Skip to main content

In the Garden of Shadow Masks, Ceremony and Ancestors

Dear Friends,

There comes a time when one chooses to invoke Healing and it perhaps leads us to the past or the areas in our life that we have left behind for whatever reason. It is that time for me. During my recent path to healing and while practicing Shamanic herbs and guidance on my Medicine Path, I was led to do a parasite cleanse. I am in the portion of the cleanse in which most people get sick, from the little critters dying off and decomposing in my body...and it has been interesting.

Let me say this from an Anthropological perspective before I further discuss my specific situation; in many tribes, a tribal shaman is tested for their ability (especially as they are growing up) to transmute toxins or highly trans-formative substances...IE. in Peru they pick a child with shamanic tendancies and start them on Ayauwaska at a young age of 8 (sometimes younger). For this cleanse, during my trek to the White Mountains of Arizona this summer...I was led to gather and prepare Wormwood for consumption in a parasite cleanse that was on my mind at the time...that and black walnut....both of which I found wild harvest in my travels....without seeking them. So maybe it was that they found me...this was oddly verified the other night when I spoke with a friend about it being a popular herbalist recommendation for Wormwood and Black Walnut to be taken in combination...I was a little shocked but felt gratitude instantly on a spiritual realm when I heard my guides remind me that I was being directed by the Ancestral will of something bigger than my ego!

This conversation was after the cleanse became rather trippy so to speak. I was in a fever space for a long while (13 hours about). Since that strange fever day, I have been up and down with the healing. It has been odd in that I am feeling great and almost normal for an hour or two, then depleted and crash with sensitivities to everything and almost a headache. Lots of sleep (and dreams) and water has become my existence these days.

I think that I reached an old plateau in which healing stopped or me when I was a teen, and a section of my past that I often deny as a Yoga professional and Spiritual teacher. Just the other day, I revisited some of the music I listened to as a teen....and wow some of my close friends were appalled and uneasy with my interest and embodiment of the words as I sang the music.

I again recalled the areas of my life that ignore and deny because I am often trapped in "politician excuses" to act in a certain way...perhaps you have done this or even do this now in your life in order to better fit in with a clicke (yoga teachers, business owners, shamanic traditionalists). So I experienced my darkside and sat with it, and enjoyed it.

In this moments of darkness, I discussed my ancestors and the spirit guides that I feel are "ancestral" with my friends whom were most interested in finding solutions for my hip and shoulder pains. To my amazement, I discussed the intuition based theory about having shamanic ancestors who, just have to "help" or intervene in my life and the lives of men in my family...IE Grandpa Grinning Jaguar.

Background on Grandpa: He was my first teacher. Once upon a time, when he would care take my brother and I, we would get scared in his house by a growling sound down the dark hallway on the way to the bathroom. Of course it was him imitating a Cougar, and the having a rousing laugh after he made either my brother or I jump out of fear. Well, it has been that he taught us about the natural world and advocated the Golden Rule, and he further trusted and explained to us that for him, life was painful due to injuries from a long time ago and an individual had to learn to live with the pain...Hip pain.

Well Grandpa and I are older now and have come to an understanding of our similarities. He has hip pain that after "hip replacement surgery" he has not been able to overcome. I have hip pain or back pain depending the day (but everyday none-the-less). He and I look identical at this age; family members have compared his WW2 photos (when he was in his early twenties) to the way I look now and the resemblance is uncanny. Now Grandpa isn't one for the spiritual but Grandpa's Younger Brother (my Great Uncle) is, and I have visited this side of the family that relocated to Northern California only to find extensive talk of Spirit Guides....I even listed to my Great Uncle talk of Entheogens and giving names to the Spirit Guides he carries.

My hypothesis is that Great Uncle is a Shaman and Grandpa is a wounded healer on his spiritual path to become a shaman in fullness...the men in my family Acuna are "called!" There is no other way of looking at this, even a friend of mine from Sante Fe (Melissa Weiss Steele- The Oracle of Initiation) received messages on the subject of Ancestral Shamanism in my line about me, Grandpa, and my blood Uncle (Grandpa's youngest son).

Do you have any spiritual calling that is genetically linked and could therefore be incorprated into your healing this lifetime? Write me and tell me of your past, the connection to family living and dead, and messages that you know are truth but sometimes to afraid to follow to an end!

Story to be continued...

Namaste,
Trevahr Hughes
Order of the Sacred Spiral
Waking Within
760-710-1713

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Yoga Swami and Encinitas History

Readers and Yoga Adventurers, Just recently called the Yoga Mecca of the USA, Encinitas CA and Yoga Swami (where I teach two days a week) are special and are a must visit for any yoga adventurers. See the article in the winter 2008 copy of the Encinitas magazine. http://www.encinitasmag.com/about.html Encinitas, Swami's Surf Spot, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and Leucadia...can be consider spiritual vortex hotspots. This evident in the number of places to worship just on the coast (west of hwy 101) near the cliffside beachs or Swami's and Moonlight. So my mother's family (mexican americans) lived in Encinitas during the period of time when Paramahansa Yogananda (the Swami that Swami's is named after). This time period was about the 1930's- 1940's. At this time Encinitas, was well liked by Swami Yogananda and he settled there for sometime. Swami Yogananda was a capricorn and he was a very involved meditator and yoga practicioner. His foundation still exists in E...

Dreaming the Dark Times 3: Salvia and Mushrooms for Seers

  Salvia the diviner’s mint, is one of the most powerful psychedelics in the natural world. It along with Magic Mushrooms are used traditionally by Meso-American shamans (Mazatepec, Mazatec, Zapotec, etc) and my ancestors for purposes of healing and visions. Unequivocally, magic mushrooms which are containers of psilocin, psilocybin and baeocystin have been consumed by nearly all our ancestors including lighter skinned and nordic peoples. Salvia has only recently become a whole world phenomenon with many places banning it. Most western people take salvia as an extracted smoke, while most people in history chewed the leaves and burned them dried and unextracted. Salvia when taken orally as opposed to smoking seems to be the best focus of this article on dreaming. Some psychedelic effects are possible with this method especially if you are holding your saliva (spit) in your mouth for at least 20 minutes along with the herb or extract. Most of these are spiritual, central nervous syst...

Journey of Las Medicinas y Church of the Sacred Spiral

Dear Friends, Some of you joined us and many of you heard that last weekend we completed a beautiful series on the Magic Cactus with our Ethnobotany students. I held space along with some of my dearest friends and presented a series of Neo-Shamanic altars and rituals. The divine Earth we walked upon for our journey to healing was a blessed and sacred site that my family owns on the back side Palomar Mountain. As we got out of the city and into the country, I prayed for perfect weather and perfect community. Sunday throughout the ritual and the hiking that preceded said ritual, I was overwhelmed with GRACE for those who chose to stay behind and not attend this journey. I honored their path and allow them to continued to build trust in themselves and the medicine work and in nature and weather. When we arrived, the weather was perfect and mild and incredibly...there was rain everywhere except for where we hiked. All week and the day before, people were scared of bad weather and hard time...