Shamanism & Spritual – Lisa Z. Lindahl

December 21, 2017December 17, 2017

Winter Solstice 2017

The celestial doings in our corner of the Cosmos often pique my own doings. The Winter Solstice, when the light begins to gain time in our days, is one of those significant “doings.” Light lifts me up, extroverts me, helps me.

“From out of the deepest, darkest night of the year comes a “new-born” sun, full of promise for days of greater light and warmth. It is this event that symbolically reminds us that light comes out of our darkness, the chaos of our lives, the heartbreak and the pain we sometimes endure. Yule is about promise.”
-From Wicca: A Year and a Day, by Timothy Roderick

As is traditional, at least for me, I use this time to reflect. Try to get up & out of the rut of my daily thinking and habits and take a look at this life I am living.

What am I liking these days?
What am I avoiding lately?
How’m I doing with that whole procrastination thing I’m prone to…
What are my actions saying that my words aren’t?
And the ever popular: that which no longer serves me: out!

I have a burn pit in my back yard. It’s not fancy, but oh so effective. It’s not for regular, uh, trash…but special refuse. (Now there is an interesting word, refuse. It can be both a verb and a noun, but basically meaning the same thing! I use it here as the noun).

Special refuse: things that once held a special place or meaning that must now be given up to disengage from any energetic hold they may have on/with me. To make space for anything new, a Solstice Burn is a cleansing, of sorts…

…Old drawings. Love letters from sundry exes. Recipes never successful in my kitchen. Years ago an acquaintance once burned 3 years worth of her old diaries at my Winter Solstice burn pit, the handwritten pages sparking, charring and flaring up into the night sky.
This year it will be just me at the burn pit. I will feed it some artwork, the crinoline from my wedding dress, and reams and reams and reams of papers with once meaningful words on them.

It will all be transformed in my heart, a fire feast to feed the returning light. To clear away the darkness that resides not on the physical plane, but in the energetic one…
…in our little corner of the Cosmos.

April 23, 2017

Matter vs. Consciousness as the Chicken & the Egg

In our current age of the almighty Reason and Logic, everything has been about matter. You know, stuff — the physical world. If you can see, touch, measure it – then it is real. Our reality is made up of atoms and photons, wavicles and quarks that form earth and stars and plastic, music and lipstick. Matter is primary…Right?

Not so much anymore. This is currently under debate. Consciousness is giving Matter a run for its, er, money.

In philosophical, spiritual and I guess quantum physics circles the debate is raging: which is primary: matter as we have always thought, or in fact consciousness?

The theory of the primacy of consciousness (vs. the long-standing incumbent Primacy of Matter) states that it is consciousness that’s responsible for creating reality. Under this thought it might be a “divine consciousness” that creates reality as easily as it may be any individual consciousness creating their reality. So, Joe Pizza Guy and God are co-creating our world. Well, that could explain a lot.

Kidding (?) aside, there is the popular doctrine that holds we all do carry a spark of the divine. So maybe the fact that we are busy creating what we call reality is that very spark of the divine that is being referenced? The god/goddess within creating our physical world?

A big but: if our understanding of what it is to conscious is to be aware of something, then how did that something come into being in the first place? It is a chicken or the egg conundrum. So these questions evolve:

can we have a consciousness without anything to be conscious of?
Does consciousness imply an observer and observed?
Or is consciousness by its very nature “aware” of and in fact is the wholeness that we name the Oneness…the very Isness?
In other words, is the state of awareness as pure consciousness experiences it foreign to the concept of duality so inherent in our matter-driven psyches?

To this last question I say yes, I think so. I think the human brain, so busy differentiating for, among other things, the love of control and organization cannot easily grasp that consciousness is a very different chicken. There is no “other.”

There is no other. That is the essence, the beauty of consciousness.

Why spend time pondering such?

Because we humans are evolving. Our consciousness, specifically, is evolving. To even make that statement can bring up a slew of questions for those who haven’t yet explored this area, as well as for those who have. Part of the current cultural unrest we are experiencing is that the tug between what I will call “old conscious” (and I do not mean this judgmentally, it is just an expression to delineate parts of a dynamic) and this consciousness evolution. Both live in individuals but also get expressed among like-minded others and result in a “group-think.”

None of this is bad. It can just become uncomfortable. Sometimes very uncomfortable. So some of us spend time pondering the ol’ chicken and egg…

Your thoughts?

December 21, 2014

Winter Solstice

YAY! This day has always been special to me. Where I live on the planet, the Winter Solstice in December is the shortest day and the longest night. After the Solstice, the days start to become longer, nights shorter. Light is in ascendance. For this I celebrate.

A bit of factoid trivia: “solstice” has its roots in latin, and means to stand still. To early humans, the sun seemed to stay in one place for several days twice a year — in December and again in June — before continuing its travel across the skies. Hence our twice-yearly solstices.

I revel in sunlight. It instantly lifts my spirit. As one teacher put it, “the Sun is the Master Shaman.” The master healer, medicine being, bringer of Beauty.

Enjoy the day. Celebrate our natural cycles and the return of the light, once again.

photo by Lisa Lindahl — Winter sun in the South

November 14, 2014

Core Shamanism

Some people’s eyes glaze over when one brings up the term “shaman”, or shamanism. That’s the best case, actually. Many others equate it with superstition, woo-woo crazies or witchcraft.

Shamanism exists everywhere on the globe, and has for thousands of years. It is about humankind’s relationship with the natural world and our spiritual connection with other sentient beings. Shamanism, at its core, is a healing modality. A term floating around these days is “Neoshamanism”, referring to modern folk who follow particular cultural patterns and practices of Shamanism. While familiar with Neoshamanism, I am currently studying what is called “Core Shamanism.”

There is a link, I find, between the awareness and the practice of True Beauty and the shamanistic viewpoint — so I explore this path. But the best description I have found of Core Shamanism — thoughtful and far more comprehensive than my quickie definitions above, was written by Judy Tsafrir, a fellow student in this journey (no pun intended, really). Please read the link for a truly fascinating Post about Shamanism by a Boston psychiatrist, Judy Tsafrir, MD.

If Judy’s article piques your interest, below find a link to Michael Harner’s new book, Cave and Cosmos. Harner is the the anthropologist who founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS). Check it out!