“Life is a mystery, a blessing, and a challenge. It is exciting and full of adventure, but can also be overwhelming or even tragic.”
“We are reaching several thresholds in our journey as human beings on earth. We need intentional changes to shift us from an unsustainable and oppressive way of life to one that is more sustainable and liberating.”
“Everyday we make choices as to how we live our lives. The further we progress in our individual healing and awareness, the closer we become to fulfilling our role in bringing change. Every role is unique and every role special.” ~ Evon Peter *
In a Bioneers panel-presentation with fellow Native American activist-leaders Winona LaDuke and John Trudell, Evon Peter said that on this path …
“There are no quick fixes; there are no short cuts. This path is going to take years, require us to face our fears and to be courageous in challenging ourselves to grow, and learn, and open up.”
“In my experience, I have never worked with a North American person, indigenous or non-indigenous, who did not have to go through the equivalent of a nervous breakdown on this path of healing, because we need to deconstruct what it is that we believe to be our realities and our existence as human beings in order for us to actually return to being human beings, myself included.” **
Evon Peter is a former Neetsaii Gwich’in Chief of Arctic Village and founder of the Indigenous Leadership Institute. Listen to the Bioneers talk here, and learn more about Evon Peter here.
The Bioneers talk was called “Becoming Fully Human,” which is lovely given that Bioneers is focused towards a large and diverse audience.
Yet I wonder if it’s more accurate to say “Reclaiming Our Humanity,” given a culture and many, many generations of dehumanizing and inhumane Empire-norms.
… or remembering our humanity …
… or restoring our humanity …
… or renewing it …
… or revitalizing it. Celebrating it. Rooting in it.
Reconnecting to every last bit of ancestral wisdom that exemplified and thus strengthen humaneness and our sense of interconnectedness and shared humanity.
As a sort of inoculation against the dehumanizing virus of inhumanity, but even more than that, as a presence and example of humaneness or humanity.
These are ideal “RE …” words for the Energies of Now, actually, with Jupiter and Saturn both retrograde, and Mars readying for its retro-Vision Quest that’s one of the Astro Headliners for 2016.
Big Love and happy (Humanity) reclaiming,
What’s stirring and ‘headlining’ for your own Vision Quest in the coming months?
Have a Sophiastrology Treasure Hunt reading or consultation for inspiration and insight. Check out the Current Specials here.
March 31, 2016 at 1:23 am
It is good to read you again after so many months, Jamie. A Vision Quest sounds exactly right for where I am at. I just watched a movie on Gaia called, “Finding Joe”, on the works of Joseph Campbell. one of the things the cast members were talking about is how, on the Heroine’s Journey, we will be asked to walk into The Forest (during the Initiation Phase), and if we find a path there already, then we know isn’t our path. I found the idea very comforting, as I navigate my new reality towards my intentions, and find myself with a path to follow. A vision is exactly what is needed.
April 1, 2016 at 6:31 pm
Welcome back, Janece. 🙂 I’m glad it resonated. And yes, Joe and his work is honored here as well. It’s a helpful ‘map’, for sure. I do appreciate that quote, too:
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
There’s another version, too, which you’ve likely seen or heard: “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
So it seems. 🙂 It reminds me of the scene from Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn says he’s lost sight of his path, and Arwyn says, “It’s laid out beneath your feet.”
Seems a time of Heroine’s and Hero’s Journeys, and Questing into a greater vision, to be sure, doesn’t it?
Wishing you well as you invite and cultivate your ‘big vision’, and as you continue on your path.
xoxo Love, Jamie
March 31, 2016 at 2:29 am
God I wish the New Age movement would lay off the inept appropriation of spiritual tropes from other cultures. It causes no end of problems.
The damage Carlos Castaneda did to the Yaqui with his gross misrepresentation of their culture has been well documented. Less so the contribution Marlo Morgan has made to the cultural genocide of Indigenous Australians with her fabricated and ill-informed book.
But it cuts both ways.
When people from consumerist, English speaking Judeo-Christian cultures lift Hindu advaitist concepts such as ‘unity with the godhead’ and render untranslatable Sanskrit terms such as ‘paramatman’ as ‘Self’ then flog the whole thing off as a recipe for self-improvement they invert what is meant to be a life-long practice of inquiry and renunciation into a commodity of adornment that strongly reinforces the very egos it’s meant to extinguish.
I don’t know how well the idea of ‘becoming fully human’ has been ported across from Native American cultures, nor enough of their history to know what it has meant to them. But as an Australian Aborigine I sure know enough of our history to know what it means to suggest that those who aren’t part of the religious and cultural in-group are somehow less than fully human.
Maybe followers of New Religions (usually purporting to be old ones) in America should take a look at their own history. Of Jim Jones, of Branch Davidian, of the Manson Family, of how Rajneeshpuram panned out, and think a bit about whether packaging up distorted, processed versions of the spirituality of other cultures to flog off to your own spiritually impoverished masses might really be benefiting anyone other than the vendors or whether it’s more akin to introducing an invasive species into a naive ecosystem.
March 31, 2016 at 8:29 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and for sharing your perspective and insights drawn from your Aboriginal ancestral lineage and experiences.
Agreed … I’ve never been much of a Castaneda Et. Al. fan, truth be told, nor of most New Age or sanitized ‘Eastern’ packaged-spirituality (in fact, a friend and I were just discussing this very thing earlier this afternoon).
It’s useful and illuminating to be familiar with the roots and history of one’s own ancestral traditions (and how the march of Empire did the very same to indigenous cultures across the world, including Europe … anyone who’s actually familiar with the history of Empire, including and outside of one’s own ancestral tradition, can see that the m.o. of Empire was identical no matter where it did its work of eradication.).
My own Native American ancestors were in the Northeastern U.S., and my Gael ancestors experienced the very same, in the same 17th-19th century timeframe, though their story is lesser known and lesser told. Who knew?
Again, knowing the history is very illuminating indeed. Helps us all to break away from the easy and often inaccurate assumptions, though just having respect keeps us from mindlessly and disrespectfully appropriating from other culture’s traditions.
(Then again in the U.S., there is such diversity that most people have at least several, if not more, ancestral and ethnic backgrounds — our multi-racial president is a good example — so many people here in fact draw from multiple traditions.)
And true enough; in any hyper-commercialized cultures, everything and anything will get appropriated and sanitized.
Perhaps that’s why so many elders and teachers from different cultures and traditions feel it’s important to share their wisdom here and now.
Thanks again for stopping by.
Jamie
April 4, 2016 at 9:23 am
So pleased I visited today Jamie.. Reading the quotes and resonating with the Nervous Breakdown.. It was from this point in my own life in the early 90’s I began my own path of transformation, all be it slowly as I awoke to the world of reality.
Over the last few months I feel I have been reconnecting to the basic roots of what is important in life.. Music, laughter, art..
I look out into the world and have to switch off .. It is not that I am not caring.. In fact sometimes that is my failing.. I feel too often too much of the worlds pain..
But I see humanity as a whole has become desensitised to the traumas, seeing the value of our human lives as nothing more than pawns being passed from country to country as they do not see their stories of suffering..
So my grief is not going to help them.. But the energy of my love, in bringing my own world more light is the only way I can think of as helping transform the world..
If every one of us set our Vision Quests to transform the way we think.. Instead of getting caught up within the politics, the anger, the judgments of the world.. I feel we could each help transform our world for the betterment of society..
Loved your new layout Jamie… And wishing you a wonderful Month of April
Love and blessings
Sue
April 4, 2016 at 5:04 pm
Many thanks for your visit and your comment, Sue. It’s true – for those who are strongly empathic, we pick up these things in the shared consciousness field regardless of whether we ‘tune in’ and follow the ‘news’ (or what passes for it), and all the more if and when we DO visit with the constant toxic-drama that passes for ‘news’.
You probably notice that too I imagine, yes? Hence the wisdom of being discerning about it. If true empaths (clairsentients) are a type of ‘filter system’ energetically and psychically, it’s necessary to be discerning and mindful.
It’s hard not to notice, or not to have moments of grief — sometimes profoundly so — and yet it’s just that as the Tao te Ching shows (and Chogyam Trungpa’s Shambhala wisdom emphasized) that it’s through just such grief-carved, grief-sensitive valleys that the waters of spirit and Love can flow.
Setting a Vision Quest to evolve and transform the quality of our thoughts and ‘thinking habits’ (since that’s what they are … habits … for better or for ill!) is very much aligned with the essence and themes for Saturn in Sagittarius, particularly in square to Neptune in Pisces and Jupiter in Virgo.
I’m feeling it today, to be sure … low-ebb vibe, as one kindred-sister put it in her email to me.
Wishing you a beautiful Spring, April, and ‘Dark of the Moon’ Monday, and New Moon Week, Sue. And plenty of T.L.C., too.
xo Love,
Jamie
April 6, 2016 at 12:03 pm
Thank you Jamie. Loved your thoughts on this.
Yes the energies have been intense lately.. And about the Vision Quest.. your post came on the back of me reading last week another Vision Quest… And I wrote a fictional post oh some 6 yrs ago about a Vision Quest in a then book I was trying to write.. Which got Shelved 🙂 after about 6 chapters.. 🙂 So maybe I need to revisit it again 🙂
Have a blessed April too
Sue
April 6, 2016 at 3:26 pm
It’s always interesting to see what spirals back around after gestating for a time, isn’t it? I just read a book (fiction) that the author started, writing 40 pages, then set it aside … and found it 12 years later (that’d be a Jupiter cycle!), finished and published it. 🙂 Happy Spring to you as well (though we’ve suddenly got Winter weather again for a bit, it seems!). xo Love, Jamie
April 7, 2016 at 11:22 am
Yes the winter seems to have returned.. making us keep on our toes that Nature rules.. 🙂 And thank you for sharing that.. I hope to edit a little and share some of it.. The quest alone took over 5,000 words.. So I need to break it down into digestible pieces 🙂