Finding Your Passion Shamanically

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Mara

I’m getting ready for drumming circle tomorrow and thinking about how we find joy in life. Meaningful joy. Sometimes the requirements of daily life, the beliefs we carry with us from childhood, and the messages from society can distract or impede us from spending time in joyful states. These states can be brought about by doing particular activities that resonate deeply with our true selves, maybe without us even understanding why. They can be brought on by being in certain environments, or with certain people or groups of people. They can be brought on by work or by play, or in ideal circumstances when both align. Sometimes we forget what affects us this way and need to look for it. Sometimes we know the “what,” but have lost touch with it or don’t make time for it. Usually it’s not just one “thing.” 

Although there are many things that can help us have the experience of joy, we can cultivate joy by turning inward rather than turning outward to particular circumstances. Happiness can be fleeting, contingent upon external circumstances. Although we can become familiar with the sensation of joyfulness through some of these connections, joy is really about maintaining an inward balance. Rejoicing in our existence, even when it’s complicated, even when it’s painful. Hopefully along the way you can find ways to spend your time, people to spend your time with, and places to spend your time in that reflect joyfulness back to you.

We’re going to explore this topic tomorrow night at the drumming circle (more information), and in more depth on Tuesday, June 18th at 7:00 on the Reawaken Your Brillance web TV Panel discussion. 

Wishing you a peaceful heart,
Mara

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Can Nature Help Us Heal? Forest bathing, a room with a view, and new studies about nature, stress and brain function.

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Mara

With the burst of extraordinary weather we’ve been experiencing here in Durham, many of us are turning our thoughts to the outside (if you can brave the pine pollen that’s drifting down like snow!). Whether it’s planting a garden or walking in the woods, I hear repeatedly, and know from my own experience, that being in nature is nourishing at a deep level. What better way to “ground” than to feel the earth under your feet or spilling through your hands as you create cozy beds for your herbs or flowers? As with many things that we’ve known instinctually and experientially for ages, science is beginning to back up that feeling of wellbeing we achieve from being in nature.

Several years ago I learned about the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. I just love that phrase! What a delightful image, to soak in the sounds, smells and sights of the forest. It simply means walking in the forest or a natural environment, but the translation adds a nuance that conveys what we do when we give ourselves over to immersion, when we are really soaking in nature, delightfully saturated with the experience. Research shows that people who participate in forest bathing have lower blood pressure, lower pulse rates, and lower cortisol levels.

The Atlantic Monthly recently published an article called How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies. The author referenced the research findings about shinrin-yoku, in addition to other studies that show how being immersed in nature allows us to regain mental clarity and heal better after surgery. Early stage breast cancer patients did markedly better on challenging mental tasks when they had spent time in nature. And a study of patients recuperating after gall bladder surgery compared people whose hospital rooms afforded them a view of trees with patients who looked out at a brick wall. Patients who looked at trees while they recovered healed and went home faster, experienced less depression, and required at least 50% less painkillers than their counterparts with the brick wall view.

Portable EEG monitoring is now possible, so researchers are able to track the affects of being in nature in real time. As reported in the New York Times, researchers in Scotland published a new study this month in The British Journal of Sports Medicine. They attached these new, portable EEGs to subjects as they walked through different urban and rural environments. They discovered that after the intensity of urban stretches, the brain was able to reset itself while in nature, allowing participants to recoup from the effects of a tremendous input load and reducing mental fatigue. Doctors involved in the study suggest breaks from the workday to be outdoors, as “It is likely to have a restorative effect and help with attention fatigue and stress recovery.”

Perhaps it’s worth spending some extra time outside to see if whatever might be ailing you will improve? I know I always feel better when I do. I’m going to go wash the dirt from under my fingernails and the pollen out of my hair now.

Wishing you a peaceful heart.

Mara

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Going Dark, Pregnant Opossums, Easter, & Personal Evolution

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Mara

On Sunday we participated in the Pledge to Go Dark for the Earth and turned our lights off for an hour. It was a symbolic gesture, a display of universal commitment to protect the planet. We sat and talked in the golden glow of a table full of candles (and an iPad, I admit). In addition to the reminder about our planet and our energy use, this process got me thinking about light and dark.

We’ve emerged from winter, a season where darkness abounds, to spring, a time where light flows back and enlivens our world. In this season light expands literally and metaphorically. The days are getting longer; the flowers are blooming; the birds are singing more vigorously, perhaps an enormously pregnant opossum is preparing to give birth under your shed! (yes, that’s happening here). These are external signs of the return of the sun. But spring’s light often brings something else, a sense of internal expansion and potential. We are inspired by new life. During our traditional spring-cleanings we shake off the dirt from the confines of winter when we’re pent up in the cold and dark. Time to move out of old cycles and start fresh.

Spring is a season of hope. Not clichéd saccharine hope, but instinctual, millennia-old, felt in our cells, capital H, Hope. For our ancestors in ages past, and for many people living without adequate shelter, spring’s arrival was a big deal. We survived! Life goes on. For most of us in the Western world in 2013, winter is not a matter of physical survival, but we still had to endure the darkness. However, without the unique kinds of nourishment that dark provides we can’t reap the benefits of the light. For example, without the time to lie dormant and recharge, the tulip and hyacinth bulbs would not bloom.

Maybe we have that aspect to us too. Maybe our “darkness” is physical pain, emotional struggle, professional challenges, loss, grief, whatever makes us feel bleak and despairing. But perhaps the act of moving through that darkness fuels the flowering of our personal springs (yes plural), when we heal, overcome, succeed, dream, love.

Spring is a fertile time, again literally and metaphorically. Our holidays reflect the theme of birth and rebirth. Easter celebrates Jesus’ resurrection after the crucifixion. Passover commemorates the Jews exodus from slavery in Egypt to start physically and spiritually free lives. Beltane, which comes a little later in the spring, honors the fertility of the earth and the power of the waxing sun.

As the baby birds are hatching, new ideas, and even new versions of our selves, are hatched most easily in spring. Is it time to recreate your self and your world? In a subtle way? In a dramatic way? What colorful vision are you ready to create in your life’s garden? Perhaps an internal and external life that hums with the excitement of a spring day? Are you ready to call your innate power into your world now?

That is what personal evolution is all about. It takes energy, just like it takes energy for Nature to do what she does; for trees’ leaf buds to burst forth into full verdant canopies; or for the tightly wound orbs of peonies to spiral out into ruffled masses of sweet pink perfection; or for the bees to go visiting, tirelessly making their rounds from bloom to bloom. But it’s what they are meant to do. It’s where their power lies. They don’t worry about it, debate about it or lose sight of it.

Defining for yourself what you need to be powerful is a first step in your personal evolution. It’s different for all of us (with some overlaps, of course). This is one important aspect of Personal Evolution Counseling™. If you need some help with that first step, let me know. I encourage you to move joyfully and bravely into the light this spring.

Wishing you a peaceful heart,

Mara

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Spiritual Art on Display at Unity Center of Peace in Chapel Hill

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Mara

Unity Center of Peace in Chapel Hill is currently showing my paintings. They will be on display until June. 

I’m very happy to have them there. Since I paint from a spiritual perspective it’s always nice for me to have the work in a spiritual environment.

For more information about the art itself, visit www.marabishop.com. Additional paintings are available that are not yet on the website and commissions are also available.

Here is a statement about the work.

I’ve merged my spiritual and creative practices. Before I start a painting, I set the intention of opening myself to peaceful, healing energy and allowing it to come through me onto the canvas.  When I paint I enter into a meditative state and let color and form flow naturally. In my art, as in my life, I am inspired by nature and the spiritual aspects of the world around me. My intention is for the viewer to be positively affected by the energy the paintings radiate, in addition to the way they look in their home or workplace. By focusing on my intention, and by painting while embodying healing energy, I create healing objects that beautify and harmonize any space.

Unity is located at 8800 Seawell School Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. 

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Drum in the Spring at the next Circle!

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Mara

Spring Drumming Circle

The next circle will be on Monday March 25th from 7:00 – 9:00. As usual, our focus will be on journeying and creating sacred space as a group. There will be time for drumming. We will journey on a group topic and also on personal questions.

Core shamanic journeying is required for these gatherings. Please contact me if you would like to learn to journey. 

Please visit the WholeSpirit.com Events page for more information and registration information for the circle and classes.

Hope to see you there!

Wishing you a peaceful heart,
Mara

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Are you Stuck in the Muck? Are Cliffs of all kinds Looming? Read this.

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Mara

Every once and a while I peruse old posts for new insights. Sometimes I find something that is quite timely for what my clients or I (often there is an overlap) could use a refresher on. This has been an interesting month, no? Before you hurl yourself off the (metaphorical) cliff I mention below, either with joy or frustration perhaps try the FOCSDA thing I talk about. Acronym not really applicable, but didn’t want to give it away in the first paragraph! Remember, nothing stays the same. Sometimes that’s a good thing, especially while everyone seems to be wrestling with colds and sickness of one sort or another.  So find a person or practitioner you trust and take care of yourself while you wade through it. See below…

All my best,
Mara 

In the last post I talked about how a willingness to sit in the mist of uncertainty serves us well sometimes.  But there are different ways to sit, right? We can slouch and look at our fingernails, annoyed that we can’t see anything around us. We can sit up straight and watch the mist swirling in interesting patterns, listening for sounds…or the absence of sounds. You get the point. Our engagement makes the difference.

Following on the theme of managing challenging and uncertain times, we often can’t control external events, but we can affect our internal response and experience. Panic or calm resolve? Despair or persistent hope? Panic and despair are natural parts of our emotional repertoire. However, we can help ourselves move through them more quickly by having tools for reconnecting with our deeper resources. This helps us evolve without freaking out and running off a cliff (literally or metaphorically).

I recommend blending three approaches to Personal Evolution. Focused Observation, Conscious Stillness and Deliberate Action. They are simple to remember and easy to implement, but have wide ranging affects.

Focused Observation is simply watching yourself and the circumstances of your life – what’s happening around you. Paying attention. Looking for patterns. It’s detaching from your emotions and your personal viewpoint when you can, in order to get some different perspectives. Sometimes we are so engrossed in what we are doing that we miss the proverbial forest for the trees.

Conscious Stillness involves ceasing our talking temporarily, but it goes further. Being still and listening come into play. It’s making room for silence and a time to hear your inner voice. We are so surrounded by sound, both externally and internally, that often we forget what silence is like. Most of us can’t find inner silence with the chatter of our internal dialogue. Making time to experience quiet, specifically turning off devices that provide content (phones, TV, radio, podcasts, etc.) and experiencing silence reclaims a space for the subtler sounds to enter our consciousness. We may observe the ambient sounds of our environment, or start watching the thoughts meander (or march) through our minds. Gently, kindly, maybe using chant or soft music, we can slow or distract our usual thoughts enough to invite some new insights to well up. Our inner divinity is a great source of guidance and wisdom and often needs this intentionally created time to speak and be heard.

Deliberate Action can result once we’ve observed and listened and feel ready to move. When Focused Observation and Conscious Stillness have become a regular part of our lives, Deliberate Action can often feel like a natural reflex rather than an intellectual choice. It’s when the mist lifts and we act decisively and bravely when we know we have to. Choices, even if they are hard or complicated, feel right somehow.

The Taoist principle of Wu Wei comes into play nicely during these times. Wu Wei is a paradoxical idea of the action of non-action. A state of non-doing which allows us to enter into alignment with the natural cycles, where our actions feel effortless because we are aligned with a larger flow and able to respond appropriately to whatever situation arises.

By blending Focused Observation, Conscious Stillness, and Deliberate Action we are able to manage stressful situations while remaining connected to the reality of the circumstances and true to ourselves. We do our part to stay grounded and inspired for a new day, while enjoying the view from this side of the cliff!

Wishing you a peaceful heart,

Mara

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Facing Global Collapse? Prince Charles, Nature, and Home Organizing

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Mara

I read this headline in a newsletter called The Future put out by John L. Petersen the Arlington Institute. 

Experts Fear Collapse of Global Civilization – (Inter Press Service – January 11, 2013)

Horrified, but not surprised, I read Petersen’s synopsis which is below and then the full article.

Last March, the world’s scientific community provided the first-ever “state of the planet” assessment at the “Planet Under Pressure” conference in London. More than 3,000 experts concluded humanity is facing a “planetary emergency” and there was no time to lose in making large-scale changes. “We’re all scared,” said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. Global collapse of human civilization seems likely, write Ehrlich and his partner Anne Ehrlich in the prestigious science journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society. See original article. This collapse will take the form of a “gradual breakdown because famines, epidemics and resource shortages cause a disintegration of central control within nations, in concert with disruptions of trade and conflicts over increasingly scarce necessities”, they write. A key element in meeting this unprecedented challenge is “to see ourselves as utterly embedded in Nature and not somehow separate from those precious systems that sustain all life”, writes England’s Prince Charles commenting on the Ehrlich’s paper. “To continue with ‘business as usual’ is an act of suicide on a gargantuan scale,” Prince Charles concluded.

When I read things like this I can’t help but have a despair moment, how about you? What can I do really? It simply feels too big and therefore hopeless. Even if I packed up my life, moved off the grid, ate grass and grubs, and only traveled by foot it simply wouldn’t make that much difference. I feel overwhelmed and therefore paralyzed. 

But I’ve also felt similarly about major projects, the process of dealing with disastrous relationships, and maintaining various household systems. I recognize that comparing growing mounds of undone filing to impending global destruction may be, um… inappropriate? However, in a self centered, fleeting moment it can seem equally depressing and is more immediately visible. What has brought me out of paralysis in many of these moments is an understanding about how progress gets made. 

There are times when progress is swift. We make radical choices, or are forced to create sweeping changes, in our mindset or our external actions. That may be called for to save us as a species. It is certainly needed to bring about what Prince Charles refers to, as we are a long way off from viewing ourselves as “embedded in Nature.”

In other situations progress comes through an accumulation of small actions over time. Bear with me while I return to my filing analogy for a moment. The whole job became too big for me to deal with – I never had the uninterrupted days to clean up the backlog of paper. The cabinets were stuffed full. I had no system. As a stop gap, when the mess on my desk became too much, I’d dump the whole lot into bins and stash it in some little traveled corner of the house. Cheap, backwater real estate, so to speak. I had my own dumping grounds and added to them over time. The radical approach didn’t work for me here, it was too much, practically and emotionally.

What did work to stop the filing crisis was: 1) sking for advice about simple ways to improve the situation. (Help came in the form of organizer Jocelyn Kenner’s direction to an easy to implement system.) 2) Putting a few pieces of paper in the new files on a regular basis. 3) Clearing out some files from the full cabinets in 5 to 10 minute stints.

Honestly I have not yet returned to clean up my old dumping grounds, but I have stemmed the flow into them, and have managed to make a little progress on the once increasingly bleak big picture.  I broke this monster task into manageable bits, and although it’s not done, it’s much better than it was and continues to improve. 

That was the long way around to saying that when I read some horrifically depressing article that predicts the end of our species,  I  accept that that is a possibility, but I try to find things to help that are within my scope, efforts towards change that, although small, can add to a larger pool, that may create a tide… that may turn in our favor. Do what you can, when you can. Vote for politicians who you believe will stand up for our environment. Make purchasing decisions that support sustainability. Ditch the gas guzzler. Turn out the lights. Buy local. Plant a tree. Recycle. You know the drill. As a parent of young children, it may not be feasible for you to yank everyone out of school and off the grid, but you can teach the next generation about conservation and model conscientiousness for them. Just some ideas. I’m sure you have many more and I’d love to hear them. It may not be enough in the long run, but it’s better than doing nothing and feeling bad about it.

Wishing you a peaceful heart,

Mara

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Thank you CNN! Love, Healing & Nonsearch.

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Mara

Last night I started to look around for some research on the ways that love affects our ability to heal. It was a relatively broad search, motivated by my continuing movement toward a practice that focuses on generating a particular attitude or energy with my clients, more than on the techniques used. Love and compassion. Radiate love and compassion. Surround people with love and compassion and see what happens. Not new ideas of course, but I’m delving deeper into how those states relate to miraculous healing and how we can create them in our lives, both inside and outside of a practitioner’s space. It got late and I went to bed, without making much headway.

This morning CNN posted this article by Barbara L. Fredrickson. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Love. I’d had a successful experience with “nonsearch”! Nonsearch is finding exactly what you are looking for soon after you stop looking it. Yes, I made the term up, but expect more on the topic because it’s happening more frequently. Among many interesting research findings about love, compassion, and both of their effects on our health and happiness, Barbara says the following;

“…your micro-moments of love not only make you healthier, but being healthier builds your capacity for love. Little by little, love begets love by improving your health. And health begets health by improving your capacity for love.”

She goes on, “The radical shift we need to make is this: Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of connection shared with another.”

Yes! She’s talking about some of what I’m trying to do with my practice and my life, but from a research based context. Right brain and left brain are happy! There are the micro-moments, as Fredrickson calls them, certainly, and they build and reflect back. And there are also the macro-moments, the big infusions, the divine downloads. I work with those as well, and know that people are changed. I am changed.

Fredrickson is a professor right here at UNC Chapel Hill too. I love the synchronicities of my “nonsearch,” her proximity to my location, and the benefit it gave me personally to get this message right now (a mini “Amazing Grace moment“).

Wishing you days filled with micro and macro love moments. And, as always…

Wishing you a peaceful heart,

Mara

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Time for a Chat with Your Spirit Teacher?

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Mara

Come to our first drumming circle of 2013. Next circle, this Monday, January 28th, 7:00– 9:00. Please RSVP by Friday Jan 25th if possible.  We will journey on a group topic and also on your own questions.

Please contact me if you would like to learn to journey. Visit the WholeSpirit.com Events page for more information and registration information.

Wishing you a peaceful heart,
Mara

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Core Shamanic Drumming Circle ~ January 28, 2013

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Mara

In 2012 I started a second core shamanic drumming circle as more people asked about joining a circle that met regularly to share shamanic work. I’ve been delighted with the groups that have evolved over this past year. I say “groups” because each meeting has been a little different. Yes, there are some people who tend to come each time, but there are others who come sometimes, and a few who have made a single appearance. I wanted this circle to offer the opportunity for people to come together and journey without needing to commit to coming to each session. On the other hand, I also wanted people to be able to count on a group that meets regularly, to meet others with shared interests, and to create a sense of community. It appears to be working so far and I look forward to taking it deeper in 2013. 

The next circle will be on Monday January 28th from 7:00 – 9:00. As usual, our focus will be on journeying and creating sacred space as a group. There will be time for drumming. We will journey on a group topic and also on personal questions.

Core shamanic journeying is required for these gatherings. Please contact me if you would like to learn to journey. 

Please visit the WholeSpirit.com Events page for more information and registration information for the circle and classes.

Hope to see you there!

Wishing you a peaceful heart,
Mara

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