Hi Mom and Dad :-)
J. and I just got home from a 4-day shamanic workshop in Wisconsin, part 2 of 4 which will come to completion in May of 2011. It's pretty amazing work and I'm glad that we're both doing it together. The course is all about working with the Peruvian medicine wheel, each class centering on one particular direction of the wheel, its archetypes and challenges, and ultimately its Medicine. It is all about inner work, clearing out shadow aspects, ego, beliefs about self, etc. Each meeting is extraordinarily intense, and we spend the 4 days initiating 3 new stones into our medicine bundles, our 'mesas' as they call them. When we finish, we'll have 12 stones altogether. Now we have 6.
This past weekend was all about West (we started in South), the place of Jaguar and also the place on the medicine wheel where we die. We spent much of the time tracking imprints and curses from our Ancestral and also Past Life lineages, finding lives where we had a lot of power and lost it, where we had a lot of power and used it poorly, and lives where we had a lot of power and used it very well. The process is fascinating - we do a shamanic journey to find these things, then blow the essence of that into the stone that chooses to be part of that particular process. We then build a 'sand painting', a nature mandala outside at a spot where we're led to, and the stones alternately 'cook' out there and are brought back inside at intervals for more work. We did three layers of work for each stone over the course of three days, gradually making it part of our medicine and a great ally for us.
On Saturday, we died. We had been instructed to write a eulogy for ourselves. In groups of 5, we each took turns being underneath a black shroud and lying on a massage table. Our eyes were covered but we could hear what was being said, much like the spirit of a person who hasn't crossed yet. Sacred space was opened by the person being 'shamam' and the eulogy was read. Then there was 'kitchen talk', the gossip that you might expect about a dead person, and around his/her funeral or wake. Then, the person acting as 'shaman' physically disconnected our chakras and the group lifts the luminous energy body of the 'dead' person. When I was being dead, I could actually feel this. When I was one of the other 4 around the table, I could also actually feel the luminous body of the person from whom we were lifting. Even though this part was all done in silence, I could actually feel my luminous body coming back to me as the participants lowered it back into me and before they even touched me to let me know that this was going to happen.
Since J. and I are a couple, the teacher had us work together, asking us each to be the other's shaman performing the rites. I was fine up and until the point at which I had to unwind his chakras and then I just began to lose it. Even though I knew he was not dead, going through that was very, very powerful. As they say, I made Great Medicine with that act.
This work is very grounding and helps shed the 'stories' that I carry around with me about myself and about others. I can't wait to see you in November and tell you more!
I'm back in Cleveland for a 3-week gig; this time we're doing 12 performances of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610. Seeing as how this is the 400th anniversary, it's a big bang :-) I left Wednesday morning after getting home Sunday night from Wisconsin. I arrived yesterday and had about two hours to compose myself before our first rehearsal. We went until 9:30, then I went and had a beer and some fries at a local institution that serves about 200 different really good beers. They have an iguana that is their mascot; it's in a lighted, heated glass cage and is about 5 feet long from nose to tail. The beer is great.
Weather here is in the 70s at present, getting down to about 40 at night, which is glorious after the endless high-90's that we've had in Huntsville. I've lost plants and my trees are stressed.
I paid my court fees and had my last court appearance (yay!) about the citations for the outside of the house. I've got to repair some electrical stuff before we can get power back, and I'm hoping that my friend D. the handyman can do some of that work before I get back. It's relatively simple, but I have to pass the inspections before the utility company will hook the house back up so we can use power tools again.
I've taken a local gig in December; I'm singing the Bach Magnificat solos (version in Dmaj) and also the tenor solo in Cantata 36 (which I don't know and will have to learn while here). It'll be a fun thing, doesn't pay anything, and will hopefully redeem my wretched performance back in October 2007 the weekend that grandmom died Interestingly enough, doing this Earth Mesa work has allowed me to have more freedom and less tension when I sing. I was called on last night to do some of the flowery solo work in rehearsal since the principals are not here until tomorrow. Mom, I'd love a voice lesson or two when I'm home. I could trade you a session of Illumination - it's amazing work that J. and I learned at the first class, South mesa, back in April and have been practicing each week since.
More info on that here:
www.waterwillowmoon.com/modalities.html
I'd love to do some work for C., too. Ethics dictate that I can't do anything on his behalf without his asking, so I'm going to work on getting him to actually ask me. This work is so amazing; Jeff and I have witnessed one miraculous thing after another while doing and studying this work. I'm confident that this work could help him. Oh, and by the way; I taught my first beginning shamanism course two weekends ago! It went well and the students were amazing. The helping spirits really came through for everyone. While we were flying back on the plane, I journeyed and was given a new method for 'enlivening' shamanic tools and artifacts which I'm going to try out with a few friends. I'll turn that into a workshop, too. I'm teaching a short half-day workshop in November; I've got 9 students signed up already. They were signed up minutes after I posted the class on-line :-)
Massage work at the cancer center is going well, if a little slowly. Though things are picking up: we may be hosting a regular Reiki clinic soon, and I'm going to begin giving guided meditation sessions for people who ask for it - one of my shamanic teachers gave me an absolutely fantastic method of strengthening and shielding that can be used by anyone. She comes from a north coast Salish tradition, and this is part of what she was taught as a little girl. Incidentally, her grandmother who was Scotch-Irish used to tuck her and her siblings in with, "From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, may the good Lord deliver us. And ... just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they can't see you".
You know? Once I just decided to just be that little flower child that you've always said that I was, life became a whole lot easier.
Life is Good.
Love,
Raybob
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