shamanic healing

Who is Your Power Animal?

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Your power animal (or spirit animal) may take the form of insect, mammal, reptile, fish, sea creature, amphibian, bird, arachnid. Even extinct or legendary animals may come to you in spirit form.

They may be tiny, shy, sleek, flashy, magnificent, meek, camouflaged, strong and powerful, a hunter, a grazing animal, a nest builder, or burrower, a deep sea diver…

Grasshopper on purple coneflower

To meet your spirit animal, close your eyes and let them come to you. They may not be who you expect! They will choose you, for spirits know what powers you require in your life, what messages what healing energies for your growth and wholeness. They are attuned to you and your spiritual mental, physical and emotional needs.

Be open to whatever creature comes to you. Set aside your logical mind and allow yourself to be curious, without judgment. All creatures have powers and wisdom to share!

Power animals, also called spirit animals or totems have access to spiritual information that humans do not. Human vision and knowledge are limited and Earthbound.

Your spirit animal can help expand your awareness and bring hidden knowledge and wisdom to your life. Ask your power animal how they will work with you, what you can do for them, how to honor and thank them for their service to you.

When you meet your spirit helper in animal form, use your senses to get to know them. Imagine feeling the texture of their coat, their scales or feathers… imagine smelling their scent, hearing their voice. Picture them running, flying, sliding, gliding, crawling, swimming. Imagine the feel of their body heat, or the dry coolness of the skin or scales, the delicacy and fragility of their tiny wings, the sharp claws, the wet nose, the soft fur…

Red winged blackbird
Red wing blackbird

Get to know them. Create a relationship with them by meeting often. You can do this by learning to do shamanic journeys, by writing and asking them questions, by going out in nature, leaning against a tree and tuning in to the wavelength of spirit and asking for their presence.

You must call them in each time you wish to visit and have a question or intention for your meeting. Pay attention to the messages you receive.

Build up your trust in them by meeting often. When you know them well, your power animal will be with you during times of trial, they will be with you when you are sick, they will be with you when you sleep, when you travel.

Orange butterfly on elderberry bush

Your part is to ask for their presence, ask for their advice, ask for their protection…ask for what you need from them. Then use your senses, including your sense of intuition to discern the messages they bring.

A power animal will expand your awareness of what is possible in your life.

Heal yourself, heal the web of life

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In freeing and healing yourself from unhealthy relationships, patterns, beliefs, and situations, you free others. In the web of life, all things, all beings are connected.

In this way miracles happen, coincidences occur beyond your awareness, without your conscious participation.

Set your course for health of mind body and spirit, then trust and allow the mystery to unfold for your highest good and the good of all beings.

Amazing spider web

Set your healing intention into motion, follow the instructions of compassionate helping spirit guides and helpers, and ask for more guidance.

Ask for spiritual guidance. Pay attention!!! Listen and act with integrity. This is all you have to do.

(True spiritual advice will never hint at or ask you to hurt yourself or another, will never ask you to curse anyone, will never advocate hatred or violence.)

When you are compelled to heal and free yourself from unhealthy situations and patterns, you are regaining your power, autonomy, life force, and vitality.

When you free yourself you unlock what may be many lifetime of enchantment. Then like Sleeping Beauty, you wake up the potential and renew the life energy that has been dormant in you

When you do the sometimes lonely and often difficult work of healing by moving closer and closer to your own pure spirit, your own soul, healing your wounded heart and psyche, reweaving the hurt, making yourself whole again, you send ripples of well being and freedom throughout the web of all things, making those broken places stronger and more resilient. Creating wholeness.

Red wing blackbird, bare branches

Through you, others are set free as well if it is their soul level wish. You cannot control the ripples of the web, you cannot control who receives healing. These assignments must remain a mystery to you while you are still in a body. You can only work on behalf of yourself and do what is right for you.

So much is beyond your knowing and control as a human being in a body. Surrender to the mystery!

Rededication

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Jack in the pulpit

We (GCW and Betty) rededicate ourselves to bringing forth messages of nature’s wisdom and loving words of spiritual healing to those who are ready for them. Grandmother Cottonwood authors and transmits the feelings, impressions, images, and information. Betty receives the information and puts it into a form others of her kind can understand.

GCW speaks: My dears, this is first and foremost about love, the framework, the foundation of all that is. I wish to communicate to you the vast incalculable web of love that is woven around and throughout all existence. You are each and every one an integral part of this web. There is no separation, no complete severing of any particle in the universe.

The only separation, if you experience it, exists in your mind and heart. If you think you are separate, if you feel that you have been cast into infinite darkness, you are living in illusion – in your head.

My desire is for you to know the oneness of all things for then you will begin to care for each other with love, not obligation. You will care for the earth with appreciation and partnership, not dominance and destruction. You will care for yourselves with heart expanding joy, and in the joy and appreciation and love you will be made whole and all that surrounds you healed.

When you are love, the reflection you see in the mirror is love. If your reflection is less than love, seek to release the illusions you have taken as beliefs. These beliefs may seem true, but they harm you and do not serve you.

Wake up to the love at your center! Live it!

Fear of moving forward

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GCW speaks of moving past your fears:

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Winter sunshine and shadow

Do you feel stuck in the mud, glued to the spot, relegated to the shadows? Is taking action painful? Do you allow yourself to be distracted by shiny blinking things, physical pain, TV sitcoms, murder mysteries? Do you worry about things that will never come to pass in this world or the next?

If you look in the mirror and see a body and a familiar face looking back at you; if you reach out and touch yourself and feel warm skin and a pulse; if you take sweet air into your lungs and breathe; if you exist in this place and time in a human body, you are meant to take action when inspired. You are meant to move forward into the unknown when called, and fearlessly reinvent yourself in each moment.

You are meant to dissolve the invisible barriers that keep you small. You dissolve unfounded fears by shining a light on them, loving them and moving forward past the doubt, the heaviness in your chest, into what you know in your gut is right for you.

You do this in response to your heart’s desires, the driving force behind all existence. You are spirit and body, and the heart is your navigator. You must get out of your chair, out of your head, and into the place where magic meets the material world. Surrender to your heart. You know it is where your true wisdom lies.

Tap in to the powerful energy of your heart. Listen for guidance. Act!

Getting real

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GCW speaks of getting real:

Touch the blood and sinew, the messy heart of life as you reach closer to the center of yourself where you are real – real with no apology or excuse. In this inner place you are completely and 100% you without baggage, without fear, without agenda. Do this, my dear, and your feelings will flow, your inspirations will guide you, your life will unfold as you have dreamed!

Be willing to face the dark, the mess, the shadow inside, for that is you also. Unite the light and dark in yourself and become whole. If you are afraid, find someone to take your hand and guide you on your soul’s journey. Enter the dark cave and find your way to the light. Healing of the spirit is possible for you in this lifetime.

Being whole feels good! It satisfies your soul, it lifts your heart! You think this being whole is for “holy”, pasty, ephemeral, head-in-the-clouds, deity worshipers, and those who wear saffron robes and chant endlessly… those who have no spark in their eye. Wrong! It is for you – the gutsy, powerful, earthy you who bridges spirit and body, and who has come into this life of blood and bone and muscle and messy emotions on this earth at this time. You are meant to be here now!

Afraid of getting close

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E of central Iowa asks:

Dear GCW, I want several close friends but I’m afraid getting close will cause me to lose part of myself. I feel split in two.

Do you feel you must choose between having a personality and being alone?

You were boxed in and controlled as a child. Other people represented a threat to your spirit, so you had to hide your true self deep within and protect the soft heart and soul, the sweet tender bud of you.

You still keep yourself apart for fear others will steal your soul, but you and you alone are in command of your soul and your life energies! My dear beloved, you are no longer a dependent child. You no longer need to pull in and shield your uniqueness, your true light, your wise self from others who misunderstand you. You’ve been given a body, free will, and you are a soul that will endure beyond the boundaries of time and space. You can learn this now, or in another lifetime. My beloved one, which do you choose?

Hiding your light from others for fear of theft or attack has become a bad habit you first learned as a child for self protection. It is time to reclaim your power to be do and have all you desire, all you are, to live with your dial turned to the highest setting possible! Joy!

Know that you are the captain of your ship now! You too can be fully yourself, surrounded by friends who love you just as you are!

Expand or contract?

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GCW speaks of expansion and contraction:

It has come to my attention that your human hearts, the center of your brilliant selves can expand or contract, depending on the fear or joy you feel. The joyful loving heart fully expanded can encompass the universe and all its inhabitants with light.

Do not think you are insignificant! Do not think your feelings, your transmissions of emotion have no effect, for each of you sends powerful signals to all that is, the the web of all things. Emotion and feeling are the messages. All particles in the universe are affected by you!

Do you wish you hadn’t read that? You can’t go back to pretending you are powerless; you can only move forward with the knowledge that you are a being of light, that you matter, that your existence is meant to be. Step up and claim your power!

When you close your heart to this knowledge and squeeze off the muscles of your chest, cave your shoulders in around your center, shut off your feelings, wall in your energy, you inhibit the flow of your natural joy! You contract and subtract from the sum total of well being available to you and those whose lives you touch and outward into the great web. Perhaps if this becomes a habit, your heart has no choice but disease and decay.

Heal those breeches, tears and blocks in your energy. Turn inward and notice what is happening within you. Healing is possible. Reach out and ask for help so that you too may feel the expansion of love and joy and power throughout your being and have it mirrored back to you ten fold.

You too are a shining star at your core. Allow yourself to know it, feel it, and live it!

An old cliche

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Milkweed blossoms

GCW speaks of an old cliché: “Bloom where you are planted”.

That is the motto of all good plants and rooted things, but for people? Bloom and go where you are called? Then bloom there too?

You have been planted here on the green planet, Earth.  Make the most of your circumstances, let life unfold from your center outward, for it is within your heart that all blooming begins. Your heart, the deep center of you is connected to all that is and if you listen to her quiet messages, you will be steered effortlessly toward your highest good.

So many things pull you away from your true center and heart, the embedded bud of growth within you; sugar, in thousands of tempting disguises, shiny objects, moving pictures on a blinking screen, drinks that inhibit your light, drugs that dim your brilliance, worries that swim and flit in your brain like a school of fish.

My beloved, you are capable of being the light, of transcending those whirlwind thoughts, of gently letting go of those distractions that sap your growth and wilt your blossoms. You have the power to put into perspective those emotions you are afraid will engulf and drown you. You can release the fear, you can let that energy flow harmlessly and release it once and for all! You need not live in fear! Ask for help if it feels too big. No-one on this planet is meant to exist in isolation or live in the dark.

Can you see yourself from a tree’s eye view, a newer, higher, loving and understanding perspective where the entire tapestry and web of existence is visible and your energy is integral to the structure of the weave?

Above all, see yourself with compassion and know you are meant to be here now in all your brilliance. Rooting and growing and blooming with ease and delight is your birthright! Claim and become that! Yes, it is possible for you!

Weather

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GCW Speaks of the weather:

I have noticed how humans love to comment on the weather. It is not often good enough for you is it? It is too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too humid, too windy, too much, not enough.

Can you simply bless each day as it comes to you? Do you know what a blessing each day of this life is? Can you feel the power of the meaning of you in this body in this place at this time? You have chosen to manifest as a physical presence here on this earth! This is an honor to be cherished and acknowledged….but I digress into a speech….

Can you bless even the coldest windiest day of the year? Can you feel joy within you during an overcast week, or is the cloud cover a mirror of your human atmosphere? Have you allowed the clouds of fear and stuffed feelings to accumulate in your energy field until they block your light? Do you clear them? Crying, like rain, can clear and air. Let clearing be your daily practice, for your health and the health of the planet. Simply feel, as you were born to do. Allow yourself to feel. Acknowledge your feelings and locate them in your body, and this will help to clear them.

Hurt no other in this process, for violence of thought word or action is a gross misuse of nature.

What is emotion but energy; like wind and breeze it needs to flow and move. If you stop it up the layers of cloud get thicker and thicker. You may feel a storm coming on. You may feel restless, unhappy, sad confused, anger may build within you if you squeeze and hold back and stifle and pretend it is not what it really is.

You are meant to clear the clouds daily and shine brightly like the sun! Create your own weather! Let it flow and all the earth will be blessed.

Ancestors

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GCW speaks of the ancestors

Do not be alarmed. Your ancestors who have passed on to the light, are with you now, even those from before history was recorded. Does your room feel crowded?

They wish you, embodied in a physical presence, with feet on the earth, the best. They are indestructible spirits (as you are) that continue to learn, grow, that are mightily interested in the unfolding your your lives.

You may feel their loving presence at time when you allow yourself to release human constructed ideas about what is and isn’t real. Get over that! You limit your brains to the concrete physical world and you miss the infinitely wider spectrum of possibilities and relationships and inspirations and love that will flow easily to you. That happens only if you allow it by releasing your grip on the “real” every now and then.

So much is possible! These spirits are not cold scary aloof beings and ghosts, but warm loving and caring helpers! They who have lived in a physical existence time and time again, have made mistakes and experienced fear, but also great love, these ancestors have much to teach us. They desire to assist as you create your loving home, the nurturing safe and beautiful places for all who dwell on this plant.

You are supported, loved and guided by these spirits of light who beam with passion and joy as they witness the unfolding of your lives.