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Week 4: Your Allies
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Calling and Your Allies
This week I speak about:
- Allies in this world
- Allies in the other world and what that means
- My own experience of connecting with Nature and Spirit
- How conversing with nature is stepping toward the unseen world
- The importance of childlike curiosity when exploring this topic
- The cultural critic
- A practical step you can take.
I encourage you to give yourself 10 minutes of uninterrupted time so that you can track the Speech of your Soul while you listen.
Listen Now:
or
Download to listen later:
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Week 4 Interview
This topic is so important to the exploration of calling, that I wanted to make sure that you heard numerous perspectives. We will start with the first interview with,
Marti Spiegelman on Connecting with your Allies
This hour long conversation is packed with deep thinking, so get ready to dive into the world of shamanism, science, anthropology and consciousness.
Here is a short bio if you are not familiar with Marti Spiegelman:
Marti Spiegelman brings nearly four decades of specialized training in shamanic traditions and related fields to her current work as a leadership advisor, executive mentor, and shamanic teacher. She is the founder of Shaman’s Light™, a professional-level shamanic initiation and mentoring program dedicated to the evolution of consciousness and the creation of abundance through passion-based work. Marti holds a BA in biochemistry from Harvard and an MFA in graphic design from Yale. She also has advanced training in psychology, anthropology, and neurophysiology, and she is initiated in shamanic traditions in Peru, West Africa, and the Himalayas. Marti’s insights into our uniquely human capacity to create, evolve, and thrive provide the inspiration for the training programs and lectures she offers around the world. For more information go to: www.martispiegelman.org
Here are some of the many topics that we covered:
- Indigenous understandings of calling
- Marti’s personal experience with allies
- The importance of mentorship
- The four cornerstones of consciousness: Perception, Awareness, Linear or Strategic Intelligence, and Relational Intelligence
- Mature ego structure vs. ego of separation
- Our unique role as humans
- How to recognize an ally
- A few exercises to begin your explorations
Marti Spiegelman Interview:
Listen Now:
or
Download to listen later:
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Week 4 Bonus Interview
If you are particularly interested in shamanism and connecting with allies, I encourage you to listen when you have the time.
Here is a short bio if you are not familiar with Timothy Flynn:
Timothy Flynn is a shamanic practitioner living in the Monterey Bay Area of California. A near drowning experience inspired an early interest in Death and Dying and various spiritual pursuits, ultimately leading him to a twenty year focus on shamanism. He lives on a small homestead with his wife and two children, exploring the intersection of sustainability, shamanism, and modern culture.
Tim has a BA from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in Transformative Arts from JFK Institute of Holistic Studies, Orinda California. He completed the Foundation for Shamanic Studies 3 year training program in advanced shamanic practices, as well as other advanced shamanic training workshops from Tom Cowan and Betsy Burgstrom. Tim taught for the Foundation for Shamanic studies for several years, departing recently to focus on his own work.
He is a dear old friend, a wise man, and a skilled practitioner.
We spoke of:
- The importance of being aware of cultural issues when exploring indigenous wisdom traditions
- Connecting with animals and plants as allies
- Learning how to receive from nature
- Natural ways to altar our consciousness, or brain waves, that can aide in widening our lens of perception
- Simple exercises to explore connecting with nature.
Timothy Interview: Listen Now:
or
Download to listen later:
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Experiential
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Week 4 Lesson Downloads:
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Week 4 Lesson Downloads:
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Homework to read online:
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Gathering your Allies:
- What aspects of nature do you feel most connected to, be they elements, bioregions, plants, animals, or even certain kinds of weather? How do you experience yourself and the world differently when in close contact to this?
- Have you had an experience that felt numinous? (This refers to the ethereal, intangible, holy, and palpably spiritual). If you think you have not, allow yourself to sit with this. Numinous experiences do not just happen in relationship to nature, they can happen in any circumstance. When and where they occur is of significance. What memories arise as you ponder this?
- What practices or activities connect you to the holy? Are there allies that show up when you engage that practice?
Expressing your Allies:
The visual exercises are the basis for the work. If you care to take it deeper and wider, you can also explore the somatic and earth-based invitations.
- Visual Expression: Choose one or two images that represent your experience of (or your imagining of ) an ally.
Add this (or these) images to your collage. If you have not engaged a collage, worry not. All that matters is that you choose an image that you can see regularly throughout the week. This will serve to acknowledge the ally, and to let your psyche be in more conscious relationship with it.
We have been taught to believe that we have no connection with the world of Spirit and Nature, but that is simply not true. It may take a leap of faith or of imagination. Let your child-like self court an ally. This open-minded aspect of our psyches is more available to the subtle, magical, and supernatural. This does not need to make sense to your linear mind. Certainty is not a requirement, nor is it necessarily desirable. Go with a felt sense, a longing, or an intuition.
- Somatic Expression: It is a cross-cultural indigenous practice to become one’s ally as a way to feed it and to come to know and embody its powers. Although many traditions focus on animals primarily when considering allies, I hold the term more broadly. Allow your imagination and allurement to lead. When you land on one ally to explore:
1) Make sure you have uninterrupted time. 2) Open sacred space in anyway that is most natural to you, which could be as simple as lighting a candle, or setting an intention, or as elaborate as calling in directions and giving offerings. 3) Speak your intention out loud to the ally you are engaging. Ask that only the energies that are in the highest for you show up. 4) Let your self move, make sounds, or simply just feel what shifts. Do this for as long as feels enlivening and generative. There is no time requirement. 5) When you are complete, give thanks and release your ally. Move your body in whatever way you need to in order to come fully back to yourself.
What powers or qualities does this ally hold that might serve you as you embody your calling?
- Land-Based Exploration: Give yourself some time to be in nature, or close to some aspect of nature that is accessible for you. Allow yourself to be allured to some nature being. It might be a rock, a tree, or even a crack in the sidewalk where a blade of grass is growing. Apprentice to what you are drawn to by simply being quiet, observing, and bringing your attention again and again back from “monkey mind” to your senses. No need to figure anything out. No need to understand what this has to do with your calling. No need to have any particular kind of experience. After, you can use your tracking journal to note what arose.
Tracking: Your Allies
Track what you have noticed as you have been gathering and expressing this week.
Inner Eye: Did any images arise that caught your attention, surprised you, enlivened you or disturbed you in any way?
Inner Ear: Did you notice whispers of the soul arising as you gathered or expressed? What did you hear?
Kinesthetic: How did your body feel during this process? Did your body speak? If so what came into your awareness?
Inner Knower: Do you know something about yourself that you did not know before you began this process?
It can be helpful to also track:
Archetypes:
Symbols:
Patterns:
Synchronicity:
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