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Caitriona Reed

About Caitriona Reed

https://fivechanges.com

Caitriona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki are co-founders of Five Changes as well as co-creators and stewards of the land at Manzanita Village Retreat They have trained and mentored creatives, evolutionary leaders, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and spiritual seekers for three decades. The range of their experience, and their lifelong commitment to learning and change, now blends contemporary brain-science with ancient mind-tools for deep personal, energetic, mindset change. The depth of their wisdom, and their perspective as artist and poet, makes them uniquely suited to support and mentor smart, creative visionaries who march to the beat of their own drum.

Posts by Caitriona Reed:

Manipulated image of Matisse's painting of five dancing figures

Heuristics. Tools for Intuitive Competence.

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Manipulated image of Matisse's painting of five dancing figuresHeuristics. Tools for Intuitive Competence

Heuristics is discovering the solution to a problem by looking for it in places you never imagined you could find it.

Open a book, put your finger randomly on a word, then use that word to guide you as you write your speech, or start the awkward conversation you’ve been avoiding,  or begin that difficult project.

‘Trusting your gut’
‘First thought, best thought’
‘Forget everything you think you know about this situation’
– are also forms of heuristics.

If you have a problem which is abstract, or if your understanding is unclear, look for another problem that is more specific and use it as a clue on how to proceed.

Draw a picture, or a map, to represent a situation you don’t fully understand yet.

If you have a problem that can be represented by two individuals, choose two people in a crowd, at a shopping center perhaps, or in a bar. Watch how they move and stand, how they interact with each other.

Heuristics can be a Constellation. Constellations are heuristic.

We imagine that the world is more linear, more coherent, more bounded by fixed rules, less interconnected than it is.

We assume that our problems are unique and specific to us. Imagine that we spend our lives representing different elements within countless constellations, for countless others. Imagine that the parts we play, while unknown to us, may be as essential to those in whose systems we serve as the air they breathe. While we, unbeknownst to ourselves, help them navigate their way through the mystery of their lives?

Abstract human portrait with illuminated head.

How We Make Meanings

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Semiotics. How we make meanings.

Late one night a bat flew into the large hall where a group of us were meeting before a night-long ceremony with our South American curandero friends. It flew once around the room in a wide circle then flew back into the night. The shaman asked me, “What does it mean?”

Perhaps, for the shaman, the bat was a portent, perhaps he was testing me, to discover what meaning the bat might have for me. I suggested that the bat was a beautiful creature of the night – the spirit of the night – paying respects to the people who had travelled so far to join us for this ceremony.

Semiotics recognizes that all the images, symbols, and forms that make up our every-day experience are as specific and meaningful as words and language. Our world is infused with the meanings and nuance of a myriad images. Some of them have been with us for millennia, while others enter our collective consciousness through art, through the forms of nature, through commercial branding, or simply through repetition in the media.

A bat of course, is just a bat, but through continuous human contact with them, bats, like countless other animals, plants, landscapes, objects, and events, have taken on a wealth of meanings and associations.

The scientific fundamentalism that has pervaded our thinking for the past several centuries and which has come to be accepted in the dominant culture as the de facto ‘truth’ would declare that a bat is simply a winged rodent, driven by basic instincts.

But a tension exists between our mechanistic explanation of the world and the reality of our associative consciousness that has absorbed the richness of mythological and semiotic meaning.

An indigenous shaman divining whether it is auspicious to conduct a ceremony might have very specific associations for a bat, or a snake, or a tree growing in a certain way, or a pattern in the clouds. That’s how divination works. It’s also how semiotics works. We make meanings, and from those meanings we derive a context-specific reality, a truth.

“We are meaning-making machines,” says Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP. We are continually extrapolating meanings from our experience. We have to, in order to make sense of it all. If we didn’t, the world would be an incomprehensible soup of random pieces of unrelated information.

Neurologically speaking, we’re wired to make patterns. It’s how our brains make intelligible images from the fragmented bits of information it receives from our eyes and our visual cortex. It’s how we organize memories, thoughts, sounds, tastes, smells, and the wealth of somatic occurrences, all within the dynamic neural network that we construct and experience as our senses, our bodies, our life.

We experience the world as a vast neural network that is continually prompting us to make patterns, stories, and meanings.

No wonder then, that we sometimes get our wires crossed, or compromise ourselves with outdated or inadequate information. No wonder, given our propensity for seeking what is familiar and safe, that most of us resist change of any sort, and avoid disturbing the patterns by which we have comfortably interpreted the world, and our experience of it, for a lifetime.

This tension between the mechanistic-rationalist worldview, and our ability to transform what appears before us into archetypal representations, is exactly why constellations are effective. It opens a door to a part of our psyche which has laid dormant for generations.  It’s as if we hunger for a pretext to open to the realm where we can make fresh meanings about our life, where we can see with fresh eyes, where we can understand something about what ‘we know but don’t yet know that we know’, where we can trust our intuition.

The new meanings may be as fragile and unverifiable as a cloud in the sky foretelling the future, or as the diviner’s cards thrown down on the table, but that doesn’t make them any less true or useful. Perhaps their fleeting evanescence makes them all the more real, by reflecting the chimera-like nature of the world.

 

Five Tarot Cards

Tarot de Marseilles

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Tarot de Marseilles

Typically, a Tarot card reader will ascribe specific meanings to each card, and give fixed meanings to each position in any given spread, then read the cards as if they were a parrot or a robot.

Originally, the Tarot was a game, le jeu de Tarot. It was a game of free association, improvised meanings, lots of puns. In parts of Europe where the old ways persist, or among a few of us who learned and hold to those ways, the cards are used like words in a sentence. The cards are placed one at a time on the table and the reading continues for as long as the cards are put down – un tirage en ligne.

I’ve heard that some of the old Romany readers will sometimes use all 78 cards in the deck, and weave an entire story, though I’ve found that five or six cards can be enough for a useful reading.

It begins with a question from the client, the more specific the better. Then the cards are put down, and the interpretation is given, often as a single sentence. The meaning of the cards is derived from where they land in the sequence, how they relate to each other, the semiotics of medieval symbolism, the patterns they form together, the transitions that occur (three cups turn into four swords, the Hapsburg bird on the Empress’s shield flies into the tree under a star-filled sky), and also with any associations that pop into mind – first thought best thought.

I have been using the Tarot as a form of constellation for many years. After laying down the cards in response to a client’s question, I will speak my sentence, explain a little at how I arrived at it. I explain that the reading describes the situation as it is. Then I ask the client to rearrange the cards as they would like them, describing to them the new implications of this new ordering of the cards. Then, as with a constellation, I will return the cards to their original order and ask the client if there is one card they would like to move, or remove, from the spread – thus they make their first step towards the resolution or transformation of the system that the reading has shown to them.

My teacher asked me to lay down some cards with the question: What am I good at?

Five Tarot Cards

   

My response:  XX – the call (Miles Davis often comes to mind here), XII – biding my time, XIII – then getting moving, getting through this stuff, 0 – gathering momentum, XVIII – (re)emerging

My line: I’m good at reinventing myself.

My teacher’s response:  For your trip down the Ancient Highway, the Journey starts with the call (and Miles called from a different galaxy that most), continues with meditation, past lives in other bodies now dead, tomfoolery with the Familiar, and ends under the Moonlight where there is no human voice to be heard. A perfect place to reinvent a self, if you still need one.

 

Four curanderos

Sacred Medicine. La Medicina Sagrada

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Four curanderos
Putumayo, Colombian Amazon

It began with a walking constellation. We saw them coming through the gate of our center – the curanderos and shamans from Colombia. Then there was a phone call. Then they arrived. They were here! And our lives changed forever. The world I had constructed from the fragments of our collective fundamentalist-mechanical worldview unraveled, and something else took shape from things I had missed, ignored or rejected as too fantastic. All the meditation, constellation work, hypnosis, psychology, NLP, and Psychomagic came to fruition in those dark nights of ceremony. Much of what I thought I understood well, I realized I had known only in the most superficial way.

  • The mind-body is not our own, nor is it bounded in any of the ways we assume.
  • It is possible to create a reality from any thought.
  • Anything is accessible through thought and imagination.
  • Tend to your thoughts wisely.
  • Everyone you meet has something to teach you about the system you are part of.
  • Treat them all with tenderness and love.

Sometimes, in ceremony, so many intangible beings appear that I have to keep my eyes closed. I prefer to feel them rather than to see them. I recognize that many of them have nothing to do with me. They are part of the constellated elements of others’ lives, assembled there: spirits, demons, ancestors, guardian angels.

Once in the forests of the Amazon, within minutes of drinking the medicine, they streamed in. They leaned over our hammocks, ancient spirit-healers, from the trees, from the river, deeply curious, attending to us carefully, tenderly, studying the strangers from the north.

Once, sitting in a room in the city, oblivious to the noise of the police sirens and revelers on the street outside, SHE came. She came, In a dress made of intricate beadwork like the jewelry of indigenous people in the northern Amazon. Seven feet tall, she sat in front of me all night long. She said, “I will never leave you.” Waves of joy, regret, delight, gratitude, sadness and love washed over me, all the emotions it is possible to feel. For the first time I felt myself to be part of this strange universe where I lived. I felt included, for the first time. I realized that until that moment I had never felt such a profound sense of inclusion.

“Remember, I’ll never leave you,” she said as she stood up at the end of the night to go. She smiled, “I’ll never leave you,” and ever since, wherever I am, I can call on her and she will be there, and I will know that I am included, in this world, in this universe, in any universe, in whatever situation or system I am part of at that moment.

Matisse. Dancing figures

Family Constellation

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Suddenly, we experience that it is possible that we are united in a way which goes far beyond our usual experience. This greater soul encompasses not only the living, but also the dead. And this is something quite extraordinary to experience: that we are part of a greater realm which unites the living and the dead, and that we have to meet the dead as we meet the living. 
Bert Hellinger. Originator of Family Systems Constellation work.

Family Constellation Workshop October 26, at Manzanita Village 

How Family Constellation works

So, here’s how it works: First, let’s assume that almost all the issues we face have their roots in our family of origin.

Even for problems that emerged more recently, the seeds were already sown.

A group of people come together under the supervision of a facilitator to help a client to transform an unresolved issue; emotional, inter-personal, professional, spiritual, even a health issue.

Often it’s something that conventional modalities have not helped resolve.

The other participants do not need to know any details. In fact, the less they know the better.

Members of the group are then asked to represent specific members of the client’s family and are directed to stand in the agreed workspace, which is usually a designated area in the center of the room.

Sometimes only two or three participants are involved, sometimes ten or more.

The facilitator and client observe how the ‘representatives’ interact with each other — choreography, gesture, expression, reaction.

The facilitator will question the ‘representatives’ and ask for their response to the situation as it unfolds.

The ‘representatives’ will interact with each other, observe their own feelings and reactions, respond when inspired to do so, and if called on by the facilitator will speak, either to relate their experience, or to address other participants directly.

Something extraordinary begins to happen. The simulated family system takes on a life of its own.

It’s always mind-blowing how easily representatives can let go of second-guessing, role-playing, acting, or imposing their own ideas on this family simulation.

We’ve seen this time and again, even with people entirely new to the work.

It’s as if permission had been given for each person to step into a collective field of energy and unconscious information, to trust the vast resources that, as it turns out, we all have access to.

Call it intuition, or the collective unconscious. In Family Constellation Work we call it ‘the field’.

It doesn’t need to be explained. The act of the client witnessing the movements, interactions, and the words of the people who represent their family system invariably creates new perspectives, new appreciation, new possibilities and choices, and not infrequently will shift the habits of a lifetime.

However many times we witness, participate in, or facilitate this work it’s still a mystery and a miracle, beautiful and sublime, a testament to the unfathomable nature of ‘mind’ itself.

Family Constellation Workshop October 26, at Manzanita Village 

Through Family Constellations, we are able to watch family entanglements unravel, by observing representatives who stand for members of the family system, with the support of an experienced facilitator….In Family Constellations those who are present in the circle, despite often having no former connection with other participants, are willing to stand as representatives of a family system, which may have suffered loss or conflicted relationships. Facilitator, client, representatives, and all who are present, gain access to a wider field, a larger, deeper way of ‘knowing’ and healing. The generosity of this work and what strangers are willing to do for each other IS phenomenal. — Francesca Mason Boring

Portrait of Don Ricard (Ric Klein)

Don Ricardo: The oldest religion, wandering alone in the mountains

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Ceremonial and Vision Quest leader, Sun Dancer, Pipe Carrier and Musician

The first thing we had to learn was respect for what we were experiencing, and putting it in a sacred context.

The oldest religion is wandering alone in the mountains.

We have the idea in the West that worship is bowing down before something, I think it’s more like celebrating and embodying.

A leader is someone who gives everything away.

The old guys in the Peyote Church used to say “You’re invited to come in, and sit down and shut up for a couple of years, and just watch, and maybe you’ll catch the flavor of it.”

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Portrait of Marie Luna

Marie Luna: Bend down low to the earth to reach the stardust

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My entire life experience has been informed by the wilderness, by interacting with the creatures and mountains and deserts of Colorado, from a very young age, a lot of the time alone. My work has been informed by decades of noticing natural systems and the incredible great common sense involved with natural systems, and natural thinking.

Curanderismo means bringing healing modalities to the world, not in an egotistical way, but in bringing healing modalities that are appropriate to each person. There’s a humility in curanderismo that I am really attracted to.

Any creature will be happy to rest if they can, so if we are afforded the opportunity to rest we should take it. A bear, if they have enough calories, they like to rest. It’s also a good idea to vet your inner resources. A coyote or a lion will really look at how far away the prey is and how much energy it’s going to take to make an attempt to bring it down. We can really look at that, to learn from that, to learn from the animals, and rest deeply when we get the chance to. Fortunately, for a lot of us who live in the more privileged part of the world we do get a chance to rest; but humans create a lot of concocted urgency to prevent themselves from resting.

The alarm bells were going off for me when I was a child, fifty plus years ago, about the direction our Anthropocene is going. I reacted very strongly when I was young. As a teenager I was in Earth First. It occurred to me very quickly, because of my observations of wild creature, that they will only try a thing a certain amount of times. They’re not going to beat their head against the wall. After a few years I realized that what we were doing was a drop in the bucket, what we need is a change of consciousness. So that propelled me into this larger vision of helping to bring the consciousness of the beauty and enchantment of natural systems to people who aren’t so in touch with that.

What sustains me is that everything in our world is constantly changing, and we may not survive these changes that are coming, but I think there’s a deeper part of this, we can call it soul or spirit. Different cultures have different names for it. There’s a deeper part of us that will keep going, will sustain. To be able to navigate as a soul is very important. That’s where my work’s at this moment.

Marie Luna was raised in the Southwest United States on ranches in the high mountains and desert canyons. Nature and wild creatures were her formative teachers, and they remain so today. She was influenced by her Indigenous neighbors of the Ute and Dine Nations at an early age, attending Blessing Ways, dances and curings. Her plant medicine practice encompasses 40 years of experience with high-integrity lineage holders whom she still studies with today. She has done isolation meditations with various plant helpers under the tutelage of Amazonian healer teachers. Her Tibetan Buddhist path and dakini practice meld seamlessly with her articulation of plant medicine practices in ceremonial form. She is an herbalist, a midwife, and a mother living in the mountains of Colorado. She works full-time as a ceremonial facilitator, helping with weddings, wakes, births, flower water limpias, and plant medicine ceremonies. 

Gracia Divina Church Colorado

 

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Portrait of Lisa Garr

Lisa Garr – Transformational Radio

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“Several years ago, Lisa Garr suffered a brain injury during a California State Championship Mountain bike race, where she was in second place, about to take over first. She fell down a long mountain to the bottom, cracking her helmet in 13 places. Lisa had a near death experience while lying on the side of the mountain until the helicopter medics came to transport her to the nearest hospital. This experience transformed her level of consciousness and was the catalyst for starting her media platform about awareness that now reaches millions of people per month worldwide. Lisa rebuilt her brain and her life using specific visualization techniques and accessing different levels of conscious awareness she calls Brain-nastics.

“Since that experience Lisa Garr created The Aware Show, a transformational radio show about natural health, cutting-edge science, personal growth and spirituality. Since 1999, Lisa has hosted a day-time talk radio program featuring best-selling authors and experts in the fields of spirituality and healing. She is considered an expert in the field of lifestyle and transformational media programming.” from https://theawareshow.com/

I was going down the wrong road. I was working in acting, I was working in television production, and I was working 24-7 and it was the wrong road here, the wrong person there. I don’t believe I was in the right place at all. I think God was saying, “Uh-uh. We put you here for another reason. Your purpose is not being fulfilled. We’re going to throw you down a mountain and knock your head around so that we can get you back on task.” I did have a brutal accident, and shattered my helmet, and had an incredible near-death experience, where I floated into an infinite, boundless state, with all that is. I saw that everything was alive and that there was no separation between anything. I realized, “How small I am living!” Also, it’s something you can’t un-see.

I started The Aware Show because the accident wiped out my memory.

Now, twenty years later I am doing the radio show, and I have these conversations with God, I say, “Look, you put me here for a reason. You saved my life multiple times. We are doing the show together. What is the next step here? What are we doing?”

In an age when telling the truth is no longer a requirement for the media, there is a parallel, unprecedented opposite movement towards truth-telling in a whole new way.

The unseen epidemics .. suicide, despair, perfectionism.

The purpose is to awaken the audience and allow that person to be a voice for a change, and if that effects one person who effects one person .. people start to make choices that brings the power back into their hands, so they’re not relying on some outside source to help them. That grassroots movement is how I believe we’re going to uplift humanity and heal as life become more and more chaotic.

Sunday papers with Marie Schreiber http://mariashriver.com/sundaypaper/
The Aware Show with Lisa Garr https://theawareshow.com/

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Business Coach Jayne Warrilow

Jayne Warrilow – Life is Choice

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We are raised to look outside ourselves to measure the meaning and value of life, and it’s only much later that we may be challenged to shift to filter for internal markers to ascertain our lives.

I so often work with clients who are being challenged, and who completely miss seeing where the problem lies. It lies with them. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent, they just don’t have the habit of looking inside. A big part of the work I do is bringing people home to themselves.

.. I was given a terminal diagnosis .. I was lying in the hospital, and I realized that life was my choice, and the life that I created was an internal thing, and the external world was a reflection of that. The world shifted on its axis for me at that moment. Knowing that I had the power to do so, I chose to live.

We have the choice in every hour of every day whether we follow our own internal truth or whether we just keep quiet and do what we think is expected of us.

We choose life – in every moment – or not.

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Portrait of Shereen Sun, Visionary Coach

Shereen Sun. Speaking Your Truth

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Shereen Sun: Speaking You Truth

There were so many ways, as I was growing up, that I felt very different. Feeling ‘other’ everywhere.

I grew up in a Muslim family in Las Vegas, I came out as queer in 7th grade. Coming out means continually peeling away layers to reveal ourselves, to ourselves and to the world.

The first time I was in a space that was both queer and South Asian was shocking. I felt like I had to hide from other South Asians. I had to start learning that I didn’t have to hide. I didn’t have to worry that it would get back to my parents.

A sense of wonder and curiosity pervades my life, and a sense of accepting what can really start to happen when you open up to who you are. And how you are safe when you really accept ALL of yourself. It’s the kind of space I want to create for people, especially the women who are attracted to my work.

After I came out to my mom, and her initial shock, she became my greatest ally.

When I saw her pain and suffering, and said, “This must be so hard for you,” and she understood that I really did see her, everything changed. People want, above all, to be seen.

I help people speak their truth, which is why it’s so important that I come out to my dad as soon as possible. I help them make the energetic shift that helps them take risks.

Business is not just about money but about liberation.

We have to listen to what’s coming out of our own mouths and take guidance from that.

After working through the oppressions of racism, homophobia etc. we must work through the barrier of, “I am unlovable.” Regardless of who we are, our work become the work of reflecting love back to the world.

I was talking about the Buddha as transgressive, as ‘queer’ to a group of straight couples. I suggested that everyone in the room was actually ‘queer’. I witnesses this room full of straight people nodding in enthusiastic assent.

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Figure mimicking pose in front of Michele Benzamin-Miki image. World We Long For.

Michele Benzamin-Miki – with Guest Host Dr. Scott Mills

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Michele Benzamin Miki in Conversation with Dr. Scott Mills
Step Aside and Allow others to Have Their Experience

From her beautiful home at Manzanita Village, a spiritual retreat center in Southern California, Michelle Benzamin-Miki joined me for an inspiring conversation about the crossing the boundaries into a world that no longer remembers what it is to be at war — at war with ourselves, with each other and with the planet. And as soon as she began to imagine this world with me, she also provided guidance on how to begin this journey, right now, and live a life that you love.

She explains that what she’s really about is “loving life — feeling like is a gift — and staying interested in it no matter what.” Considering how many people I come across who have gotten bored with themselves and the world, I’m excited to hear how she gets there day after day.

Michele is an Aikido master as well as a gifted artist whose work has won many awards. She has taught Buddhism, meditation and deep ecology around the world with luminaries like Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Thich Nhat Hahn. And her experience as a biracial woman with a foot in Japan and a foot in the U.S. has also informed her. This has allowed her to walk between many differing worlds, mediating between what can seem like opposing forces. .

Our conversation was so rich but I want to highlight five of the life lessons that I will be reminding myself of this week.

1 Release the need to take things personally. It’s so easy to make it all about me. Of course, you are the center of your universe. I am the center of mine. But once we step out of the house in the morning our universes begin to collide. We get ourselves into trouble when we think that the person who bumped us on the street or was grumpy in the elevator is a bit player in our life rather than the center of their own universe. When we release into this truth, we gain a better perspective on life.

2 Get into agreement with yourself. What a beautiful way to remind us that all of us is okay. Many of us spend so much of our time beating ourselves up for having an errant emotion or thought. But Michelle starts from this place of self-compassion that allows us to be okay and present to whatever emotion you may be feeling. Receive it like a welcome guest rather than turning it away at the door. This allows it to complete and creates a space for something new to emerge.

3 Step aside and allow others to have their experience. This deep insight from the world of Aikido makes me want to spend my life in Michelle’s dojo. I think of all the times that I want people to act the way I would like. (It’s hard sometimes to remember that their universe is more relevant to them than mine, especially in moments of pain.) We can choose to allow for others to complete or to block the flow of their emotions most often creating escalation. Most of the time it’s not about you. It’s about them. Just as you allow your own emotions to complete, allow those of others so that something new can emerge.

4 Invite your active, fierce compassion. The notion of fierce compassion couples with allowing others to complete. It allows you to also have fierce compassion for yourself. It is about being “able to engage fully and say yes to the moment and the love you feel.” At the end of the day, fierce compassion is about being able to stand with someone in the fire of their experience, perhaps a little singed but expanded. (Of course, nowhere is Michele suggesting that someone should allow themselves to be injured or abused. As a matter of fierce compassion for yourself, if you are in danger get to safety.)

5 Unleash your inner Obasan. When I asked Michelle about how art informs her teaching she tells me a story about her grandmother (Obasan in Japanese). When she was three years old the artist impulse that every child possesses had already invited Michelle to color outside the lines. Rather than limit her, Michelle’s Obasan covered the walls with paper and encouraged her to color wherever her imagination led her. This was first time she felt “the freedom and the liberation of the line.” And this permission to fully express has travelled with her to this day. If you did not receive this permission, it’s not too late. You can give it to yourself right now!

When I asked her what is the biggest change she wants to see in the world she laughed and said, “I want a lot.” (How can you not love her?) But at the core of her wanting is a world where children don’t know what war is. Where “this notion of war becomes an old thing of the past, an old story, maybe a metaphor of how we used to deal with things.” She dreams of a day when we can be more creative in our solutions with each other and release the violence that has become an easy solution to far too many problems.

I’m excited to live in this world with Michelle! The work she does is helping to make that dream a reality.  Scott Mills 

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Portrait of Diego Marmolejo and Samuel Velez

Camino al Sol: Wisdom of the Earth

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Diego Marmolejo and Samuel Velez: The Wisdom of the Earth and Our Ancestors
with Abraham Garcia

We’re here to receive the wisdom of the Earth and of our ancestors. Everything that surrounds us – places, people, plants – is medicine. When you understand that, you can call yourself a shaman, a medicine man.

I am the plants and the rivers and the animals. People know that about me because I can transmit that essence to others.

I remain the same person despite all the ups and downs of life.

A long time ago I had a vision that I was in a desert. I was driving and there was a lot of dust. I asked an elder, who told me that probably one day I would come to the U.S. to teach. Being here is not an accident. We have a mission here.

Much of the ancient knowledge has been lost, so we use the sacred plants to help us remember the essence, to awaken the elders that belong to every place and every life.

The land is a great master. But a human without land, without a place they know deeply, is not fully human. The first thing we must learn is how to take care of the land, of the Earth. Afterwards we learn what it can provide to us. Without a relationship with the land we have no direction.

Ultimately we are the land.

We use the sacred plants to remember the ancestral teachings and the wisdom of the earth.

The land – the specific territory where you are – is your school.

I teach my children, not by repetition, but by keeping them close to me and helping them experience the land and the inner territory. This is not something they teach in schools.

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