While multicolored dragonflies and hummingbirds cruise the flowerbeds, or deep in the short nights, it's not unusual for me to find myself flying and bridging across time and space. One question that arises is: Who is traveling? Another way of asking is, which body is traveling? We have more than one. 

Whether in dreaming or in magical moments in this world, you can feel when the energy body is active. It feels different: very alive, deeply connected, and altogether outside our rational mindset. Reality has new rules. We can't explain it.

One can do amazing things with the energy body, sometimes called the double. Developing the energy body through practices, awareness and intention is an ongoing endeavor, present multiculturally, and definitely part of shamanic practices. I've been newly focused on this work lately, as I delve deeper into my own abilities with some expert guidance, and also revise materials for an introductory group retreat on the subject. Working with my own levels of attention and intention is one area; creating words and dreaming practices for others to explore is another. Both are bringing me surprising insights on the identity constructs and personal coping strategies that keep connecting with our energy bodies – or anyone else for that matter – at arm's length.

The energy body operates beyond the confines of the attributions we place on ourselves and everyone around us in the everyday world. To activate and inhabit your energy body, you gotta drop a lot of stuff. Sweep your islands clean. As I prepare to instruct others in introductory practices, I bump up against my stuff on my islands like icebergs against the Titanic. How can I inspire trust, create safe, nurturing space for letting go, and convey the practices skillfully when I'm uptight about dropping my stuff too? Maybe partially by saying so at the get go.

Recognizing a fabulous opportunity for self-awareness and transformation, again with some pitch-perfect guidance, I get it: clearing the identity decks for greater connection can feel challenging, effacing, threatening. You want me to what? Let everything go and see what emerges? Open to being not what I thought I was at all, but something that requires me to abandon my formerly held notions of self? Merge with a tree until it speaks to me? Feel okey-dokey about lifting out of my physical body in broad daylight, or having everything around me disappear in a a golden light? Because you say it's cool?

When pressed, it is very natural for people to resort to coping strategies that are ingrained from past survival modes. Whether or not it really works for us now, we launch into our prescribed ways. I do it, you probably do it too; then we feel bad about it later. Why did I say that? Well, because we didn't know what else to do and were feeling, for whatever reason, a little pressed. Sweeping our islands clean means letting all that fall off the edge, and though we want to, it can leave us with a new problem. If that's gone: who am I?

This is where the rainbow comes in. The rainbow body is a complex subject I'm not really getting into very deeply here, but, like a rainbow, our energy bodies are here but not always visible. They are a most powerful aspect of our existence, and have therefore been poo-poohed as non-existent by many for a long time. Never mind that. If you're interested, you can develop yours. Your energy body bridges across time and space and feels wondrous to behold. It is your vehicle of light, there if you choose to develop it, to ride it.

The rainbow is a handy phenomena to use as a simile. Who are you when you drop all the coping mechanisms, early adaptive strategies, crusty identity constructs and quick defenses against the other and all the things you fear? You are present. Shining. Reflective. Beautiful. You're like a rainbow. In the world but not of it. Able to be here, and there and there. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Your energy body is impervious, traveling, shimmering. Might even be eternal. It may well be the body you can climb into and take off in when all else is finito. And meantime, with practice, you can develop it for a plethora of wonderful uses. If you're willing to sweep and see what happens. Guidance is important; the rest is up to you. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

I get that my task is to assist in creating safe space for this work, to own up to the dichotomy of self and other and the postures that pervade our reactions, to seek for the key that allows me to transfigure my stubborn bewilderment into helpful insight for others on the path, into compassionate understanding of our dual wishes for freedom and containment. Actually this is exactly what the energy body affords: freedom and containment. Like a rainbow. 

ps: the Rolling Stones have a song...you might have heard

Woke up from a night of intermittent sleep and howling winds to a clear blue sky and thick ice on Sir's water bucket. But in comparison to the extreme commutes I glimpsed on the morning news feed of friends, from my blanketed comfort zone, my work schedule on this blustery cold day is a dream. I'm working right now, in fact, as Alice Sara Ott plays Chopin piano waltzes for the delight of Tigs and Tux, destined to stay in until temps climb to today's high of 30. Mid-20's is quite a bit warmer than -11 currently playing in my hometown back in Illinois. Winter work for me today is centered on clearing channels, residing in open space, working with the energy of light, and learning the healing powers of sound. And writing of course, from a variety of positions. Starting here with the first blog post of 2014. Aloha!

The photo shows one of my main work stations: the pillow on the journey rug in the workroom, with the apophylite and amethyst that often hold the high chakra ground while I work, and are known to be effective in such a position for the work. The word work shows up four times in that sentence, and that's indeed the word for it. Doing the work is a real thing, as is the writing or editing work I'll also do today, from another work station in a comfy chair looking out at the blue. Which is a different kind of real work from the laundry, or the soup stock making also on the docket today. No driving required, no money spent, and I can attend to my old horse, Sir's, hydration by carrying out hot water buckets throughout the day. Simple, but effective, allowing perfect movement breaks. The simplicity and balance of today and today's winter work is a joy, and I am grateful for the myriad small and immense wonderments all around me. The light is phenomenal.

Basically, we're all doing the work of transformation on various levels.. Winter work here today includes turning bones to clear liquid; turning ideas into exchanges that in turn transform into checks in the mailbox; turning blue sky and ice into tankas; turning sound into healing. The foundation of all transformation is open space filled with light, and the different ways we real-ize and work with it through our minds and soul's knowing. 

In journeying, I look in and out at the same time, with eye covering blotting out all light. Headphones feed my mind with repetitive drumming by a group of fellow practitioners, keeping the theta waves going in a sound-generated lifeline to this world, the lifeline I literally journey on so I can get back. Doing the work requires being in multiple dimensions at once, going into other worlds or realms at will, interacting with the assistance and guidance of helpers, and bringing back energy to this world. In remote work, that energy gets transported through Middle World to the client wherever he or she may be. 

So, as in dreaming, there's a lot of traveling, which is why it's called journeying; a lot of interactions and transmissions. The mind receives an amazing array of information through many channels, visual, audible, sentient, metaphysical; yet to the ordinary reality eye, nothing happens. There's nothing seen, eyes are closed, there's nothing said, and nothing done. A dance of embodied spirit with disembodied spirit that medicine men and women have danced through the world for hundreds of thousands of years.

In meditative practices, such as with the Warrior Syllables I'm doing at present, another kind of relation to open space is happening. Mind is stilled, channels in the body where the chakras spin clear and open, obstacles are removed, and groundedness in space allows positive qualities to spontaneously manifest. Doing this type of practice before journeying, and others such as discharging energy through placing my hands on the crystal clusters set up for that job, readies me for the work. Doing it for my personal attunement is, I'm discovering, essential. And as a practice for healing, it is most effective. I am just beginning to learn this technique. The ability of masters to affect cellular structure through this practice is astonishing and seems miraculous; it is in truth an adept use of open space. For me it is another area of work in progress. To the ordinary eye, naturally, it appears as if nothing is happening.

Which brings me to the famous line by the poet W. H. Auden that poetry makes nothing happen. Nothingness is the primary field of interest in my poetry and critical work. I can't help it, it enthralls me. Here again is the awareness of open space as the stuff of life, what the universe is made of, what we are made of. Looking out on this clear blue sky day, it appears there's nothing happening. The wind moves through the high treetops, and they respond with their own movement and sound. The wind chimes on the porch play a few notes, in tune with Chopin. In open space what arises arises, what disappears disappears. Without open space nothing would happen. Nothing does happen. I love my work: to let the arisings come through, let the open space fill with light, and energy transmit and transform. When I do my work, I aspire to be a hollow reed the wind blows through, creating sound and resonant vibration that affects matter across time and space. I myself do nothing.

Okay, back to work! May your winter work be warming and transforming. Oh, and speaking of those two things, it may be a perfect day for this alchemical medicine: Jane Grigson's Celery Soup, a genius recipe from Food52. May your journey home be magically assisted by helpers in many forms.

On days like this when the sun comes out after days of cloudy rain, the river calls and I walk on down the road. I just took this snap of the Sandy River coursing down from Mount Hood fresh with rainwater and snow. Yesterday's big rain had it churning brown when I drove over the high bridge where I stood today to take this shot, now transformed into its frothy jade green look. Two ravens circled high above, giving an oracle that I heard interpreted as keep going, and variations including  perseverance furthers, and go with the flow. 

The Incredible String Band's Water Song came to mind and I sang the line wizard of changes, teach me the lesson of flowing back to the river, as I often am impulsed to do around flowing water. Being in flow as part of All instead of sitting on the bank with your worries feeling out of flow is an image I've received from others who work with invisibles, with assisting self and others in raising frequency, transforming fear to love, trusting and participating in flow. The way we assist each other, encouraging, inspiring, and sometimes directly transmitting information or energy through and to each other is reflected by the mirror all around us. Just then, the message from the ravens, the sound of the river swollen with yesterday's rain, the resonance of what I was watching with the metaphor from the written material on flow, and the welcome rays of the sun did their stuff and I received the benefit in mind, body and spirit, helping me sync with flow.

In doing shamanic work – and in many other modalities of healing, lightworking, wayshowing, channeling, dreaming up – part of the assist comes from the practitioner's connect, gifts, and medicine, certainly. But a lot of what is going on is in the connect in us all: the connection of the people working, but also the connect that happens within the person receiving the work. What information, inspiration, guidance, helpers, wisdom, energy, power you personally connect with that was needed, to return to flow and raise your hum. 

Sometimes I describe shamanic work as energetic jumper cables from one human battery to another. Sometimes each of us needs a jump to start up again and get back on the road, so we can go with the flow. Sometimes we need encouragement, support, information, affirmation, or a key energetic component we don't feel, can't see or locate. News we can use. The receiving of that is deeply connective and reflective, awakening parts of our soul that were fragmented, lost or sleeping, freeing shadow parts from the dark shameful closet we've locked them in. Helping each other through our helpers, our shared fragility, our innate insight and gifts, our connection happens in each moment, all around us in nature and beyond, throughout the universe. 

When we're in flow, the universe flows to us and through us. Our brains light up and we feel that sense of group belonging psychological experts tag as essential to a person's well-being. We can each connect with flow and allow it to flow through us as we travel through our day, in traffic, at the store, at work, with our peeps, or in nature, seemingly solitary as I often am, but never alone. When you're in flow you can feel you are one with Source, and things are easier, simpler. What you're looking for turns up, whether it's a parking space, that thing in the junk drawer you need, the name of the guy you were supposed to contact, or the next step in your career, home, or relationship situation. The phone rings, the email pings, the eagle flies by overhead. Ideas come to your writing or project and revisions are obvious, delightful.

Living so close to a river is an excellent mirror, or flow chart if you will, and I've been fortunate to find myself living near several through the years. Each day the river is different and fluctuates wildly. Each drop of water is unique and different than any before or after it. Yet it's all river, and all rivers flow to Source. And from the source, come to think of it. Conditions affect flow but flow continues, sometimes more than we think we can handle, sometimes less than we think we need. Learning the lesson of flowing is the work of many lifetimes, but in essence, simplicity itself. 

If you are feeling out of flow, what will help you return? It might come through stillness, movement, silence, or sound; words or dreaming or nature or love. It might be all of the above. How do you restore your connect? If you need a jump you feel I can assist with, let me know. Our work might be in the Lower World, in water flowing underground [yes, cue the Talking Heads], or emanating in Middle World from an ancient water bubble in a crystal, from a waterfall in a past life, or from a few drops of a flower essence, or from a celestial Upper World wash of light that jumpstarts your cells into resonance and healing. We might actually be working at river's edge in an intensive nature training session. Or you might be on the other side of the world. Maybe a part of you returns, carrying the heart medicine you lost in an estranging event, re-lighting the fire in your head after a bewildering situation, renewing your thirst for life.

Wherever we are, may we be going with the flow, awash in the ever-present universal glow. 

What's up with the photo? It seems to have orbs floating in the sky, a tilting old building, and some kind of swan cloudshow. I took this photo at Hawkwood in December of 2008, looking out the window of the big room where The Company of Hawkwood had just finished a meditation as part of the weekend mystery school with Caitlin Matthews, John Matthews, and professor-author Ari Berk. Just today, Caitlin Matthews posted about this longstanding annual event on her blog, Soundings, where you can be guided to everything you need to know, and even still make reservations to attend this year's weekend, if you so desire.

I bring it up because she brought it up because it's coming up for me big time as I create my own mystery school musings. Today I mention it not only because of the Company of Hawkwood energy, but because of world events, as a way of thinking about what my particular mystery school concept encompasses. As I synthesize How Things Happen into areas of potential inquiry, as I develop the scope and discuss it with colleagues, questions arise, and it's helpful for me to articulate answers to those questions. People ask, what sort of stuff will you do there? The scope is wide but small, far reaching but quiet.

Not that there's anything wrong with dressing up and eating chocolate. More on that later. Tonight, as we all know, is All Hallow's Eve, a powerful night by any name, including one you might have seen and likely have mispronounced: Samhain. You wouldn't be alone in saying Sam Hane, like it's some dude, but the Celtic word is pronounced  SOW-hen. And blessings on all who get that right! What's with the blessings part, you ask? Isn't tonight about scary zombie types? 

You might know all this already, but if not, and are interested, let me refer you to Celtic seer and author Caitlin Matthews, who explains Samhain in full on her Soundings blogspot for us today. You may be familiar with her work, hyperlinks to which are found on my Resources page, and the About page. I've used her books and decks and divinatory tools for years in my work and personal life, had the honor of being a member of the Company of Hawkwood in 2008, and benefitted from private ancestor work with her in Oxford. Her insightful scholarship is eloquent on the subject, freeing me to do my thing here more willy nilly. And get to the chocolate part.

Being a liminal zone walker between worlds, tonight is totally in my comfort zone, and optimal for the work. This year is particularly outrageous because of the nearness to the New Moon on the 3rd, which is also a Solar Eclipse, meaning this whole deal here is a major power time of new beginnings. As a Triple Scorpio born at sunrise on the New Moon while Mercury was in retrograde (as it is again now) three score years ago, it's triple-y so for me, in all senses of the word. Creating new beginnings out of the release of the old, having a lot to do with dead people, is very much the thing at this time in my orbit. Maybe you are doing a new beginnings, old releasings thing yourself. Humanity is kind of pretty much doing that right around now, come to think of it, and there's lots of wonderful help coming from invisibles through the veil. One online channeling session that you can participate in is certain to be transformative: Paul Selig's Know Your Worth workshop. Yes! Tonight!

The veil between the worlds is indeed thin at this time, as you may have heard mentioned once or twice. In fact, this morning I awoke from a very powerful dream where I was talking on the phone with two people, in two ears from two different places, and realized when I woke up that one of them was dead. While I was listening to their mindblowing comments, the 'waiting room' I found myself in was filling up with people, one of whom answered her mother's impatient we've got to get out of here with a gentle it's about love I think, we just need to be patient. Along with the rest of the dream, including sifting through a box of old, brown crystalline stones and realizing they were valuable, I've already had one of several visits through the veil.

The crystal in the photo, below the Pictish Double Disc and Z-Rod symbol from the Scottish Highlands, found me in Arcata and called from a neglected bottom shelf behind a door of a tiny shop that's gone now. As soon as I walked in I heard it (or would never have seen it) say THERE you are! I've been waiting for you. It cost all of $8 and is my personal crystal. No one else touches it, and I only use it for my personal work. It usually lives in the medicine tools cupboard, but as you see, it is out and ready to work today. It knows more about our long association than I do, and tonight it will tell me more about what we are doing together through time and space. It shapeshifted into the group of brown stones I was neglecting in my dream to get my attention. 

In my view, the diversions of this holiday, now complete with paper plates and greeting cards, are all fine and dandy. The guy from the bank in Newport Beach, California, who just called to thank me for being such a longstanding customer, completely out of nowhere, like one of the dream callers, is apparently dressed as Austin Powers today, baby. It's all good! But for me, this night has been, for many many years, about the work. This, for me, includes honoring the ancestors, which I do by toasting the family portraits and thanking them for all they did and went through, for surviving and for my DNA and my life and all the bequests. Some of these, as in all families, have been in need of transformation, disentanglement, soul retrieval, extraction healing, the work of Isis, and a lot of cord and imprint wrangling. This work goes in both directions, helping the ancestors in the past, me in the present, and future family folk. Which, who knows, could be us again. I express love to those who left this mortal coil abruptly. We all do the best we can, and as the girl in the waiting room told her mom, it's about love I think.

So, I'll do that, and also will acknowledge the spirits of place around here, where I will be visited not by trick-or-treaters, but by wild animals and other beings. Coyote, elk, owls, eagles, who knows. A communicative crop of new amanita mushrooms sprouted by the fir circle near the barn this morning, and are powwowing with the trees as we speak. Yes, mycellium do transmit info to the forest in which they live: fact! Check out Mycellium Running for more on that amazing phenomenon. 

And, I will journey with and to my old friend, the etched Smoky Quartz crystal, and receive the transmission and do the work that is to be done. Past-present-future are in full swirl, the invisibles are near, and come to think of it, that room filling up in my dream is no metaphor.

For the chocolate bit, I'm making organic, vegan Almond Joys! I have to thank Amanda Hesser's genius Food52 again, for bringing a recipe from April into view just now. Check it out here! Mush pulsed-up honey, coconut, coconut oil together into the classic shape, push in an almond or two, chill them up for a half hour, melt the chocolate, dip each piece into it on a toothpick, let set for half a minute. Done. Yum.

Whatever you're up to tonight, have a blessed, big-ass fun, deep power time, and circulate that love thing through time and space, through and to all beings everywhere.

Cloud watching is almost a full-time job for me, and yesterday did not disappoint. Her Majesty, Mt. Hood, was working her magic with changing conditions from the east, and by late afternoon had created thunder, lightning, rain, and a vibrant rainbow, plus the wonderful changes in the fragrance of the air, the negative ions and ozone, all of which produced a shift in my inner state of mind. Posts from entranced friends in Oregon and Washington attested to the magical power of a summer storm on our psyches and spirits.

Living near Her Majesty for three years, I've felt her power and how she exerts it to change conditions around her. Sometimes she whips up electricity, sometimes sends alpine winds down her sides, cloaks herself in dramatic clouds, froths the river in green glacial melt on a hot day... she has a stunning repertoire. And then, I remember that when she was an active volcano, she helped create the epic Columbia Gorge over millions of years. The forests, waterfalls and sylvan glades we enjoy on weekend hikes were created through fiery explosions and lava flows which wiped out everything in their paths, over and over again, for millennia.

Major life force energies like volcanoes and floods, beautiful phenomena like snowflakes and rainbows, and every day weather like this morning's quiet cloud cover, result from conditions. Create the conditions for rain, and rain falls. You may have seen reports about Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, who creates clouds inside galleries as an art installation. Viewers gasp in wonder when the cloud appears, and it is quite magical. But, like creating an oil painting by applying oil paint onto a canvas with a brush until an image is completed, the artist creates the artistic expression of a cloud in a room by creating the conditions that makes clouds form, having to do with proportions of humidity and temperature. You can watch YouTubes of the artist creating a cloud in a room.

Changing conditions in the mind also changes conditions in the physical plane. Body symptoms and conditions, living environment, relationships, abundance and manifestation capabilities, happiness and inner peace are some of the areas that change when the conditions we hold in our minds as true are allowed to shift. What seems impossible, like producing a cloud in a room, or healing a longstanding condition, will continue to appear impossible if conditions do not change, because the conditions for the transformation are not in existence at that time. Wishing or worrying are not effective in creating change in conditions, although they do play a part in attracting or repelling the conditions that create change. 

Maybe I love watching clouds so much because I can view nature's transformative powers and their results in real time as an ongoing master class in the ultimate mystery school. The mountain, too, seems to say, are you watching? Are you listening? I'll show you again. We too have the power to change our lives, our bodies, and our world, the whether, if you like, around our personal sphere of influence. Group mind changes conditions in society and can effect global shifts in consciousness. Working with ourself is the starting place for changing conditions: looking at our thoughts, our fears, our held emotions – what we believe to be true, or possible. And who has the power to affect conditions.

Like the mountain, we do not hold all the conditional cards: there are other elemental forces that interact to create conditions at any moment. Rather than a skirmish, it can be a dance, a graceful intermingling of energies, realizing all is an expression of the one. Working – or playing – with the interweaving of forces, in alignment with a necessary degree of internal power conditions, including knowing, intention, fearlessness, trust, detachment, nonresistance, and love, is the work of transformation. Clearing negativity, removing obstacles, repatterning thoughts, letting go of old hurts and resentments, releasing fear changes static conditions so that transformation can occur.

Sometimes it is helpful to ask for information, energetic transmission, clarity, guidance, support and practices to assist in changing mind and heart conditions so that the 'weather' within and without us can change. Each of us can cultivate our inner connect, our stillness, our intent, to transform conditions in our lives. And then, the sweet showering from the sky begins.