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Video Summary: Several blogs ago, I talked about the different levels of consciousness that human beings reside in. I spoke about the challenge of relating to someone who is in a different level of consciousness than you because you're essentially in different realities and experiencing the world very differently. Today, I want to talk about inhabiting different levels of consciousness ourselves. When we grow spiritually, we rise to higher levels of consciousness. All of us h

Video Summary: I'm going to start with a story that actually happened this past week. I work at a hospital in Medford, Oregon, and it is going through some serious financial challenges. We got a new CEO in, and he is saying everything's on the table for cuts, and there have been layoffs. And… my coworkers are freaking out. Many of them are younger than I am and haven't been through something like this before. Several supervisors called a meeting to update the staff on where t

Video Summary: The holidays are a big deal at the emotional level. We can rationalize our way out of this. We can be a Scrooge. We can say the holidays are no big deal. It's just another day. I work the holidays. I've heard all of these and used most of them. I found out the hard way that the holidays really did mean a lot to me. It’s natural to spend the holidays with the people who are the most important to us. It’s who we choose to be with on this special day. Yet sometime

Video Summary: A concept that I call contracts is very useful to understand some of the dynamics that happen in relationships. Contracts are agreements that we create with someone else in a relationship. This could be any type of close relationship, including romantic, parent, child, sibling, work, or friend. My premise is that all relationships are contractual. When we create a relationship, we establish agreements or contracts in that relationship. Some of those contracts a

Video Summary: The Medicine Wheel moves through the seasons of the year. The east represents springtime, where we initiate our new intention for the year. We develop and learn about that in the south and summer. The west and fall are where we harvest and glean value from the things we cultivated throughout the year. As we move into winter, we're going back into that time of introspection between this cycle and the new cycle next spring. So right now we're moving from the west

Video Summary: We're taught from a young age about how to accomplish something. It's often an intellectual, memorization-based approach that gets indoctrinated in school. You learn about something and take a test to prove that you've learned it. Then, when we get into the work world, we have projects we're working on, and we build upon things to accomplish them. You do A, which leads to B, and there's a step-by-step linear process. If you're building a house, you build the fo

Video Summary: The term sacred circle comes from the shamanistic tradition that I've practiced for years. Our sacred circle is the place where we hold our preciousness, beauty, and the things that are most important to us. It includes things that matter most to us and that we care a lot about. We may have spent years figuring out what these things are and awakening these things. They might include how we feel about our family, significant other, children, and pets. It may als

One of my favorite teachings is that people will always show you who they are. It's become my truth as I've noticed it over the years. People show us who they are through their actions. Even if they're being deceptive or manipulative, they’ll still show us who they are if we hang out with them and pay attention. Yet what I've found is we often do not see them as they are. So I wonder, where is the breakdown? And I'm talking about intelligent people with lots of clarity, intui

Video Summary: The coyote, in my tradition and in many Native American and shamanic traditions, is the trickster that helps you see the things you have difficulty accepting about yourself. He shows you the things that you don't want to look at. He does this so you accept the things you would like to have for yourself. The coyote's healing power is that it brings awareness to unconscious patterns and issues. He shines light into the darkness so you can see the things getting i

Video Summary: The invitation of this spiritual inquiry is to consider whether each of the things presented is something that's outside of you, inside of you, or both. Do you experience it outside of yourself or inside of yourself? I want to apply this to a few things. The first of which is truth- specifically the experience of truth. So does truth happen outside of you or inside of you? Say you read or hear a spiritual teaching and you have an epiphany. What is the truth? Is

Video Summary: Collaborative creation is when we offer an intention, it interacts with Spirit or the universe, and then Spirit offers doorways and experiences that allow our intention to unfold and take form in our lives. In contrast, willful creation is when we envision a specific goal and make it happen. Collaborative creation can take you places beyond what willful creation can because you're teaming up with Spirit. Collaborating with Spirit allows you to unfold things tha

Video Summary: As we grow as human beings, we move through different levels of consciousness. Piaget’s developmental psychology described moving from the concrete operational stage with black-and-white thinking to the formal operational stage with gray thinking. This is moving from one level of consciousness to another. We also move into higher levels of consciousness as we grow spiritually. It's almost like moving into a different dimension that has a totally different vibra