SHAMAN JOURNEY A: TEACHING STORY:

Sandra Ingerman – several times repeated during online study courses:

“THROW AWAY ALL YOUR NOTES AND LISTEN/LEARN FROM YOUR GUIDES…YOU CAN JOURNEY YOURSELF FOR HEALING.”

I began journeying and found two spirit guides: a male who lives and heals in a Hogan and a female who keeps her doctoring apothecary in her wickiup.  My instructions were visual images of white birds, animals, geometrics and human figures chipped into black rock faces.  The home of these images is the Piedras Marcadas section of the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I have hiked and prayed for over a year.  The black stones, from ancient volcanic eruptions, exactly reflected the location of my only stalking nightmare.  This nightmare entrapped my four-year-old self, deep in the rocky earth, struggling for freedom and breath.  My mother’s seven-week hospitalization following my twin brothers’ birth preceded the dream and my spirit teachers had instructed me to work through it NOW.

I wandered up and down the mesas scanning for a healing gateway.  I found it under a large, well-rooted juniper tree located just off the side of a mesa.  Surrounding the tree’s base was a semi circle of hard earth walled in by clumps of black stones: a place out of sight to the world.  I crawled in and looked up at plump, dark blue berries scattered throughout the junipers bough.  The day’s heat burst the smell of both from sleep and soon I was journeying with three eyes: one open to this world, the other to the waking dream and a third to the all- around.

JOURNEY

I awakened to a girl with curly, shoulder length hair wearing a petticoat.  She was opaque, floated over and behind the boulders, and bright against total darkness.

She told me she was the holder of my mother loss and all subsequent losses/traumas in our lives: “I stayed in the rocks because they helped me protect you from these things…and I was also safe from you hurting me!”

“My teachers told me to come here and I found you. Come back with me.”

“Good luck with that…your teachers are as stupid as you are if you think I am going anywhere just like that. You don’t even know my name.”

“I don’t.”

“That is the only thing you will get from me today – Rocky Girl.”

Along with her name, she presented me with a red stone from the mesa.  Our journey ended with the hawks call.

Walkabout

I hiked, again, to the Piedras Marcadas clutching the red rock.  I opened my walking prayer with gratitude to the elementals, the center, the as above, so below and the all around.  This time I hiked as Shaman and Therapist.  Rocky Girl took her time in berating me for not coming sooner, cursing and swearing as she did so.  I began crying, sat in the dirt, and covered my face with my hands.  I was exhausted and cracked open to pain.

“Start screaming, you imbecile!  Stomp, throw stones – anything!”

This startling insight was in my face: who was the real Healer?

I began raging and screaming.

The boundary between Rocky Girl and I loosened and the screams turned into chanting transforming the energy of pain into beauty.  We sang and marched together honoring the darkness and naming our experiences as heroic; in doing so, we began building a bridge of trust.  Mother earth joined the concert by spiraling pulses of energy through my chakra system.  The strength and power I felt terrorized me into a state of panic that stopped my breath and I was back inside the rocks, struggling for air.  I thought we were going to die and could feel Rocky Girl sliding back into the boulders.  Remarkably, the chants turned into a single tone vibrating across all my body cells and systems from the smallest to largest segments and Rocky Girl stood with me.  She handled the red stone, touched it to her heart, and returned it to me with a smile.

INSEMINATION – full moon

A warm wind sprang into the back yard, skipped around, and turned over leaves undisturbed since winter.  I heeded its call and journeyed to my Teachers who suggested that I needed to birth Rocky Girl into my life versus retrieving her; tying a red cord around my waist and attaching it to the ceiling would let her slide down from her world into mine.  I spent the next several hours feeling the light of the moon slithering inside my woman space.  I danced to its rhythm and the song of the leaping wind in the trees.

Birthing – Dark moon

George attached one end of the red, birthing spirit cord to the ceiling on an air vent hook, just above my ceremony space.  I opened and smudged the circle in my usual way and included the five mothers and all my spirit guides.  I tied the red cord around my waist and performed the ceremony sky clad sitting on red material and wearing on my head a fringed eye cover.  To attract Rocky Girl, I used two items: a Native American baby rattle and the Fourth of July fireworks already blazing and etching colors in the sky.  After drumming and swaying for some time, I rattled all around me, concentrating on my heart chakra: the connector of the physical and spiritual essences.  I sang a birthing song to Rocky Girl describing our future lives together.

I heard the birth song echo inside my head; it bounced off the walls, and vibrated against my nakedness before sliding to the floor in honeycomb shaped puddles. I could feel the terror rising inside my chest because I was going somewhere and could not stop.  I kept chanting and this “thing” kept happening.

Out of nowhere, I distinctly heard the sing – song, mocking voices of my teachers:  “false shaman…false shaman; boo who, who!

A window hovered before me.  Perched on the narrow sill was a sparrow, shivering against the January freeze.  She pressed herself into the little warmth radiating from the other side of the frosted glass.  I knew she would die because the window was nailed shut.  I watched helplessly, still hearing my hateful teachers, throughout the starless winter night. At some point, I fell into sleep, but awakened in the morning to find me – and the little one – still alive!

THE BEGINNING

“Two leggeds think having a baby means birth. That is true, but there is a bigger vision; birth gives never-ending life to Mother, Father and child by what it does.  This is creating change that never stops across the community and inside the child and parents.  It ripples the waters and underneath them.  On the surface, we see many circles while underwater other things are happening that takes new eyes to see.”

That is what my teachers said when I next journeyed to them, but there was more: “Our hatefulness to you in your last journey, and your dreamtime experience, strengthened your connection with Rocky Girl.

“Is Rocky Girl fully realized in me?”

“What must you do to continuing growing the bond with each other?”