This beautiful season calls us to introspection. We go into the deep places where we can experience comfort and care. Inside. Louise Hay has an affirmation that it is safe to look inside. How many of us really understand how true this is? We are truly being called at this time to discover and recover what is valuable to us. What are the great treasures we have given to others through who we are and how we live? What gifts have we given future generations through our mindfulness and creativity? Our creativity is one of our greatest blessings. How can we create a gift, a prayer, a poem for someone who was a treasure to us or brought magic or grace, peace or wisdom into our lives? We are the gifts. How do we treasure our gifts and value the gifts of others? Each day is a gift. Count every meal as a blessing and send loving thoughts to those who prepared it.
Write a letter or poem of gratitude to the earth, to a teacher, to an ancestor, and send it air mail wherever they may be. Come alive, recognize that planting a tree is a powerful remembrance and so is a sculpture, a drawing, a letter, or a dance.
Thank you life. And thank life for you.
Make a blessing, send a voice of gratitude to all that we don’t understand reveling in the Mystery.
With Great Blessings from the Mystery, Char Sundust
In Memoriam
Many blessings and great gratitude to all who supported the transition of a beloved practitioner in our community. Death is a divine appointment with the mystery, we all have this appointment, we don’t know when and we don’t know how, but we do know we want to leave as many blessings as he did in this community and for the sweet earth. This is also a time of death and rebirth. Special deep gratitude to all those who have supported Dariusz Rawa in his journey to the Mystery. This community shines in your strength, kindness and connection to Spirit.
Our Winter Newsletter for 2010 is now available detailing classes and workshops from January through May. You can download the newsletter PDF here. It includes a registration form within it for your convenience.
May we experience your gifts of dreaming, of gestating, and remembering in the deep places who we are. May we remember our wishes from childhood. May we take action on the beauty that still resides therein, a way that honors the sacred dark that holds the stars, that maintain our wishes until we are willing to bring them down to earth. Help us bring them down to earth.
The location for the upcoming 3rd Year Circle and Clinic is Bastyr University in room 186.
If you have completed your 2nd Year training, or equivalent through Mentorship, and want to sign up for the 3rd Year Circle, please email Jeremy at sundustoracle[at]comcast.net
Thank you for your interest in the Soul Purpose Workshop that was scheduled for October 9, 10, 11. We are rescheduling this workshop for a time later in the year. Most likely to be in the Spring or Summer. We look forward to offering you this beautiful medicine at that time.
How can we be the healers we know we can be? Someplace inside us it exists. We want to offer our gifts to the world. We want to bring forward healing options that will serve the heart of our community; while our lives enrich others and we ourselves are able to expand and deepen our own growth, learning, and well-being.
We can explore. We can experiment, and we can (horror of horrors) learn. I love what Patrick O’Neil says, “you can’t do it right.” I love this phrase because it is a reminder that we are all discovering how each moment renews us with a gift, a new learning, or an opportunity to open our hearts in concern for another’s welfare; to open with honor and respect to receive another moment, another surprise. Learning more every moment is the secret to aliveness. Bring compassionate sharing and a wonder for life through your heart. The heart knows. Follow your heart. Trust your gut, trust what you are feeling. Always trust your contact with Spirit, with the Mystery, that brings unsought answers to your door; visions of your future self, of your becoming. We become one step at a time and we continue to become all of our lives towards our deeper, truer, greater selves. This is your life, today, right now, the way it is. If this is not the way you want it then do the work to create a tomorrow that is the way you want it.
Healing is a manifestation of our own goodness towards ourselves, and our own willingness to make medicine of our gifts; and to not allow anything or anyone in our lives that would diminish, or dismiss, or minimize our gifts. Allow only people, places, and things that uplift your talents and refine your soul with truth. Allow only that which can open your heart and your ears and lead to revitalizing your happiness.
“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found a way to serve.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
How do we serve the truth in others about how they want to feel every day for the rest of their lives, and assist them in finding what gives them that feeling? Is it sustainable? Does it bring a blessing to their family, friends, and love ones? If it does then they can do it. And nothing, I promise you, nothing sustains like joy. No person, place, or thing, no external can give you what you are looking for. It is what flows through us that brings us joy. It is our emptiness and our fullness. Our empty hands that have so much to offer bring us the greatest gift. Our greatest offering is in trusting the Mystery and trusting the healing power of love.
Don’t check out, check in. Ask yourself a question and then listen for the answer from the regions of your heart. This is 99.9% accurate for impeccable long term positive direction choice-making.
Listening is the 1st law of love. Not just hearing, not doing something else, but fully tending to the voice of another person. We all know what great courage it takes to use our voice to express ourselves authentically. Listen with your heart. What if you were really listening? Then perhaps the next time you spoke you would also be heard. Don’t be distracted by things you could care less about. Put your focus on what you care more about. Make space for simple pleasures, for fertility, for the soul. Sharon Reed says, “sit still and notice what is moving outside.” I have discovered the pleasure of two Bohemian Waxwings most recently from this exercise. Be there for yourself and you will have a supply, a well, of pleasures to delight. You will fill your own place – the place you give from. From this place you can motivate others toward their own healing.
Discovering what is healing for you, what inspires you, this is life. Simple, sweet, one step at a time, this is your heart. Be the source of its supply and the source of its wondering. You can choose to be a mere puppet of other people’s wants and needs. Or, you can show up, owning yourself, owning your heart with a courageous destiny before you. But choose you must. A vital inspired path is the choice that takes the most consciousness and offers the greatest rewards.
Tend to your gifts and they will tend to you. Steward them and they will steward you. Show hospitality and gratitude for the mystery that supports you and it will show gratitude and hospitality and support to you. There is a Tibetan saying that what you give away chases you, wants you, finds you. It’s wonderful who you are. Love it life it be it. I have been waiting for this day when get rich quick schemes are replaced with get happy and fulfilled schemes or authentic dream schemes. In the dream lie the joy, the abundance and nourishment of the soul. If you dream, if you nourish, if you dance or bake, paint or take care of children, if you nurture elders write stories, pray, walk in nature, love birds, if you garden or hunt, if you wild craft, counsel or cook. If you live these gifts fully you will be tended to. We are all builder, we are all tenders, and if we flower in consistency loving what we love, nourishing our dream, facing all things with pause, then reflection, then action, one step at a time. Then we will always have enough.
The Hopi prophecy says grow your own food or at least one food item. Lao Tzu says rejoice in what you have, be content in the way things are. When you realize nothing is lacking the whole world belongs to you. If we have not been doing what we love, then it is time to start over, to clean house so what has meaning will emerge. What we value is the only thing others can value. What we love others will care about also, the others that really matter. To quote Dr. Seuss, say what you feel and be who you are, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Becoming ourselves is a great mystery or as Yates says a terrible beauty. We have to learn something new. How to value who we are and what we have to offer as much as others do. Teacher’s, healer’s visionaries, counselors, bakers, doctors, what is essential has come to the surface and the important question of who are we when there is no almighty buck to follow. Maybe we could return to our hearts. Live simply, simply extend our unique and beautiful medicine, our talents and interests to create a new currency based on fulfillment, tending to community with our talents and bringing and making beauty and soul as a part of everyday life.
We have a choice at this time, to enter a new current, a new way of seeing currency. Remembering our joy and implementing a step by step plan to do what we value each day, to do the hard work of helping others or to play into the lie that we are victims. We are not unless we allow our imagination to be taken by the externals instead of by the drive of our dream and goals. There is an infinite supply of miracles and really it takes very little effort to be one.
What makes you happy? If you don’t remember go on a walking meditation for 15 minutes. Hold in your heart that question and ask to be shown by the great mystery what you enjoy. Nature will show you as you notice, notice the pulse of your heart, notice what you see and hear, and bird’s o wildlife spirit speaks through nature.
Spend time with friends who regenerate you. Talk to one another about how, as Angeles Arrien says, to turn things in a more positive and beneficial direction.
Remember what you enjoy doing in quiet times when you were a child. There is a calling there is a gift there.
Pray, meditate, spend time, reflect, call on assistance to strengthen you, remember the ones who came before. They made it through to bring you into the world, rely on them. What are their gifts that are beautiful…Strength? Courage? What’s good, what’s love, what works? Stay with that and thrive.
We all have a gift that will serve our community, technological, creative, or healing. To teach, nurture, serve, or protect. They are all essential gifts. And no community can go forward unless we all develop and offer our inspired gifts. May we support one another in being real because if there is enough and you are enough, then what are you going to do? It is sure to be the right direction. As the Buddhist quote says ‘if you are headed in the right direction all you need to do is keep on walking.’ There are things that people will always need. People will always need to be fed. Grow food, prepare food, learn about foods that nourish. Learn about foods that heal. People will always need healing and comfort. Develop your innate healing gifts within yourself. That is about listening, counseling, prayers, needles, herbals, surgeries, medical intuitive work, and ceremony. Develop these healing gifts, they will always be needed. Tend to your soul, people will always search for meaning. Deepen your capacity to reflect and access your own wisdom. Wisdom will always be needed. People will always need shelter, protection, nature, and spirit. Human beings will always need beauty, paintings, gardens, wild or otherwise, ways to create and to bring spirit into form. Angeles Arrien says that beauty is a portal to the mystery. What else is needed in the world? What else does the earth need? Human beings will always need this connection. Preserve and protect these resources, this beauty, this aliveness.
As we step deeper into winter we have the opportunity to honor the fourth wind from the North.The North brings wisdom from the well, the dark night of stars, and the cool that bundles us up within ourselves.Even when we are in the world there is translucence when we look at ourselves during this time.Some questions to ask ourselves at this time, in order to both deepen our relationship to ourselves and to winter, are:
What do I like about myself? What are my creative talents wanting to bring into being at this time? What is personal for me? Do I professionalize my relationships or do I receive from those I love in intimate ways?
It is easier for some of us to give than to receive.Receiving requires an openness of spirit.Truly receiving requires self love and a generous dose of intimacy and divine love.Curiosity and openness require that we are not opening from a place of dutifulness or control, but from a place of delight and creativity.
How am I receiving love, compliments, and gifts from others? What am I creating at this time? What motivates my giving? Do I give to myself time, energy, gifts, compliments, acknowledgement?
If I were to give from my heart what would it be?A scarf I knitted.A vase I saw in my best friend’s favorite color.A journal with a poem for the writer in my life.A tea cup for a friend who has committed to spending quality time with herself.Or art supplies with paper for family member who has expressed an interest in drawing again.
All of these gifts are from the heart and show that we have been listening to the soul of our friends and loved ones.
A gift from the heart is personal. It is accompanied often times by a note or sometimes with positive acknowledgement of gifts received from that person.In indigenous cultures give-away is a tradition to honor an event, an initiation, a teacher, a parent or a sibling.The spirit will guide this gift so that it will be something that will be a gift that opens the heart and inspires the spirit.Often times we will give the thing most valuable to us, which means that it carries a story and the soul of that story will be felt by the person receiving it. Especially when we go for a healing we always bring a gift that is equal to the healing we would like to receive.
Generosity is a healing salve when it comes from a creative place.When you have given creative thought and energy to a gift the people in your life will recognize that your gift is of the soul.
Gifts are an offering to Eros. May you give what you love and love through your receptive nature.May you do the work of remembering what brings you joy and giving yourself time to do just that. So spring might come a little bit sooner to everyone you adore.Explore your creativity as a blessing and a form of nourishment to enrich your own soul and bless the lives of others.What you make is beautiful.May you explore and share your gifts.
Healing Circle Begins in January & FLOW – Bringing Spirit into Form: An Ongoing Program for Writers and Those Who are Called to Write begins in February - Check out the SOI Classes and Workshops pages for more details
