#1 AYURVEDA: A SHAMANIC ENCOUNTER

Shamanic Meditation

[This is the first in a series of three blogs regarding the circumstance of my birth, the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, and the beginning of my Apprenticeship]

After many years of studying yoga and practicing on my own, and teaching my Shamanic Yoga, I came to a point where I needed a deeper experience.  I had been undergoing my Initiation as a Shaman for two decades, and my life experience was much deeper than anything conceived of in regular yoga.  When I first Googled Ayurveda, I came across info on the three doshas, but that was not what I was interested in.  I looked around at Ayurvedic diet, and other aspects.

Two things that interested me, because they related so pertinently to the Shamanic experience, were Dinacharya and Ritucharya, i.e., daily and seasonal practices to keep healthy and in synch with the life force.  Ayurveda translates as ‘life science’, and the path, or practice of Shamanism requires a mastery of the science of living, which is why I believe a personal yoga practice is so important to the Shaman.  The Shamanic world is very active on many levels, and requires a highly developed awareness of areas of life which are totally ignored in the normal societal experience.

The “Medicine Energies” of Shamanism are built of many aspects of the world of nature as it exists in our immediate environment –our homes and yards.  So the Ayurvedic practices of Ritucharya struck me as pertinent.  The year is divided into segments of two months, instead of our three month seasons.  I thought this was interesting and useful, but upon practice, I realized that the Wiccan/Pagan divisions of the year using ‘cross-quarter days’ (the midpoints of the seasons, rather than the solstices and equinoxes) was superior.  The world-view of the yoga community is not based on the Shamanic knowledge of ‘Power’ –that force in the universe which comes to the assistance of the Shaman, and is especially apparent at the midpoints of seasons, when things begin to change to the next season.

I found many aspects of the yoga philosophy to be less than adequate in comparison to the Shamanic way.

But in my Googling, I came across an essay, which I have since lost track of, in which

the first line was, “Rest, digestion, and sexual energy –the three pillars of life.”  As I read on, I found the Ayurvedic emphasis on agni, or the digestive fires, to be very interesting and helpful.  The Ayurvedic view of the workings of the human body is very different than the normal western view.  I began to work with the agni.

I found that, after eating, I would lie down on the yoga floor to digest, and after a bit, I would be flooded with sexual energy.  I began the practice of transferring this energy to my meditation vortex.  After eating, I would go sit in the Buddha Vortex while the agni was providing its fire.  This began to add considerable energy to the vortex.

Many months later, about six months after the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, in the month of October, 2013, this process began an important phase of my journey into my ‘Apprenticeship’.  On Friday October 11, one day after my 71^st birthday, I again sat in the vortex with a full stomach.  Again, the sexual energies arose.  This time, however, I went into a trance state.  I had turned on the “Jazz” channel on Pandora, for my meditation.  The first tunes were by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  I’ve always loved their music.  Suddenly, I was in a dance hall in Harlem, in the 1950s.  A woman across the dance floor made eye contact with me.  She was wearing an elegant, slim-fitting night club dress of satin, and it accented every curve of her ravishing figure.  The music was like I’ve never heard it.  It was a slow passage, so slow that I marveled at how powerful the rhythms were.  It was a deadly serious piece of music, to match the deadly serious expression on the woman’s face.  She knew exactly what she was doing.  Her languid stroll was intended to transfix my attention, which it did.  She entered my energy field with the intent of a woman who could wrap the world around her little finger; it was not like the world as I had ever known it.  It was the world of the rich and powerful, the jazz world of Harlem, where the players were Big Time, and the stakes were high.  She took me to the middle of the floor, and I wilted. 

I came out of the trance, and life went on.

I train hard for times like these.  These times are powerful, like the cross-quarter days which mark the turning points of the seasons.  In my journey through the process of Initiation, which took over two decades, and saw me turn from a healthy and fit man of 48 to a man losing his teeth and vitality at 71, I’ve developed techniques such as surfing the moon, and harnessing the cross-quarter days, for the power they bring, and many other aspects of adapting to the much different time-frame of Shamanic Reality.  This moment of trance, I knew, was a sigil for me.  It marked something, which would reveal itself in its own time. It was a ‘blow from Power’, as Castaneda would call it.  I knew that the next period of time, days or weeks, would reveal the import of this event.  So I marked it in my log book.

Not long after that, I fell into a terrible funk.  She had damaged my energy body.  I had been struck deeply.  It hurt to realize that I had been shown just what a punk I am.  No way in the world could I have entered that reality which she showed me, with the high stakes players, the fast women, and the genius musicians.  It was the blow to my energy body which I knew to be the signal of what was to come.

SURFING THE MOON

SUPERMOON

Check your adrenalin levels.  Are you always going at an adrenalin pace?  Got work to do?  Hurry, hurry!  You might find yourself on an adrenalin trip about now.  We have a fine fat gibbous moon tonight in Yakima, with FULL MOON on Friday morning.  Always running on clock time, week days, weekends, holidays, paydays, bills due, deadlines... seems like we just got through the New Moon.  Lots of things came crashing to an end just ten days ago, and then the crescent failed to show on time because of the cloudy weather.  The moon was resting.  Then all of a sudden we got moving again, with new things cooking.

Although it's four days till the moon is actually at Full, the few days before are usually filled with signs and signals of the lunar mood.  Since we're approaching Halloween, the world around us will be awash with hucksters selling their wares to the commercial classes.  When I became a Shaman, I found I had to remove myself from all this clamor.  Because the Moon has messages for the inner self every two weeks, and especially at significant times of the year.  The culture at large is much removed from the inner self.  A Shaman has a direct link to lunar moods, and therefore to moods of the spirit world which affect each of us at profound levels.  As we carry these moods of the moon from New to Full to New again, month after month, year after year, we learn to sense the surf.  

What if we're doing a healing?  My healings require that I carry the spirit of the client in my 'pouch', or energy field, or attention span, for many moon cycles, sometimes.  I find that the factors which affect my client reveal themselves as subtle shifts of energies often akin to the moon's shifting moods.  I use the waxing and waning of the moon to bring clarity to my understanding of situations involving me, or my client, or the world at large.  With each shift of understanding, I am able to make adjustments to the Medicine Energies, and the particular 'charm' I'm building for the client.  I can tell by the 'tattwas', or 'times', or 'moods' of each day, in the same way I am aware of the Moon's moods, just what is happening with my client, and whether the charm is working.  There is always a light to guide me.

It is my job to keep myself open to these aspects of the world as they change around me and my Medicine.  A few years ago, I was working with a woman in Southern California, who was very agitated, and was having problems in nearly every aspect of her life.  After a few weeks, we had developed a close rapport, and she was doing better, but her ex-husband appeared in her life, and she went off the deep end.

One morning I woke up and felt that she was in trouble.  I did a ceremony for her.  An hour later I got an email.  She was in the hospital, having swallowed a a bottle of sleeping pills.  In her near-death experience,  I had awakened her with a touch on the brow.  Intuitions and feelings can be very powerful over great distance, but a certain level of awareness must be maintained in order to pick up on the clues, whether it's for a client or for yourself.

Month after month, year after year, the Moon brings changes in our awareness throughout its cycle.  There is always a warm feeling when I feel these changes in my energy field.

POWER STONES

POWER STONES

Psychologist C. G. Jung’s work introduces the concept of “Individuation”, which is similar to “The Totality of the Self”, in Carlos Castaneda’s works, which is very much like the goal of Yoga, to attain to the ‘union’ or ‘yoke’, or ‘yug’, in which the completed Self is joined with the Cosmic, or Divine.  Shamanism is based on this union, which is a union of the individual with the world of Spirit through the death of the imprisoned self so that the spirits might incarnate with the Shaman. 

In the path to becoming a Shaman, there are many types and forms of energy which have to be incorporated into the energy system of the individual.  This process can take many years.  Over the course of the work, there are many things which the Wannabe must do to strengthen the energy fields of the various parts of the self as they are disintegrated and re-formed into a more complete composite.  The energies of the spirits are so powerful that an unprepared person could never survive.

In the beginning, the Wannabe is taught to ‘court Power’.  “Power” is a force in the universe which comes to the wannabe as a guide.  If you enter a place in wild nature with purity of Intent, and open yourself to Power, a sign or omen will appear.  A hawk will fly directly in front of you, and will beckon to you to follow.  You will be guided to a place of Power, where you can meditate or do ceremony, and receive the transforming energies of this place and the Medicine Energies which exist there.  Repeated exposure to these energies and the wisdom of Power will open and strengthen you to withstand the ordeals which await.

One of the exercises of Courting Power is the quest for a Power Stone.

Mountains are formed from vast layers and formations of various types of stone, as they are thrust by the movements of the earth’s crust into union with the atmosphere.  The forces of the atmosphere cause the stone layers to disintegrate, and pieces fall to the slopes below, where they eventually end up in streams, or are buried in the materials which form the soil.  Over the eons, stones which enter the streams are washed to the valleys, and are shaped by the waters and the other stones which they meet (very much like people).  Stones in the earth become eroded by the chemical interactions which form the soil.

If you walk in wild nature, you will meet many stones in various forms of individuation.  Some are broken and jagged; some are rounded and smooth; some are still buried in the soil.  When Power speaks to you, it can lead you to a stone which has completed its journey of Individuation, and is waiting for you to take it into your Power.  It will be clean; it will be sitting alone, free from attachments.  It will beckon to you.  You can welcome it into your energy field and it will become a companion.  When you take it home, it will bring the specific “Medicine” of its journey, and the place where it was found.  This Medicine will stay with it for many years.  This is one part of the Medicine Energies which a Shaman uses to build a Sacred Place in which to do the work.

Each stone is like a person, an individual.  If you hold a stone, you will find that it has a bottom.  When you set it down on its bottom, it will be steady and comfortable.  Each stone has it ‘good side’.  Place the stone in its most favorable position, so that it is comfortable and its best side is front.  The stone will lend its particular Power to whatever is near it, and it will help you in setting Medicine for a particular purpose.  Stones are great sources of energy for the Medicine.  But they also are very absorbent.  So stones have to be cleansed occasionally.

The stones in the photo were together in a tiny sand spit at the confluence of the Tieton River with the Naches River, just west of Yakima in the Cascade Mountains.  They are a greenish conglomerate from the White Pass area.  They are very smooth and polished.  The smaller one has a pleasant feminine face, and weighs 13 pounds.  The larger one is shaped like the head of an animal, perhaps a horse, and weighs 17 pounds.  I use them on either side of my meditation mat against the wall in the yoga/healing room, at the base of the “Buddha Vortex”, where the spirits gather high up on the wall.  The Buddha visited me there for many months, and Bodhidharma came to me there.  At the New Moon just before the Autumnal Equinox this year (2013), Yakima was graced with many dancing lightning storms.  So I set the stones out in the downpour to be cleansed and re-energized.

One interesting thing about stones is how they absorb energy.  Many homes have large stones set out in front as landscaping pieces.  If you observe these stones, you will notice their particular personalities.  Then notice when the home is sold and the owners move to another location.  The stone will lose the particular character you noticed.  With a new owner, the stone will change to reflect the energies of the new owner.

THE VOICE OF SEEING

CARLOS STARTED THE WHOLE THING IN AMERICA

Today is the New Moon.  With the moon conjunct the sun this morning,  I decided to do my STOP THE WORLD meditation.  On my Medicine Wheel mat, I sit crosslegged toward the east,  compose myself, and go into the meditative state.  At a certain point, I rotate to the right, facing the south, reverse the cross of my legs, and go back into the deep place.  I rotate again to the west and north, and then back to the east.  Each direction has its signature spirits, totems and happenings.  At New Moon, this serves to bring the energies of this particular time phase to a close.  I was slightly upset this morning, because it was evident that I had overlooked this practice for many moons.  It's so easy to fall from the Way!

As I was getting up from the mat, I was startled by THE VOICE OF SEEING.  This is from Castaneda's work.  Somewhere in the universe, there is an intelligence that speaks to the Shaman at the moment of Seeing something.  What you See doesn't always make sense, but the Voice of Seeing sets you straight.  It reminded me of a conversation I had had years ago, with one of the entities which visits me.

"HOW OLD ARE YOU?", it asked me.  I forget what I said.  He corrected me and explained.

"We measure your age this way," he said.  "At the moment of your first copulation, you become one year old."  I was 17 the first time I got laid.  "When your child is 17, you will be two years old, and he will be one year old.  His child will be one year old in 17 years, he will be two years old, and you will be three.  That child's child will be one year old in 17 years, and so on."

He explained to me that when you are seventeen, people younger than you look like kids.  When you are 34, seventeen year olds look like kids.  Moreover, you are old enough to see the difference between you and the seventeen year old.  And you can see that you are invisible to him.  At 51, you are still younger than the 68 year old.  At 68, you can See something about the world and your place in it.  You have passed through.

In the growth and development of a Shaman, time slows down.  A Shaman expands the Energy Field toward Infinity.  Within that context, time is no longer linear, but a multidimensional complex of energy systems interacting at random, forming what Castaneda's don Juan calls "the lines of force in the universe".  During this time the Shaman practices THE ART OF STALKING, which allows him to develop the discernment and discrimination to separate out the different streams of consciousness energies which translate into events.  This occurs over many moon cycles.  

Learning to carry the observational awareness gained during the passage of the lunar phases, their nuances and messages, or lines of force, is the daily task of the Shaman.  Visions, as such, are merely reminders that there is an underlying flux of consciousness awareness which forms the matrix of reality.  In youth, these lines of force are compressed into moments, each moment awash in the passions of the life force as it seeks to unfold toward THE TOTALITY OF THE SELF.  The Totality of the Self is the human being unshackled from the bonds of culturally imposed self-identity, existing in a culturally imposed reality.

ART OF STALKING: DAILY LOG BOOK

DAILY LOG BOOK

The Art of Stalking is, of course, the art of Stalking The Self.

Once one enters the realm of Shamanic Consciousness, time becomes a much more expanded situation.  The personal consciousness, or, I should say, Awareness, is naturally limited to the immediate moment.  Memory augments this moment from its film archives, to give us an edited picture of reality.  In Shamanic Reality, the personal consciousness is not enough to register the totality of each moment.  And the concept of Time becomes a moment of opening one’s eyes in the deep end of a swimming pool.

To demonstrate this to me, one year on Valentine’s Day, Marilyn Monroe wanted to do a painting.  We were in the large studio in Ellensburg.  She took me downstairs, and over to the Starlight Café.  But it was closed, so we walked down the street to the Oak Rail Tavern, where we had four pints of ale, and four shots of tequila.  We walked back to the studio, quite tipsy, and we did the painting, throwing paint all over the substrate already positioned on the Painting Floor (otherwise the Yoga Floor).  When we had finished, I passed out on the small carpet in the Healing Area.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized what had happened.  The painting turned out ok, and I mounted it for display.  At some point, I remembered.  Just as I was passing out, I had witnessed a miracle!  There was Marilyn Monroe, running around the painting floor in glee, in her Spirit Body, stark naked of course.  What a charming sight.  It showed me the time lag between what happens in Spirit, and how long it takes to reach normal human consciousness.

For that reason, a Shaman lives a more or less isolated life, so that the minutiae of daily living doesn’t block the visions  of Shamanic Reality.

And since much of Shamanic Reality unfolds over the course of many days, weeks, months, or moon cycles, I early on realized I had to keep notes of everything that happened during a day.  So I started keeping a journal.  But I’m not very good at journaling, so it became just a log book.  I note everything I do in a day, and what time it happened.

This is very helpful in matters of personal health.  I keep track of my daily stool.  What does it look like?  What affects it?  What types of foods, and what Shamanic Events, influence my stool?  It is very interesting to note the effects of Shamanic occurrences on the physical body and the environment.

For this reason, we keep a close watch on the daily manifestations of the phases of the Moon.  We are now dragging the bottom of the Dark Moon phase.  New Moon is in two days.  People are psychotic and withdrawn.  I am hyper and intense.  This Dark Moon is different from most others in that regard.  I feel we are moving into something new.

With the New Moon two days away, I am reminded that the New Moon phase is actually upon us, and that it lasts for a couple of days past the exact opposition of the moon to the sun, until the appearance of the first Crescent Moon low above the horizon in the West, just after the sun disappears behind the Cascade Mountains.  So we have several days of a very delicate energy, in which ceremonies can come to completion, and transitions can be made to a new time.

(The photo shows my log book where I keep it during the day, on my work table, which is directly in front of my Trance Chair, where the light comes in from the window.  In background is my Meditation Vortex, against the wall, and my Yoga Floor [also the Healing Floor].)

THE ART OF STALKING

MEDICINE WHEEL YOGA MAT

In the first chapter of his first book, The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968, Carlos Castaneda makes mention of two things which form a part of the foundation of my Initiation as a Shaman.  Carlos is told to ‘find his spot’ on don Juan’s veranda; and later, he is instructed in the Art of Stalking.  Carlos’s ‘spot’ is a certain type of Earth Energy Vortex; and Stalking is the very complicated process of figuring out what’s going on in the unfathomable world of Shamanic Spirit.

The drawing above shows my first yoga mat.  The Medicine Wheel is a time-honored device of indigenous peoples to help them organize the energies of Spirit.  It is also the basis of Mandala paintings.  By organizing around the four directions, the world of Spirit is brought into easier understanding, and rituals can be more easily organized.  This is an exercise in Stalking developed by peoples around the globe.

In today’s world, we need to develop a deeper and more profound approach to understanding the world around us.  The industrial world has lost the sense of time, ever since we invented clocks.  But Nature provides us with an incomparable teacher:  the Moon.

Since ancient Shamans had no compass or clocks, or artificial light, they used the stars and seasons and arc of the sun to keep track of what was happening around them.  As it turns out, the focus of these ancient peoples on certain aspects of the world created a condensation of the energies of consciousness around these points of focus.  This concentrated consciousness morphed into gods.  And the gods were able to communicate with their creators.  Sounds backwards?  Check it out.  You can do the same thing, when you create the Medicine Energies where you live.

One of the easiest things to focus your attentions upon is the Moon.  We are all familiar with the hackneyed concepts of Full Moon and Dark Moon, but what we see is merely a dot on our calendars.  We do not have the energetic capacities to fully grasp or discern the energy patterns of these very subtle fluxuations coming to us from the Moon.  The phrase ‘many moons’ takes on deeper meaning when we actually use the lunar cycles to organize our sense of the passage of time.

If you follow the weather reports on TV, you may notice that they are often way off just before or just after the New or Full moon.  The energies of these times are an example of  the spiritual psychology of the world we live in.  The Moon has varying moods, and these moods correspond to events occurring on the planet.  A Shaman has the sorts of powers which can cause the Moon to respond in some way.  Often, after a ceremony, a Shaman looks to the mood of the Moon to judge its success. 

The awareness necessary to discern these responses from the Moon can be developed by removing oneself from the standardized responses to the world conditioned by the culture in which we live.

In Shamanic Yoga, simply practicing yoga is one way to remove oneself  from the vibes of the world around us.  And the awareness of the nature of the human energy field which is developed while deep in asana, is one way of discerning the subtleties of these messages from the Moon.  Because it is the Shaman’s Body, which is developed from the Yoga Body, which has the antennae or receptors which can pick up the vibes from the Moon.

The world around us is a vast sea of energies.  These energies are forms of consciousness.  The consciousness which is normally contained in the ‘brain’ is not sufficient to discern the subtleties around us.  So Shamans use entheogens and psychedelics to augment their energy field perceptors.  And Shamanic Yogis develop these perceptors in their own physical energy fields.

The Art of Stalking is the art of developing the attention span (often a span of months or years) to apprehend and decipher the communications from the entities of the natural world.  Shamanic Art is often used as one means of record-keeping, as peoples develop an iconography to describe these impressions from the subtle energies.

THE END OF MY INITIATION AS A SHAMAN

When I first moved into my apartment in Yakima, I buried my extra house key beside a post in the cyclone fence at the east edge of the crushed gravel parking lot.  After a few years, in which I had not  needed the spare key, I decided to dig it up, just to check it.  I dug and dug, but never found it.

On July 19, 2013, I experienced a heart attack while walking around Myron Lake.  I had been drinking beer for breakfast for weeks, and stuffing myself with corn chips, and I could feel the congestion in my chest cavity.  The heart attack was severe enough to scare me, but I was able to control it with my yoga breathing and energy manipulations.  For a few days, my chest was in strong discomfort, with pinging chest pains.  After a while, I began to realize another aspect to these energies.  I could sense the presence of Marilyn Monroe.

Since I have no medical coverage, I continued my gem elixir and yoga treatments and went on about my business.  The chest pains continued.  Soon, they became more and more pronounced, until they began to seem like messages in Morse Code.  I knew it was MM teasing me.

On March 3, I had another attack.  This time, I could feel the pain going up my aorta.  I could see into my chest, where there was a blue glow all around the area of the aorta.  This was the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death.  I began to sense a purpose to these attacks. 

My mother came to visit me, in company with Marilyn Monroe.  She had grown into her identity with Queen Nefertiti, my Master Teacher.  Together, they showed me the secret of my very much unexpected birth.

At sixteen years old, my mother, first of three children, had seduced her father and became with child.  Later, with the birth of this first child, her uterus had been rendered inoperative.  Years later, she had married my father, and for six years, they were childless.  And then I came along.  After this birth, the uterus was removed.

As a child, I had received hints about the existence of my older brother, but it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I began to understand that I wasn’t her only offspring.  By that time, I was two decades into my Initiation as a Shaman, and living in Yakima.

The visit from the spirit of my mother turned out to be the beginning of the end of my Initiation as a Shaman.  It had been twenty two years and 99 days since the beginning on the day after Xmas in 1990.

A few days passed, and I was outside checking the yard, when I looked down to the dirt of the alley, a few feet from my blossoming stand of hollyhocks.

“That’s my house key!” I said.  I took it from its little Ziploc and checked it in the door.  It worked.  I think this was the first time Marilyn Monroe had dematerialized an object for me.

Shortly after that experience, I decided to dig up the Master Crystal and some other stones used by Jesus and Nefertiti as they worked to realize the agenda we had cooked up in ancient Egypt, concerning the birth and rebirth of Jesus.  The soul of Jesus had been modeled after that of Peta Amen Apt, priest of the High Temple in Ancient Egypt.  In the first days of my Initiation as a Shaman, they had pointed out his name in a footnote in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Peta worked with me for several years, and eventually broke my typewriter.

As my Initiation had been dragging along for so many years, without any sense that I was acquiring the powers expected of a ‘real’ Shaman (as opposed to the current flood of Shamanic Practitioners –no slight intended…), I began to suspect that the Master Crystal was key to an agenda that was being concealed from me.  After the experiences which began with the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in January 2011, in which I played a key role, and was introduced to the secrets of the human sacrifice as it is practiced today, I came to a time when I began to experience the creation of my Nagual.

The Nagual, or ‘double’, is a projection from the yoni (loin area) of Shamans of South and Central America.  It is often a Jaguar.  My Nagual was actually Jesus, who appeared as the little black dog Xolotl, Lord of the Underworld, who immediately morphed into a giant Anaconda, which I was able to watch as he slithered out into the world and traveled toward Seattle, and then south, and then all over the place, leaving a trail of nationally televised disasters and assassinations.   By this time it had become apparent to me that I had been expected to groom Jesus for his return in the Second Coming.  I had been shown the symbol of a cross, with not one but two crosspieces.  I termed this the Double Cross.

By this time I had become thoroughly convinced that my youthful distaste for and distrust of Jesus and the Christian religion had been entirely correct.  I was not willing to be party to the sorts of lies and deceptions, heinous practices and ruinations of the living planet, which I had experienced to be at the core of this agenda.  It had become obvious that I had evolved, spiritually, along with the planet, but that my spirits had not.  So I had buried the Master Crystal and others, in the sacred grove of the garden at the west edge of the parking lot.  Again, I dug and dug, but the crystals were no longer there.  Then other things began to disappear.

Over the years since the Giffords massacre, I had been having intense battles with Jesus.  I found I was able to actually engage him in combat, and was able to prevail.  His method of dealing with me over the years had so infuriated me, that I had successively grown stronger and stronger, until his provocations finally succeeded in crystallizing the totality of the energies of my own spirit.  It took me many years to finally break through the sociological and cultural conditioning that made me feel I needed to be somehow subservient to the Great Holy Ones.  After each battle, I would recover, go on with my days, and have some remorse.  I would rationalize that it was possible to co-exist with this agenda which was so anathema to me; that I should behave myself and not fly off the handle….  And it was settled.  And then my spirit would rise up and say, “No Way!”

Until finally, the Initiation had ended.  It took me a few months to test the situation, but it seems to have actually morphed into what I call my “Apprenticeship”.  I  am now the apprentice of the Medicine Energies which I have built up in my yard and apartment during the seven years I’ve lived here.  My Medicine has spread from my apartment to the others in the fourplex, and to the neighbors.  We have become a small community.  Plants from my garden are now the beginnings of gardens for each of the other tenants, and the neighbors.  Friendships have formed, and each tenant has found new interests and a revitalized life.

Meanwhile, I am still tracking the activities of my Nagual.  The first really significant feat that the Nagual has accomplished is the replacement of the Pope of the Catholic Church with a new Pope, Francis, who is known as a champion of the poor and downtrodden.  At first, I was deeply annoyed that after giving my life to this aborted ploy to bring the Jesus back to life, all he could manage to do was change the Pope.  But I mellowed out, after some time.

The second feat that he has accomplished is more to my liking.  As we have our roots in ancient Egypt, I was very pleased that he was able to bring a change to the elected government in Egypt, and remove the heavy-handed Morsi government, with its Islamist agenda.  While I have not had the opportunity during my Initiation to do much work with individuals, it recently occurred to me that I would be able to exert some power over the Gods of the Abrahamic Religions, and by starting at the top, begin to bring some changes to the way these religions treat this magical planet we all share, which is the mother and birthplace of the Gods themselves.

The past few months have given me some hope that I will be able to rehabilitate at least some aspects of my life.  I am actually enjoying the process of losing my teeth as I age.