Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Special Gifts

Tuesday, April 29, 2014



I had an enjoyable Skype conversation with a student of the Foxfire Institute of Shamanic Studies in Berlin, Germany this morning.  It’s always a pleasure to chat with someone who has what I would call soulful eyes.

I first developed an interest in shamanic practices many years ago while studying under the direction of Dr. Colorado.   And yet I believe my sensitivity to phenomena we typically do not perceive in ordinary day to day reality has been with me since I was a child.  One experience in the earliest years of my childhood stands out in particular. 

At the tender age of twenty-three I lived among the Lakota Sioux Native American people on the Rosebud Reservation in southern South Dakota.  I can still vividly recall driving back to the reservation after making a trip out west to the vicinity of Rapid City.  As I drove back amidst a landscape completely empty of human habitation I found myself suddenly overcome by an immense amount of grief.  The grief I felt did not feel as if it belonged to me.  It seemed to me that it was a collective grief experienced by an entire group of people who were no longer living.  I did not see ghosts with my eyes.  I did not hear voices with my ears.  But my heart was telling me a different story.  My heart was telling me I was traversing a landscape that had been the site of much suffering.  I already knew this intellectually.  To feel grief in my heart was another matter entirely.

Looking back in hindsight a number of years later I believe I was experiencing the grief of the Lakota people who lost so much when the Americas were colonized by people not indigenous to the two continents.  How exactly I was able to feel this grief is not something I can easily describe even now.  What is the term for something that extends beyond your individual self?  I believe the term is transpersonal.

My conversation this morning leads me to reflect on the gifts I carry within me.  And I wonder if there are perhaps more gifts inside me than I have consciously been aware of.    Exploring your culture of origin can activate what I would call ancestral memory.  It’s my belief that such memory may literally reside encoded within our DNA.


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