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The way to work with our light in service to the whole begins with the simple recognition that our light is a part of the light of the world, part of the spiritual light of life.
This simple affirmation frees our light from the grip of any self-centered patterns and returns it to the oneness of life.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Saguaro Sunrise – photo by Jeni Foto, bigstockphoto.com
…trees are to be respected and revered as living entities. They are not to be ignored as non-living objects that must be used and exploited for self-interest, but instead they are to be recognized as living forces that sustain the entire Earth.
~ Ninthin Sridhar
500-Year-Old Oak – photo by Difen Bahia, bigstockphoto.com
Blessing is not a healing technique, rather it is a loving impulse from the heart which surrounds a person or situation that arouses our compassion. I won’t give here a definition of blessing…but the experience of thousands of people all over the planet who have adopted this practice is that, after a while, it becomes a way of living and looking at the world. Some who practice blessing in their daily lives have reached the point where they spontaneously and above all instantaneously bless any form of suffering they encounter during the day, be it an old peasant woman carrying a load much too heavy for her (in which case blessing might lead to a concrete act of carrying her burden!), an aged prostitute trying to find one last client at 3a.m., a dictator bellowing on television, a wounded bird, a country field ravaged by a terrible thunderstorm. Everything can be a subject for blessing and has indeed become so for some who use this practice in viewing life and the world.
Every single blessing heals in that it brings peace, it acts as a balm to any suffering, and it expresses heartfelt joy in the presence of beauty, kindness or any other form of good.
~ Pierre Pradervand
Sunset, Li River, Yangshuo, China – photo by streetflash, bigstockphoto.com
The primacy of experience lies at the heart of shamanism. This means that direct experience should come prior to dogma, culturally transmitted beliefs, preconceptions and institutionalized knowledge. It is mostly the direct experience of ourselves as multidimensional beings connected to an original unity or source. Our path is, to use Stan Grof’s term, ‘Holotropic’, that is, moving towards the whole – towards unity.
~ Gilbert Ross
Sunset Rainbow, Sedona, AZ – photo from bigstockphoto.com
Spirits are everywhere, and as we acknowledge their presence and honor and bless them—seeking counsel, support, and appropriate outcomes—we become more fully human; we help manifest the interconnectedness of everything;and we contribute to harmony, true being, and right action.
~ Claude Poncelet, The Shaman Within
Elf Garden, Iceland – photo by Ragnhildur Jonsdottir
…deep ecologists seek to emphasize that all living beings should be permitted, whenever possible, to purse their own evolutionary destinies. In contrast to anthropocentrism, in which things have value only insofar as they are useful for promoting human ends…ecocentrism calls on people to respect individual beings and the ecosystem in which they arise.
~ M. C. Zimmerman
Mt. Fuji over Lake Kawaguchiko, Japan – photo by Nuttawut Uttamaharad, bigstockphoto.com
More than ever before, we need to fall back in love with the land. Silence is our meeting place.It is our birthright to listen, quietly and undisturbed, to the natural environment and take whatever meanings we may. Long before the noises of mankind, there were only the sounds of the natural world. Our ears evolved perfectly tuned to hear these sounds—sounds that far exceed the range of human speech or even our most ambitious musical performances: a passing breeze that indicates a weather change, the first birdsongs of spring heralding a regreening of the land and a return to growth and prosperity, an approaching storm promising relief from a drought, and the shifting tide reminding us of the celestial ballet. All of these experiences connect us back to the land and to our evolutionary past.
~ Gordon Hempton
Great Kiskadee, Belize Rainforest – photo by Wollertz, bigstockphoto.com
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.
~ Black Elk
Night, Escalante National Monument, UT – photo by Kris Wiktor, bigstockphoto.com
When the powers of nature are the focus of your awareness and your thoughts, you come near to spirit, near to the source of all life. This is why most people love to walk in the woods or by the sea: they come close to the original source, and it is healing just to be in its presence. It cleanses you, brings peace of mind, touches your heart and brings you home to your soul.
~ Chris Luttichau
Trail in Redwood National Park, California – photo by Maks_Ershov, bigstockphoto.com
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
~ Nelson Mandela
Sunset, Hwange National Park, Metabeleland, Zimbabwe – photo by Arlush, bigstockphoto.com
Can we not also speak to these powers, and listen for their replies? Can we not cry out to the winds, whisper to the river and the deer, offer our tears to a tree, challenge the mountain with our questions? Outrageous as it may seem, such animistic (or participatory) modes of discourse are simply necessary, I believe, if we wish to really enact a respectful relation to these other beings, to remember the wild alterity of the waters, the winds, and the breathing land itself. If, finally, we wish to ensure an ethic of restraint in our human engagements with the more-than-human earth.
~ David Abram, “Between the Body and the Breathing Earth”
The Silent River – photo by Kavram, bigstockphoto.com
Lakota Instructions for Living (Passed down from White Buffalo Calf Woman)
Friend do it this way – that is, whatever you do in life, do the very best you can with both your heart and mind. And if you do it that way, the Power Of The Universe will come to your assistance, if your heart and mind are in Unity. When one sits in the Hoop Of The People, one must be responsible because All of Creation is related. And the hurt of one is the hurt of all. And the honor of one is the honor of all. And whatever we do effects everything in the universe. If you do it that way – that is, if you truly join your heart and mind as One – whatever you ask for, that’s the Way It’s Going To Be.
~ Passed down from White Buffalo Calf Woman
Yosemite Valley – photo from bigstockphoto.com
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
~ Henry Beston
Sunrise – Monument Valley, photo from bigstockphoto.com
There’s only one being shining out of all of our eyes. We spend all day finding reasons to hate people or feel better than other people, but it’s not true. There’s only one being.
~ Krishna Das
Sunrise – photo by Alex Efimenko, bigstockphoto.com
The Earth is a living oneness born from love, being remade by love each instant. And we can be part of its spiritual transformation, its awakening. The Earth is waiting and needing our participation. It has been wounded by our greed and exploitation, and by our forgetfulness of its sacred nature. It needs us to remember and reconnect, to live the oneness that is our true nature. And love is the simplest key to this oneness, this remembrance. Love is the most ordinary, simplest, and most direct way to uncover what is real—the innermost secrets of life. It is at the root of all that exists, as well as in every bud breaking open at springtime, every fruit ripening in fall.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Hvitserkur Rock, Iceland After Midnight Sunset – photo from bigstockphoto.com
