Preparing for your Shamanic Mask Making Experience

I have had a few people ask how they can prepare for the workshop I am presenting in the spring. I believe, to have a productive journey, you must be able to ground and stay grounded. Journeying is traveling to non ordinary reality in an altered state of consciousness. This in itself can feel like you are not grounded.

Grounding energetically protects us and helps to keep our energy flowing smoothly and unobstructed. Grounding helps to keep us in our power, in our bodies and present. It enables us to focus our energy and helps us to hear our intuition. Grounding secures your energy to planet earth It gives you a vehicle to release unwanted energy that you are storing in your body. It can increase your physical and emotional stability. Enables you to connect with spirit with more ease. 

How do you know if you are not grounded? A person’s energy is not focused. They have a hard time staying on task. They loose things easily and sometimes act hyper. But most of all, when you are not grounded it is easier to absorb negative energy. When you are not grounded, entering a room full of people with a lot of activity can be overwhelming. 

Often times you may walk into a room and realize that the energy is not comforting. Maybe there is an argument in progress, maybe there are just a lot of people, and there are too many different energies in the room. Grounding a room will help with all of these situations. You can bring harmony to the room or area by grounding it. Grounding a room will also assist in shifting the energy so that meditation, journeying or healing work may be more effectively done.Learning techniques to help you ground can benefit you in many ways. 

Techniques for Grounding Yourself

Heaven and Earth Connection

Begin by bringing your awareness to your breath. Breath in, filling all three lobes of your lungs with air or heavenly chi. As you continue to breath, bring your breath all the way down to your diaphragm noticing your diaphragm pressing down as you inhale. Continuing your breath awareness draw your breath all the way down to the pelvic bowl, or lower dan tien.  Standing with your pelvic bowl level draw the chi down filling your pelvic bowl. Nourishing your ocean of chi, your energetic reserves. As you continue with breath, notice your pelvis softening and expanding. Bringing the energy all the way down and out the perineum, down into the earth creating your earth connection, your grounding cord. This cord connects to your root chakra (CV1) and reaches all the way down into the center of the earth. Creating your earth connection. With your next outward breath, release any energy that does not serve you. Using your energetic cord that was created with your breath, release any negative thought, physical pain, or emotions that do not serve you. Release them out through your grounding cord using it like a funnel. On an inward breath draw earth energy up through the soles of your feet and the ethereal cord you just created, Again drawing energy into the lower dan tien. Continue drawing earth energy all the up the spinal column filling the cranium with energy. Notice the cranial bones relaxing and the cranial sutures softening. As you continue to breath, notice space forming at the top of your head allowing your energy to leave through your crown chakra (GV20), reaching all the way into the heavens. On the next inward breath draw again, heavenly chi in through the top of your head bringing it all the way down to the pelvic bowl. You now have a heaven and earth connection and are grounded through the earth.  

Drinking Water

Drinking water is a fast way to ground yourself, especially after receiving healing work, meditation or exercise.

Breathing

To ground quickly, Bring your awareness to your breath. A couple of deep breaths will bring you right down to earth. Often times during stress we begin shallow breathing and become ungrounded. This is also a great way to stop mind chatter. 

Grounding A Room

Stand or sit quietly. Bring your awareness to your breath. As you breath consciously in and out drawing fresh heavenly chi all the way down to the lowest lobe of your lungs bring your awareness to the room. 

Imagine the four corners of the room become redwood trees. Imagine these beautiful trees growing a root system deep into the earth, bringing weight to the room. 

As you continue to breath, imagine a trellis connecting the trees to one another. Replacing the walls with a trellis covered in beautiful climbing roses. 

Now imagine the floor below you turning to earth, and the ceiling above you turning to sky. 

You have now grounded your room and are standing one with nature. 

By practicing this you will have a more productive journey. You will be less likely to fall asleep and you will remember more of what happened during your journey.

Slide Show of the process

An Interview with Wanda K Whitaker and Antoinette Cresci de la Torre

Listen!

Please join us for an information interview about our up coming workshop. 

Ann Bauden, Soul Collage Facilitator will be interviewing Wanda K. Whitaker and Antoinette Cresci de la Torre on the benefits of ancestral healing, epigenetics, shamanism, and the mask making process.

Ancestral Vision

Honoring the ancestors is a lost practice. Our ancestors send us forth with wounds and gifts. This is an exploration of how we can begin the process of healing and learn to use the gifts we have been given.

The Ancient Ones

Lets first get an idea of what exactly an ancestor is. Our relatives are people that are still living. Those that have crossed over are our ancestors. We have our blood, DNA ancestors, but what about our soul ancestors?  What about the people who were our relatives in another life time. We have our body, blood, DNA ancestors and then we have our soul, spirit, past life ancestors. And yet still, what about the people that we have a soul agreement with that parent us in this life? The people that adopted us. Those relatives.... we can even have ancestors from those people. 

We are all related. What comes to mind when you hear that? For me it means not just humans. It includes animals, plants, creepy crawlers and star beings. These are all our relatives. These are also our ancestors. From a science perspective, we emerged from the sea by following the plant life on to land. From a spirit perspective, if we can have a soul family in human form, why not in plant or animal form? Why not in rock or star form? 

In traditional societies, how we are connected is very important. Even in what we in America call "The Old Country". In my Sicilian heritage when I meet someone who's family came from Sicily the first thing we establish is rapport.  We want to know if we are related and if so how? Its a connection that is important to us. But sadly, we as a culture have forgotten our brothers and sisters the four legged beings, the plant beings, the rock beings and so forth. This is not as important to us anymore. When honoring our ancestors, they are included. We have been in contact with all of the elements and all of the beings on grandmother earth since the beginning of time. And we are the dreams of our ancestors. We carry both the DNA link to the past and the Spirit link to the past. 

When we came through our mothers we brought with us all of the pain and grief that was experienced for life times. But we also brought the gifts and talents and inner knowing too. Have you ever watched a small child and thought, wow, this kid remembers!  We are learned into forgetting. But our memories can be jogged and we can heal the past for future generations. Spirit and healing goes beyond time and space. One of the gifts we come through with is our intuition. This is an inner knowing. 

When I was a child my mother had a pair of earrings. I adored those earrings. They were silver and I coveted them. She kept them in her jewelry box. I would take them out and hold them up to my ears. I had to have them. She never wore them, they stayed safely in her jewelry box. One day when I was about 15 she gave them to me. They had been a gift from my God Father. He had been a merchant marine and he brought them back for her from Egypt. Forty years later, I still have them and I wear them at least once a week. Way back then, I was having memories but didn't know it. Whether it was a DNA memory from my ancestors before they arrived on Sicily or if it was a Soul memory of a past life.  I have always had a connection to North Africa. Even as a teen who knew nothing of the Continent of Africa much less the countries or cultures there.  Fast forward a few years. I was working at a health food store in San Francisco. The owner of the store had a yoga and belly dance studio upstairs and the employees could take one free class a week. I chose belly dancing. The first time I heard the middle eastern music I felt like I had come home. Another memory. I continued to dance and learn about the cultures in North Africa especially Egypt over the years. There have been many more ah ha moments over the years. My point is when we are exposed to another culture and it resonates with us, it could be an ancestor is sending a gift. 

These gifts awaken our memories on either a spirit or cellular level. Don't ignore it. Maybe this is an awakening for a spiritual practice you didn't know you had access to. Many modern people are resonating with traditional and indigenous spiritual practices. I believe this is our ancestors waking us up. They are guiding us to carry the medicine forward. They are guiding us to use this medicine to heal the patterns that do not serve us anymore. We can do this for future generations. The ancients are calling us to wake up. 

She Comes Through Me