Gems of Wisdom, February 2024

Welcome to my Gems of Wisdom. This month I began offering what I've learned from 20 years of working at the intersection of Healing Trauma, Liberation/Anti-Oppression, Astrology and Shamanism.

At first sight these may seem very disparate things, but as I've prepared these weekly offerings, I see how much they have in common.

All forms of oppression--sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, class, religion, disability and others--are violence. And in a world structured by violence, the result is trauma. This is why we all must walk a journey of healing.

The connection with Astrology and Shamanism may be harder to see, but bear with me. Every human problem, from the climate crisis to the wars, to greed and poverty, can be summarized in one word: separation.

Feeling separate from nature is what has allowed us to go on this frenzy of destruction that is threatening life on Earth. Feeling separate from each other--a dynamic reinforced daily by all forms of oppression--is what allows greed and poverty to happen side by side. We forget that the Earth is a finite system that cannot be exploited infinitely. The Earth is our only home, and when we destroy her ecosystems and destabilize her climate patterns, we only harm ourselves.

Astrology and Shamanism are powerful contradictions to our artificial sense of separation. We are all indigenous to the Earth, even if in the colonial shuffle our people have moved around. We all have ancestors who thought every being was ensouled, including the animals, plants, rivers, mountains and planets. And every Shamanic/Animistic society had an astrology.

I will say more about this in my upcoming article for The Evolving Astrologer magazine, which I will be sure to share in my mailing list, but for now suffice it to say that Astrology and Shamanism guide us back from our culture of separation and disenchantment, to seeing the world as ensouled, and us as having a sense of belonging here.

If we heal ourselves, and the separation between us, and reclaim our sense of belonging as children of Mother Earth and Father Sky, the world is ensouled again and we begin the work of world repair.

So, from now on:

Friday Venus Day is Astrology Day

Monday is Moon Day is Healing Day

Tuesday Mars Day is Shamanism Day

Thursday Jupiter Day is Liberation Day

If you're signed up for my newsletter, you'll get my blog with the month's Gems of Wisdom, but if you'd like to see them in real time, you can follow me on social media:  FB @magalimoralesspiritualcounseling, IG @magalispiritualcounseling

I am looking forward to healing the world with you!

Welcome to my 50th birthday party

Magic is afoot. When I woke up this morning, my house was ten times bigger! All the better to receive you. I spent all day cooking and preparing a wonderful Mexican feast. Now at last, you have arrived.

The pathway is lit with beautiful lanterns. The house looks festive and delicious food smells waft in the fresh forest air. I receive you with a great big hug, but don´t take off your shoes or coat yet, because we are going to the backyard. The medicine wheel Dan has been building, was magically completed this morning and transported to a secret spot at the center of four great old stumps of ancient trees. Each of the bases of these ancient trees is now surrounded by a ring of second growth trees. We stand amid four cathedrals.

Each stump, covered in rich green moss and pastel green lichen faces one of the four directions. The second growth Redwoods tower overhead, and their baby saplings shine with the bright green of youth. Welcome to the heart of the Forest.

We have prepared a tower of wood for a bonfire and a row of tall drums. When everyone has arrived, from the babies in arms to the elders, we begin.

Thank you for coming to celebrate with us. I am grateful for your friendship, I love you and you are very precious to me. It means the world that you are here. For my birthday, I have called you together for this Ritual of Renewal.

I smudge you with fragrant copal, sweep your body with my feathered fan, and we breathe in the AIR that sustains us. We honor the Zayante tribe of the Awaswas nation, who took care of this land for over fifteen thousand years. I call in the directions and rattle you in, and we weave ourselves back into the web of life and belonging, accompanied by our winged and furred and finned siblings, from the tiniest to the biggest, from the youngest to the oldest, and witnessed by the long chain of ancestors looking down benevolently from the heavens like stars. The fire blazes in the twilight.

Your heartbeat follows the beat of drums. We chant and sway. We are the village. The ritual begins. We are filled with gratitude to be together in this clear night, warmed by the FIRE, lifting our voices and swaying our bodies in harmony.

When the time is right for you, you step through the NATURE threshold into the magical world. You approach the EARTH altar, a deep pit in the ground where you can pour all the things you are tired of carrying, the things you no longer want and suspect it is time to let go. A tide rises in your stomach, emotional indigestion. You drop to your knees. The drum sounds are distant, but they sustain you. Even though you take each of the actions of this ritual alone, you know the entire community is rooting for you and supporting you with their drumbeats and chants.

The moist earth smells cool and mineral, but it is not enough to stop you from retching. Out it all comes: the fear that tries to protect you from future disappointment, the old resentments like pebbles in your shoe, your rage and impotence, all the ways you’ve given up and given in, your waves of grief neverending as ocean waves. You wail like a wounded animal, which you are. You just let it all out and ask the EARTH to transform it as only she can.

When you are done, your emptiness feels light and spacious. You can smell the piney essence of the forest again. You wipe your earth-caked hands on your thighs and you rise.

You now move slowly toward the river, by the golden glow of the lanterns, where the WATER altar awaits. The time has come to bathe in the WATERS of peace and reconciliation, to be rinsed clean. Two members of the water clan are there to assist you. They can barely see you in the dim lantern light. You feel shrouded by the darkness. You take off your clothes, garment by garment, and place them on a bench beside the altar. They hold your hand and help you wade into the cold water. You shiver, then take the plunge and bounce back out, dripping wet. Blood rushes to your skin, tingling. You feel so alive! The water clan people offer you a towel. You dry yourself and get dressed again, but you know you are no longer the person who came to this party wearing those clothes. You have been renewed.

You now approach the altar of STONE. On the indentations of a great moss-covered boulder glitter crystals of all colors. Images of all the village ancestors magically appear. Whether you loved them or not, whether they treated you well or not, even your weird uncle, your grumpy aunt and stern grandfather look upon you with new compassion and excitement. Now that they are souls, they see with clarity. All your ancestors, kind, maddening and imperfect say, “We believe in you. You are the hope for the world.”

You feel the continuity of life flowing through your veins. You realize that you are the one we’ve been waiting for. Grateful for all they did to get you here, you make offerings. You take a pinch of cornmeal and toss it in the air. “Please look upon me with benevolence. Please help me make these dreams come true.” You name all your wildest dreams. That every being may have clean water and food and air and a safe home. That we may learn to share and work together. That we may regenerate and repair ourselves and the world. That we may live in alignment with our most precious values. That we may cultivate a way of life that will nurture the next seven generations and beyond…

With your heart full of clarity and resolve, you walk back through the NATURE threshold and rejoin the village. We welcome you with hugs and invite you closer to the fire, to warm yourself and let your hair dry. You have never felt so clearly that you belong. Here and now is where you are meant to be.

You chant and sway. You take a turn at the drums. You rejoice in knowing that your voice and your music is supporting your fellow villagers to go through the steps of their ritual. You know with absolute certainty that together you will bless the world with your gifts and your acts of repair.

And when everyone has gone through the steps of the ritual, and the fire burns low, we thank all the beings of nature and all the ancestors and all the benevolent spirits for holding us in this sacred way.

We safely put out the fire and head back to the house, where I’ve laid out a great feast for you. You eat to your heart’s content, the children run around, people tell funny stories and laughter rings out. Someone picks up a guitar, a harmonica, a drum, a tambourine and we will sing and dance and celebrate long into the night.

Thank you for coming, my friend. It wouldn´t have been the same without you. Thank you for being in my life. Here, take some leftovers home. Don´t wake the child, asleep on your shoulder. Drive safely down the mountain, have sweet dreams tonight and see you tomorrow, when we show up to do the work we came to this planet to do.

Your gift is your presence. If you have a gift for the world that you want to share, you can write it down below.

Everything I Know About Healing Trauma, 2

Dear readers,

If my blog has been so quiet in recent months, it is not for lack of love for you, but because my own recovery from emergency brain surgery 16 months ago has taken a lot of my energy.

The world these days offers us no shortage of violence and loss, and in the past months there have been many situations where I had to stop and follow my own advice, including the self-soothing exercises I offer you in the videos at the end of this post.

Healing Dispatch # 5: Emotional injury is a lot like physical injury

Imagine you accidentally cut your hand while cooking. What do you do?

If you ignore the cut and don’t clean and bandage it, it might become infected. If it becomes infected it will swell and cause pain, not only to the hand, but radiating out to other parts of the body. At worst, an unattended cut can cause fever or worse complications.

So you clean the cut with soap and water, maybe apply an antibiotic ointment, and bandage it so it's protected from getting dirty.

Do you have to tell your cells how to repair the tissue? No. Your body knows how to heal. You can trust it to do so. But first you have to remove obstacles to healing and create the ideal conditions for your body to heal itself.

It’s no different when it comes to psychological trauma. Your body knows how to heal it too, if you let it. Unfortunately, too often we suffer an emotional injury and bear it alone. Or worse, we tell somebody what happened to us and they stab us right back in the wound (I'll return to this in a later dispatch).

But when we feel like we cannot tell anyone about this terrible thing that happened to us, it's like ignoring the wound. It demands attention because it hurts, but we carry on working and doing what’s expected of us, and doing whatever we can to ignore the pain. This is where many compulsive behaviors develop: we may self-medicate or distract ourselves so we don't have to face our pain, but the pain only grows.

When we are avoiding dealing with our emotional pain, a portion of our life energy is spent in suppressing it. It's natural to want to avoid pain, but it always COSTS us something. And coping is not the same thing as healing. Coping allows us to survive and get by, but healing frees up our energy again.

So do you prefer the pain of attending to the wound and creating the conditions for healing, or the accumulating pain of shoving it aside and having it grow larger and zapping your life energy?

When it comes to emotional injury, cleaning the wound means making space to acknowledge what happened. Believing that it was not your fault and that you deserve to heal and be cared for.

Disinfecting and bandaging the wound means that you strengthen your boundaries and try not to expose yourself to the hurtful conditions again while you heal. I realize this puts too much burden on the injured person. We cannot control what others do to us, and certainly acts of violence are squarely the fault of the perpetrator, but we must try to be self-protective if we want our body to heal.

The marathon runner doesn't run on a broken ankle. In the same way, it is a mistake to push ourselves to “function”, to carry on as if nothing had changed, when we have been emotionally hurt.

Healing dispatch # 6: Resources for self-soothing

I created these videos in collaboration with my friend Melissa Manning and the projects she created to help our community after the pandemic and the devastating CZU fire that destroyed many homes here in the Santa Cruz mountains. It is never a bad time to acquire some coping skills to add to your repertoire, so here are some of my best, the same ones I use when I am triggered or stressed. I hope you find them helpful.

If you'd like to learn more about my services and how I came to do this work, you can read my recent interview on Mystic Mag.