Inari’s Holocron

My husband flew out on Sunday bound for Minneapolis, where he is working for the next 3 weeks. Strangely enough, I’ve found that there is actually very little impact upon my routine with regards to his not being here. It’s brought to my attention how much of the household and family tasks I take upon myself…basically it’s everything! The only thing I’ve had to do extra is hear Rhys’ reading and read him a story in turn. That’s a bit sad isn’t it? I mentioned it to the receptionist at the place where where I work today, and she said I should give him a kick in the ass and make him do more. Probably I’m my own worse enemy in this regard, as when I notice a mess or something that needs doing I tend to just do it while it’s got my attention.

A few things came to my attention this week, which speaks much of the state of the world to me. Firstly, I was asked by a client to massage her brother, who is in long-term care in a hospital, and it was something the family wanted to do for him. After dealing with a weeks worth of bureaucracy from the hospital, and providing them with a copy of my insurance certificate, they advised me that I’m required to hold 10 million in professional indemnity and 20 million in public liability if I was to do that work at the hospital, which is twice as much as cover as I currently hold (and I hold more than most therapists do, I’m actually a little over insured) . I was frankly shocked, though it is not to be held against the hospital, I think it’s a State Government rule. I advised the client and she was shocked too, and very annoyed they hadn’t mentioned that to her in the first place. We agreed that it would be unlikely that she’d find anyone with that level of cover, though I’ve made a few inquiries around on her behalf.

Basically though, it means that this man will not be able to benefit from massage because of the cultures propensity for suing at the drop of a hat, which while not as bad as the US is still prevalent. And by extension, neither will many other people.

Secondly, this week an elderly man murdered his wife and two grandchildren, and nearly killed his daughter with an axe, in NSW. Almost on the same day, I saw a story on the news about a man in Texas who shot two men to death, they were breaking into a neighbours property. By law, he was legally in his rights to do so.

So often, things that seem legally right do not seem morally right, though I’m sure that plenty of people would disagree with me. Life seems cheap all too often in all the ways that count, then things that could improve quality of life are suddenly out of reach.

What a world we live in.

Today I was at the market again, while the others continued with their course. For a strange coincidence though, I decided today to go and have a look at a bead shop that is on Rundle St, it was a bit slow this afternoon and the notion popped into my head.

While in the store, I noticed a few nice things..’Oh, that’s nice, hmm so is that, OK better get back to the stall’. It was at this point that I decided I should have a quick squizz in the window. And there it was. A torus shaped pendent, made of brown jade, with two big cats (I have decided they are jaguars lol) carved into it. I heard my guides voice saying ‘A gift for you’ and knew that I should ask Claudio and Sa to dedicate it as a Pi stone for me before they go. Of course, I had to BUY my ‘gift’. My guide explained though that though sometimes such ‘gifts’ are actually given for free, usually it is the organisation of the right item being available at the right time that is the ‘gift’. It is up to the recipient to recognise this. He also advised that I should keep and use this pendent as a meditation device (holding it in the hand) and that I should use it to ‘honour’. I’m not sure what exactly it is I’m supposed to be honouring though.

So, yesterday and today I was undertaking the first four rites of the nine Munay Ki rites.

It was held at a place called ‘Meg’s Place’ in Stirling, this seems to be a place that is available for people giving New Age or similarly themed workshops. The room was lavishly decorated with pictures, mandala’s, little glass angels (for sale), and there was a large table with pamphlets, crystals etc etc. It was heated by an elegantly vase shaped pot-belly stove and had a small kitchen and bathroom attached. In the centre the people running it (Claudio and Sa) had set up a little alter with candles and quartz crystals. Unfortunately the chairs were of the garden variety with cushions, and I think most peoples backs were a little sore after a while.

Before I get too far into talking about what we were doing, I’d like to describe some of the tools they used. They used these gorgeous tools for smudging. Two of them had were basically the whole wings from spotted owls (road kill, presumably), with fur beneath and then fixed to antler. These had a very impressive movement of air. There were also a couple of others with wedge tailed eagle, raven and owl feathers, one fixed to antler and one with woven beads on the  quill of the eagle feather in red and yellow, with dangling beaded tassels. There was also a ‘drone flute’ which I’d never seen one of before, and ’singing drums’. I particularly enjoyed being ’smudged’ by the drums, they weren’t loud but held a pleasing resonance. Apparently there’s a chap in Reynella who makes these and holds workshops. Looking at their products it’s evident that is where Sa and Claudio got their equipment. I’m now eying off the drum workshops. It’s a pity the kids aren’t older ‘cos I bet it would be fun. Here is their site. http://www.nativeamericandrums.com.au/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

So, we got smudged on arrival each day, both by sage and by drums. Then the six spirits were called to open ‘medicine space’ and a talking stick was handed around so we could do some initial sharing. I was amazed because the talking stick had actual beaver fur on it, and was somewhat distracted for a time by wondering where and how beaver fur was obtained in Australia. During the ‘talking stick’ times I got heartily tired of hearing the words ‘beautiful’, ’sacred’ and ‘gratitude’ but hey, I’m sure they meant it and it was appreciated.

So, Friday involved receiving the Healers Rite, calling upon the energy of Jaguar, Eagle and Quetzalcoatl into the hara, heart and third eye chakras, and then blowing the spirits into the hands. This was a bit of a surprise for me, I was quite startled when Claudio did that. We then practiced the rite twice upon each other (which was done with the other rites too).

For the next rite, the Bands of Power we needed a Pi Stone. This is a donut shaped stone (about pendent size) and to avoid any arguments about who got what stone they were all put into a baggie and passed around for us to put our hands in and pick one. I picked a lapis one. The stones, which have been blessed with the Spirit keepers rite, were then used to put the five bands around the body.

On the second day (today) we did the Harmony rite, which puts the energy of the four animal archetypes and then the three angelic like beings into the seven chakras. This was done lying down. Sa did this initiation on me and the first time she did it, it felt like a hand was pressing on me where she was working, but she wasn’t actually touching me. I peeked to make sure lol. When she reached the solar plexus chakra my stomach started hurting and actually kept it up for about 15-20 minutes afterwards, which wasn’t fabulous.  I didn’t feel much on the other chakras.  Later, when working with one of the other students who was doing the rite to me, it felt to me like some sort of wheeled object was moving slowly from my base chakra to roughly below my heart chakra, slowly moving up and then moving down again. It was very weird. This repeated itself 3 or 4 times and then subsided. When discussing this with the other student afterwards, we decided it was likely the beginning of the Kundalini energy movement, which is just called ’serpent energy’ in the Laika terminology. Additionally, when she was working at my sixth chakra it felt as if she was pressing hard on my forehead, and my teeth actually started to ache!

The final rite that I undertook was the Seers rite, which involves creating two bands of light to link the third eye chakra, the visual cortex area at the back of the brain, and the heart chakra. It is supposed to help you to see with the eyes of the heart, and to build the ‘Witness’ sense (what I like to call ‘It’s Not My Movie’. This rite used the Pi stone again.

One thing that was NOT mentioned in Alberto’s books, and is apparently quite important for the continued development of these rites is called the ‘fire ceremony’. Basically, it involves using a candle or similar, and re-doing the rites on yourself, cupping energy from above the candle and ‘feeding’ the ’spirit seeds’ that are implanted during the rites. We were told it would be likely that it would take a few weeks of regular fire ceremonies to fully develop these initiations. It is my personal idea that it might be possible to use a moxa stick as well, as it sounds very very similar to the use of moxa to put chi into an acupressure point.

A few final notes. We did the chakra clearing exercise sitting in a chair with no problems. Some people got quite confused about how to go clockwise and counter-clockwise during this. I sat there listening to the confusion growing, then gave my own suggestion, which was to imagine that the left shoulder was one o’clock (1 looks like l for left) and then the left hip became 4 o’clock, the right hip 8 o’clock etc. Sa exclaimed ‘Ah, logic!’ and liked the suggestion very much.

The other things were that it is important to open and close personal medicine space, and to express gratitude when working. The coordinators are planning on passing around everyones email addresses, and hopefully I can get one of the others to give me the rest of the initiations at a later time. I think that by at least doing the foundation rites, I have a reasonable grasp of what is involved, at least enough to continue to an extent on my own.

Like the good little trainee that I am, I went to the library on Tuesday and picked up a couple of books about dreams, picking the titles that I’d look at more or less randomly, in that way that seems to work best for such things. One of the books that I borrowed ‘Understanding Dreams’ by Keith Hearne & David Melbourne, is about how sleep and dreams actually work.

While flicking through this book, I noticed a section on Stage 1 sleep, the ‘nodding off’ stage. It represents the onset of sleep, and it is possible that during this stage, very vivid images…as opposed to dreams…can appear. This is called hypnogogic imagery. I got one of those little ‘dings’ in my head while reading this, as I realised that I am most probably in this Stage 1 of sleep when I converse with my spirit guide. I asked him about it last night, and he said that most meditation, visions, trance states etc have to do with this altered state of consciousness. I am going to try to do some more reading on this subject, find some research if possible and I’d like to see if the brain waves while a person is meditating, journeying etc fit the profile for the Stage 1 sleep pattern. My guide also said that when people are on the borderland between waking and sleeping, their defenses are lowered and they are more open to their own intuition and insights, as well as spiritual guidance.

Sometimes I think I have so many things I’d like to find out about that I wish it could be a full time job. Either way, I’ve got the books for a few weeks and will see if I can write something up about it at greater length.

An update on the last few days.

I had an interesting dream on Thursday, recorded below:

I was in a dormitory in a forest with some other people. There was a low, long window on one side of the building. I heard a sound of wings, and four eagles landed at the window (which was open) and peered in. One of the other people went over to the eagles and one of them snapped at him. Then they sat there, peeping and looking around. I said to the others ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be an eagle?’ and we discussed that for a couple of minutes. Then one of the eagles said, in a male voice, ‘But you can be. Come over here’. I went over to the eagles and they did not snap at me. Looking at them, I could tell they were a mother and father, daughter and brother. I said as much to the ‘brother’ eagle and he laughed and agreed.

Before I could talk more with them, a dogs head lunged through the window and snapped at my ear. Drawing back, I saw that the dog had two heads, and was a mottled white dog. One head was male, one female. The dog was clearly malevolent.

Then I was in the forest, walking after the afters. A young man came running up to me, and said ‘Do you know me?’ I said no, and he said ‘I was that eagle you were talking to earlier. As you can turn into an eagle, so can we turn into humans.’ We chatted a bit, then for some reason we started folk dancing, just the two of us. We did so for a few minutes, before the two-headed dog came after us again. He/she stood between us, snarling, then herded me back towards the other people. The young man ranged ahead of me, unthreatened by the dog and went over to the others.

I got woken up by Owen at this point.

Icarus later PM’d me and suggested that I might be almost ready to embrace conscious shapechanging, but not quite so the dog (a guardian figure) chased me back.

Perhaps I’ll get to find out a little more this coming weekend, I’ve paid for the foundational Munay Ki work, though I haven’t heard back to be sure they’ve got my payment. I’ll give the people a call tomorrow night if I haven’t heard from them before then. The work I’ll be covering is:

RITE 1 – HEALERS RITE
The Healers Rite is an energetic transmission that activates a deep undercurrent of healing energy that gives us the ability to heal ourselves and others.

RITE 2 – BANDS OF POWER RITE
The Bands of Power Rite installs essential protection in the luminous energy field. The protections consist of 5 luminous belts (earth, water, fire, air and light) woven into the fabric of your own energy field. These energies either break down any negative energies coming towards us and then uses that energy to serve us instead of harming us or they deflect the negative energies away from us They are continuously activated.

RITE 3 – HARMONY RITE
The four organizing principles of creation are planted as seeds into the four lower chakras and then the three archangels, luminous guardian beings into the three higher chakras. These seeds will serve to break down the psychic sludge and heavy energies, residues of traumas that have collected within your chakras from this lifetime and also from past lifetimes.

RITE 4 – SEERS RITE
Filaments of light are extended between the visual cortex in the back of the brain and the third eye and heart chakras. This Rite awakens the ability to see the invisible world (auras/energy). The seers rite enables us to be the Witness in our lives. The Seer is not identified with the seen.

I am quite looking forward to this, though I won’t be very available for a few days due to this.

Also, on the week just gone, we had both Owens 4th birthday (a quiet family party on the public holiday Monday) and my 10th wedding anniversary. We left the kids with the grandparents on Saturday night and had Thai for tea, then went to see a movie (Prince Caspian, it was OK).

Finally, last night I was doing some meditation on the dreams I’ve had recently. I have been trying to converse with my guide about these and the mandala, but he has been very quiet of late. Last night, finally, he was more inclined to talk, but he wasn’t talking about what I wanted to talk about (isn’t that the way?). He advised me that I should do more work on dream interpretation, saying that it is a skill I need to be able to apply for others as well as myself,and suggested I try the library for texts, specifically Jungian ones. He also said that it is my role to become a ’seer’ (his word not mine). I was like ‘What!!! Another darn thing to learn! It’s got nothing to do with what I’m doing right now!’ He also said something about ‘dream walking’, I’m not too sure what this is meant to be, I’ll have to have a google on it.

I guess this is another stage on my ‘training’.

I received an email from the people giving the workshop late last night. They are starting their traveling to Adelaide today, so I caught them just in time (a good sign, I think). They are doing all 9 initiations over the four days of the workshop, and I cannot commit to that sort of timeframe, but you can do just the first four initiations over the Friday and Saturday, for a cost of $400 which I might be able to manage. I’m feeling a little excited right now and need to settle and meditate on this (and work out if I can afford and arrange the time for this).

After reading Alberto Villondo’s books, such as ‘Shaman, Healer, Sage’ I’ve been wanting to do the shamanistic initiations offered by his Four Winds society, but was at a loss as to how to afford the necessary trips to the US to do so (and deal with small children etc). However, in the recent edition of ‘Inner Self’, a free local spirituality magazine there is a course being run in late June by some Perth people who have done the training and are offering the initiations in Australia. It is very unlikely I’ll be able to afford the course at this short notice, but I have emailed them to ask at least how much it is, and also to get some more information on what is necessary for organising the courses (as they’ll do them for 6 or more people).

Their link is http://www.sacredradiance.net/default.html

Well, I’m pleased to report that the rebuild of the site hasn’t caused too many drama’s as yet, so I had time after all this week to read the book I ordered from Amazon several weeks ago ‘The Humanure Handbook’. I was very interested in the findings and recommendations in this book and am planning on writing a paper for the Jedi community on this topic in the near future, as part of my greater ‘offline community’ project.

With regards to physical training, I’ve been doing quite a lot of massage 4 days a week now and have not been doing as much exercise bike riding, which has dropped to 20 minutes twice a week, on the days I am not doing massage or Tai Chi. I have been finding that I have just been too tired in the evenings after massaging all day. I am still doing a reasonable amount of walking every week.

Speaking of massage, I had an interesting conversation with an elderly chap yesterday while working the market. He was a massage therapist before retiring and is a Reiki Master, and was telling me some stories of how clients found that they got a deal more out of some therapists massage treatments after the therapist had done their Reiki training, and were much happier clients. I have found the same thing from time to time, I’ve only done Reiki 1 but have also done Qi Gong and cultivate my chi through Tai Chi and meditation. With some clients, especially those who are really run down and that I am feeling especially compassionate towards, I can feel energy passing through me and into the client and they have really been recharged, even from a short 10 minute neck and shoulders massage. The most recent example was a female doctor who’d just come off a 13 hour shift at the hospital across the road, and hadn’t had much sleep for the last few days. Haggard was the kindest description that could be made for her. I could ‘feel’ her exhaustion and gave her a deep but slow and nurturing neck and shoulders massage, and could really feel the ol energy kicking in. Ten minutes later she looked so much better it was hard to believe. She felt it too, and was really thrilled. At best, I’ve gotten myself a regular client (always nice) and even better, I bet she slept well when she went home and worked better at the hospital too.

With the fictional Jedi universe, and some of the discussions we have about how a Jedi should serve, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the work a Jedi does must be on a grand and visible scale. The smallest and most humble actions, however, hold the potential to be as profound as any other action.

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I’ve been meditating on a couple of subjects this week. The first is on my dreams. I’ve been having a lot of dreams about ‘The Doctor’ from Doctor Who of late, and have been wondering why this might be, as while I enjoy the show it’s not especially profound or that much different from some of the other shows I watch (e.g. Supernatural). This morning, however, it came to me that the Doctor is a person who is dedicated to saving lives and civilisations, to the point of risking his own life. I think that in some ways the character is a bit TOO ready to sacrifice himself for others. He also almost always can navigate confidently through the vicissitudes of his life, and inspires others to trust and help him. He uses his wits and a bit of luck (and occasionally psychic skills) to get himself, his friends and others out of jams, and violence is his last resort, but when he chooses this path, he has a certain ruthlessness to him. In some ways, I think I identify with the character, or would like to be more like him.

Secondly, the character of the Doctor is someone that I could happily follow and trust that he has the best interests of all in mind, even if it comes to the sacrifice of the individual. When I was thinking about this, it occured to me that while I often seem to end up in a leadership role, its not because I crave the leadership role. Its more because I look around and see few who do what needs to be done and because it needs doing I’ll step up. The Doctor, however, represents the sort of person I could happily follow and lend my support to, because his actions parallel the sort of actions I think need doing, and he has the strength and integrity to inspire. So, to cut a long and rambling discourse short, there may be a part of me that wishes to have someone to follow, to assume the burdens and responsibilities of leadership. Unfortunately, much as I like and admire aspects of my fellow Jedi that I have met, I don’t really know anyone deeply enough to be inspired in this way by them.

Today was a really quiet day at the market, it was a bit rainy and there were very few people around in the late afternoon. One of the regular stallholders is called Margie, and she does channeled mandalas. I’ve been eying off her work for the last several months, and have bought a few of her cards and things for people for birthdays etc. Today, since it was so quiet, I left the stall in Karina’s charge and went over to see Margie.

What Margie does is connect with some aspect of the person she’s doing a mandala for, I think it’s the Higher Self. The first thing that came through for me was the number 8. So the mandala she made for me has eight points. It looks like three eight pointed flowers each inside the other. The first is medium blue, and is the inner or core aspects. The second is green, and the last one is a soft pink. Outside of this is a border with olive green and gold, and then the gold that she was putting started escaping outside the circle that defined the mandala until it looked like the three flowers were in a burst of gold ziggy shapes. She then did some highlighting and prettying up with glitter and suchlike. She had a few words to offer about the mandala, but did say that the lines going outside the circle are pretty unusual for her work (I haven’t seen any like that when I’ve wandered past) and that it’s up to me to meditate on the mandala to determine what the meaning for myself is in it. The few words she said was that blue was a colour of communication, green of healing and nurturing, and the pink of compassion and love. She couldn’t remember what the olive green stands for and the gold is for spiritual development and enlightenment.

So, I’ll have to have a meditation about my mandala, and I hope that it might give me some actual answers. One thing that drives me a bit nuts sometimes is the nebulousness of my insights and meditations and dreams. I like concrete answers! A ‘you should do such and such to move to such and such’ would be greatly appreciated.

I’ll probably post a pic of the mandala at some later stage.

Oh man, what a couple of days. I’m going to summarise things in order to help me to get a clearer perspective on what I am going to do.

Saturday morning I logged on early to put my dream into my dream journal, only to find that the Jedi Academy site had been deleted by our host, Bluehost. As the account holder, I did not and still have not received any actual notification as to why this was done, the site was paid up for until September. When asking helpdesk, one person said fraud (!!???) and another that it had something to do with a cron job taking too much CPU, though I’ve turned off all of the automatic running cron jobs and already run the backups section-by-section manually to help avoid this. At present, I’ve got a ticket logged to try to get the site restored from tape and then to find out what the hell happened. Either way, I would never recommend Bluehost to anyone after this fiasco, and we’ve already decided to move the site and have setup a new URL and hosting solution.

The cruelly ironic thing is that only a few days ago I managed to win some space clear of the Academy to work on other issues that interest me. Now I’m being dragged back into a site rebuild and there is a deep undercurrent of anger and resentment in me about this. I’m sure there is a ‘test’ in here somewhere, but I am not sure what it is. I cannot abandon Jax and the others right now to deal with a stuffed up site (not that anyone else is helping), yet such activities take up such incredible amounts of time that I should be using for other things, including what I actually want to be doing.

Mixed up with this are personal issues. My husband spent Saturday down at the mechanic’s shop tinkering with his car (and I mean all day) and then Sunday, when I had to work at the market, I got home at 5pm after leaving at 7:30am to find the house a mess, no dishes done etc and there wasn’t even any clean pots to cook dinner in. So I had to do the dishes, cook tea, tidy up, then do my book-keeping and then checked the google caches for Academy stuff while he impatiently waited for me so we could watch Dr Who. I didn’t display any anger signs, but I did let him know that I was severely unimpressed. His response ‘This is the first time I’ve sat down all day’. What the heck was he doing all day? I spent Saturday doing housework, food shopping then about 6 hours sewing a tablecloth cover for the market.

Additionally, his work wants to send him to Minneapolis for 3 or 4 weeks, starting mid-June but this is not yet confirmed and it is now early June. This leaves me scrabbling for childcare for the up-coming school holidays, plus faced with all school pickups/dropoffs at a time when I’ve commited to do some extra work for Henderson’s because other people are on holiday then. Not to mention Owens 4th birthday and our 10th wedding anniversary to arrange.

In some ways, I was looking forward to his going for a while though as my guide suggested that we do some more concentrated work then, when I will have several evenings when I know that I’m not going to be disturbed. I might be able to do that still, dunno. I have the feeling that I’m going to have to schedule my time very tightly over the next 6 weeks or so, and I’m not happy about that either.