Oct 29, 2013

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Why Are We Afraid to Live Well?

One of the biggest challenges for us to understand in the New World is sovereignty or the supreme power to govern yourself. The sense that we have supreme power terrifies most people because we witnesses abuse and misuse of power every day at home and around the world. Add to that the fact that your supreme power carries with it your supreme responsibility to govern yourself, your energy, your thoughts, your choices, your physical health and most people are diving for the couch and some electronic device to escape. Why are we so afraid to live well? This is the question host and shaman, Christina Pratt explores this week offering shamanic remedies for the cultural issues that ail us and challenges for the soul cultivation that lies just out of reach. What better gift can you offer the next generation but the image of a life lived well?

Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Oct 25, 2013

Bishops Behaving Badly

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.




Catholic bishops are making headlines again and not in a good way. This week saw the suspension the "Bishop of Bling." It's a decisive action from the new pope that shows him actually putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak. One hopes it is a harbinger of things to come and that Pope Francis will start backing up more of his lovely rhetoric with decisions that reflect it. For a pope who seems to take the vow of poverty very seriously, the German bishop is downright embarrassing.

When Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Germany traveled to India last year to minister to poor slum dwellers, he reportedly flew first class.

This year, renovations of the Roman Catholic bishop's church-owned residence in the city of Limburg ran massively over budget to cover $620,000 worth of artwork, $1.1 million in landscaping and last-minute design revisions -- $42 million in all, billed to the Vatican and German taxpayers, Hamburg's tabloid daily Bild reported.

Dubbed the "Bishop of Bling" by European media that have been avidly tracking the bespectacled clergyman's lavish lifestyle, Tebartz-van Elst was suspended from his post by Pope Francis on Wednesday in a clear sign that the new pontiff is serious about diverting resources from the "princes of the church" to the paupers in its congregations.

Because Tebartz-van Elst is a bishop in Germany, there's more to this case than the obvious hypocrisy. For Germans, donations to their church aren't voluntary. Germany does not separate church and state and German church-goers pay taxes to support their churches.

Oct 22, 2013

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Why Are We Afraid to Die?

The stories we have been told about where we go when we die shape our reality about death. Millions of people are terrified of death because they have been told a story of hell and damnation. Others face death without suffering because they have been told a story of the turning of the great karmic wheel and reincarnation. The beauty of shamanism is that we can actually go explore what is true underneath these stories that shaped the Old World. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt this week as she explores cultural stories about death and how to work shamanically in your own life to find your fear of death and dispel it. The idea that we would go anywhere but Home when we die has done great harm to humanity, caused great suffering, and created a logjam of frightened souls between here and the Land of the Dead.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Oct 20, 2013

Stealing Malala

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.



An excellent write-up in Salon takes on Sam Harris's disturbing crush on Malala Yousafzai.

In an era of narcissistic self-obsession, there’s something to be said for the value of self-awareness. This week, atheist philosopher Sam Harris leapt forward to claim Malala Yousafzai as another trophy in his one-man jihad against Muslims and the weak-kneed “Muslim-apologists” he perceives on the left.

That Harris has been denounced as a crude, pseudo-intellectual bigot for his various tirades about the monolithic evil of Muslims didn’t do much to deter him; but what was most interesting about his latest missive was its complete disregard for Malala’s actual words and opinions. Either he didn’t listen to her words at all before plastering her face on his website or he was too contemptuous of her to think it necessary.

According to Harris:
Given the requisite beliefs…. an entire culture will support such evil. Malala is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She is an extraordinarily brave and eloquent girl who is doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do—stand up to the misogyny of traditional Islam
It’s worth pausing here to listen to whether Malala thinks that she is standing up to her own evil culture and the misogyny of “traditional Islam”:
“The Taliban think we are not Muslims, but we are. We believe in God more than they do, and we trust him to protect us…..I’m still following my own culture, Pashtun culture….Islam says that it is not only each child’s right to get education, rather it is their duty and responsibility.”
Whatever one thinks of this, given that these are Malala’s beliefs, anyone with a modicum of decency or respect for her would not go ahead and use her suffering as a tool to attack the very things she is fighting to defend. Yet Harris takes up this opportunity with great vigor. For him it doesn’t matter whether Malala believed she was defending traditional Islam, because anyone who tries to differentiate Islam from the acts of extremists are part of the “tsunami of stupidity and violence breaking simultaneously on a hundred shores … the determination that ‘moderate’ Islam not be blamed for the acts of extremists.’”

Oct 15, 2013

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Lessons in Courage with Don Oscar Miro-Quesada

Lessons in Courage, by Don Oscar Miro-Quesada, is a guide for changing our lives and bringing much needed healing to ourselves and our planet through the applied wisdom of Peruvian shamanism. This book offers us challenges, insights, and daily practices to aid us in becoming the people the New World needs us to be. Host, Christina Pratt, explores this new book with Don Oscar, originator of The Pachakuti Mesa Tradition (PMT), a five-part workshop apprenticeship series and tradition rooted in the Peruvian spiritual methods of sacred relationship with the Earth. Don Oscar is the founder of The Heart of the Healer (THOTH) Foundation and our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How is this shaman meeting this extraordinary need today?

This week's guest:
Don Oscar Miro-Quesada

Don Oscar Miro-Quesada Solevo is a respected kamasqa curandero and altomisayoq adept from Peru. His apprenticeship in northern coastal huachuma curanderismo and initiation into the southeastern Andean paqokuna shaman/priesthood, formally took place between the years 1969 and 1986. Don Oscar has been facilitating experiential workshops and apprenticeship programs around the world since 1979 that integrate millennial and contemporary healing practices and Earth-honoring ceremonial traditions with a focus on the creation of heartfelt sacred communities around the world.

Don Oscar is the originator of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition of cross-cultural shamanism, a soul-infused vehicle for deep personal and planetary transformation, that blossomed organically from Oscar's practice and fulfills the noble intentions of both venerable elders who bequeathed don Oscar with the oral sanction to preserve Heart Island's (South America) ancestral healing traditions as Peru's legacy to all future generations. He is also the visionary founder of The Heart of the Healer Foundation (THOTH) whose mission is preserving indigenous wisdom and restoring our earth. More about THOTH can be found at www.heartofthehealer.org. He is the author of Lessons in Courage: Peruvian Shamanic Wisdom for Everyday Life.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Oct 14, 2013

Once Upon a Time There Was a Chymical Wedding

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

 photo OnceUponATimegold_zps4ef63114.jpg


"Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves


I'm a little late to this party -- two years to be exact -- but I have recently fallen in love with Once Upon a Time. Once again I tried to curl up with a little diversionary fluff and was instead abruptly pulled into the heart of the mysteries. As ever with these pop culture creations I am left to wonder if the writers are just randomly pulling these profound archetypes out of their deep subconscious, totally unaware of the implications, or if it's a carefully scripted foray into Gnosis.

The central plot is clever and entertaining. The evil queen from Snow White, she of the poison apple, takes her revenge by casting a spell that drags a myriad of fairy tale characters into a small town in Maine. There they live trapped in time and unable to remember who they really are. But the curse may be undone by the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, who was secreted out of the enchanted forest before the curse fell and predestined to return at the age of 28. Twenty-eight years later Emma Swan is living a lonely life in Boston until a young boy claiming to be the son she put up for adoption pulls her to Storybrooke. He insists she must fulfill her destiny and break the curse cast by his adoptive mother, who he is quite sure is the evil queen in his very unusual book of  fairy tales.

Each episode weaves together the complimentary narratives of the characters' lives in Storybrooke and their history as fairy tale creatures. It's skillful, if somewhat predictable, storytelling. But it's in the imagery that the creators tip their hand. They speak the language of symbols far too well for me to take the series lightly. From the first episode I was struck by the subtle but brilliant use of sacred geometry, character names, and striking tableaux. 

It is essentially a mystical story employing the most basic numerical code to appeal to conscious oneness.

Oct 10, 2013

TEDx Gets Punk'd

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.




While some of us were focused on TED's censorious and insular nature, the many people who don't care about that were noticing something else: TED has simply jumped the shark. Snooty articles are popping up all over the place opining about the fact that the once clever packager of ideas has devolved into self parody. TED hate is the new black.

And so the stage was set for the self-important TED talk to be lampooned by an ostensibly serious TEDx speaker.

Everyone is annoyed by TED Talks these days, those vacuum-sealed idea nuggets. So comedian Sam Hyde sneaking onto an (independently organized) TEDx program at Drexel University last weekend and delivering this incomprehensible 20 minute talk on the "2070 paradigm shift" must be seen as a symbolic victory in the war on bullshit, even if it gets kind of old after minute 10. (Which is, I think, part of the joke.)

The best part: "What inspire me, is teaching African refugees how to program Javascript. What inspires me is finding out how to use MagLev trains to get resources to the moon. These are the challenges that tomorrow's going to face."

Oct 8, 2013

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Shamanic Practice in the New World

How is shamanic practice evolving, as it has in every age, to meet the challenges of our time? The spirits gave us good council as we entered the New World, but what have we done with that information? Are we shifting our relationship with the Unknown in ways that allow us to truly guide the young through initiation into adulthood and the dying safely through the threshold of death? Have we embraced the path of the passion and true heartedness to effectively guide the reassembling of people struggling with PTSD and our epidemic of mental illnesses. Have we made any progress at all out of the lie of separation from God and begun to bridge religious separation and embrace diversity as our true savior? Have we accepted the piles of research that supports the ancient knowing that sustainable health is rooted in the ability to rest, fully relax and to nourish that which matters in life. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how to work with the guidance of spirit to change your story, live in new ways, and to write the New Story with our shamanic work in the world.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Oct 1, 2013

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Around the Web, Around the World


"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Shamanism in the New World

The shamanism of today must continue to evolve if we are to respond to the times we have chosen to live in. Our contemporary shamanic practices have not been immune to the influence of the Old Story. Now is the time of the New Story of the People in the beginning of a New World. This week we explore how the lie of separation, so foundational to the Old Story, undermines the personal message of love and self worth from our helping spirits. And, more importantly how that lie keeps us engaged in the age-old religious battle between good and evil, instead of using our understanding that Everything Is One to return even evil to it's origins. Fear of the Shadow also drives the Old Story effectively keeping us from facing our fears and experiencing meaningful individuation and initiations. But with our helping spirits we have an avenue into the Shadow that allows not just understanding, but the rescue, transformation, and integration of the original ally form. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week and she unpacks the Old Story in our shamanic practices and challenges us to write the New Story with our shamanic work in the world.

This show originally aired February 5, 2013.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 11:00 AM Pacific

Log on to Listen
Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

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