shamanic healing

Christmas tree farm

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment

2015-11-28 12.30.21GCW speaks of a Christmas tree farm. (with guest help from evergreen tree spirits)

This farm is such a place of beauty and serenity. We are a community with trees of different ages, shapes, sizes, colors, and varieties of evergreen so beautifully kept and nurtured for your human delight and enjoyment. You beautify this corner of the earth through your farming, and you spread the joy for miles around. This is a sacred place.

We (evergreen tree spirits) bless you with our heady scent, the texture and beauty of our green leaves, thin and short, long and soft, the sticky sweet sap, the sharing of your holiday season.

2015-11-28 12.41.32

You bring us into your home and we bring you joy! Human tree interactions at their best! Our greenery decorates and freshens your spaces, giving you hope in the cold, dark and gray time, when most green things have died or gone to sleep. You are welcome!

We love you! Even when you come and cut us down, another of your kind will plant seedlings next year to continue the cycle of yearly blessings. You make a fuss for us. You bring more of us to life on this farm than would grow naturally. We are given more chances to feel the sun and rain, the cold winter winds, to witness the lightning in summer, to feel the thunder, to know the earth supporting our roots and pulling them toward her loving center, to be fed by the rains, to sense the wheeling hawk and vulture above, to support nests for lively songbirds, to shelter the little furry ones that come and make their home here among us. This life on earth is precious and not to be missed!

Remember the earth in which we grow and receive our sustenance. Give us back to the earth when you are finished with your holiday, and we will feed next year’s growth.

Focus

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment

DSCN1858

GCW speaks of focus:

All of your being- mind, body, spirit, and heart is concentrated in this moment. That is focus. With focus you are doing one thing. ONE THING. You and the one thing become one and form a unified field. Whatever you are doing – writing, playing a new piece on the piano, knitting a sweater, raking leaves, conversing with your beloved grandchild, washing the floor, the entire beingness that is you is doing only that. “Multitasking” as you humans call it, is for those who with to diminish their power and effectiveness.

With focus you become like a column or beam of light. All other thoughts, actions, words leave your mind as you do what you have been created to do; be fully present here and now in this moment. Your full attention is required to do your best work and live your lives fully!

Do you find it difficult or nerve wracking to pull yourself together and let go of those extra thoughts and ideas and sudden feelings that distract you from the very power you came here to express? The oneness of purpose that is required to keep your focus?

Practice! For only you have access to the power of your physical being. Take it slowly, put down the shiny thing in your hand, unplug your ears from the music player, bring your scattered self into your heart center where all is one; where your true power resides

Now, focus on the one thing you’ve chosen. It could be your breath, a new song to learn, enjoying your child’s beauty and perfection, an intricate knitting pattern you want to learn, a round of yoga poses- the list is infinite, as you are.

This is a paradox. Learn to focus your awareness in the here and now and feel your life expand into new dimensions!

The spirit world

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment
Tree as healer

Tree as healer

GCW speaks of the spirit world

My dears, there is no separate “world” in which spirits are confined! All things that you can see taste touch small and hear are so much more than the outward physical manifestation you sense with your bodies.

When you tune into your feelings, when you observe your thoughts, you are tuning into your own delightful energy – AKA spirit! Yes, you are spirit as well as body! Understand, feel, know and sense that and you will deepen and enrich your earthly experience beyond measure.

As you become more sensitive, you will begin to open a window to the wider spectrum of experience. You will begin to know what lies beyond the everyday experience of the physical world. You will be shown the underpinnings of this life, the source in which all things are one.

You cannot be told! You must experience and travel this path for yourself. A teacher can guide you if you flounder and resist. But know this: Your heart is the compass to navigate the unseen realms, the foundations of all that is. Trust it!

Going beyond what you know with the senses is to deepen and enrich and make incredibly precious your life here in the body in this place at this time.

Family

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / 2 Comments
Autumn in Iowa

Family of growing things

Grandmother Cottonwood speaks of family:

Technically, in the great classification system devised by humans in which all things are separate, we are not defined as members of the same family. I, a magnificent and glorious Cottonwood tree, am not related to your potted snake plant, your beautiful shiny philodendron, your red flowered geranium according to this way of seeing and analyzing the world. Worst of all, this system states that I am not related to you, my many layered human friend.

Yes, we are not family by blood or sap. We do not share hair and eye color. On the surface of things we share very little in common. Your bark is very thin and would never stand up to winter storms of summer suns like mine does.

Can you guess where I’m going with this? Then you already know that you and I and all living things, all rooted things, all six legged things, all bacteria in the soil, all creatures on this earth are intimately intertwined and interwoven of the same stuff, the same energy – the stuff of life that permeates and enlivens all. I am here to tell you that you must expand your idea of family! We are family. We all belong together in our shared home.

Let us take care of each other and love each other! Let us know that each of us from the tallest redwood to the tiniest speck of algae to a minuscule deer tick to a new human baby, each of us belongs here, is desired, wanted, needed, loved and cherished by all that is. Each of us has our part to play in the great web of life, which is our extended and beloved family.

Illness

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment

GCW speaks of illness

New life from old

New life from old

Do not blame outside forces for your illness. How is it affecting you? Are you tied, achy, is it hard to breathe? Go inward to the mirror that knows all things. Ask what you are tired of. Ask what is making you ache with emotion. What is preventing you from taking in life fully and allowing it to express through you? Where do you feel these things in your body? Pay attention. Befriend your body.

Your body is not separate from your emotions, feelings, thoughts, spirit. Take care of all of you. That includes your spirit. Acknowledge and befriend your infinite spirit, the essence of you. Pay attention to your feelings and emotions for they are your true guidance in all things.

If you persist in doing something that feels wrong, or too much, or unpleasant, something in you will send up an alarm. Pay attention! Address it before it mirrors itself in your magnificent body. Then you will be forced to pay attention!

Do those things that feel good and make your heart glad! If that means resting, sleeping extra, curling up with a book, closing your eyes while the sun shines, find a way to do it! Do not be contrary! I know you will try to argue and say you do not have time! Grandmother Cottonwood wishes the best for all living things, that this community, this mother earth may continue to bless all who dwell here. When you make time to do what is right and healthy for you, it strengthens the exquisite web in which all things are one.

Four elements

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment
Burned tree

Burned tree

GCW speaks of the four elements:

Fire

Leaping, consuming, transforming everything in your path. A reckoning! Change is commanded, forced. A fresh start, a renewal from scorched and blackened earth.

Contained and tended you mesmerize, encircled by bodies and hands that need your warmth. Out of control you are a tyrant rolling forward with no pity– Destroyer.

Creator of new beginnings.  Tend and keep your inner flame.

2013-01-01 00.00.00-149

Water

Must seek its way, must join droplet to sea, creek to river, river to ocean, to all that is, where all finally become one.

Simply to merge and become one; to give life itself to all living things. And all living things must know in time, what it is to merge and become one with spirit. Stuff of life, roots reach deep for you, thirsty souls are blessed by your giving. You draw us to your shores and banks with your power and your effortless flow.

Carry us easily on your flow to the river’s mouth, where waters join and mingle, where all our burdens can be released.

2013-01-01 00.00.00-557

Air

Unseen giver of life. Surrounding, breathing through all living beings the rhythm of this earth. The rise and fall as you support life on this planet without effort. You exist and permeate all. The ultimate giver.

And we breathe you in, carrier of sweet scents, this earth atmosphere that clears and heals itself. Leaves roots branches, all alive, all breathing- grasses, trees, flowers, every bird, every animal, every insect, every living thing; all breathing. Our health and your health inextricably aligned.

2015-06-06 10.55.51

Earth

Ground of being. Roots reaching deeply into your heart for our daily bread. Nothing here is severed. Nothing stands alone. All is interwoven in a vast web that extends to the reaches of the universe. You dear Earth, are love made visible, made physical.

All that make their home here commune with you in the age old dance of life – death – life. Ebb and flow, seasons of the year, moon cycles; we are deeply attuned to your elegant rhythms. Each of us belong here as an integral part of this magnificent web of which you, dear Earth are the center.

Addiction

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment
Monarch butterfly on purple coneflower

Monarch butterfly on purple coneflower

C of Ames, Iowa asks:

Q. Why is it so hard to give up my addiction to sugar?

A. What is sugar, but a substitute for love? Wasn’t it easier for your parents to give you a gooey brownie or warm cookie and send you away than deal with the truth, the messy feelings, the real inside of you, the heart and soul, the hidden depths of you?

There is always some sugar filled or encrusted thing available to give you another high. But it keeps you distracted from what is going on deep under the surface of your being.

Your physical being is altered by sugar. The energies of those on sugar feel to me as though they are on overdrive; too much – too fast – not real- not a source of real sustainable energy. It revs you up and wears you out! Your body wants it, your mind wants it. But your spirit does not want it, Your wise self knows the addiction to sugar is distracting you from your true power.

And then, there is blackness when you crash- when there is not another candy bar or doughnut within reach. You focus on that, on getting the next cookie or bag of candy, removed from the only thing that really matters, your heart and soul, the feelings that flow and form the fabric of your life.

Tune in. Become aware of your feelings, the promptings of the spirit and learn to be with them, and you will need less and less of the sweet stuff that is unnatural in such huge amounts!

GCW Speaks

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment
Cottonwoods

Cottonwoods

GCW Speaks:

My entire being cries out to express the love and delight, the expansive energy that is at the heart of my being. These qualities my beloved, reside also in you. My purpose in speaking through your representative is so that you may know and feel and live your true nature. So that you may know that at your core, you are love, the energy that holds this planet together. Know that love is the stuff, the quantum particles of the universe that saturate all things seen and unseen.

Know your magnificence! Know your nature as powerful beings of light! You are so much more than you think you are. Step up into knowing with all that you are, and you will never question your worth again! You will know your true nature and you will never be able to un-know it again!

These words do not express the expansion, the joy, the delight that we all are! Feel and know these feelings that lie far beyond the scope of words!

Spreading warmth

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment
Golden cottonwood leaves

Golden cottonwood leaves

L of Ames, Iowa wonders:

Q. As fall approaches and your leaves fall, what is the best way to spread warmth?

A. My dear L, you are a source of warmth yourself. The beauty of you when you allow yourself to shine fully is like a pure candle flame, drawing from the darkness others who will learn to shine and glow from you.

Keep your flame burning. Tend it wisely. Honor it! All of those who allow full power, full brightness of their light create a network of love the beauty of which you cannot imagine! Know your beauty! Tend your flame! That is your true work. Without effort, you spread the light and the warmth you speak of.

You are not here to rescue anyone or make something happen. You are here to be fully and completely yourself; and in so doing, the web of all things is enlightened, blessed, and warmed.

How many children will I have?

/ Shamanic Healing of Ames / Leave a comment

2015-07-04 10.18.47

N of Central Iowa asks:

How many children will I have?

My dear N,

You have the loving all-encompassing heart of a mother. Your sweet energy emanates from the heart of you and encircles all those around you in the energies of pure love. You have so much to give and you wish to give it! In the giving the love circles back to you, for the giver and receiver are one.

GCW cannot, will not predict your future for you, for you have before you many choices, many paths, many probabilities. You are free to choose, to change your mind, to take the alternative route. However, know that at this time in this place, there is a probability of you with three children. I see you with these beloved children and a bright shining countenance, loving beyond all you have known before, the moments you share. Your aura envelops and allows your precious ones to grow and become and thrive in the sweet light of your heart.

You need do nothing to make this happen. If you are struggling or pushing for what you want, let that go. Simply allow your love to flow, allow your heart to sing, allow yourself to feel fully, allow yourself to feel the perfection of each moment of your life.

Blessings to you and your growing family!