist doctrine. We put the human as the pinnacle of evolution, the center of everything. But what if we removed ourselves from that stance, that epicenter, and put ourselves back into a more horizontal reality where we are no better or worse than anything else?
What would it look like for us to work harder for the right to be here instead of assuming that we are gifted, that belonging is a given, that we are entitled to this place?
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The second piece that spoke up was JAAR, which represents spiritual filth.
I love this piece. It's a very powerful piece, and what it spoke of is that all actions – big ones, small ones, unconscious ones, intentional ones – generate far reaching consequences beyond their immediate, identifiable purview. I want you to think about a drop of rain landing in the ocean. Insignificant, maybe, but it still casts a ripple that keeps traveling far beyond that immediate, tiny drop in some way; creating a seismic change in the whole and altering it forever.
This is how everything works.
Whatever you do has immense consequences, far beyond your seeing, your sensing, your knowing.
Do you walk as though you know this?
Supremacy in all forms is a disease of the soul. Human supremacy is the greatest disease this planet has ever known.
Is there something in you that believes that your life, your agenda, your needs, your story, is greater than the life of a tree or an ant or a river? Where in you persists an idea that anything is owed to you, that anything is yours?
You belong to nature. Nature does not belong to us.
And once again, let me invoke the animist cosmology, which is that nothing is outside the circle. The circle must include everything otherwise that is not wholeness, and it is wholeness that restores. Everything here – even the ugliness, even the suffering, even the garbage, even the microplastics – is part of our work. Without that essential recognition nothing is in balance.
We do not get to heal outside of that.
What is the point of turning away from the garbage and the rot and only focusing on ourselves?
This belief – that everything counts – is the fundamental ontological orientation of animism, and of most indigenous people. Humans are the original sacred custodians of this earth. That is the endowment we incarnated with. That is the collective spiritual mission beyond your personal soul mission; that is what unites us as a global people.
The indoctrination and subsequent disconnection of pillaging religions and belief systems that elevated God in the sky above us, instead of eye-to-eye with all that is around us has fundamentally shifted our conception of what was sacred, of what was ours to care for, and what was worth protecting and praying to.
My teacher talks a lot about horizontal consciousness versus vertical consciousness, and you can feel the difference just in acknowledging the difference. Vertical consciousness is monolithic. It is hierarchical. There is supremacy built into it, and it fundamentally shifts how we orient to the earth, toward each other, to that which we do not understand or recognize as valid or real or essential.
Whereas with horizontal consciousness, we are all at the same level – the big and the small, the significant and the insignificant.
By necessity, it is a de-centering and an inclusiveness that is so radical that it will remake your consciousness.
Our hearts, our minds, and our spirits, have been colonized by these wayward, virulent belief systems, and we are being asked now to clean them, to repair them, and to re inhabit our ancient ancestral heart.
If you find yourself crying or grieving as you contemplate this or while you do the following rituals, you are on your way home.
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What we will talk about now is a series of rituals and messages that are designed to clean your heart, your mind, and your spirit, because the beings made very clear that is what is needed for us to begin our work.
So the first ritual I will offer is that it is very good and necessary to be in the habit of laying your heart on the earth. It is so simple. But I can't tell you how many people I talk to who can't find five minutes to take their shoes off and lay their body down.
We are so busy, we are so distracted, we are so disconnected that even this action feels like too much. Are you too busy to heal? So as often as you can, when you remember, lay your heart on the earth, skin to the skin, to entrain your system with energies and memories that existed long before you. To reconnect with the pulse, the heartbeat that exists both inside and outside of you. Be in the habit of offering your body back to the dirt, even if just for five minutes. This will start to clean you.
You can also gather dirt from a wild place, from your backyard or a park. If you have access to the place where you were born, your childhood home, this is even more powerful soil, because it remembers you.
Gather this dirt and make a poultice.
You can blend it with water, your spit, your blood. If you don't want to prick your finger or put your moon blood in there, you can use hibiscus, which is a sacred stand in for blood. And I want to be really clear about the fact that when we offer our blood, it is a bond, it is a vow. It is not to be taken lightly.
So you can make this poultice out of these ingredients, and you can put it on your heart and let it dry, and before it dries, you can speak out loud and ask it to help pull out any diseased ideas or beliefs that sever or block your connection to the earth mother.
And finally, we often talk about where we come from, where we live, and I know many of us here do not have access to our childhood homes, our actual ancestral homelands, and that is a deep pain in and of itself.
But instead of saying “I live here in Washington, DC”, I invite you to say “I belong to this place.”
I belong to this earth, right here. I belong to this land. You do not need to know the native names. You can simply frame your words as “I belong to this place”, because you do.
Something I see a lot in spiritual communities is this idea of traveling somewhere else to have a spiritual experience of the sacred – to connect with this holy lands of Bali or Costa Rica or Egypt. But we are missing the actual point. You are here, and you belong to this place here, and there is a reason you are here, because this place needs you and your medicine as it is, as you are.
All places are holy places, if we have the eyes to see them, and we must start seeing all land as holy.
Otherwise we are just simply reinforcing another form of supremacy and severance that only injures us.
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The next piece that spoke is MONG, which stands for healing.
And so we will now talk about the mind.
The good news is that within you is a blueprint. You were born with this blueprint. This template, this blueprint, was decided upon before you incarnated between you and the ancestors, because we are all here to continue some of the deep work of our lineage. The gifts and the wounds that you incarnated with are a part of this ancient plan.
So this soul blueprint is your original instructions. And many of us stray from this over time. Many of us forget this. Some of us are actually severed from it. We are cut off from our own instinctual, intuitive knowing at a very young age. Maybe this happened to you.
And so some of our work is to recover and to remember and to come back into deep alignment and coherence with this blueprint, because the violent and virulent nature of our current human story creates such strong conditioning.
And the best way that I have to describe what happens is using technological metaphors in that you are like a computer, right? You have a set of hardware, but we have to program this hardware. Programs can be installed and de-installed.
You entered this world uncorrupted. You had what you needed. You had the instructions to function perfectly, but then your family, or your community, or the overculture, or the religion that you were born into, installed a faulty program full of viruses and you started running this malware, this incomplete idea, to the point that you started identifying with it, perpetuating it, believing it. It was kind of impossible not to. So forgive yourself.
If this experience is true for you, this is part of your work. This program is not of you, and it is not yours, and you do not need to carry it. This is also something that you can give back to the earth, to return to the source, to let it be digested back into the greater field, to be returned to love.
This programming does not need to persist within you.
There are ways to reset this original encoding, to defrag your hard drive, so to speak. And this is a ritual to do that. This ritual has been coming up a lot for people, because I think many of us are in need.
What you are asked to do is to find a clear crystal quartz point because crystals are programmable. They represent the integrity of the whole. They are uncorrupted. That is what crystals do, they take living memory, living knowledge, and they hold it in an uncorrupted format.
So acquire this clear crystal. Make it something that you can hold, right? It doesn't need to be a piece of selenite that's bigger than your leg. Print out your birth chart. You will take your printed birth chart and this crystal out to an area where they can rest on the earth uninterrupted and undisturbed for a full moon cycle. Ideally, you put them out there on the new moon, and they stay out there until the full moon. Even if you don't have a backyard or private places, you will find a way. Maybe it is even gathering wild earth and putting it on a platter in your house. But either way, whatever you do, you want this crystal to have access to the moonlight and to the earth.
You will place that crystal on top of these charts, right in the center, on top of the earth. You will speak out loud into this crystal, asking it to absorb and be programmed with this original soul blueprint, with the memory of what you came here to carry, to hold the constellation of your truth and your gifts as it was ordained at the beginning.
Then you will make an offering to the first ancestors, the Nyamping.
They are star beings, and I will share a quote now from Mark's book that describes a little bit more about the Nyamping and why we are being asked to work with them.
"The Nyamping are extremely old ancestors who have been liberated from the onus of biography – the first, first, first of your line. They are part of an undifferentiated pool of the very old of an ancestral family, and they are deeply committed and entirely in service, having shed all traces of selfhood, identity, ego, desire and so on. This frees them to be wholly of service to their lineage, to you. They are a pure, simple and selfless being, hard working and quietly noble. Nyamping are key guides in times of death and transition. They are the trusted escorts for us.”
And I find that whenever I'm asked to do soul blueprint work, it is with Nyamping, because they are the ones that hold this frequency, this energy, for us. Even if we forget.
So you will make an offering to these first ancestors. You don't need to call them Nyamping. You can just say: to the old, old ones, to the first ancestors of my line, who hold the knowing of this blueprint. You will offer them clear spirits: vodka, gin, mezcal, it must be clear. Offer them clear spirits and a plate of food that you have cooked, and leave this with the crystals for at least 24 hours.
And if you are in a wild place you can just leave the food, but if it is somewhere in your home, I recommend letting that rest with the crystal for 24 hours, and then to put it somewhere out in the wild. We never want to throw offerings in the garbage.
Now you will leave those offerings for 24 hours, but you will leave the crystal and the charts in place for a full moon cycle. And when that moon cycle has completed, your crystal is programmed. It is holding this blueprint, and now you must use it. Sleep with it under your pillow. Hold it when you make decisions, when you are in difficult conversations, when you are making decisions about your life, when you are taking action. Bring it with you into ceremony. Put it on your altar. Ask it questions. Ask it to help you. Bless it. Offer your prayers to it and see what happens.
There is not one specific right way that it will work with you. It will work with you – so see what emerges, what comes forth.
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The next piece that spoke is called Broken Earth, and it is similar to the tower card in tarot.
I love the tower card.
And what Broken Earth means, in essence, is that something must fall apart in order for it to fall together at a deeper level. And as you are probably feeling, seeing, sensing, knowing, a lot is falling apart in our world right now, maybe a lot is falling apart in your world right now.
This piece is inviting us to be in our center, to be grounded, to be steady, to be stabilized when great chaos is occurring all around us. It serves no one, especially you, to subscribe to these chaos stories, these intense and immense stories that are playing out.
You must learn to hold the pose.
This teaching has been coming for me all year, all fucking year. I call it “sensei pose”, which literally means sometimes it feels like balancing on one foot, as tidal waves are trying to crash over me, as I am screaming, as I am despairing, and yet I remain steady in my pose, in my trust.
Because this time is our sensei training.
This time is for cultivation of spiritual warriorship. And I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that things are not going to get easier anytime soon. They are not going to get more coherent. We are not yet in the Endarkenment.
And as someone who works with spirits, I have access sometimes to teachings and knowings that are not pleasant to receive, and that is one of them. We are not yet in the actual and Endarkenment of this time. The curtains are just starting to open and we are looking into the belly of the beast. We are looking at the true nature of what we are going to reckon with.
And there is more, more will come. More will test you. More will try and destabilize you.
Pressure is meant to collapse and to compress, but also to refine and to reveal. This is your diamond that is being birthed. The fragile, unsustainable, incoherent structures must and will collapse. That is the only way we will see what is true, what is real and what is ours, what is sustaining.
Do not be one of these fragile structures.
Refuse to give your power away to things that are meant to distract you. Do not diffuse your strength, your focus, your presence, your conviction, because the things around you cannot find their balance, their center. At the center of every tornado, every whirlpool, there is an immense calm.
Let that be you.
Do not waste time berating yourself or punishing yourself that is not helpful, that is not serving you.
Use every mirror, every window, every doorway, to look at yourself, to investigate what in you needs refinement, needs resourcing, needs replenishment, needs support, needs healing, in order to stand in your center. Know what your center feels like and trust it.
If you do not reinforce your internal architecture, you will be swept away.
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The last piece that piece that spoke is Siura. It represents soul fragments.
At the end of the day, we are here. We incarnated for the great work and the great work is not just about saving ourselves.
It is about saving everything.
I had a divination recently with someone and the spirits talked at great length about how you are no longer just polishing your little stone. You are polishing a great stone, the stone of humanity. When you get to a certain point in your healing, that is what you are tasked with doing.
When you finally stabilize enough that you can give more to the collective, your work will take on a greater dimension, a greater responsibility, and it must be that way. Because here in the West, we do not have many elders to carry this work, to carry us. Our self work alone neglects the immense responsibility of all the relationships that we are woven into, and that create and maintain wholeness at every level.
And I know that we know this, right? Like conceptually I'm here for everything and everyone. But when the shit hits the fan, it's easy to forget that. When we are stressed, when we are dysregulated, when we are in victim mode, it is easy to forget.
Another important aspect of the Dagara creation stories is that God, the divine, has little power or relevance. Instead, what takes precedence, what is primary, is EVERYTHING else, everything that is here on this planet that they are in contact with, that they are in relationship with.
There's something so beautiful about that, because I often encounter people who come at me with some ignorant beliefs that somehow this medicine is occult or demonic or evil. I had a man say to me the other day “I'm only interested in being in connection with the Divine.” And I did my best not to laugh in his face, because that is not serving the healing of this relationship to the whole. It triggered the fuck out of me, because I look around and think, “What is the divine if it doesn't include everything here?”
That is just another tactic, that is just another severance that removes you from the conversation that we need to be having with one another and with ourselves.
And I recognize how easy it is to subscribe to that belief system, that hierarchy. The Dagara spend most of their day maintaining a vast, complex network of relationships that dictate their time, awareness and attentions, and they are in communication with a vast realm of spirits. Time moves differently in Dagaraland because of this. There is not one thing, one king, making decisions or governing everything.
Everything is part of that conversation.
And because of this way of life, the Dagara are so deeply woven into their community that to have more status, more abundance, more blessings than anyone else would simply not be tolerated. I want you to think about that. I'm going to share a quote that Mark included in his book that is attributed to anonymous. I don't know who stated it, but it is one that really hit me deeply.
“As an aside we should reflect on the American dream. For many it is to amass enough wealth and power to be entirely self sufficient, to not need to depend on anyone. This demented dream relies on power and material things to achieve independence, not on relationship and collaboration to achieve its ends. It is, however, a very lonely destination. Wealth is nothing but an absence of people.”
That last line really rocked me.
Does any of our stories matter if they take precedence over someone else's, if they are more important than someone else's? Does any of our success matter if it doesn't raise up our networks, our communities, someone across the world who is struggling?
Power is a greatly misunderstood and abused concept in the West, all over the world, but especially in the West, because true power is never an isolated or individual event. It does not just live within us. So much of my work has been about power, so much about my healing has been about reclaiming power, and because of this, power has been one of my greatest, most humbling teachers.
Because true power is always wielded in service or against others – period.
If we amass power, if we have claimed our power, if we are standing in our power, how are we using that power to protect what is greater than us, to protect those who are more vulnerable than us?
Power must be used in service to the collective.
Otherwise power will destroy, decay, rot, become infected, and you can see that happening. Look at all these people in power in the west. It is deeply infected because it does not concern anyone but them and the amassing of wealth. In service of what? Living on an island while everyone else dies?
What inheritance is that?
Because power is infectious, it can be a healing infection or a corrosive infection. Power breathes, it incepts, it instigates. It inspires. This is why resistance movements and war are always expressions of power.
If your power, your success, your opportunity, includes more than yourself, it will be greatly supported and expanded in ways that you can't even fathom. And the last thing I want to say is that how we use our power will impact our personal karma.
If your power contributes to and benefits the whole, if it brings healing and goodness to the collective, it will heal you at the soul level.
If your power contributes to the injury, decimation, or suppression of others, it will lead to disease at the soul level.
You must think in greater arcs of time. Lifetimes, because that is the arc of karma. What you do now will inspire your next life. Your service, your contributions, will be paid forward in dividends that are recognized at higher levels and dimensions. It is not always the immediate reward that we are aiming for.
So it is time. It is time to start thinking as a collective being, as a cell. You are a cell inside of a greater entity. It is time for us to stop our self servicing.
Everyone has a power place or several. Again – think back to, “What do I belong to?” That is your power place. I never expected to be in Washington, DC, but here I am – because this is a place I now belong to, because it needs my gifts. It needs my skills. This place is where all of a sudden, all of the medicine and what I carry made sense. This place is not where I wanted to be, but once I got over myself, I started to see all the richness, all the opportunity, the abundant forms of possibility that were waiting for me – because I belong here. I belong to it, and my medicine is needed. My gifts are needed.
Don't resist this. Embrace this.
Become like a tree that is planted, that gives back, that breathes oxygen into the ecosystem. And the last thing I want to say is a quote that when I read it, I just was like, wow, I can't say it better.
“As the natural world recedes for us in the West, and the machine based nanosphere explodes around us, we have deprioritized the genius of our body, our senses, our animal inheritance as well as our connection to the physical realms, especially our Earth. It's as if we are trying to uninhabit our physical selves and disappear into the other realm of ones and zeros. We unconsciously, or maybe consciously, dematerialize. We de-mother ourselves.”
So I offer this medicine to you, these rituals to you, in the hopes that you might remother yourself back into this web, back into relationship, to find your place, where you belong.
And the question I will leave you with is this: What is the greater wholeness you are committed to serving? To who and what do you belong?
May you serve this without hesitation and without question.