Welcome to my blog! Welcome to the launch of the Jaguar House website! Welcome to the conversation!
In my first official blog post on this Jaguar House website and blog, I’d like to talk about the issue of communication with the spirit world. Since the bulk of my work as a shaman is communicating with souls and spirits, both visible and invisible, this seems a good place to start a conversation. The purpose of my blog is to write about spiritual experiences and the shamanic path from various perspectives. There’s no better way to communicate with people than by stories. Since I am also a writer, this is very handy! Some stories will be about topics in general and others about how I came to be a shamanic practitioner myself, as well as whatever else comes up, including talking about dreams and why they are important–life changing even.
Please feel free to comment and share your own stories. The “comments” tab resides at the bottom of each blog following the tags. Just look for the word Comments and click on it.
Ultimately I’d like to create both a online and face-to-face community of people who are experiencing their own Shamanic Paths. My path happens to be that of the Jaguar House, or Jaguar Way, which is an inclusive medicine path dedicated, so far, to helping people understand, appreciate and more fully experience what it is to be a modern shamanic practitioner, meaning that you communicate with various forms of the Spiritual realm in a regular way for your own purposes and/or to help others.
My practice in dream interpretation and shamanic counseling is designed to help others communicate and interface more completely with the spiritual realms using a variety of practices and skills.
So, let’s begin!
Does the Spirit World really communicate with us?
If you are like me, you might often wonder if the spiritual realm is real, or if you are just making it up, based on your own needs and desires to feel more secure and to participate in varying degrees of magic from time to time.
I’m sure the spiritual world, whatever kind we subscribe to, laughs a bit when new doubts show up, and humans say variations on “Help me please help me. Give me sign. Any sign.”
Especially when I’m desperate and frustrated (which is when I usually talk to the Spirit world), I say things like, “Give me a sign. Any sign. I don’t care. Just make it big and bold, in my native language, and ridiculously obvious. Pretend I’m totally dense (not a stretch for me) and SPELL IT OUT IN BIG RED LETTERS IN THE SKY!” Or some variation thereof.
From what I’ve seen, communication from the Spirit World occurs after we’ve made such an appeal. Equally as often, we feel our entreaties go unanswered and we feel ignored and abandoned, left to deal with whatever form of suffering we are experiencing.
No doubt we go unanswered sometimes (which itself might be an answer), but maybe we just miss the reply because we aren’t paying attention or because it comes in an unexpected way.
In fact the word ‘coincidence’ may just be synonym for not really paying attention.
SIGNS THE SPIRIT WORLD MAY BE TALKING TO YOU
So if you nearly get hit by lightning, but not quite, on the way home on your bicycle, you really shouldn’t ignore that. The landscape of not getting hurt or killed is the medium of the answer.
If while sitting on the beach facing away from the waves, screaming and sobbing about your lover breaking up with you all of a sudden, and the ocean suddenly breaks over you, tumbling you completely inside it, out of control, and then throws you way up onto the bank where the succulents live, and does not drag you back out to sea, and once you catch your breath you feel completely different, that’s an intervention.
If you are late for your plane that is taking you to a time-sensitive, and very important yoga retreat on the other side of the country and the ticket agent, whose name is Jesus (I shit you not), holds the plane for you without you asking, THAT IS A SIGN. You would have missed the plane otherwise.
If while having a meltdown after your live-in lover says s/he wants to break up and you are about to fall down that vertiginous endless black hole of agony and you literally hear a voice that says, “You will be okay. Go to the ocean right now. Get up and go.” And you go and it keeps you from having the hysterical meltdown the effects of which could last for weeks….you have received direct assistant from your Sacred God, Goddess or Guides.
If, after sitting in a sacred spot in nature, drumming and doing some ritual, you go down the hill and a hawk circles over you and then literally stops his forward motion and hovers over you—THAT’S A SIGN. You are being answered. If two hours later, you experience 25 Medicine Eagles (Turkey Vultures), circling over the area in the Canyon where you memorialized your mother’s life and death….the spirit world has heard you and is responding.
If while on a Vision Quest, you walk at twilight near some red sandstone and mudstone cliffs in the Southeastern corner of Oregon and you see an Owl on the cliff, and then he alights, flies just in front of you and drops a tail feather….and then goes back on a cliff and proceeds to do what only could be called an Owl Dance with a fellow Owl, dipping his head and lifting his tail feathers over and over in a rhythm…what should you call that?
If on your way home from work on the interstate one October night, and your drive shaft breaks on the off-ramp to your house when you are slowing down to 20 MPH, and your truck will no longer move forward, and the guy behind you who stops to help is a mechanic….you are being protected. A broken drive shaft hitting the pavement at a lot of speed can flip a car. The on-the-spot mechanic diagnosed the problem immediately for me. The tow guy went out of his way to take me home and then drop my car off and didn’t charge me for the extra miles. My mechanic fixed the problem in an hour the next day and charged me around $40.
My own experiences are enough to suggest that there is no real separation between Our World and the Spirit World: it’s mainly a matter of intention and perception.
But I am NOT the arbiter of all things shamanic! I am one person. Do you have tales of messages or interventions from the Spirit World interfacing with our material realm? Feel free to share in the comments section.
For the next few blogs, I will continue to discuss this theme of: how can we tell the Spirit World is talking to us? Helping us? How do we know it’s real? I also welcome questions and requests about other topics.
To see what kind of work I do, please visit the other pages on this blog!
Until then,
Blessings from the House of Jaguar!
Deborah, the 13 Jaguar
