A couple of Saturdays ago, like most mornings, I consulted the Mystical Shaman Oracle. A one-card reading for myself to guide my day. I was shown the Vision Quest card. And the instruction was to “keep seeking until insight is gained. Go out in nature and ask for wisdom.”

I perform divination to guide my day and at significant moments in the year like my birthday or Samhain. And if you ask, it’s always a good idea to listen to the answer. So I went to Earth Sanctuary here on Whidbey Island to get out in nature, as the oracle suggested. I had in mind to walk the labyrinth, walk the Medicine Wheel, and visit the Cottonwood Stone Circle.

There was a little voice at the back of my mind saying today was not the day to do the Medicine wheel. But I had made a plan and so I was set on doing it.

I have been on the main path so many times I don’t need to see the signs anymore, so I made a left at the first junction expecting to arrive at the Medicine Wheel. After walking about twice as long as I remembered it, I realized I had turned too soon and ended up on the “middle path” which I had not walked before. I decided to go with it and see where it would lead me, figuring the little voice was right. About halfway up, there was a sign that said “Detour – Muddy trail ahead! To avoid mud, take this detour.” Since I didn’t know where I was going, I chose the detour – but realized after I passed the spot of the detour there were three choices – turn back, take the detour, or engage with the mud. That felt familiar. How many times have I backed off, or bypassed, rather than engage with my inner mud.

Each option has natural consequences. Backing off is rarely an option, though being stuck is certainly always there for the taking. Engaging with the Shadow is essential for our growth. Bypassing usually just postpones the inevitable, but even that at least keeps us in motion and there will be lessons ahead that perhaps we can successfully learn to make us stronger when the mud we bypassed confronts us again.

The middle trail led to a place I had forgotten about -  the Infinity Tower, which represents the cosmic axis, the joining of earth and heaven.

So during this walk, I attended to the Oracle’s message and opened myself to my surroundings – the croaking frog, the cool air, the filtered light, the beautiful mixed tree canopy, and the peace. Here is what I heard.
“Your vision for your Sacred Path is a declaration. You commit to the purpose you will serve, the principles and values that will guide you, and the practices and disciplines that will sustain you. It is not a picture of the end of your path because the choices and decisions you make ensure that the ending is in flux. You change the future each time you face a crossroad and choose, so the end is not determined.

And when the need is there, a sign will appear pointing you in the direction of your intention. You and only you must choose –which way to turn at the crossroads, the companions and resources you will take on your journey. It’s when you get moving and travel your path that Spirit can support you.”

The purpose you will serve is the one that you and your Guides, Angels, and Higher Self agreed to before you entered this lifetime. Careful consideration and divination to retrieve the essence of what you believe it to be is essential to be at peace with your journey. As you go inward you are looking for those things that have always resonated for you. Using Divination, pathworking, and journey work, you can come to a decision about what feels right to you. And you can affirm that purpose.

The principles and values that will guide you are reflected in the things for which you will take a stand. Will you trade instant gratification for a sense of integrity? Is kindness toward and service to others paramount in your life? Is your soul mission reflected in the growth and development of your children and grandchildren? For what would you risk everything?  These values allow you to develop guiding principles, the guardrails for your life journey.

The practices and disciplines you choose to sustain you are those things that make you feel closer to Deity, help you plumb the depths of your unconscious to discover what is true for you, and make continual progress in mindfulness.

Once you have a vision, you have established your North Star. It is your principle means of navigation – deciding if you are on or off course in your Spiritual journey. Your guiding principles allow you to set personal boundaries and choices about what you will accept in your life, and the means to edit what gets in. Your disciplines and practices are the means for the journey inward.

You may know the actual North Star as Polaris, and you would be right. But according to Wikipedia, due to the precession of the equinoxes, a different star occupies that place in the remote past and the distant future. 3,000 years ago, the star Thuban in the constellation of Draco occupied the place of the North Star.

Similarly, your soul purpose will seem immutable when you reclaim your sacred path. But last time you were here, you were following a different star. And next time, you will again. 
​

   Reclaiming Your Sacred Path Podcast

On December 6, I will be talking with Laura Tempest Zakaroff, "artist, author, blogger, designer, artist and Witch to name a few." Please check out her website, http://www.lauratempestzakroff.com/ . We'll  discuss her work and her book, Sigil Witchery:  A Witch's Guide to Crafting Magic Symbols.

Please plan to join us at 6:00 PM Pacific/ 8:00 PM Central/9:00 PM Eastern time. Here is the link to the show:
​
  http://tobtr.com/11088187

​
I’ve been lucid dreaming and doing pathworking quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, and I received an insight about a subject we discuss a lot – that we are here by choice, we came with a purpose, and our task in this life is to reclaim that purpose and walk our life path according to our plan for our soul’s evolution.

You know – or should – that you are a Spiritual being having a physical experience. Our eternal souls never die, though our bodies and minds are in a continuous cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.  We didn’t necessarily ask for everything that happens to us and the consequences of those things, but everything that happens to us and that we initiate in the world of form contains a lesson that will contribute to the evolution of our souls.

Between death and rebirth we make an agreement with ourselves, our Higher Self, our ancestors perhaps, and Spirit Guides. After reviewing what we did in the lifetime we just left, including the lessons we learned and the ones we bypassed or didn’t quite complete, which we may need to repeat,  we come to agreements about our focus for the next life.  What purpose will we serve, what lessons will most contribute to our soul evolution? And once we decide the Soul mission, we consider who will come with us. With whom do we have unfinished business? With whom would we best engage in the lifetime to come? And how can we contribute to others’ growth?
If that’s all true, great Divine plan! Why don’t we remember after we’re born?

This is the Great Forgetting. It is the reason I place so much emphasis on creating your life path vision in Reclaiming Your Sacred Path workshops and individual work. Some explain it as a consequence of the trauma of the birth process and the undeveloped brain capacity of the infant. The delay between arrival and the development of at least pre-adolescent cognitive ability means we lose conscious awareness of those agreements.  Plus, we undergo intensive training from birth to cognition. We learn that parents and other adults are to be trusted, that institutions must be respected, and we are given an explanation for how we got here and what we’re supposed to do to live as a human being. And all of that must be obeyed, or there are consequences, which instills fear, and the inevitable mistakes and violations induce guilt.

A Course in Miracles states that the great forgetting was caused by the development of the ego.  When God’s creation asked one little, insane question – What would it be like to be separate from God? – All of existence as we know it sprang into being in our collective imagination and the rest is literally history. In this cosmology, the ego blasts us with guilt for having “killed” or abandoned God, and fear of what his wrath will do to us if he finds us.

And so we play a game with God in this scenario – “If I don’t look at you, you can’t see me,” like an ostrich “hiding” with its head in the sand. Everybody knows you’re here, dude.

So the Great forgetting is the result of guilt and fear. Whichever cosmology you prefer, you receive clues – significant number combinations that consistently appear, omens, coincidences, déjà vu experiences, instances of telepathy, intuitive knowing, spectral visitations. All of these are messages from our higher selves, rapping on the door of our awareness, to awaken to the splendor of what we really are.

We actually experience simulations of the great forgetting very frequently in our mundane lives, which I think of as little forgettings – dreams we half remember or forget after waking, the inability to remember all the details of a Shamanic Journey or visualization/pathworking. This made me wonder if we have trouble remaining in the “Alpha” state of astral travel and dreamwork because of the echo of fear in our minds that reentering our true Spiritual state however briefly will expose us to the God we have disobeyed or cause us to abandon our human training. So we forget, and are then we’re safe for the moment.

I think the key to the great remembering – recovering your soul purpose so you can walk your sacred path – may be to stop ourselves from allowing those lessons to slip away. This is the value of journaling. When we journal our psychic and super-conscious experiences we are writing a letter to our “lower” self – the physical, mental, and psychological being we act as in this life -  from the perspective of our higher selves. Our true wizard nature informs our muggle selves that there is more to us than meets the eye. Our lower self may report what happens, but our higher self knows what it means. If we journal both, it helps us raise our level of awareness and make progress in the same way that regular exercise gradually increases our fitness levels, making us capable of more.

But we are not here to just observe, or spend our lives in the dreamtime or introspection. to learn the lessons we came here to learn, we have to engage, learn to be in this world but not of It as the Bahai’ writings put it. This does not mean not to care, become a new-age bliss bunny and pretend all is well when it’s not. That is spiritual bypassing. We must respond to what confronts us in our lives and answer it with Spirit. Our lessons are learned through engagement – in our devotions, engagement with Deity; In our Magic, with the Spirits who support us. Our guidance comes from within, our higher selves communing with Spirit. Our lessons come from our work, our relationships, how we spend our time and attention, and the way we manage our physical and psychological well being.
​
Mindful of our true nature, we can choose to create, act, and respond to what confronts us for the highest good of ourselves and others. This is the result of resuming Your Sacred Healing Journey.
​

Reclaiming Your Sacred Path is back on the air on Pagans Tonight Radio Network  on Blog Talk Radio every first and third Thursdays of the month at 9PM Eastern time/8PM Central time/6PM Pacific time. Please join me, or listen to the podcast later! Here is the link to the next show, with Dr. Dennis Dossett, discussing Conscious Living on November 15:

http://tobtr.com/11066227
​