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Spring and the Element of Fire
Ceremonial and Ritual Guidance from the Mayan Medicine Wheel
Spring. Our time of renewal and rebirth when all of life infuses us with a knowing that it is as simple as living this day fully. In the Mayan Medicine Wheel is the element of Fire, it represents the first phase of our lives in early childhood and the Red Road of embodied service and love in action. This season, we invite you to carry the Fire within and without with awareness, appreciation and intentions for balance. Light candles, burn smudge to purify (sage, cedar, copal, other dried herbs whose smoke brings spiritual cleansing), smoke your personal pipe if you have one, and make a fire to tend to as a living prayer in whatever way you can. Feel the gifts of Father Sun, the warmth on your skin and Earth itself. Give thanks for the fire of your hearth as you cook and nourish yourself, take none of it for granted. Feel the warmth of Life in your body, in your blood and the beating of your heart. Our culture has been deeply out of balance with the element of fire, the raging wildfires so many live in fear of or what we experience when things are out of order. When we connect with it, feed it our offerings of compassionate words and prayers for wellness, we tend to the places we may ignite the wildfires within us. We invite you to create a safe space to witness the fire, talk with it, observe it. Like all the elements, it can be a sacred helper, and can also devastate and destroy. We can lose the “spark” of life and become depressed, depleted. How do we feed our inner fires? Where are our fires out of control and end up burning ourselves or others? Emerge again with all that has been rooted through the winter, stretch and grow in the warmth of spring’s returning fire. Give thanks for Grandfather Fire, the Eastern Gate and the Red People of this Earth.
Turn the soil of your heart and mind as you work the warming Earth with steps of hope, promising each other’s bodies new growth and the nourishment of the elements it takes to flower this year. Cycle through the Medicine Wheel sowing seeds of last year’s harvest, giving and receiving in the infinite cycle of gratitude for all that nature provides up.
Walking through this world while letting the light in your eyes say thank you in every language.
May you bundle threads of wisdom and all you love into your center, may you generously live from that place. And so it is.
Spring Blessings from Earth Peoples United
Wake to be with the sky as it changes from dark to light, opening to feel the gifts of Father Sun. The Heart of Heaven, the Heart of Earth, Your Heart in between. Feeling the gifts of the warmth on your skin, like the Earth herself in that infinite promise of sacred reciprocity. Giving thanks for the fires of your thoughts, your home and family, taking none of it for granted. Stretch each morning to feel the warmth of life in your body, only building with every repetition of gratitude you pray to with the beating of your own heart. Many blessing to you from the Heart of Earth Peoples United, may these offerings enrich your being this season.
Wisdom Share from Tat Erick Gonzalez
May this timeless traditional teaching be a blessing in your life.
In the ceremonial ways and spiritual trainings, many things known and unknown to us will be revealed. These are aimed to help us go through our healing and our integration of the sacred wisdom, to maintain our grace, love, and gratitude. The ceremonial journey opens the possibility to receive the strength, the endurance, and the perseverance to create a more harmonious, peaceful, and abundant life.
We look forward in each day to greet the Great Mystery that is being expressed at each moment and all around us. Through these experiences we are being groomed to become the “Singing Rainbows”. We strive to become spiritual beings again – remembering that we are having a physical experience through our journey within the Mother Earth.
Due to the experiences within the web of life, it brings us to relationships, and how we relate within those creates our reality. In this journey, we can experience both the gifts and the challenges of the duality of creation: life and death, breath in and breath out, etc…
When we create an intention to start the ceremony and get closer to spirit, by natural law a vacuum is created, and the challenge and the negativity is also awakened, both from within us and around us. As these things come up, the quality and the spiritual maturity within us is defined by our actions and our relationship to our surrounding world. These actions can come as a gift and a teaching, or as a trauma and a negative experience.
Our profound spiritual experiences are molding, shaping, and renewing us. These experiences translate and prepare us to be aware of our sacred placement within the web of life. Through having witnessed for ourselves the incredible beauty and divinity of the spirit, we can contemplate our participation with life and All our Relations.
We search for ourselves so we can understand who we are, what we are doing here, and what our sacred purpose is in this human experience. In this great journey we have found many things – one being each other. We share our love, we support and help one another, and we look forward to seeing us reach our full potential and celebrate it. The incredible joy that we can manifest with our beingness can inspire others to experience spiritual love and spiritual healing in their own lives.
To protect ourselves, the altar and the medicine, our spiritual recommendations are:
Flow and adapt like the water.
Burn it away in the fire.
Give it to the earth and ground yourself. Breathe and pray.
~Strive to be attentive, deliberate, and precise in each moment of your daily life.
~Stay in the prayer and focused on your healing, no matter what happens in your interactions with others.
~Practice patience and acceptance with everything within and around you. It is what it is- do not have any expectations!
~Give gratitude for where you find yourself in each moment.
~Recognize that Spirit is giving you exactly what is needed for you alone, and that each one of us in on a unique path.
~Take responsibility for your own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Just because a feeling comes up doesn’t mean you have to act on it.
~Be willing to go beyond your limits so that new ways of being can be birthed.
~Be generous in all that you do and trust that the generosity will be returned to you.
~Reflect on your actions and the impact they have on others. If you made a mistake, take whatever action you can to correct it, and then learn from what happened. It is through our mistakes that we often receive the deepest teachings.
~Be willing to look at yourself through the obsidian mirror so that it can reflect back to you with complete honesty.
~Remember that we have the choice and free will to use each moment to make a change for the better.
~Allow others to have their freedom of expression as long as it is not hurting anyone else.
~Protect what is sacred and be willing to defend it.
~Accept what is given with humility and gratitude.
~Give from the heart with no expectations.
~Live every day as a ceremony and find the sacred in every thing you do, no matter how mundane it may appear.
~Make things as beautiful as possible.
~Keep things flowing and pay attention to the places where we allow things to stagnate.
~Be flexible but don’t compromise the sacred space and work within the structure that holds things together.
~Do what it takes to hold the staff of your being straight and strong so that it does not burden another with having to hold your staff as well as their own.
~Pray and rejoice.
~Walk gentle and respectful so we can see the beauty and be at peace with all life.
~Welcome the spiritual gifts and share them with love so that we can become full blossoms and manifest our full potentials.
~Have the dedication and commitment to make a difference in our daily lives.
~Make the commitment to have Openness, Honesty, Respect, and Honoring with All Our Relations, knowing that our humanity exists.
~Create the safe containers for the healing of our families and our peoples. This container can be the Council of the many that is able to bring accountability towards the “one” so that the whole can flourish.
~Keep the confidentiality of our experiences in a sacred and respectful way. Always be attentive to the way we share our ceremonial experiences and to whom and at what time and the purpose is being shared.
~Our ceremonial gifting is also very delicate and fragile, so we must hold it with much care and awareness.
~Keep the communication and the dialogue open to create understanding, so that we can make better decisions for the relationships that we are sharing.
~If the fight or flight feelings come up, STOP. Move on, for you will not accomplish much. You do not need to justify or defend yourself. You do not need to convince another… This is especially necessary to maintain your dignity. If your ceremonial actions cannot stand on their own, then there is nothing you can say to convince another otherwise, so do not engage.
The ceremonial teachings are to help you surrender to the Spirit (it doesn’t mean you give up anything in your life).
~ Mooji
Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.
Honoring FIRE
As your ally, as your witness, as your guide.
T
Take time to work with your breath as you gaze upon the flames of a fire, as a fire outside or as a candle or smoke from a smudge in a vessel upon your mesa. Offering your breath and words of spiritual intention each day as food for that fire.. Noticing the effect that is created in your body and mind as you give what is purely you in the form of your breath as the toj or sacred gift in reciprocity for the medicine of fire in your life. Embracing this simple yet profound ritual to guide and empower your path at this time.Use the awareness of your breath to meditate on being open to receiving help to see yourself and meet what you see with good actions. Gazing on the flame or smoke, honoring the fires of inspiration within you. Your awareness of whatever may be your hook or trap that diverts you from your inspirations may come up, allow it without judgment, Let it be a gift to receive the luminous transformative light of fire. If/when this should happen just give thanks. Aloud with that breath, really hearing the humility it takes to embrace each curve of our growth. Thank that which trips you in life into this space where you can claim your wholeness and dare to embrace all of you.. Breathe in, breath out.
Learn from the fire as we journey from the midpoint to the solstice and take the opportunity this season to focus on your emotions and thoughts with this simple ritual, claiming the balance between any extremes within you in order to build your power to navigate gracefully through any feeling, fear, excitement or otherwise. Breathe and meditate, contemplating all that may be happening in your life without judgement, but true seeing instead. And again using the breath to center yourself, make the prayers for your life and the world you envision. This time of year is a good time plan, prepare, and request visions for the year ahead. Dream through the fire and ask what you are ready to transform your yourself into..
When you are complete, give thanks, take care of the fireplace used and honor all the elementals for their gifts in your life.
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Daily Rituals
Use these simple ways to connect with the fire element this season to usher in your potential for profound growth within. We hope this guidance cans serve you as tools for healing, visioning and integration of your greater ceremonial lessons from the year we are emerging from this spring.
In all ways you can, with some grand intention or within the effortless little moments in between the motions of your daily life, give yourself the gift of time in child-like wonder this Spring. Just being. Being in nature and feeling the new growth around you, getting face level with a flower or drinking the rain with your mouth open to the sky before splashing in a puddle. Make every moment you take in wonder a precious moment of life as ceremony. Make art or re-create a favorite childhood ritual if yours, something encoded with your story and the ones who have been part of it. Really allow yourself to embrace the aspect of Spring in the Mayan Medicine Wheel that represents our early childhood and be thankful for the support from the cosmos to connect with your inner child and the children around you.In ceremony we often reach for inner-child healing, we search for it or try to command it. We even suffer from the absence of the playfulness we set down somewhere in time and space without ever knowing we yurn to connect again. Yet sometimes it is as easy as just embracing your inner-child through your sense for you to return to the wonder that came with that playful spirit. If there are wounds there, they will be nourished without needing to focus on them and show up for ourselves as the adults we are now, to embrace and take of the inner child.. with playfulness and patience.
This season connect with new growth, and make offerings of beauty through the cosmic fire encoded in the flowers.
In their intoxicating infinite expressions the flowers hold the reflections of our purest potential as part of creation. They can teach us about our own flourishing through their cycles and nature, in their medicine and aroma. All flowers have their own vibrational frequency and specialization so to speak, while all being transmitters of the endless dance of creation that is Rucux Ka and Rucux Eleu’s sacred symbiosis of union and being on earth. They symbolize life and fertility — the fire of father sky and the matter of mother earth in the creative cycles that it takes to bloom. They are great teachers and sacred central elements of our ceremonies we hold as Earth People, as altars, mandalas, offerings of dried petals and flower essence waters that we use to bless and purify with.
May these ways to work with flowers and fire this season bring you closer to the fire of your own blossoming, and may we all bless and pollinate each other along the way!
Make it stand out.
I
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INTRODUCE YOUR BRAND
Sun and Earth
The flowers and all the gifts we have been given.
This spring connect with the flowers as the pure expression of the sacred mother and father life giving creation energy working through our lives. Recognizing that flowers we use in the creation of altars and flower waters are encoded with the cosmic fire received by the earth, to bless and heal us, and to call us into our own blossoming so that we may share from that place. Work with these plant allies in your homes and upon your own altars, and when you’re ready — share your light!
Flower altars can be created in a pool of fresh waters as the vessel to anchor, celebrate and honor the plants you will be working with. Always begin with preparing yourself and your space, making offerings of smoke and words to ground the space to make medicine. Ask permission, be open to spiritual instruction and start your process only when you are sure you can complete it. Place your altar where you will be able to connect to it he most, where visitors to your home can receive from it’s beauty and honor the flowers by carrying their color and light with them through their appreciation.
Set your smudge and a candle close by to continue to work with it as you wish through your process. Begin by placing your vessel with intention, note that it should not be moved once created. With a prayer of appreciation for life, partially fill an earthen pot or any beautiful water tight vessel of your choice with spring waters. As you work make your prayers of intention to invite the blessing of the flowers into your live, giving thanks and offering the gift of this space, this home within your home to honor the flowers in their fullest flowering expression. A sacred reflective action you can give to yourself in this process. As you place each flower and give it a home, receive the space in yourself to flower. Allow the process to spiritually guide you and reveal as flowers do when they open.
Vibrationally it is best to work with plants you have grown or gathered, that have been grown in the area you live or hold symbolic meaning central to your prayer or place on Mother Earth. With that said, all flowers are perfect and what matters most is for you to be guided by spirit in your process of making this offering of beauty.
Allow yourself to place flowers with intention and commitment, not lifting or moving things about once set to avoid drowning them or the gifts in your life with the lack of stillness or care. This timeless ritual of creating flower and water altars honors the pure essence of the love between the sky and earth and ourselves as part of it. It becomes our witness and anchor reminding us to tend to the garden of our hearts, inviting us to pause in appreciation of others in their own process.
You can work with symmetry and balance, diversity and color. Appreciating the fleeting moment of time that a flower is with us and all it took to arrive there with those blossoms in the display of their shapes, color and fragrance. With gentleness and care complete
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Journey through the living altar of orchid medicine
Journey through the living altar of orchid medicine
This season Tat Erick invites us to create a living altar of orchids in our home. To learn to be with this flower that in it’s essence holds an ancient encoded memory of another realm.
Orchids have a particular need to not be smothered or burried, to be gracefully attached and upheld by the presence of the standing people, the trees, and the rocks. It has air roots and speaks the poetry of mist in the atmosphere, drinking from the tiniest molecules of water vapor, showing us how to source from the elemental movement of our own environment. It elegantly nests itself to breathe and bloom amongst branches, mysteriously capable of finding home in unlikely and wild places. Orchids can help us find our true nature and the spiritual source of it’s renewing energy. To honor this, ask permission of your plant to live with you, to learn from it and learn to help it thrive in reciprocity.
Orchid plants emit the eastern fire elemental medicine of renewal. And like the eastern place of the sunrise, they accept the darkness and death process that the light emerges from for a spiritual dawn within us to occur. As we tend to this living orchid altar we can imagine the planetary timekeeping of spring and fire, making movements of renewal and acceptance of the death process in our own lives, willing ourselves to bloom through what at times we convince ourselves is impossible.
Imagine yourself like a beam of light coming into your own celestial alignment with the mountain of fire through this precious flower — the alignment of renewal when we plant the seeds of intention for all that we want to crystalize in our lives.
Stretch to contemplate how you/we get here as you gaze upon the orchid plant and transformt hose thoughts into the already embodied state of being in your vision.. Differnt than an intention or plan, this is not the alchemical state of being in your future memory. Remembering how it felt to create the thoughts. Let the orchid guide you on this passage through time to imprint within your senses what it feels like to have already been there, as a sensorial promise to creation and spirit.
Close these practices in gratitude for the orchid and be quietly with yourself in order to feel the feelings this practice generated in your body for as long as possible. Doing this before bed helps, as does sleeping near this altar to invite the orchid essence into your dreaming space. You can offer the crystal or stone as a gift to the plant and collect spring water for it in reciprocity for it’s mystical gifts. She is a goddess.. she is a healer.. and she can be our ally.
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Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.
