Living Spirit, by Lynn Andrews

Living Spirit, by Lynn Andrews


“We were all born wild like a mountain lion. To live in civilization we become sheep at a very young age. We become tame. But we are not house pets. We are fierce and wild by nature.”

Many years ago, very early in my work with the Sisterhood of the Shields, Twin Dreamers, one of my shaman teachers said to me, “Lynn, dream on these words. Consider what is left of your instinctual nature. When you see a horse, you become both happy and sad. That horse represents the wildness within yourself that you have never dared to become.”

I was stunned by her words, for they revealed an essential truth in my search for a higher understanding of life that I had never dared to voice.

I had known since I was a small child that there was something missing from my world, something that I yearned for with every fiber of my being yet could not begin to understand. I have even ridden horses all my life, racing across the landscape of my childhood with my best friend, Beverly, a Native American girl the same age as I. On horseback, we followed the clouds, pretending we were stars in the sky as we chased each other across the universe. During those long, beautiful days, I felt more complete and perfect within myself than at any other time.

As an adult, galloping across the plains on the back of a magnificent Arabian mare, I still get that same sense of perfection. Yet until Twin Dreamers spoke those words to me, I did not equate the feeling of perfect completion within me when I am on horseback as the fulfillment of my wild, instinctual nature. I only knew that when I ride horses, I feel closer to God than at any other time.

How do you experience God in your life, the Great Spirit, the presence of divine harmony in whatever form you know it? For me, I know that I am one with the Great Spirit when I am living my own truth. That happens when I stand in the center of my own being. It happens when I stand in the center of my own personal truth and not what someone else tells me the ‘truth’ of any given situation should be.

How often have you heard someone say, “This is the way it’s supposed to be (whatever ‘it’ is). It’s the way it always has been and the way it always will be?” And every fiber of your being is crying out, “No it isn’t. You’re wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Yet not only do you say nothing, which is sometimes the only thing you can say in the face of such adamance, you decide there must be something wrong with you for disagreeing so completely. The more strongly you disagree, perhaps, the worse you feel about yourself until you walk away feeling wholly defeated, hobbled by some unseen force that obviously wishes you nothing but ill will.

That is the way it feels when we deny the existence of our own personal truth. It feels worse than the worst insult anyone else can hurl, crippling to the point of total personal defeat.

On the other hand, it feels so exhilarating when you say to yourself, “You know what? I couldn’t disagree with you more. Maybe I can’t change the way you think, and maybe now’s not even the time to try. But I couldn’t disagree with you more, and I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to think what you think; I’m not going to believe what you believe. It may be your truth, but it’s not mine and it’s no part of me.” And you walk away feeling so good about yourself, so personally empowered, so completely right with life.

That is the way it feels to stand in the center of your own personal truth. The most wonderful part of it is that your own personal truth resides at the very center of your being, and that is the place where you are one with the Great Spirit and all that is in the universe. What a fabulous place to be!

The truth is within your own heart and within your own soul. Whenever you become lonely or afraid, all the answers you will ever need will be found within yourself. Sometimes we need other people to help us find those answers, and that is good. It’s good to see the light of the Great Spirit reflected in the love and wisdom of others. But you must always measure what you find out in the world with what you find inside yourself. You must first ask yourself, “Am I being faithful to my own truth?”

Your being is like a spirit lodge. Within this spirit lodge dwell the sacredness of your being, your realization and the divine light of your creation. Sometimes your sacredness matches what everyone around you is saying, and sometimes it doesn’t. You find peace and joy in life when you live in your own spirit lodge, the place within you where you are one with the Great Spirit and all of life, the place of your own sacred truth, regardless of the chaos that might be going on around you. This is what I mean by ‘living spirit,’ it is living in your own spirit lodge.

Have you ever wondered why some people can be so serene in the midst of what everyone else sees as impending doom? It is because they are living in their own spirit lodges; they know they are one with the Great Spirit and all of life, and no matter what happens nothing can ever separate them from that Oneness. They have taken care of what is around them to the best of their ability and placed their faith in the Great Spirit.

In the words of Shakespeare, “This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cannot then be false to any man.” Outside your lodge is a great wilderness that can often become a battleground stained with ignorance and earthly pain. Many people live without a sacred place within, and those who do not have a sacred place within do not know how to enter the spirit lodges of others. To me, that is the definition of true loneliness, not being able to enter the spirit lodge of another person.

When you live your own truth, you find that it is much easier to allow others the honor of living their own truth, as well. Even where you disagree, it is not important. What becomes important is honoring the divine light within you both. This is the true meaning of freedom, when you are not shackled to an existence that is based on beliefs that are false to you. When you are living spirit, you are living your own sacred truth. Then you are as magnificent horse, wild and free through your oneness with the divine light of the universe, unfettered by beliefs that bring you only discomfort and disharmony with your own existence.

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Lynn Andrews is the New York Times and internationally best-selling author of the Medicine Woman. She is the founder of the Lynn Andrews Center for Sacred Arts and Training and is recognized worldwide as a leader in the fields of spiritual healing and personal empowerment. Learn more at www.lynnandrews.com.

Linked In: Earth Based Religion group

There is a professional networking site called Linked In. It's a place to make contacts, look for jobs and post services. I have created an Earth Based Religion group; it's at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2015057 This group is for Earth Based Religions of all sorts to share information, connections and resources. You are welcome to join.

There are also groups for writing, publishing, and many sorts of media. The home site is www.linkedin.com

How I Got Started in Entity Removal

How I Got Started in Entity Removal
by
Sherrie Adkins-Mountain Hawk Lady


There are a lot of different entities around. Some are demonic, some are angelic, and there are all flavors in between! Some folks have a lot of hubris, and think summoning entities is a way to give them more power for their magick. Summoning is best left to those who know what they are doing, and how to get rid of what they called up. I do not recommend it for someone just starting out in the use of magick. There have been some cases where the person called up something they couldn't handle and it ate them!

The first time I got involved with dismissing a demonic entity was in the late Seventies in San Francisco. I had read a short novella by Fritz Lieber about a stone formation called the "Bishop's Chair" in a park in San Francisco. Later, I got to know Fritz and he said he based the story on a strange happening of his own with that formation. I thought that was interesting but didn't worry about what had caused his experience with it.

Then, my friend Carol was almost killed by an entity. She was coming down the backstairs at her apartment building, and the step she'd just stepped onto vanished! She went through the stairs and fell two stories down onto some concrete rubble. As she fell, she called on me and the rest of the psychic family in SF! That helped her brake her fall enough that she went down in slow motion and landed lightly. She ripped her palm on a nail on the way down, but that was her only injury.

She went on to run the craft sale for her coop that day, then called me in the afternoon. I went over and picked her up, and made her go to the hospital ER for her palm! By then, it was too late to stitch it, so they trimmed off the triangle shaped piece of skin and flesh, gave her a tetanus shot, and bandaged her hand.

I took her home and looked at the staircase. The board was entirely gone! We never found even a splinter of it. Then I stood on her back balcony and looked out over the vista. About the time I realized I was looking at the backside of the park and in a direct line with the Bishop's Chair, I realized something really nasty was looking back at me! It hated humans, especially women, and it was coldly angry Carol had escaped with her life. It was manifesting as a black roiling boil of clouds over the stones.

I knew that I couldn't handle it on my own and called some ladies I knew. Kellan and Sunny came over. Sunny was a witch and a Shoshoni trained medicine woman. She took one look, got white in the face, and ran back inside, saying she couldn't begin to deal with it! Well, Kellan and I were both warriors from a couple of old schools, and also had the Celtic mule stubbornness, and we weren't going to back down. Kellan had her ceremonial knife with her, and I borrowed a Chicago Cutlery boning knife from Carol. We fought the thing back into its lair, and put a temporary seal on it.

Spirit told both of us it would take twelve women to permanently seal it away from our plane. It was a demon to us, but probably a jolly good fella to it's own kind. I called it a kraken because it was a wind demon that looked like a giant squid. We were also told that in the early Thirties, someone guy on drugs had opened the portal to the kraken's plane and conjured it through the open gate. It was not amused and killed him first! We never found out why it hated women so much. It hated being here, but couldn't get back to it's own plane without a lot of help.

Kellan and Sunny had trained with Z. Budapest, and knew some women who might be willing to help. I had some friends who were psychic but not trained, who wanted to help, so on the next full moon, we met and we fought! It wanted to eat us all, and we wanted it gone! We managed to get the gate open and shove it through! Then used a Seal of a Star of David in a circle to seal the gate. Then, one woman said we should rotate it in time so no one could ever get it open again, and we did it. Then we partied to celebrate!

Next morning, I walked out to the balcony and there was sunlight over the Bishop's Chair! That was so rare that Herb Caan commented on it in his column in the paper next day! I never saw the black cloud formation over the Bishop's Chair again.

Some years later, I was telling this story at a meeting of my Moonstone Circle. Scotty, my then boyfriend, exclaimed, "You're the one that got rid of that demon! Did you know it had been killing women for over forty years?" He knew of it from some of his Ren Faire friends who were also into Wicca. The police thought it was a serial killer at work! For over forty years, every year there would be at least one and sometimes two or three women found dead, suffocated, and lying on the sidewalk near the backside of the park. The local witches knew it was a demon, but no one knew how to get rid of it. Then, one day, it was gone and the killing stopped!

Most of the women who were in that circle were also members of Michael's Legion of Light. Our knives turned into Swords of Light as we fought, and the Light from those swords is what drove the demon back into it's home dimension.

Oh, and the knife I borrowed from Carol was useless from then on. After I used it to fight the demon, it wouldn't hold an edge!

Love, Sherrie Mountain Hawk Lady

Sherrie can be emailed at mthawk2@yahoo.com

Sacred Sites by Sherrie Adkins

I was young, I walked the farm my grandfather owned. He took me to a place where we made offerings to Grandmother Earth. It was a small waterfall in the spring and a half circle of grass with a four foot high shelf of line stone with sparkly quartz in it the rest of the year. We took pretty stones, or a perfect flower, or a bright leaf and laid it on the shelf. He never said we were performing an act of worship, yet I knew that was what we did, and it meant more to me than any church service! I found peace and serenity there, and felt the presence of Spirit.

Later, in the Sixties, I lived in Arkansas and was involved in spelunking (cave exploring). I had a chance to go into a cave that was a sun temple of the little people. We crawled through a worm hole on elbows and knees, (I was a lot thinner then! LOL!) and came out in a circular cave, which was about seventy-five feet tall, and had two levels of cave to it. In the middle of the bottom round was a flat stone made of travel time which contained a lot of quartz. On the summer solstice, the sun shone directly on that stone from a small sink hole in the top of the cave. That place was very wakan (holy). I could *hear* voices singing in there, and I knew it was considered a womb of Grandmother Earth by those who had worshipped there.

When I lived in Highland Park, I had a jacaranda tree in my back yard. Two ley lines crossed under that tree and formed a swirling pool of energy we could draw on for Circle, so I had my medicine wheel built there. We did circle around that tree for over ten years. It grew so big and so beautiful that it towered over the whole neighborhood, and shone a lovely silver hue in the full moonlight. After I moved, I would go back and see the tree from time to time. It drooped after a few years and the silver went away. I had only rented, not owned the property, so I couldn't stay with my tree.

What I am trying to say to you is that the sacred places are all around you. Open your spirits, your hearts, your very souls and look for them. Any time you cast a circle to do magic, you have created a sacred place. If you cast in the same place repeatedly, it becomes more and more sacred. Those who come after you will feel that energy and also respond to it in their own way. Generations of worshippers created Stonehenge, the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, Notre Dame, and any other sacred site you can name.

You can create a sacred site in your own back yard. I know because I did! Maybe it didn't have the force of a Stonehenge or the others, yet it was sacred to us and we worked some wonderful healing in that place.

Love, Sherrie

Sherrie Adkins is a spiritual councilor and healer. For consultation email her at mthawk2@yahoo.com