Blog

Video Summary: I want to talk about personal ethics. My premise is that our ethics are personal in that they're specific to us. And not only that, they're specific to how we are right now. My ethics are different now than they were 20 years ago, or even five years ago. The first way this shows is that expecting another person to have the same ethics as you do is unrealistic. Our Judeo-Christian culture sees ethics in an absolute, right-and-wrong way. What’s really going on is

Video Summary: I think everyone, in one sense or another, has had dreams in their life that they were really passionate about. It could have been when you were a little kid wanting to be an astronaut or a princess. It could be later in adolescence, in college, or in the early twenties. It's this thing that you were fired up about, and there was a lot of fire in your belly around it. It could have been music, art, social activism, dancing, or sports. Maybe you were on a really

Video Summary: One of the things I prescribe to my clients in sharing circles, sessions, and retreats is a practice I call matching investment. The idea is to naturally interact with someone, notice the level of energy and investment that comes back from them, and then match it. By investment, I mean an investment of energy, time, money, commitment, and caring. These qualities require emotional energy. We work hard to generate and invest this precious energy, and we only get

Video Summary: I just gave a talk on the Aboriginal Dreamtime, shamanic ceremony, and the spring equinox. It was a free introduction on Zoom for the Spring Equinox retreat that I'm going to facilitate in the Ashland, Oregon area, March 23rd through the 26th, here in a couple of months. I'm really excited about it, and the people who participated were excited about it, which made it even better. And more importantly, they asked some really cool questions. And it's always when

Video Summary: Intuitive learning is the learning of the body. This becomes useful as we start going through life with an open heart, allowing ourselves to feel and trust our intuition. With intuitive learning, the body is learning by getting a feel for it rather than learning with our intellect. We were conditioned in grade school to learn through intellectual learning. Unless we were learning to play a musical instrument, in the woodshop, or figuring things out, we weren't

Video Summary: Another aspect of this time of introspection over the winter is that it's a really opportune time for healing. When our heart is open, and we're allowing energy in, we may get triggered or spun out. We go into our stuff. We may get angry, scared, reactionary, or judgmental. You could think of it as we're allowing energy in, and it hits a wound. When someone says or does something that hurts our feelings, rubs us the wrong way, or offends us, it may be an indica

About 30 years ago, we gathered to do a ceremony during the Summer Solstice. We often begin such retreats sitting around the fire, doing a sharing circle, pondering such questions as, What's in your heart? What have you been experiencing? Or, what are you hoping to awaken during this retreat? At this gathering, however, our teacher just looked at us and said, "This year I want to know something different. What do you bring to ceremony this year?" We were a bit taken aback as

Video Summary: I want to share a spiritual inquiry that I've been working with. Spiritual inquiry or self-inquiry is when we ask a question to our higher self, spirit, inner consciousness, or intuition, and then wait for an answer. When we allow the answer to come to us, we might experience it in a number of ways. Some of you may know I've been exploring the Australian Dreamtime. In fact, the spring retreat I’m offering in March this year is going to have a Dreamtime theme. T

ideo Summary: In my tradition, coyote medicine shows us the things we don't want to look at and the things we don't want to accept in ourselves. The coyote is the trickster in that he tricks us into seeing things we do not want to see in ourselves. So why would we not want to accept something about ourselves? One reason is that we attach to an emotional transitory state and make it a statement about ourselves. So if we’re experiencing fear, we go to, "I'm a fear-based person,

Video Summary: I want to talk about another dimension of wintertime, which is the time of introspection on the medicine wheel or the wheel of life. The life energy of nature is going inside of us and into the ground. The animals are hibernating and going into the earth. The energy of the trees has moved from the leaves to the trunk and roots. In the wintertime, nature is hibernating and dormant. Its movement and momentum have come to a stop. And that can happen for us because

Video Summary: I've been noticing a tendency for us to evaluate ourselves based on how other people respond to us. This really becomes critical when we're being honest, speaking our truth, being vulnerable, and having a new view of something. When we offer this new view, we look into people's eyes and at their facial expressions to see if they agree that the idea is good. The challenge is that our most innovative and powerful ideas and expressions of our authentic selves are

Video Summary: I've been working on finding the flow of my life in my personal spiritual practice. I work part-time at the emergency room in Bend, and as it turns out, working in the emergency room can be a really good indicator and teacher if I'm in my flow or not. Yesterday I asked a nurse for a hand with a patient, and she simply looked at me and she just said, “No”. I was a little surprised and taken aback, but I just kept moving and found someone else to help me. Later,