Jedis, lightsabers and PTSD

My experience with PTSD is not unique, nor is the methodology in which I have chosen to handle this beastie. And trust me, it is a beastie, anyone who deals with it or has to watch a loved one wrangle with an episode knows this for certain. My mother has helped me a great deal by customizing a meditative technique using the Silva Method platform for this issue I face and she has encouraged me to share it here with you and your loved ones. This is a method that need maintenance. It is not a one time deal and certainly not an emergency handler, although during an episode, coupled with reiki from a partner, it helps significantly and will help bring you out of the episode within a few hours instead of a 24 hour- a week long dragged out hell. My mother reminds me to go 'clean out my brain' when she recognizes and episode setting in and this has been a genuine help for me. So with out further adou, I will walk you through the meditation for you to memorize and use or walk your loved one through.

We are going to count down from 3 to 1 and as you exhale,  see the number 3 three times and mentally say the number 3 three times in your mind.

take another deep  breath and as you exhale say the word 2 three times mentally and see the number 2 three times.

take another deep breath and as you exhale say the word 1 three times mentally and see the number 1 three times.

you are now at level one, you can use this level for any developmental work you wish. we are going to deepen this mind frame by counting back from 25- 1 as you breathe deeply and fully.

( count from 25 to 1)

Before you, you see an environmental bubble. It is filled with all that you need to travel comfortably into the outer dark of space. Step into this bubble and seal the hatch behind you. The bubble carries you up into the air, past the atmosphere and into the great outer dark where you are surrounded with stars, nebulae, and planets. Observe these bodies as you travel further still a place where only the black lives. Here is where your work will take place.

( 30 second pause)

On your shoulder you notice a miniaturized version of yourself in Jedi garb carrying a lightsaber. Your Jedi-self cuts into the back of your head and crawls in to take a look at your brain. Inside your brain there are neural connections each carrying messages from your brain to your body. While you are watching these connections, you begin to notice that there are two colors being shown as the energy of your thoughts and body functions are crossing your brain. One color indicates healthy connections that promote a healthy mind and body. The second color is clearly unhealthy and reacts in negative manners within your mind and body. These unhealthy connections are associated with PTSD. 

(30 second pause)

Ignite your lightsaber and begin to cut out the unhealthy PTSD connections. Pull them out of your brain and push them out the airlock into the deep of space to be transformed by the universe for something constructive and positive. As you pull each unhealthy connection out of your mind, see them float away from you where they can no longer harm you or anyone else. Look within the folds of you mind. Find all the connections you can see and remove them one at a time. When you are done, your Jedi-self steps out of your mind, seals the incision that you used to access your mind and reintegrates back into you as a part of your healing body. Allow yourself to enjoy the trip back into the Earth's atmosphere by watching the stars and planets pass. When you are back upon the earth and back into yourself, take a few deep breathes and observe the clearness of your mind.

( pause 30 seconds)

Count from 1 to 5 with each breath. You will open your eyes, feel refreshed and ready to move forward with your day. You will feel better and better.

( count slowly from 1-5)

This meditation should be practiced every few day to make sure the connections remain fewer and fewer with each session. I have noticed improvements with my PTSD symptoms from the first meditation session. I continue to use this as a means to keep the attack few and far between in conjunction with my counseling and acupuncture. I hope this helps you and your loved ones as much as it has been helping me.

Angry imps!

I like this discussion on the dark side of meditation and the issues that can occur. I view them of course not necessarily from a scientific or even scholastic perspective. I come to this discussion from personal experience ( which is king in my book) and a shamanic eye. It is necessary to have this discussion because these are real consequences of awakening a possible shaman without the lore/ guiding hand/ shamanic ethos and spirit contact. Meditation is not a practice of scientifically silencing the mind and it's voice, it is a conscious effort to connect yourself with the divine part of yourself and divinity as we are able to perceive and understand. This requires understanding of uncommon sense to be applied in a common sense world. Yes this is indeed a paradox, but if you are in the mirror's reflection, everything is backward, yet we still understand it.

 I agree with the Dalai Lama: you cannot have a Temple without a large library to support it. ( Library guides are also very much desired.) Libraries and library guides teach us that there are answers out there and if they are not direct answers, we are able to take the facts or read a pattern and bring it into focus to understand or at least come to terms with the strangenesses currently in play. Between libraries and meditation, shamans thrive; remove the libraries and the whole kit and caboodle is insanity in a crazy burlap bag of angry wet cats. Poor burlap bag. I believe that when you are centered within yourself while in meditation that what you have learned has the potential to become wisdom through right action.  I think we often forget that life is a mystery to experience not analyze.

I have had some very negative experiences in both meditation and trance. That does not make me unstable. It makes me pretty "normal." EEEEEKKKK When these disturbing things occur it is a cue for me not to run away, but to carefully inspect. I may be experiencing an angry shard of myself or even missing soul piece! That is not to be ignored or taken lightly in the shamanic world. ( it is also not red alert/ klaxon alarm/ panic button pushing event.) It could be causing illness, true indeed, even emotional disturbances. . . the good news is that you can fix it. In fact, when these things come up you are being invited to help heal the issue. Not just fix it; heal it, mend it, bring the tattered ends together for peace talks. These things, these dark frightening things that hide in our beings. . . they are us. And they want the same things we want: love and acceptance for who and what they are. Really it's like the soul shattered off and made all these little imp like shards and they come back to haunt us. The only truth we need to understand in these moments is this: It may be an imp, but it's my imp and I love it. Well loved imps are much better behaved than ignored, ostracized, and angry imps.

Thus the witch proverb:

Faithfully serve your imp, and S/He shall faithfully serve you.

Storyteller shamans

I have always thought that the telling of stories was one of the most important things for a strong society to bond into a people. Not the news, not documentaries, not the neighborhood gossip sort of stories, but the ones of legendary proportions. The ones where the villain looks to be larger than life and invincible, the heros reluctant to step to the plate, the magic hidden in plain sight. These are the stories that truly matter. They used to be told in the flickering light of a fire at night when the creatures of night stalked their shadows. The Shaman or storyteller would have everyone huddled around scarce to breathe for missing a nuance of tone as the story came to life. Sometimes the fire would help with a dramatic pop and shower of sparks. These were the days when tribes were small.

Our tribes are much larger now, but stories are still a major bonding thread through our cultures. It's not likely that we are going to huddle around a fire ( although that still sounds fun) but we all at one point find ourselves scrunched down in a movie theater chair or a sofa in our living room waiting to be told a story. When we really look at it the storyteller has to jump through many more sacred hoops to tell their tale, but the beginnings of the storytelling process remains the same. The storyteller turns inward and flies up into a realm of ethers that he or she has been invited into. Literally it is a new world with rules, heros and villains all of it's own.

Like the past, these stories link tribes of a culture together regardless of what part of the world the story travels. All who hear and love the story become kith and kin, welcomed into the world with a common understanding of humanity even if the language is different. These stories not only bind cultures together, they can act as a guide in the dark shadowed night of the soul. Often times when we are listening/ watching/ reading these stories, we end up empathizing with a specific character in the saga. During times of demon dancing it becomes helpful to look to these figures and those around them for wisdom and guidance while you dance your own shadow dance. The wisdom revealed may not be a direct application to your own motion, but rather a sudden flash of realization and inspiration. This is a true aspect of shamanism: the application of the shaman's vision to the realm we walk in whether it be a large outer world project or a personal quest.

Shamanism is not a dwindling practice, it is alive and well. It has evolved, shifted to suit the medium, the people, the largeness of the world's tribe. Maybe the traditional means and methods of training have been passed quietly around to certain keepers of these secrets, but lost they are not. There are those out there who continue the traditional practices in secret with a small group of people in clusters all over the world and sometimes in places most unexpected. Often times these Shamans, if you will, do not share their adventures believing them to be irrelevant to the outer world or useful to anyone but themselves. Sometimes what is revealed, the shaman feels should be kept secret for a time until it is the correct place in time to reveal the mystery for further unfolding. Sometimes the shaman never reveals the story because the battle is their personal dance.

Every once in a while, I fall upon a movie, book or painting that reveals to me that the art of the storytelling shaman is still alive and well. These people may not recognize what it is they are doing, but I do. If there is any doubt, ask the story teller this:" how real are your characters and their world to you?" Most of them will tell you something like this:" my characters talk to me and have a running commentary on my life." These storytellers may not have been trained in traditional manners or be keepers of traditional secrets, but they have tapped into something larger than themselves and come back with a legend to pass to their perceived tribe. Some of these modern legends have swayed the thinking and understanding of real people in this realm, possibly shifting this world in a very real manner. If that's not shamanism, I don't know what the hex is.

I believe society needs these story tellers to help make sense of our world and lives. I believe that these stories make us stronger as both a society and individual. Think carefully, who are your storyteller shamans? How have they affected your universe? What untold stories have you been invited to dance within and have you the courage to tell them?

Opening doors

 I know that I have missed out on all the hub bub with Pantheacon ( again.) I have deliberately tucked and rolled then slid into my own private thinking space for work of my own. I have one suggestion for those like Z who wish to hold a birth woman only ritual. Hold three rituals: birth women only, transgender only, mixed. End of story. Everyone gets what they want. There would be no one feeling left out, they would all have something that is their own.

Time has skipped by me this last 9 months without so much as the courtesy of a squeak as it did so. Moving into a new place has literally uprooted my patterns and shook my little sandbox around burying some things, exposing others. It's not like moving from one apartment to another where things sort of resume where they left off. There are new chores to dole out and do, there are future repairs that must be planned before a thing completely becomes an emergency, improvements to dream about, and a community to get to know. It was nice to slow down this week without being sick.

In the strangeness of my own private portal to faery, I delved into my own self and dug up some answers I was expecting to hear and some that took me completely off guard. I knew there were things I needed to pick back up since my thumb was injured. Being healed now, I am ready to pick those things up again: yoga and mudras. It is easy now to see how much of an effect mudras and yoga has had upon me. Settling into my mudra reminded me how much I missed it. There were things that I was able to note, the flow of energy as the mudra took effect was interesting. It was like someone had poured peppermint oil on all of my nerves following the path through my body as it was being activated. Each moment the mudra was held was like the electricity in my body was being elevated, like a dimmer switch being turned.

My dreamscape has been very active. Most of the characters there were familiar faces and beings I have worked with for quite some time. There was a new surprise. I found myself in front of a mirror with the Ice Maiden. She was giving me mirror scrying tips. Upon waking, I made a mad dash for my journal to write them down before they receded back into my dreaming mind. This experience lead to questions about the nature of mummification and its effects upon the energetic body. I don't remember being contacted by the Ice Maiden quite like this before. She has shown up in places like a daemon would in my past, but never has she actually shown up in my dreamscape and spoken the way she has. Did the fact that she was so well preserved have something to do with her reawakening upon being unearthed? Is there something about being preserved that allows your soul to hold a space in time, possibly to skip through generations to pass secrets of the ancient practices necessary to that Shaman Thread I spoke of earlier? Were the ancients oblivious to this or was this something they understood? While things in my life seem to make more sense there are new questions, some of them I may not have answers to until it is my turn to pass through the forbidden mysteries.

While the ritual I conducted on my own behalf has shown to be effective, they ( my guides) have added aspects to it: part two and part three are coming around soon. I can now see why my friends and guides were giving me vexing half answers before. I am understanding the necessity of certain events that were unpleasant for me. Sometimes while you are content to stay where you are, you are needed to perform a different task. That will require you to shift and give up certain things that interfere with the new things coming your way. You have to wait for the door to open before you can enter the threshold. And some doors are best not forced open.


I am feeling calm and peaceful today. It is a sensation I have not had in quite sometime and I have missed it. I have a feeling that mirror magics and lessons are in cue for me. Curiouser and curiouser.

The Shaman Thread

Many years ago I had a conversation with my father while picking up pizza at his favorite place about, of course, space faring and colonization and how my particular skills seemed to him, at the time, non essential. My response was simply how did he know that this was not an essential step of evolution before we could leave the planet? Frontiers, as exciting and new as they are, are also very dangerous because it IS new. ESP's seem like a very handy thing to have well developed to help you get a heads up about those dangers while out there.

This conversation was resurrected in the face of my feeling not so well and deciding that taking it easy with Netflix was a good idea. I settled on an oldie but goodie: Earth 2. If you have never watched this show and you are a SciFi fan, this is something that may interest you. I will try not to spoil the show for you. The premise of the show is that enclosure has become intolerable on the stations; there is a great need and desire to go planet side and live there.

There are particulars I really found interesting. Especially, the connection that forms between a couple of the characters with the planet and it's indigenous inhabitants. It becomes very clear that there is at the very least one shaman with them. This character is an accidental shaman, but he is a shaman none the less. One who has much to learn about the art and craft of what shamanism is.

The questions that rolled around in my mind while watching this show were: how do we preserve the shaman skills while on stations traveling the black oceans of the universe? How will those skills be needed and utilized before we decide to dive back into one of the deep wells of space? Will those skills be sharp enough to reconnect with a large living body and its inhabitants? Will we be wise enough to remember that planets cannot be tamed?

I have ideas that may answer a few of those questions. The obvious one being how do we preserve the shaman skills??? We teach them to those who wish to learn and show a proclivity either openly or secretly just like we have done here in this deep well of space. Station life will require that there be a green house of sorts. The techniques will be different for growing food, but there still needs to be someone who can hear the plant life and tend to it in a good way. This would be a good practice field for a shaman stuck on a station. There will also be a great need for alternative medicines since manufacturing meds may not be the best way to handle things on a station and certainly we cannot rely on planet side delivery of said things. We must learn to be independent. The face of healing will have to change and shamanistic skills will certainly be handy there. There is even now and here a great proclivity for some to connect with technology in near mystical manners. I believe we have started to call them technomages. Considering the fact that we will be depending on a large piece of technology while we float through space toward our next well, a couple of good technomages hanging about would certainly make me breathe easier. I would certainly like our flyboys/girls to have an uncanny sense of what is coming at them while they jockey around between stations and where ever else they need to go outside. Open space tends to be a bit unpredictable. Loads of things zipping about at mach 5 and other surprises I am sure.

Will those skills be sharp enough to reconnect with a planet???? I hope so. Another question remains. Will those skills be allowed to continue or will we face another persecution and devouring of a belief system based upon fear and the need to control the mass population? Will we grow up as a species and begin to recognize that we are all different colored threads in a very large tapestry creating the larger picture of who we are meant to be? If we don't, I'm not sure we will make it and if by some stroke of genius luck that we do, with an even larger stroke of such luck, maybe an accidental shaman will surface. Personally, I would like to skip the whole freak out what the heck kind of crazy have I gone? phase, but that's just me. It would be, in my opinion, prudent to preserve and nurture the Shaman Thread that runs through humanity.

A multi layered adjustment

It has been made very clear to me that things are not in balance with me in my life right now. I have spent the last few months with some sort of cootie or another and even as I type this, walking pneumonia seems to be the term docs are using for it. Oh yea! So, as the moon wanes I am working on digging into myself to help figure out and uncover the how's what's and why's of things and come up with something to restore that balance.

I think that all of this began with the move from the apartment to the house. I have been a non stop run, run, run and some of the things that I used to have time for have either gotten slashed in availability or has fallen off the radar completely. (BAD) I need to adjust things to a better balance and I think I need some other worldly help in tweeking it just right.

 I have dragged out my BOS and dug up some information that I gleaned from my tarot magic. I will be using Oleum of Isolde and my Thoth deck for this as I find that Hecate prefers it's sharpness and dark tones. I pulled out the Adjustment card, because that is precisely what I need to do. This card will become the center of my working.

Here are some things that I have found to work best as accents to using this card. I pass this on to you to use at your discretion as at one point in time or another we all find our selves a bit off kilter. I won't pass the specifics of my personal  ritual simply because it has significance to me because I wrote it. I suggest that you sit down with your self and discover your own idea of how your working should look. It will not only get the magic flowing, it will be most powerful for you.

Justice/ Adjustment: Balance
Incense: sage, copal, cedar
Oils: rosemary, clove, frankincense, rosewood, Oleum of Isolde
Stones: emerald, quartz, turquoise, black tourmaline, hematite
Candle colors: grey, white, sea green, blue


I include ritual in my personal healing for several reasons. I know healing to be something that is more than seeing a doc and taking medicine. True healing is something that happens between body and soul and it cannot be a complete process if you neglect to address all aspects of the illness including the aspects that is more often ignored: the energetic resonances of it. So it's time for this faery shaman to sit down with herself and work on herself even if it means that some things have got to be changed out and readjusted. I have sneaking hunches. It's time to verify them or find out what the real deal is.

Harvester of thorns.

I spent good part of the morning up rooting thorns and stickers from my ailing crab grass when I was reminded of a couple of things. A while ago I read The Sin Eaters Last Confession. It's written by his apprentice Ross Heaven and documents his experiences with a Celtic shaman. There is a brief section in there that talks about the thorns and benefits of thistle and it's stickers on the body. I could hear his words in my head as my own hands grabbed at the roots of the thorn plants in my lawn about how the thorns raised welts that caused blood to rush to the surface enhancing the blood flow in the area and how it drove negative energies from the body. I did actually think about wearing a pair of gloves for this chore, but there were words stopped me as I saw the tiny welts raise up on my arm: this is our life's final gift to you. You must pull us, we know, you have smalls with soft feet. The welts went away quickly leaving a clear feeling.

The other thing that came to mind is the rune of thorns. The one that first brought thorn harvesting to my mind. it was a slow thought that brewed. It took many months for it to surface and much prodding of the rune itself. I didn't like the idea of working with the thorn rune. It seemed too harsh, possibly even dangerous to do so, but thorn kept poking at me and telling me its secrets until one night, in the dead dark, I went out looked over my shoulder and clipped a thorn from one of the many cactai on the property of my apartment complex. Okay, I am listening, I told it. The thorn I harvested came from the mighty saguaro. I pricked myself hard enough to draw blood and left a few drops in thanks.

Large thorns were used by the natives as sewing needles for both cloth and flesh. I suspect they were used ritualistically, but have no academia to back that up at this moment. It is something I will be looking into as I pass through the gate of thorns. I have a feeling there are deep secrets that the children of the briar have yet to share. For the now, I will continue speaking to the thorn crowned plants and accepting their offerings. I have begun to prune some of my thorny plants and their thorns are too precious to me to waste so I have clipped them off and saved them. I have become the harvester of thorns.

Skull, skull, skull!

We live in a time when every time we turn around, someone is wearing a skull. You see them cutesy with heart shaped eyes, on earrings, pendants, T shirts and skin; sometimes they are fierce and grim. This witch has to wonder: what is it that is resonating so deeply within our culture that we must subconsciously call upon the power of the ancestors? I realize wholly that on the surface of things people think they are cool, hip and even cute, at least the heart eyed ones, but I was brought into awareness of the fact that we are attracted to certain kinds of energy in certain modes of thinking. Skulls have a very specific energy.

Skulls represent the power of wisdom and our connection to our ancestors, even the power of death and release. Skulls also represent the transmission of ancient teachings and mysteries. With that said, it could also be that skulls represent the ability to learn and evolve. All of man's ability to exist physically depends on what is within the skull and it's well being. All of society requires a healthy mind in each individual in order to function smoothly.

How do you make a mind healthy when we treat them all like cookie cutters and stampers and attempt to train them all in the same exact manner? Each individual mind works differently, we see this most clearly in school. When we take a look at how each student learns it becomes apparent that the mind of each individual takes in and processes information different. Some are visual, some are textural others yet are auditory. These are just surface analysis of the subject, what if it goes as deep as perception? What if one student is literally seeing something that most others cannot? Does that make this person crazy because his or her peers cannot verify or measure what this person is perceiving? I'm not certain that this is always the case. 

Shamanism and psychosis often times share symptoms. Those who could be shamans could indeed become psychotic with out proper awareness of what is occurring and without proper training. We are no longer a society that openly embraces shamanism. We like to call things in  black and white labels: sane and insane, good and evil, day and night. I reasonably suspect the mysteries of the ancients and ancestors are beyond the black and white labels. It may be time as a society that we openly teach basic mind stabilizing techniques in schools while children are young. Stabilizing and clearing basics such as grounding bring peace and harmony to the operation of the mind. Regardless of a person's religion, wouldn't this be a beneficial thing? There would also be the potential of an added benefit: it may increase a child's ability to learn. 

We may be calling upon the spirit of our ancestors. We may indeed be lost with out an understanding of what has become of our culture and society. We may be experiencing discordant resonances created by our lack of understanding in how our minds work.  We may be experiencing these societal traumas because we have forgotten how our minds may be connected to much more than our bodies. Maybe our minds are connected to a large streaming network of humanity not only in current existence, but past and  future as well. It is said repeatedly by spiritual leaders and spiritual people that we are all one. 

What if they are right and we are a one large organism? An organism consists of many different types cells that form and operate differently. With that said, not only would not everyone be able to be a heart cell, each grouping of cells would require a different type 'education'. It is also a strong possibility that within each cell type grouping, each cell learns differently. Maybe part of this ancient knowledge that we  lost includes information about how each of these 'cell groupings' are best identified and taught the skills they need to help the organism function smoothly. 

Maybe now that we seem to have embraced the imagery of ancient wisdom without a fear reaction it's time to start asking: what have we forgotten and how do we relearn it?

This video is one in a series of eight about ancient teachings being transmitted through crystal skulls. All eight are avail able on You tube. This is just to get you started ;)

Terrance Miller talks about Shamanism and Psychosis here. It is an interesting thought form. Enjoy!