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Happy January! We're in the north on the Medicine Wheel, which is winter time and post-holidays. This represents a time of introspection where we have the opportunity to look at, reevaluate, and understand ourselves at a deeper level. This year, I've been noticing how we as human beings leak our personal power. This is important because if we notice how we leak our personal power, we get the choice to not do that anymore. When we're not aware of how we leak our personal power

Video Summary: Happy New Year, happy 2024. It's the perfect time of year for new promptings, visions, and glimpses of your new life to come to you. It could be things that you'd like to have in your life. It might be: “I'd like to get to know him/her/them better,” “I'd like to dance more,” or “I'd like to spend more time in nature." Unfortunately, we often experience a fear-based, limiting belief right after we have one of these cool promptings. The belief tells us why we can

Video Summary: Happy belated Winter Solstice- it happened on December 21st. To me, the Winter Solstice is about the first light. It's a celebration of the light. This is a little paradoxical because the Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year. But it's a celebration of the return of the light, the new light, the light of the next cycle. The new light is the energy of your new life, your new way of being. It's the energy of the next cycle that you're being introduced t

Video Summary: I want to talk about what I think is one of the most frustrating and misunderstood parts of spirituality and making change. I'm referring to making a change in the way you see yourself and the world. So you’re changing your reality, or what is sometimes called, moving from one level of consciousness to another. The proof in the pudding is holding the things you want in the new level of consciousness, the new reality. This can be challenging because we have a li

Video Summary: The essence of Bear Medicine in my tradition is true strength. The bear can be the clown of the forest because it has no natural enemies. So it has nothing to defend and nothing to prove. So it can just be itself. It trusts itself at a really deep level that it can handle whatever comes along. The secret weapon of bear medicine is security. It is secure and confident in itself. Therefore, it can be purely authentic. There's no need for pretense. There's no need

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