HOLY WATER

It's November, the celebrated Day of the Dead in parts of the world and the veils certainly feel open today. I always wonder at the piercing quality of the elements when November arrives. It is like the stone is really stone and the water is so water, the air so apparent and the heat of fire so inviting. Life and death, well they are such an elemental process. I think it is the elements that birth the soul into living form and the elements are exit openers as the soul moves back through the realms. I have recently been thinking very seriously about how we are to live in our most alive and vital way. If the elements so keenly bring us in and help us depart, then how can we live more truly in life with them?

Each element has archetypal forces that we know through the spiritual cosmos as deities and animal beings. They have visited me in various forms over the years, hailing from various cultures be they Inuit, Egyptian, Greek, Scottish, Indian or Italian, but mainly they are beings that feel futuristic, like they have never lived in a tradition. Originally I knew them as star beings and over time realised a lot of them were fairy and from the earth. It was my practice with Schiehallion and the other mountains that showed me this. More recently, I have realised that it's not that they are all futuristic, it is that they haven't been given a place in present times for a very long time so we don't recognise them. A lot of my guides are spirits who have not been given a context in the world of humans over centuries. Well the more I have realised this, the more they appear to me.

Over the last five years I have been visiting mountains, waters, caves and the ancient sites of the world for education, direct from source about how I can live closer to the earth and what the earth might need from us all. I have always felt that the practice I work with needs to be for the times, calling it Visionary work or Creative Shamanism for this reason. I have asked everyone who comes to train in the programmes I lead to find their own way with their spiritual guidance. Spiritual practices need to develop with the times.There are new spirits in the land and there are ancient spirits too. Some spirits are eternal and some have life spans. Just like human forms and ideologies change from one generation to another, so do the spirit worlds and anyone's job as a shamanic operator is to show up and listen in the moment to what evolves there too.

Our power as humans and our capacity to make change happen comes from aligning with the times and what is living here alongside us in the here and now. There is a parliament of beings in the spirit worlds that match our vibration and creativity today. Holding onto old ways and old traditions won't help us to connect with them. Controversially, it will instead keep us attached to other times. It is usual to want to go back to the past to pick up what we have put down and remember. A lot of my learning was from checking in on what the ancients did and remembering parts of myself from other times and places where there was connection through the realms. Truly though, it is presence and deep listening in the moment that opens us up to what we need for today and allows us to open to what the future is calling for. It is through being creative visionaries and artist that the earth opens up and the future is made. I have more affinity with art than shamanism as a practice, not because shamanism isn't creative energy at work, but because in the west we can think too rigidly and with too much nostalgia for ancient ways so we miss the point that shamanism is a creative and open way of being. The best shamanic practitioners I know are compassionate ruthless artists who will paint out their favourite bit of a painting in order to bring a new gestalt into being. They live in the present and keep running like rivers, opening creative wonder wherever they may flow.

So I have been asking the ancient caves and sacred sites on the earth to show me where we can go to open up the best future. Well, the deeper I go and the more keenly I listen I find it is water and stone that are my teachers. I have been pulled deep under ground where the water flows in the deepest and most remembering of stones. Holy water is helping divine a place where the spirits gather waiting for us to join them.

Holy Water is the guide for the new Drum Mystery school course I am launching today. So I will go and tip back into the writing for that now. Basically, the course takes us through 13 different mystery school sites around the planet (one each moon cycle) in order to connect with what is there and waiting for us and open up our connection with the land, elements, spirits and the new creative ways and possibilities that are here for us today. The mission? To create radical and magical change and bring together a community of creative technicians working with innovation and diversity.

What we find through water in the end takes us to the gnosis that shamanic power is accessed in a timeless zone. I will leave you in the blessing of presence and with the words of Herman Hesse in Siddhartha:

'“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.'

Drum 25/26 begins 20 November and introductory material comes out today. It is £800 and has a Day of the Dead one day special offer on full price £500 or may be paid in instalments each quarter or as membership monthly.