Seeds for Change
"One of the most powerful and effective ways of altering and undoing the routines of your life is to introduce some eccentricity, absurdity, and crazy wisdom. . . . Taking a plunge into its absurdity will trip you over yourself in a way that brings about powerful seeds for change while doing so with laughter and surprise rather than tears."
— Everyday Soul
Mistakes as Teachers
"Learn to respect unexpected mistakes that take place in your conduct. Keep a record of them. Study your mistakes as if they were a secret code that can be broken, revealing deeper secrets about your hidden talents and desires.
"This awareness helps our errors become the seeds for more interesting futures than the one we habitually envision. Use your mistakes as teachers that point to new ways of evolving your participation in the theater of life."
— Everyday Soul
Experiencing the Divine
"A palpable experience of the divine does more than bring faith. It awakens an inner light that shows us how to move forward with a profound acceptance, deep knowing, and attuned sensitivity to the sacred essence pervading all of life. The center of the spiritual universe has already opened its heart to accept each of us. It is we who must say yes to the opening, and fall into the beauty and grace that await."
— Everyday Soul
Jump Start Energy
"You don't have to be struck by lightning to get the energy going. Anything that arouses your body to enter an excited energetic state can be used to jump-start the flow of this current. Listening to soulful music, remembering a powerful spiritual feeling, or praying for spirit to move you are several of the ways others use to get the energy moving."
— Everyday Soul
The Kingdom of Light
"There has never been anything for you to acquire, know, or conquer in order to enter the kingdom of light. All that is required is your trust in life and the fullest awareness that you are meant to be illumined by all that has blessed every enlightened being throughout the whole of time. Open your eyes and behold your awakening."
— Everyday Soul
Stop Being So Serious
"Play with the everyday hells so as to stretch yourself into heaven. . . . Stop being so serious about God. Laugh your prayer in order to find the deeper mysteries of God's humor. Cry over the beauty of joy and weep when you are blessed. Become a contrary, a Jesus coyote, a trickster saint, an outstretched cross that juxtaposes endless sacred contraries."
— Shamanic Christianity
Go Wild and Crazy
"It is no surprise that the shamanic expression of Christianity seems absent in our culture. Most if not all shamanic practices have been silenced and often attacked. Religions that have been reduced to vehicles for social and mental control do not want people dancing. In states of ecstasy, people may go 'wild and crazy.' "
— Shamanic Christianity
Dance with Your Inner Wind
"Imagine yourself as one of these dancing Shakers. You are in the spiritual world of the dancing wind. Any spirit or saint you wish to see will come if you simply ask. Jesus and Mary are available, as are all the saints and spirits of Christianized Indians and Indianized Christians. Allow the inner wind from the deepest part of you to dance you toward these holy presences and spiritual guides."
— Shamanic Christianity
Shaking as Medicine
"The taboo against full ecstatic expression of the human body is nothing mysterious or difficult to understand. . . . The oppressed find that shaking is a medicine for the suffering of the human spirit. It sets them free and opens the doors to the kingdoms of bliss.
"The shake comes as a great liberator to people in poverty, powerlessness, and suffering."
— Shaking Medicine
Shake to Free Your Mind, Body, and Soul
"Shaking is a medicine to help prevent the hardening of conceptual categories. It keeps our vessel open for the spirit to flow through. As the Lakota medicine man Fools Crow put it, we need to be a hollow tube for the Great Spirit to pass through. Shaking helps keep us a hollow tube and an empty vessel. And finally, it is not only our bodies that need to be shaken; our words and meanings must also shake. When the spirit moves through us, everything will shake — our understandings, actions, and experiences. Shake in order to set your mind, body, and soul free."
— Shaking Medicine
Change the World through Music
"The way to change the world, the most important revolution that will change hearts and souls, takes place when people start dancing in the streets and call for the lifting of our spirit. If you want to change things, start humming, singing, and whistling. Music in the air will bring down the seriousness that maintains the tyrant's climate of totalitarianism. Laugh to melt away the edge of fear. Sing and the moral enforcers are silenced. The greatest fear of despots and dictators is joy. Bring in the clowns, merry tricksters, and sacred fools, and watch the politicians get laughed out of office."
— Shaking Medicine
No One Is Superior
"Shamans aren't afraid to see that they are no better than any criminal behind bars, and that no one is any better than or superior to any other living creature, whether it is a rat, snake, or insect. Understanding where we really are in the grand scheme of things humbles us in a good way, and helps us give up any arrogant notion that we are capable of winning any battle, internal or external, on our own. In this coming to terms with our true situation, we are leveled."
— Shaking Medicine
Everything You Need
"The greatest mystery of all is that you were born with everything you need in order to receive the greatest blessings and joy life has to offer."
— The Bushman Way of Tracking God
Undo Your Habits
"Every habit is like glue. The more you perform it, the stickier it gets until you finally can't separate yourself from it. You become your habit. That's when you feel motionless and unable to move; you're stuck on a habit — the habitat of the walking dead. To set yourself free, unglue the glue. Undo the habits in any way: mess with them; short-circuit, distract, immobilize their predictability; mobilize their strength; and utilize their potential for change. Rechannel yourself onto an alternative track, then follow the signs to the unknown."
— The Bushman Way of Tracking God
Tasting God
"Once you get a taste for God, everything else is mere tap water. If the world knew that this is the drink that can quench our deepest thirst, we'd have a different way of relating with one another."
— The Bushman Way of Tracking God
