Discovering The Wild Country of the Soul: The next in our series of free webinars

Discovering the Wild Country of the Soul - the next in the series of free webinars on Shamanism in the 21st Century. We have a special guest too so sign up for the link by messaging us on the Facebook Event page, sign up via Mail Chimp on the Spiral Heart Healing page (under 'MORE') the envelope icon is the one you are looking for. Or indeed go to the website and sign up on the mailing list and we will send you info on what happens next and the links to all the webinars so far...if you tell us you would like that of course... See you on the other side.

Jane's Brilliant Friends TV Hangout on Google Tomorrow Thursday 17th April at 2pm

http://janetalbot.com/jane-talbot-tv/ My turn now... My life on the Shamanic path from 2pm live or watch it later on the You Tube channel. Click on the link above to go through. See you soon.

Musings with cancer

The Sword in the Stone…

I’ve been thinking a bit about transformation and change lately. The other night a thought sprung into my slightly muddied mind. I had been pondering about the impending chemotherapy in a week’s time and of what will happen inside me.

A sudden vision of the duel in T.H.White’s ‘The Sword and the Stone’ popped into my conscious mind. The duel is between Merlin and Madame Mimm, he the mentor of the young and still unaware Arthur and she the Wicked Sorceress, a child stealing and thoroughly un-nice person out to eat the young boy.

The duel is all about power and the ability to change quickly, adapting to the present situation.
They metamorphose into different creatures, she a cat, he becomes a dog, each one besting the other.

It is a battle of wills and of inspiration because eventually Merlin becomes a microscopic bacterium and infects her while she is in the form of a dragon, her most powerful and intimidating form.

Very David and Goliath, if you like the biblical metaphor; because of course Merlin has won. By being very small and very clever he won the day and Arthur’s freedom.

The whole book is about the metamorphoses of a boy into a King; the journey from servant to master.

Each stage of his teaching he is ‘shape shifted’ into different animals so he may experience the world the way it is for each on in its own habitat walking a mile in the shoes of each one. Every lesson is a story and every story has wisdom dressed in metaphor.
Because he is so young perhaps, the boy accepts the magic quite happily and with each successive transformation the donning of the ‘shape’ becomes easier. The lessons are more accessible as the procedure gets into the muscle of the boy.

Eventually all the lessons will have a muscle memory, so that when the King requires an answer to a problem the muscle will flex and release the energy of the boy’s memory for that problem.

Accumulative knowledge is something we do not notice. We become good at something – it gets into the muscle of our memory and becomes an automatic process, available at our finger tips without so much as a thought process to prove itself.

It is strategy, and it is what we learn from conception onwards.

These days though sometimes we forget that we can do amazing things. Sometimes we will be reminded and if we are open enough to the idea of there being a muscle there to flex, then sometimes we will remind ourselves how to deal with the Madam Mimm’s of our lives.

We can shift our consciousness to become small and to enter within our selves and fight the dis – ease inside with all the magic we can muster.
We are learning machines; we just have to be taught a different lesson sometimes.

We all know something we do not know we know yet (Milton Erickson) and we need to be reminded occasionally.

Who knows, with the right learning and the flexing of the right muscle maybe we too can pull a sword from a stone.

To help someone pull a sword from their stone go to the just giving page and help us to help Macmillan cancer support.

journey to the islands

No not those islands! The Vancouver, British Columbia islands in Canada – that’s where we were.

thoughts on audacity

THE EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO MAN MAN BELONGS TO THE EARTH..... ..... ALL THINGS ARE CONNECTED, LIKE THE BLOOD THAT UNITES ONE FAMILY, ALL THINGS ARE CONNECTED, WHATEVER BEFALLS THE EARTH BEFALLS THE SONS OF THE EARTH, MAN DID NOT WEAVE THE WEB OF LIFE HE IS MERELY A STRAND IN IT, WHATEVER HE DOES TO THE WEB, HE DOES TO HIMSELF Chief Seattle, Dwamish

Eyes to see in the Dark


The Tungus tribe of Northern Siberia coined
The word ‘Shaman’ to mean a healer, or one with
Eyes to see in the dark. It’s quite a talent, to see in
Dark for there are many different kinds of darkness.
There is the darkness of depression, low energy and
Low self esteem. The darkness of apathy, life is passing
By and all you can say is ‘so what’.

There are many different ways to be healed, there are no
Instant cures. Shamanic healing will take you to
find allies and give you resources to enable you to
find the passion that you once had; giving you a way to
Say goodbye to the past while still honouring it’s
part in your life’s journey, and your life is a journey, how you proceed with it will depend on you and the choices you make along the way.

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if…? There are many theories on this subject and it is now no longer in the realm of the impossible and not even in the improbable it now lies in the possible. Quantum physics is daily pushing the boundaries of what we suspect to the edge and beyond of what we know. For some, these have been revelations, for others merely justifications of long held beliefs now becoming fact.
Not just anecdotally but specifically and proven by eminent scientists, the quantum worlds are waiting for us to jump right in and find out how many ways there are to calculate the probabilities of what is in the box.
Otto Schroedinger could explain that one better than I.




More than 50,000 years ago, there were people who didn’t know what a box was, so they didn’t put themselves or situations in one. They saw everything as a new possibility, a new challenge and they went out to meet that challenge with a specific outcome in mind. How do I know this? Cave paintings and artefacts found at archaeological digs prove the posit that positive thinking is nothing new, it is in fact something we have had to learn all over again. We kind of lost it somewhere in the era of industrial enlightenment.
The day they switched on a light bulb something inside of us switched off.
The dark is a verdant and amazing thing, light casts only shadow which is such a flimsy facsimile of the dark that we seek to control.

The shadows are places of confusion and there lie the monsters. There are no real edges, no markers in shadow; everything is ephemeral and constantly shifting with every small change of light. So, really, depression and apathy are shadows. In the most part for some reason we are taught at an early age to fear the dark – the creatures of the night are weird and wonderful, but usually deadly… at least to the others in their nocturnal world.

Things that live in the light fear things that live in the dark; if light is so wonderful why is the womb, the safest place you will ever be, not illuminated somehow?

Or is the dark of the womb the light of creation?
©Sleepy Dragon December 2006

Art of Life, Art Full Life

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS VS THE GRAND DESIGN

The ‘Big Picture’, you know that one, yes? All the time people say to you “look at the Big Picture”; usually just before they try to sell you something, be it a car, a house, or an idea.

So, this ‘Big Picture’ aka ‘The Grand Design’, this thing that we are all a part of and is supposedly therefore a part of us; would be the Universe, right?

Now it seems to me, just sitting here, actually I was lying in bed contemplating getting up after a night of my usual weird and wonderful dreams –(of which this could be the result by the way…)- when this thought of the sum of the parts being greater than the whole, that’s been circling the drain of my brain for a while now, got caught up on the safety filter and got re-cycled; so here I sit at this laptop regurgitating it for public consumption, what a pleasant metaphor – I do hope you have eaten already?

Anyway, I digress, my favourite hobby. To get back to these parts, well those would be us then. Very simple statement on the surface but as we all know nothing is that simple – just ask the guy who built the Titanic!
I’ll bet he wasn’t too clear on the ‘Big Picture’ in that perhaps he didn’t take a clear perspective on what his design was going to be doing and where it would be doing it, after all the design in itself was flawless, according to him, the designer, perhaps if he had consulted someone who had been in the waters he may have been able to describe hazards such as icebergs that go with the flow causing chaos wherever they go, who knows?

Again, it reminds me of that little tale in one of the English books at primary, do you remember them? They would have a host of wonderful information like what a baby eel was called and interspersed between all this information on verbs and clauses there would be a little homily where everything would be put together. There was one in particular that tickled me; I had no idea at the time why, it was the way it scanned it read like a horse at the canter; I now know it was possibly my first light bulb experience on my way to discovering chaos theory.

It was an anonymous author and it was about how the simple act of losing a nail from a horseshoe lost a battle. I think it may have been about Paul Revere but don’t hold me to that. Suffice to say if you don’t know the piece that this bloke was given a message to take to a general he went to jump on the horse and noticed that the horse’s shoe was loose, but he was in a hurry and it was a very important message so he ignored it, ran the horse like a madman, the horse lost the shoe, they were in the middle of nowhere and the horse couldn’t go on without a shoe so the message didn’t get there and the battle was lost and therefore the war was lost – all for the want of securing one little nail.
Taking this into consideration, just think of the power that one man had to change the course of history.

Are you getting it now?

I have this friend who works hard and is depressed most of the time, he’s not happy! I asked him what he wanted to do about it. He asked me what I meant, like he had no control over his own state of mind, and you know he doesn’t know that he has.

Or, he really doesn’t want to know – and I think that is the crux of the matter, for if we know, then we have to take some responsibility for it, we have to be at cause!

He is right, being at cause is hard work, taking responsibility for how you choose to use the power you have been given to change things takes guts. As a rule human beings don’t like change so much, we like to swim in our soup – bathe in our custard of trial and tribulations – that is what we know and we are all wary of what we don’t know. So we wallow in our comfort zones, envying the people who step out and get dry: craving the will to go forward and do it for ourselves but feeling the cold draught of a different atmosphere we sink right back into our ‘stuff’. It’s so much easier to give the power away, and then blame circumstances for your lot.

Don’t get me wrong, we all do it, even those of us who have the towel on and are eying the door to the next room…we have to empty the bath you see, and that means that we have to put part of ourselves into it again to connect to the chain that holds the plug in order to pull it out and let all that stuff go; it’s tempting to linger there in a memory but it’s not a memory it’s an emotion that clouds the memory, that is the sticky part, it’s a bigger state than Texas and I don’t mean Alaska! Keeping the mind on the ball is one thing and it is the easiest thing if you always remember what the ball is actually for, its goal in life is to get into goal, all you have to do is help it on it’s way.

It sounds so simple doesn’t it? Oh yes,it is that simple, note, I did not say easy. If it were totally easy we’d all be quite happy being and doing and the World would be full of contented and forward thinking individuals who would most definitely be more than the sum of it’s whole.

Everything we do each day either keeps us where we are or moves us forward. I have a little anxiety attack kind of thing when I move forward, that is when I know I have, my unconscious mind tells me by making me aware of a weight being shifted from around my heart. It’s doesn’t make me feel wonderful immediately, but I recognise that I’ve just stepped out of a comfort zone and into new territory; by doing as little as writing this and posting it on the net, or talking to a stranger who I know can help me but I’m less than totally confident won’t see me as a right twit.
It’s then I remember a story told to me by an old boyfriend the end of which is ‘ if they know you it won’t matter – if they don’t know you, well, it really doesn’t matter.

As long as you are being who you are. Who you know you can be. Every day can be a good day you have the power to make it so.

Is the sum of your parts greater than your being as a whole? Do you colour your area of the ‘Big Picture’, or do you give the brush to some other? Do you think the whole of your being is greater than the sum of your parts?
It’s just a matter of Balance. Pick up the brush, it’s your canvas, paint your picture bright, see what happens…