Feeling the call to find out a bit more about nature-inspired living and learn what Earth Medicine is all about? Yearning to participate in the systematic rise in feminine consciousness but aren’t sure what that really means? What you’ll learn in EMS and from my books is that our lunar natures have been coming into fullness for decades, but now the locomotion has some real traction. Feminine consciousness provides the nurturing womb of Earth to guide and heal. From learning about how time spent barefoot on the earth’s surface helps our bodies fight chronic inflammation to building altars, (as opposed to assemblages of power objects) and learning about the teachings of the Four Directions, EMS is a foundational course of study that takes you from beginner conversations to the wisdom of your inner compass and back out into the world.
Earth is…my lifeline. I want you to first experience, in my own voice, what I do and why – with a lot of love and compassion in my heart for where you’re at, as well as deep gratitude for you being here. Some terms might be a bit new to you, but history has revealed that women on this path tend to be quick studies!
Love Letter From Me to You
Bit of Background
I began my journey in the nineties, with an insatiable hunger for books, circles, ceremonies and practices-anything I could find. I lived in the Los Angeles area, deep in the city and not nearly as close to nature as I would later find myself. Hopping from harvest ceremonies in Topanga Canyon to drum circles in Griffith Park to sweat lodges in Ojai, and bookstore appearances by Starhawk, I was on the serious prowl for earth wisdom. I was an open vessel starving for spiritual structure. I voraciously devoured books by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Lynn Andrews, learning about shamanism and what indigenous cultures were still engaging in that was missing from the modern lifestyle. There was far less available than there is now, and there also was…no internet!
I muddled through until I moved my then-husband and our two dogs to a nearby mountain community so full of nature and so few people it may as well have been the Yukon. This is when my real journey began…
How I Got Here
To read the full story of how I began teaching nature-based living skills, check this out. The quick and dirty is that I experienced a physical and emotional trauma which put me in direct contact with the light of Source and wouldn’t be turned back off. The urgent tapping on my shoulder from Spirit was not happening for the first time. I’d been in a traumatic car accident at six months old which left me with an undiagnosed concussion which would only make sense decades later. The connection to a protective force was forged then, as often is in near-death and shock-laden experiences. All this to say that everything began to make sense just as my cosmic nature was shifting into high gear before my thirtieth birthday- when Saturn’s influence (the big boss) returns to where it was at the time of birth. I did what many do when the calling occurs: made major life changes with work and home and the rest began to unfold in community and in the mountains among the plants and animals.
Guided Meditation with Mountain Lion
My fourth book, Prayers of Honoring Grief was released Spring of 2018, and serves as another piece of the human puzzle, addressing the natural phenomenon of grief and our daily transmutation of sorrow.
I wrote my third book last year called Boundaries & Protection. I’m happy to say that it’s enduring wide success and I believe this is because there is a great need to protect our energy and to honor the energy of others to create sustainable relationships and communities. I also believe that there is much more going in inside the human brain and spirit that we are just beginning to scratch the surface on. Healthy boundaries creates space to explore sacred individualism and sovereignty within relationships, the secure bases we create beyond our bio-families.
I have long been meeting Mountain Lion in my dreams and walking with her spirit by my side. My soul work with her informs my boundaries and protection practice.
I created an intensive about five years ago to help women form healthy boundaries in relationship calling on the tools of integrative shamanism for support. The results were amazing. The e-course has even been adapted by a program for incarcerated women in St. Paul, MN, where the support is needed at ground level. ALL of us need gentle reminders of how to tread and how to ask to be handled by others. Mountain Lion helped me expand my feelings of security so that I could enjoy the level of intimacy and community with others I wanted to experience.
I hear often from women that would like to form circles and close bonds with other women, but their fears of interpersonal issues, drama and conflict prevents them from connecting and building community and sisterhood.
I wonder if there might be some old, cranky stories ready to fall away around this. We’re certainly living in a time in history when the pain of isolation has kept us quiet and lonely for too long. I get to see women becoming braver to own our parts in dysfunctional relationship. I do believe we are becoming far less afraid to make mistakes in relationship and that this will help us try to form strong bonds. We are learning how to make repairs quickly and easily, humbly and unresentfully, and this is helping tremendously.
I hope that my unique work with boundaries will help open up new possibilities for communing in a meaningful, supportive way. The meditation is a little bonus pear-blossom icing on the cake for envisioning the Protectress at your side, and a peek into how I work with visualization and the animal realm to begin creating shifts in thinking and desired change.
A very deep magic rises up when people become brave to be true to themselves and also be with one another.
Experiencing life through the healing, affirming messages of the earth has been like looking into a mirror which reflects beauty, wisdom and potential rather than the cultural, social messages we are pounded with daily-messages of distrust and deprecation, judgement and harshness.
Deepening my relationship to Earth, her plants, creatures, and geological structure have helped me to see all life as interconnected and PRECIOUS.
I hope you love seeing what I see: the vast and infinite beauty in you, in all of us, and the potential to shift energy starting right in your own body and home.