The Shaman

My daughter has asked me repeatedly about the negative energy we felt on the Big Island of Hawaii. What was it? 

Some might have been coming from us; we acknowledged that,  for we felt traumatized by the move, but there was more.

We knew something uncomfortable was coming from the Island that we could not explain. 

We called it negative energy.

I even tried meditating in our back five acres one day to see if I could get some understanding. You meditate with your eyes closed right? So I sat down, and a minute later, I said, “Nope,” and left. That was not the place to do it.

Last night while reading Steven Pressfield’s book Turning Pro, I got a hit, something that related to our Island experience.

Pressfield had a chance to travel to Africa. One of his stops was at a Masai camp so far from civilization that they had to fly there.

When they got to the camp, a great commotion was happening. Their guides explained to Pressfield that the Shaman had told the people that the site they had just chosen was “unwholesome” and that they had to move.

The camp consisted of about five hundred people, young, old, children, plus all their livestock, so moving was no small feat.

The moving procession had to be led by the white cows, and they were scattered about, so the warriors set out to round them up. The women had to pack up all the household belongings. All this required sweat and sacrifice.

Yet, no one complained.

When the whole camp was packed, the warriors, those tall, slim morans, were jumping up and down and singing their ritual song. The young maidens sang the chorus.

Finally they moved.

About two hundred yards up the hill.

Pressfield began to wonder what invisible evil could be warded off by moving the camp. Did this make sense? And he admitted that he felt better after the move. Would something had befallen the tribe had they stayed? Would a young bride have miscarried?

These people had a brilliant culture, their dress, their rituals, their social organization. The young men, strong and beautiful could stand up to lions single handed, with only a spear.

 Pressfield concluded that they must be doing something right.

He wished he had his own Shaman. He said he would have breakfast with him every day and do what he said.

Or better yet, he wished he was a Shaman.

I wished, as did Pressfield that I had a personal Shaman to guide me, but I know that one of the lessons of life is to trust and follow your own intuition, your own guidance system.

And that perhaps we do have a Shaman. It lives inside of us and speaks in a small voice.

What is Your True Calling?

When my daughter and I were traveling across country, we stopped at a little restaurant in New Mexico where the waitress loved us up so much we were practically throwing tips at her.

While I remember that waitress, and I know we tipped her abundantly, I don’t remember the food. (Unlike the Easter dinner we had at the Anasazi Restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico where we had the best dinner of our lives so far. There Content was King.)

#Marie Foleo, whose B-school course I am taking, admonishes her students not to offer discounts or place their items on sale. Customers who are always looking for the lowest prices, and the best deals, will abandon you when times get tough. They will go to someone with a lower price.  However, she says, give away a lot of stuff, information, or service/love, such as our waitress in New Mexico gave to us. We remember her to this day, and that was over 10 years ago.

You will be contributing.

Yes, we want/need money to live on, but above that, we want to make a difference.

You might have noticed that the sites you are apt to sign up for have already given you tons of good advice or information.

I think back to Tony Robbins—everybody knows him, right? I have gone to events that were not his; he was simply one of the speakers, yet he gives so much of himself on stage that you are apt to go into overload. The first time I heard him speak live was in Portland Oregon over twenty years ago. I was so jazzed when I came out of that auditorium that I didn’t feel the ground beneath my feet.

Online Tony’s abundance of free information is there for the taking. When I saw the free Netflix documentary,  #“I am Not Your Guru,” I was sold.

After more than twenty years of knowing who he was, and being awed by his knowledge, and ability to move people, I plunked down my money and bought a plane ticket—and got lost.

But not permanently lost.

What kept me from his events for so long?

Fear.

I was afraid of getting busted. I was afraid of walking on fire. It was too expensive, all those, but it was my life on the line, as is yours.

Sometimes you just have to grab your own running shoes and get going.

Anyone attempting to expand their horizons, whether it be a new artistic endeavor, a new business, or changing one’s life pattern, runs into fear.

 Steven Pressfield, in his book, The War of Art, calls it “Resistance.”

Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. It doesn’t want us to do that. Instead of doing the work we were born to do, we procrastinate, we watch television, we play with our cell phone, have a new love affair, drink too much, take drugs, or tell ourselves we couldn’t do it anyway, who are we? You know all those things that keep us from our true calling.

Why do we sharpen so many pencils (figuratively speaking) before sitting down to the keyboard, or the design table?