— CULTIVATING STILLNESS: LESSONS FROM THE BHAGAVAD GITA
The Bhagavad Gita was written at a time when the Indian subcontinent was rife with conflict between royal families. As the narrative begins, the archer Arjuna is preparing to do battle against a formidable army of his relatives. It is Arjuna’s...
– How to Become a Shaman
As I speak at live events or teach workshops and seminars for the Four Winds Society, the first question I am often asked is: “What is a shaman?” The next question is, predictably, “How do I become a shaman?” The first step toward joining this...
— The Practice of Beauty
The practice of beauty is the fourth and final practice in The Way of the Hero, the first of four insights that were carefully guarded by the ancient medicine men and women of the Americas. In the Way of the Hero, we learn how to turn wounds into...
— Reading the signs of destiny
For millennia, men and women of wisdom sought to understand the workings of destiny, using various forms of divination to foretell future events or find solutions to problems. Shamans traditionally used bones, crystals, shells, drums, power...
— HEALING TOXIC EMOTIONS TO FIND YOUR HEROIC STORY
Our emotions can make us sick. Shamans understand that most of the problems we face are caused by our unhealed emotions. Emotions are ancient survival programs encoded in the limbic brain, and when toxic emotions dominate your thinking and nervous...
— THE EIGHTH & NINTH CHAKRAS
Some spiritual communities recognize seven chakras. My first mentor, don Antonio, taught me that we have nine chakras. Seven within the physical body, and two outside the body. The eighth chakra, located a few inches above our heads, is where we...
— Meeting don Jicaram and embarking on a never ending journey of beauty
In last week’s blog post, we left off with Professor Antonio Morales and me setting out across the Peruvian altiplano in search of the notorious shaman, don Jicaram. After a week of walking, and much talking, we reached an adobe hut near where the...
— The start of my journey on the path of the shaman: Professor Antonio Morales
In the early 1970s I traveled to Peru with all the earnestness, self-absorption and immodesty of a young maverick. I had been exposed to Afro-Cuban spirituality, with its drum and candle ceremonies, as a privileged child growing up in the city of...
— TRACKING ENERGY: ACCESSING YOUR HIGHER DESTINY
In a previous blog, we learned the technique shamans use to track through our past to find the original source of physical or emotional illness. This same technique can be used to track into the future to access a destiny in which you are healed...
— THE GREATEST LOVE OF ALL
Humans crave love—we just can’t seem to get enough of it. In fact, one of our greatest fears is being rejected by others and ending up alone and unloved—irrational though that fear may be when examined in the light of all the love we have within us...