Mapping Our Inner World

The Sacred Geography of Experiential Awakening

Key Points:

  • The Earth functions as a living, spiritual map, but sacred spaces are not confined to remote or dramatic environments. All of nature holds memory and consciousness, and when approached with awareness, it becomes a form of teaching.
  • Outer landscapes reflect inner states of Being. Mountains symbolize ascent and perspective; caves represent descent and inner confrontation; deserts teach emptiness and clarity; water embodies movement, rebirth, and transition. These geographies articulate psychological and spiritual processes we move through in our own lives.
  • Spiritual awakening is experiential, not dogmatic or hierarchical. Sacred geography resists institutional authority and dogma. It is personal, embodied, and accessible without intermediaries. Any place can become sacred through presence and devotion.

Although not all spiritual knowledge is gained on a mountain top, “mountains” have long held power in humanity’s imagination as spaces for sacred revelation and divine awareness. We all know the image of the mystic sage, meditating on a mountaintop. The Olympian pantheon has Mount Olympus, Lord Shiva has Mount Kailash, and the Maori believe that “all mountains were once gods and warriors.” Mountains are not the only landscape that has imprinted its map onto the blueprint of humanity’s soul. Following in the footsteps of our indigenous ancestors, seekers have climbed, wandered, and occasionally gotten lost in landscapes that mirror our inner journeys for as long as history has been shared through oral tradition. To understand the geography of the soul, we must pay attention to the geography beneath our feet, and through the soles of our feet, experience the awakening that accompanies a connection with these natural places.

The Earth is a sacred map. Every culture residing from the Himalayas to the desert of the American Southwest has its topographies of transcendence. These are places where the veil between matter and meaning feels thin. California-based eco-feminist and activist Starhawk reminds us in Earth Path that “sacred places are the Earth’s memory made visible.” When we enter these landscapes with awareness, we’re walking into consciousness itself, translated into terrain.

Mountains symbolize spiritual and physical ascent from density to clarity.
Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, USA. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

Asia Suler, in Mirrors in the Earth, expands this view beautifully. “The land is sentient,” she writes. “It speaks through form.” Mountains tell stories of endurance; rivers teach forgiveness; forests whisper about interdependence. When we listen, we learn not only about ecology but ontology; we gain insight into the nature of being itself. The landscape outside becomes a teacher of the landscape within, true to the Hermetic axiom of “as above, so below.”

Mountains, for instance, symbolize physical and spiritual ascent. To climb is to move from density to clarity. In Buddhist cosmology, the mythical Mount Meru stands at the center of the universe, anchoring heaven and Earth. And don’t forget that the Ten Commandments, those simple agreements that guide our moral universe, were received on Mount Sinai. In modern terms, we might say the mountain represents the slow, stubborn upward movement of awareness. As we climb, the air thins, the noise fades, and the ego gets subdued enough to be quiet. The summit doesn’t hand out enlightenment certificates, but it does offer perspective.

Caves, on the other hand, are the terrain of descent. They are the sacred interiors of both Earth and psyche. They appear in myths as wombs, tombs, and initiation chambers. The Greek oracle at Delphi delivered her prophecies from within a cave; Buddhist monks meditated in Himalayan hollows; and countless seekers across traditions have entered literal and metaphorical caves to meet their own shadows. The darkness of the cave isn’t punishment. It’s incubation. As Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke advised, “The dark must be honored, for it is the gateway to clarity.”

We enter caves to meet our own shadows. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid of them.
Onyx Cave in Mammoth Cave National Park, USA. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

Then there are the deserts, those vast, elemental landscapes of purification. In the Bible, prophets wandered over the harsh terrain not to escape but to strip away illusions. The desert’s barrenness forces focus. It doesn’t cater to comfort or distraction. If the mountain teaches perseverance and the cave teaches surrender, the desert teaches holy emptiness, where silence becomes scripture.

A desert represents the raw struggle of focus, where the illusions and distractions are stripped of their power and all that remains is your body and the elements, like that time my bus broke down in the world’s driest desert with only an inch of water in my bottle. Atacama Desert, Chile. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

Water, as an element of movement and renewal, flows through all these sacred geographies, transforming them, shifting them, and nourishing brittle edges with its sigh of relief. In nearly every spiritual tradition, immersion in water symbolizes rebirth. Rivers are thresholds; they separate old life from new, confusion from clarity. Even modern therapy borrows this language: we “go with the flow,” we “dive in,” we “wash away” grief. The metaphors are geological because the psyche speaks fluent topography.

The concept of sacred geography also extends to the subtler landscapes we inhabit daily. The urban park where you breathe between meetings; the corner of your home where sunlight lingers; or the trail where your thoughts untangle. These are contemporary shrines. Awakening doesn’t require airfare. It requires attention. The sacred is not located anywhere; it’s recognized in front of us.

Our inner landscapes are awakened through a connection with beauty in mundane and unexpected places, like a peaceful autumn sunset witnessed from the window of my small apartment in the center of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

Unlike the dogma of religious institutions, the map of sacred geography is without a hierarchy or leader. It is experiential; it is the mystical sensation that can never be replicated in a lab, and it doesn’t require a trained liaison. Understood in this way, a parking lot can be as instructive as the peak, provided we bring presence. Pilgrimage, at its heart, is less about destination than devotion. We journey to sacred places not because they are magical, but because they remind us to be. The geography of awakening is, therefore, all around us, and the map is etched in the fine folds that line the soles of our feet. 

Mapping the Threshold

Cartography and the Hero’s Journey as a Guide for Inner Healing

Every compelling narrative catapults from the space of a crisis, a call to action, or an inconvenient Damocles sword. American mythologist and Sarah Lawrence College Literature professor Joseph Campbell called this pattern the Hero’s Journey. It is the mythic cycle that unravels and untangles during epic plays and novels, and that haunts the shadows within imaginative fairy tales for kids and adults. However, it also swirls through the messy narratives of our own lives. Although Campbell wrote about heroes and gods, he was actually using metaphor to describe the psyche’s roadmap for transformation. Whether we’re trekking through Peru’s Sacred Valley of the Incas or simply getting through another Tuesday, we’re all walking the same ancient path of descent, discovery, and return.

Ritualized healing and psychological growth share a common thread of secret, and it is that both require adventure. The Hero’s Journey is not a literary device; it is an archetypal process embedded in human consciousness. In therapeutic terms, it’s the movement from ordinary awareness into symbolic depth; it is the moment we cross a threshold into the unknown to meet what Carl Jung called the shadow. This archetypal process, when incorporated together with the four stages of ritualized magic known as purification, creation, transformation, and grounding, form a map for inner pilgrimage.

When the Cozy Zone becomes Confinement

The call to adventure arises when life as we know it becomes too confining. Discomfort, loss, or restlessness knocks at the door of our consciousness, inviting us to confront that space of the unknown and step into it. When we feel that call and ignore it, we are refusing our own growth and transformation process. It is during these times that we project our internal discomfort either consciously or unconsciously onto others or into the tedium of daily life, and thus, we become “busy.” “Busy” but accomplishing nothing. “Busy” but counter productive. “Busy” but numb to our own needs. 

Sooner or later, we must cross that threshold into the unknown, either of our own volition or shoved into it as a result of our refusal to grow. The Universe (and the trees and the rivers and the minerals and the other humans and all of thermodynamics) wants each of us to heal and grow. (It is in everything and everyone’s eternal best interest for each of us to nurture our long-suffering karmic wounds and evolve into our most compassionate and Bodhisattva-minded beings). Entering this threshold is the pivotal act of healing; accepting the uncertainty is itself an initiation. The San Francisco-based scholar and documentarian Phil Cousineau notes that “a person’s soul cannot grow in a world that is too familiar.” Healing, like heroism, requires leaving our familiar shores of what is already known to us. 

Inviting a Walk through the Liminal Space

In traditional shamanic practice, this crossing might involve literal journeying into wilderness or trance; in modern eco-therapeutic visualization, it might mean entering an inner landscape where each symbol carries medicine. A cave, a river, or a lightning storm aren’t simply visual props; they are mirrors of the psyche’s terrain. As in myth, the monsters encountered are projections of our own fragmentation, and the helpers such as wise elders, animals, or ancestors are facets of our higher knowledge. 

Campbell described this central ordeal as “the belly of the whale,” which is a liminal zone of dissolution and rebirth. In guided meditation, this might correspond to the phase of surrender, when old beliefs melt away. Neuropsychology would call this the default mode network quieting down, allowing new neural pathways to form. In spiritual language, it’s the death before resurrection that precedes insight.

“Mystic in the Forest.” Wooden sculpture carved from a tree stump along a trail in Kentucky. Photo credits: Amanda Lynn Barker.

A New Imagination

When the hero returns, they bring back an elixir, which is wisdom, forgiveness, or creative vision that heals both Self and Community. Transformation that ripples outward is the purpose of growth. Too often, modern life keeps us trapped in perpetual departure without return. We chase experiences but resist integration. The Hero’s Journey reminds us that completion and returning home changed is the true miracle.

The journey also reframes suffering. Instead of pathology, struggle becomes pilgrimage. The breakdown becomes the threshold. As mythologist Michael Meade writes, “the wound is the place where the soul enters.” The descent into darkness is not failure.  Earth-based traditions have always understood this. Seeds germinate in the dark, caterpillars dissolve before flight, and forests regenerate after fire. Healing follows the same law of transformation through compost.

In contemporary practice, this mythic structure can inform both therapy and spiritual growth. Eco-therapists use symbolic journeying to help clients move through trauma narratives toward meaning. Ritualists use the same arc of separation, ordeal, and return to structure ceremonies of release and renewal. Even guided visualizations in mindfulness training borrow the hero’s architecture. We begin in safety, enter challenges, transform, and re-emerge into the present moment.

Embracing Natural Cycles of Growth

Herbalist and writer Asia Suler captures this cycle beautifully in Mirrors in the Earth, writing that “the soul’s growth happens not in straight lines but in circles that spiral ever deeper.” The hero’s path, then, is not linear conquest but cyclical evolution. We keep returning to familiar landscapes of challenge, only to find they’ve changed and so have we.

Something like a hero’s journey can feel grandiose when in the modern West our daily battles are mostly Wi-Fi outages, endless road construction, protecting families in our communities from illegal detainment, shortages of canned food, and existential dread from the rising authoritarian state. But myth doesn’t measure scale; it measures sincerity. The alchemy is the same regardless of how we identify the dragon: step forward, face it, find the wisdom hiding in the discomfort, and bring that wisdom back to the tribe.

Each small act of courage, every honest conversation, and every self-forgiving breath is its own hero’s arc. When we step through fear into awareness, we’re crossing the threshold of mythic consciousness. We’re proving that transformation doesn’t require epic quests, only ordinary bravery enacted consistently.

The Forest Wants Us to Win

Spiritual Ecology and How Non-Human Beings Guide Us on Our Healing Journey

We like to imagine ourselves as the main characters in this multi-dimensional, unfolding narrative. We are human, and we’re the protagonists of Earth’s story! We are the thinking species, the architects of destiny. The intelligent species. But look closely (and listen even closer) and we’ll experience a somewhat more complex plot line. We will hear the forests giving mentorship to our lungs; rivers facilitating weekend seminars to teach rocks how to flow; our beloved furry friend gazing at us intensely to model presence for our overstimulated minds. The truth is humbling and freeing. We are not in fact the main act, but instead are a well-supported side project within the collective experience’s ongoing symphony of balance and restoration.

Morning sunlight streams through autumn leaves. John Bryan State Park, Ohio, USA. Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

Although we as industrialized humans have pretty much forgotten how to engage with nature, the relationship between us and non-human beings with whom we share the planet has long been reciprocal. Botanist, Professor of Environmental Biology at the State University of New York, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that gratitude is the foundational ethic of a healthy world. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she invites readers to approach nature not as a commodity but as a community, one that responds to the experience of gratitude with abundance. Plants “gift” us with sustenance, medicine, and materials, and through the active practice of gratitude, we create a balanced ecosystem that returns more of what we require to feed ourselves, to heal ourselves, to shelter ourselves, and to build tools. Gratitude looks like expressing appreciation instead of wastefulness; sharing openly instead of manufacturing scarcity; and humble acknowledgement for where these gifts came from. When we engage this way, healing evolves from being an individual pursuit into a collective ecosystem of generosity.

Seasonal flooding of the Ohio River into a mid-winter woodland. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

Writer, teacher, and earth intuitive Asia Suler calls this reciprocity “the mirror of the Earth.” In her luminous book Mirrors in the Earth, she recounts learning directly from the personalities of plants to heal herself from chronic pain and emotional exhaustion. Reishi mushrooms taught her resilience, trilliums taught forgiveness, hemlocks offered boundaries. “The living world,” she writes, “recognizes us as a part of the whole.” When we allow ourselves to engage with non-human consciousness, we open our hearts to align with an energy that resonates with a pulse deeper than our immediate human perception. 

Selfie pic with a tree friend at the Ohio Mounds and Earthworks.

This isn’t metaphor, it’s mentorship. Storyteller and preserver of the Anishinaabe language Basil Johnston describes medicine as Mashki-aki, “the strength of the earth.” Indigenous worldviews hold space for every plant, stone, and wind current to create a specific medicine that restores or harmonizes into balance. When we acknowledge these differences in intelligence, we engage with them as collaborators, not as props or commodities. The potion works through this effective partnership.

Modern science, the late adaptor to sacred wisdom, is finally beginning to corroborate this. Studies into the Japanese-originated practice of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) illustrate that when trees release phytoncides, our bodies reduce cortisol and boost their immune function, and our brains feel less lonely. Inhaling a forest is literally good medicine. Forest bathing is as simple as pausing for a moment on a walk through a woodland to observe the light filtering through the leaves, the subtle stir of wind through the canopy overhead, or the stillness as the soil and the solitude absorbs nearby sounds. We don’t need to travel to a bucket list destination, or spend our savings account on a facilitated workshop, although National Geographic lists Costa Rica, Japan, and South Korea as prime locations for forest bathing. However, start small. Find a park or the grove of trees in your backyard. They release the same phytoncides as any others. 

Sutjeska National Park in mid-summer outside of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

Behind the molecules hums a larger mystery. Why does standing among trees make us feel less alone? Perhaps, as the animistic worldview insists, we aren’t. The animals who share our planet are fluent healers, and like the forest, they also want us to win. Horses mirror human emotional states so precisely that equine-assisted therapy is now a recognized psychological intervention. Birds remind us to sing before we speak. Dogs teach unconditional presence and cats, the art of selective affection. In my recent post, Wings in the Silence, I share a story of a connection with hummingbirds while traveling through Medicine Bow National Forest. I have had similar experiences with blue herons in the Ocala National Forest, and with a javelina in Peru’s Tambopata Jungle. Every species carries an embodied wisdom humans once considered ordinary. In returning to those lessons, we retrieve our sanity.

Lucy and I got along very well. Although she is a javelina, we connected and hung out together for an entire afternoon while I visited to Tambopata Jungle of Peru.

Asia Suler describes this process as re-enchantment, a term that should probably be on the tip of every doctor, preacher, and politician’s tongue. To be re-enchanted is to recognize that the planet is still speaking, and that wellness arises not from conquering the nature of ourselves and the nature around us, but from conversing with it. This conversation is multisensory. We feel it in the warmth of the sun on our skin, in the rhythm of waves, and through the hum beneath our bare feet. Our bodies are tuning forks for the sacred.

Trees frame a landscape vista across the Shawnee National Forest. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

There’s a quiet revolution in realizing that healing isn’t something that others do for us, but what sacred experience offers us when we’re listening. A forest doesn’t demand payment plans or co-pays. It simply invites attention. The trees breathe out oxygen; we breathe it in. The transaction is complete, effortless, primal. This exchange of carbon and of care is the original act of spiritual reciprocity.

And yes, there’s some dark humor in it too. The fungi that decompose our detritus are not grim undertakers but cheerful recyclers. “Death into new life,” as author, activist, and eco-feminist Starhawk might say, “is nature’s favorite party trick.” Even decay is devotion. In this web of interdependence, everything from the crow to the compost participates in the great choreography of renewal.

Fungi grows at the base of a tree. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

When we open to that rhythm, healing accelerates. Not because the forest cures us, but because it reminds us we were never separate from the cure. Nature does not pity us, but it invites us to remember. The oak doesn’t preach resilience; it demonstrates it silently for centuries. The river doesn’t instruct us in letting go; it performs the lesson daily.

In this light, wellness becomes a spiritual ecology. Every being from the moss, to the cloud, to the hawk, and of course us humans is part of a single breathing intelligence learning how to balance itself. When we attune to that balance, our minds quiet, our cells respond, and our spirits exhale.

Morning mist rises from a meadow in late summer. Image credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

The forest wants us to win. From our thriving will emerge its own. Next time you seek healing, look toward the meadow. Listen for guidance in the rustle of leaves, the gaze of a passing animal, the patience of stone. The teachers, the healers, the guides are all waiting.

Walking the Yogi Path

Liberation, Experience, and Practice

The eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga teach us how to pause. In that moment of stillness, we gain awareness of our choices, and are granted a deeper freedom to create. We are no longer confined on a singular trajectory, but in those pauses between breath, between movement in and out of a kriya, in the silence of meditation, we are liberated from the constrictions of routine, habit, and pattern. Just as a slight turn in a car’s steering wheel will send the vehicle in a different direction, so will small adjustments in our mindset and habits over time evolve us into a new embodiment of ourselves. This truth of Yoga’s capacity to awaken our potential for intentional manifestation is clearly articulated throughout The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Manifestation and the Power of Choice and Attention

Through the practice of Yoga, we become conscious of our sacred potential to create. We are all creating every day. Intentionally or not, we are creating our thoughts, actions, words, and reactions. Sri Swami Satchidananda, in his discussion of the Book 1: Yoga Sutra 2 states that, “the entire outside world is based on your thoughts and mental attitude. The entire world is your own projection … If you feel bound, you are bound. If you feel liberated, you are liberated,” (5). When we transform our inner landscape, we will also experience a shift in our understanding and response to what occurs outside of ourselves. 

Image credit: Pexels from Pixabay. Edited and enhanced by Amanda Lynn Barker.

The process of manifestation, according to The Yoga Sutras, begins with cultivating a clear intention or sankalpa to experience wisdom-filled-with-truth, and then directing unwavering attention toward knowing our True Self. Through discriminative wisdom and detachment from distraction, we learn how to balance the natural fluctuations of the mind. This focused attention cultivates clarity and awareness to achieve the goals and desires of our heart. Sri Swami Satchidananda explains that “a focused mind gains power, and when that powerful mind concentrates on an object, the entire knowledge of that object is revealed to it,” (30). This concept aligns with the Western neurophysiology of how we define the functions of the reticular activation system in our brain: through the mechanics of our brain, we notice whatever is in our line of attention. When our attention is consumed with looking for blue vehicles, our attention notices thousands of blue vehicles. When our attention is consumed with a victim narrative, we notice all the ways we are victimized. When our attention is consumed with gratitude, we notice all the ways we are blessed and live abundantly. 

Overcoming Obstacles of the Ego

Yoga awakens the awareness of the connection between what we desire to create and the decisions and behaviors that will manifest those desires. According to Book 2: Yoga Sutra 3, our suffering is the result of obstacles or klesas that cause distractions including ignorance, egoism, attachment, hatred, and clinging to bodily life (80). During the cycle of reincarnation, we forget our true Selves or Purusha and disconnect from our union with God. This allows us to mistakenly identify ourselves as one and the same with our ego-experience, generating attachment to selfish worldly desires. Through our attachment to seeking these pleasures and desires that fulfill our identification with our ego-experience, we come to feel hatred and frustration when our desires are not met according to our expectations, and we cling desperately to these selfish goals out of fear of loss or failure. Our attachments follow us through this lifetime and beyond as patterns or samskaras until we transform how we understand the nature of ourselves. 

Image credit: Felix from Pixabay. Edited and enhanced by Amanda Lynn Barker.

The eight limbs of ashtanga yoga establish a path for achieving this identification with the True Self and liberation, and it is a practice that cultivates selflessness and peace. As Sri Swami Satchidananda advises, “do everything with the idea that you are preparing yourself to serve others. Even the practice of meditation is not done just for your own peace but is done because with a peaceful mind you can go out into the world and serve well,” (26). Through regulation or yama, training or niyama, meditative postures or asana, breath control or pranayama, withdrawal of the senses or pratyahara, concentration or dharana, meditation or dhyana, and absorption or samadhi we maintain the health, peace, and balance of our bodies, minds, and spirits so that we are able to manifest our highest potential in selfless service to others. 

Peace through Attitude and Practice

Practical techniques for practice include the use of mantras; the cultivation of appropriate attitudes, study and practice; humming of AUM; pratipaksa bhavana; and acceptance of all experience. Mantra means “a sound formula for meditation.” Sri Swami Satchidananda recommends a “conscious dedication of our lives for the sake of the entire humanity,” through repetition of the mantra “dedication, dedication, giving, giving, loving, loving,” (79). This repetition reminds us of the manifestation of selfless service even as we advance in our practice and the spiritual powers outlined in Book 4. Through this attitude of selflessness, we cultivate attitudes that maintain our own mental peace. According to Book 2, Sutra 33, “By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness,” (51). The purpose of our practice is to maintain our own sense of peace. Our mental peace is disturbed when we display a misaligned attitude toward others. As such, we are advised to celebrate in the joy of another’s success; to demonstrate support for another’s sorrow; to imitate and celebrate the actions of others who are more spiritually advanced; and to disregard immoral actions rather than offer advice or guidance (51-54). 

Image credit: Morn in Japan from Pixabay. Edited and enhanced by Amanda Lynn Barker.

Union with the True Self

The experience of Samadhi, the final branch on the 8-limbed tree of Ashtanga yoga, illuminates for us our identification with Purusha, the true Self. This experience cannot be learned through reading or theory, but is only available as a phenomenological experience. Samadhi cannot be taught, only experienced. This experience is called rtambhara prajna or “wisdom filled with truth,” (68). After an experience of wisdom-filled-with-truth, one becomes a jivanmukta, or a realized saint. Sri Swami Satchidananda explains that:

“jivan means one who lives; mukta means liberated, so such a person is a liberated human being. You live, eat, and talk like anybody else, even do business like anybody else, but still you are liberated. A jivanmukta may be doing anything. He or she need not be sitting in samadhi in some cave; this person may be in Times Square, but is still a jivanmukta. A jivanmukta is involved in the world for the sake of humanity without any personal attachment (71).

Image credit: Rodrigo M from Pixabay. Edited and enhanced by Amanda Lynn Barker.

Rtambhara prajna is a journey, not a destination, and a practitioner must be cautious to use their spiritual knowledge of conscious manifestation of experience for the liberation of all beings, not only for enhancing the enjoyment of their senses. Patanjali describes five mental changes that are either selfish or selfless. Selfish thoughts create pain, and selfless thoughts do not create pain. Sri Swami Satchidananda explains that “whatever the thought is, if there is no selfishness behind it, it can never really bring pain to the person concerned. The result is neither pain or pleasure, but peace. Seeing this truth, we should analyze all our motives and try to cultivate selfless thoughts. That is our first and foremost duty,” (10). Whenever we are projecting an expectation in gratification of our ego-experience, we are cultivating selfishness and creating an experience with pain (94). However, when we move through this world on a path of peace and acceptance of others and ourselves, we are releasing the bondages of attachment. We are liberated. 

Patanjali and the Yoga Sutras provide a framework for living a fulfilling, peaceful, and content life of selfless service. Through daily practice of the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, we maintain physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, and we evolve into an identification of our True Selves. This allows us to overcome the petty obstacles that keep us in ignorance and suffering if we cling to identification with our ego-experience. On an existential level, it also allows us to release the patterns that bind us to a human experience. Walking the yogi path is a journey toward liberation, not only for ourselves but for all living beings. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. May all beings everywhere be happy and free. 

Wings in the Silence: Hummingbirds, A Storm, and Wilderness Magic

The universe doesn’t always speak in words. Sometimes it brushes your cheek with a wingbeat, paints a rainbow across a stormy sky, or hums in the pitch of a feather-light heart. And sometimes it sends two hummingbirds to hover around your head as if you’ve stumbled into a fairy tale. It hums. It buzzes. It flutters two iridescent wings right in front of your nose and asks: are you paying attention?

It was my second day at Friend Camp in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest, a place remote enough that the last bars of cell service had fallen away nearly fifty miles earlier. The road had been nothing but dirt and gravel, a long rumble through sagebrush flats and weathered hills. By the time I arrived at the camp, the forest seemed to breathe in its own rhythm. A dry-sweet scent of sage lingered on the air and mingled with the metallic undertone of pine sap, while the faint rasp of grasshoppers sang in the meadow. Massive granite boulders rested like abandoned toys along a trail that climbed toward Laramie Peak.

Esterbrook Road in Wyoming, thirty miles from Friend Campground in the Medicine Bow National Forest.
Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker.

I shared this wilderness with exactly three neighbors: a father, his son, and their dog, all from Houston. They were scouting elk territory for the coming hunting season and spoke with the ease of people at home in wild places. The father mentioned, almost casually, that two bears had been spotted by the creek. I nodded as though I also found bears to be an ordinary part of the scenery, and pictured my bear spray packed snuggly in the trunk of my Ford Focus. 

Friend Camp. Medicine Bow National Forest.
Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

The following morning I hiked the trail toward Laramie Peak, a four-mile climb rising nearly 3,000 feet. The air thinned as I ascended, turning sharper, cooler, until each breath felt lined with iron. I crossed boulder fields and slipped on wet stone, pausing only when icy raindrops began to fall, then hail the size of marbles. At the summit, a storm gathered in the distance, its clouds swollen and violet, pulsing with light. The wind smelled of electricity. I didn’t linger. My body ran before my mind had finished deciding, boots striking slick granite, heart quickening as thunder rolled behind me.

Laramie Peak Trail near the summit at an elevation of 10, 275 feet.
Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

I reached camp just as the storm broke. Within minutes, hail rattled across the roof of my tent, thunder shook the ground beneath me, and lightning carved the sky into shards of white. I tucked myself into a cocoon of tarps and blankets, lantern light warming the small space, the air inside tinged with the mineral scent of rain. Safe from the deluge, I opened a book: Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson, a meditation on how the universe communicates with us through symbols. One passage lingered with me: hummingbirds, she wrote, are messengers from the unseen world. They are healers, helpers, and carriers of love.

The next morning, the forest seemed rinsed clean, each pine needle tipped with light. I settled onto a sun-warmed boulder, closed my eyes, and began to breathe. My practice is simple. I  breathe first, then settle into stillness before inviting a positive emotion to enter my presence. That morning I chose gratitude, for the mountains, for the shelter that held me through the storm, for the neighbors who had worried for me. Gratitude rose in me like a tide, filling my chest until it spilled outward, as though the air itself had taken on its shape.

Practicing the Peaceful Warrior Asana at the meditation boulders near Friend Camp.
Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

That is when the hummingbirds appeared. When I felt a presence behind me, I turned my head and saw one perched on a nearby branch, throat catching the sunlight in a flash of ruby. “Are you a messenger?” I asked softly, half to myself. As if in answer, a second arrived, landing beside the first. Two pairs of unblinking eyes watched me as I returned to stillness.

Soon, they approached me. One hovered before my face, close enough that I felt its wings stir the air across my skin. Another circled behind me, its hum high and steady, like the faintest echo of a heartbeat. I closed my eyes and felt its wings moving the air around my face in a tender, almost imperceptible breeze. Another circled behind my head, close enough that I could sense the vibration in my bones. They lingered for three, four, five seconds, and then vanished, leaving behind the faintest tremor of wonder.

Sage, pine, and flower bundle I collected from the meadow near Friend Camp. I gave one to my brother for his birthday, one went to a person I met in Black Hills National Forest also named Amanda, and I kept one for myself.
Photo credit: Amanda Lynn Barker

I cannot say what message they carried. Perhaps it was reassurance, or perhaps it was nothing more than the coincidence of two birds drawn to the same patch of sun. Yet their presence left me altered. For a moment, gratitude had a body: wings, feathers, and a hum in the air. Not all messages arrive with grandeur. Sometimes they are small, iridescent, fleeting, and easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention. But when they come, they remind us that even in the vastness of wilderness, we are never entirely alone.

When the Leaves Tremble: Healing with Aspen’s Whisper

We live in a world that often praises productivity and logic while overlooking the quiet, unseen layers of our inner lives. Yet it is within these subtle realms of the energy field, the emotions, and the whispers of intuition where most of our wellbeing resides. My journey into flower essences began during a season of loss, isolation, and spiritual overwhelm. What I discovered was not only a healing modality but a way to reorient my relationship with fear, sensitivity, and the mystery of being alive. This is the story of how Aspen, the “psychic flower,” helped me move from trembling unease into steady trust.

Image credit: Grove of Aspen Trees with White Bark by David Shultz at Mint Images.

My first experience with using a flower essence was in the summer of 2022. Although I had initially learned about them years earlier through involvement with social circles who regularly discussed plant-based healing modalities and knowledge, it wasn’t until I wrote the literature review for my dissertation that I fully understood their use and the depth of their value. At that same time, circumstances in my own life were pushing me to find a solution for what I would call unhealthy patterns in my energy field. During that summer, two family members passed on, both younger people under tragic circumstances. Although neither had been involved anymore in my day to day life, the spiritual and energetic impact of their deaths was deep and profound for me. To add to this grief, I had recently moved to an isolated suburb of Northern Kentucky and was working 100% remotely with a Los Angeles based team. I might as well have been operating from a space station on the moon. Between dreams, spirit encounters, synchronistic occurrences, unexplained phenomena, my self-imposed timeline to finish my dissertation, and the social isolation I was experiencing, it was a lot to handle.

While preparing my literature review, I encountered many researchers who incorporate flower essences into their plant and nature-based healing modalities. For instance, Asia Suler is an Intuitive Plant Healer, writer, and owner of One Willow Apothecaries in Asheville, North Carolina. In her book Mirrors of the Earth, she describes her personal journey of discovering the healing power of flower essences and through them, self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. Flower essences, which imprint the energetic frequency of medicinal blooms onto water molecules, “help people connect into the blueprint of what is possible for them in this lifetime so they can begin to give their gifts to the world … In flower essence theory, these inner blockages come from our negative self-beliefs, the programs of maladaptive thinking that limit our growth and disconnect us from experiencing the true reality of our being. Flower essences help us become aware of these beliefs as the unproductive protection mechanisms that they are, releasing them from their unnecessary services.” According to Suler, flower essence healing is a process of forgiving ourselves for our blockages, and releasing our defenses so that we can focus our energy on enhancing our gifts.

We each carry a trait that is both a blessing and a curse. When we are in the positive state of that trait, we are gifted with a talent that supports the world and our own lives. But when we are in a negative state of that same trait, its expression is blocked and its shadow side manifests outwardly. In my own journey, my psychic sensitivity had become blocked. Although I have always been highly sensitive, the emotional weight of the energy current flowing through my life at that moment was causing dark premonitions, vague fears, sensations of impending doom, and blurred mental lines between intuition and anxiety.

Through study, I was drawn to Aspen flower essence, The Psychic Flower. According to The Encyclopedia of Bach Flower Therapy, “Aspen is related to the Soul’s potential for sensitivity. People in the negative Aspen state are caught up in unconscious anxieties. It might be said that they’ve been born missing one protective layer of skin… Aspen people unconsciously register simply everything- an office atmosphere full of conflict, the morning rush and exhaustion on a crowded bus, the imminent threat and fear of inflation and war- which causes them to use up a tremendous amount of energy.” Everything I read about Aspen flower essence aligned with my experience, and in July 2022, I began to take it every day. Three years later, and I have incorporated it into a signature blend that includes Aspen, Mustard, and Walnut.

Dr. Edward Bach and his apothecary. Image credit: Filosofia Esoterica.

Although the British physician Dr. Edward Bach is considered the father of modern flower essences for his deep research into 38 essences designed to balance a particular emotional state, it is not a new system of healing. Indigenous healers across cultures have practiced healing techniques using flowers and water. In the Americas, Africa, and Australia, healers placed blossoms of water beneath either the sun or the moon and then drank or bathed in it to receive the medicine. The modern practices for developing flower essences remain largely unchanged. Flower essences are energy medicines that function through energetic imprint. First, a flower is picked while in full bloom. Then, the blooms are placed into glass bowls of spring water and left in the direct sunlight for about four hours. The sun’s light imprints the energetic pattern into the water. After the flowers are removed, what remains is mixed 50/50 with brandy or vinegar to create the Mother Essence. Personal use dosage bottles are further diluted from the Mother Essence, but carry the flower’s subtle vibrational essence.

Image credit: http://www.BachFlowerTherapy.us

How does this work, you may ask. Each healing flower has a unique vibrational signature, which is a subtle energy pattern that reflects its form, color, fragrance, and life force. This pattern is then imprinted onto the water, which is a memory carrier, during its time in the sun. When we ingest the flower essence, its vibrational signature interacts with our subtle body (or bio-field, aura or energy system), not our biochemistry. Where there is imbalance in our subtle body, the essence provides a harmonizing frequency. They provide an interruption of our old emotional patterns that are stuck on a loop, and open space for new choices, perspectives, and behaviors. The change is very slight at first, but with regular use the shifts are integrated into awareness to support mindfulness, resilience, and personal growth.

Image credit: http://www.TheHerbalAcademy.com

Let’s walk through the process a bit deeper, using my personal experience with Aspen. As an Aspen type, I experienced vague, free-floating fear, and anxiety with no clear source. It felt like constant dread, unease, and impending doom, but for no discernible reason. This created a disrupted, trembling frequency like static in my nervous system, and my energy field became over-receptive to collective fear and subtle influences.

Remember that the flower’s unique vibrational signature matches its form? The Aspen tree is known for its quivering leaves, although it is tall, resilient, and with an interconnected system of roots. In fact, a grove of Aspen trees is often a single organism. Its essence carries its vibration of inner steadiness, light, and trust, even in the unseen. When ingested, the Aspen essence provides a vibration of luminous confidence and calm rootedness, and the nervous system resonates with steadiness rather than tremor. Fear transforms into a sense of protection and inner light. Psychic sensitivity shifts from being a frightening experience to illumination of intuitive awareness without fear of the unseen. Through my regular use, I have cultivated a vibration of trust, courage, and openness at the mystery of life, with less overwhelm at shifts in subtle energies around me.

Aspen flower. Image credit: http://www.BachCentre.com

Flower essences are not quick fixes, but gentle companions that help us tune into harmony where discord once lived. Aspen showed me that the very sensitivity I once experienced as a burden could transform into a gift: the capacity to perceive subtle energies with courage and clarity. By carrying the vibration of the flowers within us, we are reminded of our own natural ability to grow, adapt, and trust the unseen. In a time when the world feels uncertain, flower essences invite us back to a grounded truth that healing is possible, and that resilience blossoms from somewhere deep within our hearts and minds.

Lotus of the Heart: Awaken Resilience

In nature, lotus flowers are heliotropic. This means they respond to the position of the sun. Its petals open each morning, providing shade for aquatic life and reducing water evaporation, and in the evening as dusk settles, it contracts and closes, emerging back into the muddy waters from which it grows. As a contributor to its aquatic ecosystem, the lotus flower is an attractive pollinator, and it absorbs extra nitrogen and phosphorus from the water and sediment. 

The lotus flower is also an important spiritual teacher. Symbolically, it represents the resilience of awakening, of shifting from one state of being into another.

A proverb from the Buddhist tradition reminds us that, “like the lotus flower, we too have the ability to rise from the mud, bloom out of the darkness, and radiate into the world.” Follow the light, and respond to the position of love.

This can be difficult at times. Maybe the mud is really deep, the night is too long, and you are not sure your beautiful petals can feed all the insects buzzing around you in search of food. It is important in those moments to find stillness that allows the mind to focus on creating a sense of resilience. Sometimes, awakening is an act of conscious intention.

One practice to create conscious intention is to use a mudra. Mudras are hand gestures or “sealing postures” to “stimulate and redirect the flow of energy” that travels through our electrical or subtle body. This subtle body is an aspect of our Mind, Mind with a capital “M” because it is deeper and more powerful in our lives than simply our intellect or cognitive processes. When our Minds with a capital M are connected to how our energy is flowing through our subtle body, we are more active and conscious in how we are showing up in the world. These “sealing postures” give space for heightened awareness.

The Lotus of the Heart is a mudra from the 5000 year old Vedic Indian practice of Yoga that encourages a moment of stillness to create hopeful awakening. It activates a flow of energy into the area of the heart, while simulating the open petals of the lotus flower. It is not the hand gesture itself that shifts the energy in the subtle body; instead, it is the Mind and its focus on receptivity, spaciousness, and surrender that transforms the flow. When the Mind is open to observing inner experiences without judgement, the IDEA of our own challenges in life are transformed. We are more open, and we see and feel opportunities that otherwise may not have been visible to us. Our hearts, as literal organs, have their own “mini brains,” and the Lotus of the Heart mudra is one way to settle agitated, frustrated, and desperate neuron activity. 

To practice the Lotus of the Heart:

  • Begin in a comfortable seated position, either cross legged or with both feet planted firmly on the floor. Straighten the spine.
  • Press your palms together in front of your breast bone. Imagine your elbows pulled away from your body in the opposite direction. Lift your chin. Imagine a string pulling the top of your head to the sky.
  • Press the inside edges of your two pinkie fingers, the side edges of your thumb, and the base of your two wrists together. Keeping these three points of contact, slowly and with awareness, begin to spread apart your inner three fingers. Curve your palm slightly to form a cup. Your three inner fingers will be extended and straight, pointing slightly outward toward the sky, while your pinkies, thumbs, and wrists are pressed together. 
  • With your hands and fingers resembling a lotus flower, gaze into the cup of your palms and bring your awareness to your breath. This is the most important step. Slow your brain, and focus its thoughts on awakening resilience.

If you are having a difficult time focusing, maybe it will be helpful to use your inner voice to say something like, “my heart is awakening to the love that surrounds me,” or “I am a lotus flower that follows the light of love.” Maybe you want to close your eyes and imagine your favorite color glowing in the space of your lotus-like hands and heart.

“Be like the Lotus: trust in the light, grow in the dirt, believe in new beginnings.”

Yogic proverb

The impact of this practice is to inspire feelings of receptivity, to allow your brain to actually believe that it is in a space of openness, expansion, and awakening. After all, in the heart’s still waters, the lotus of awareness opens its petals to the sun.

Although we cannot change the mud and have very limited control over our external environments, we do have the ability to adjust how we flow through it all. The lotus flower, as a symbol of resilience and awakening, can serve as a metaphor from nature to guide our Minds toward a peaceful and abundant life. Even from within the deepest mud, we are capable of blooming.

References

Light of Yoga. B.K.S Iyengar. Schoken Books. 1979.

Yoga and Ayurveda: Self-Healing and Self-Realization. David Frawley. Lotus Press. 1999.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Translation and commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda. Integral Yoga Publications, Ninth Printing. 2020.

The Art and Science of Raja Yoga. Swami Kriyananda. Crystal Clarity Publishers. 2002. 

Stand Like a Mountain

Conscientious Objectors and Courageous Non-Violence in an Increasingly Militarized World

As global tensions escalate, some of us may want to understand how to practice our deeply held principles of peace and diplomacy. American history is riddled with war, conflict, escalation, aggression, and the national movement is trending even more toward militarization and demonstrations of violent power. It’s an uncertain time on very unstable ground. 

Throughout American history, certain individuals have stood firm in their moral, ethical, or religious beliefs to resist participating in “any war in all its forms.” These individuals are known as Conscientious Objectors. This journey has been one of principled defiance, legal challenges, and cultural impact, shaping the dialogue around patriotism, human rights, and peace. 

The Deserter by Boardman Robinson, The Masses, 1916

A Conscientious Objector is someone who refuses to participate in armed conflict due to religious, moral, or ethical conviction. While the concept of peaceful spiritual practice during times of war predates the U.S., American Conscientious Objectors gained particular visibility throughout periods of conscription across the 20th century, most notably during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Quaker, Mennonite, Amish, and Brethren communities blazed the first trail in the US to advocate for pacifism. To this day, the Quaker United Nations Office “has been working for over 60 years to secure and strengthen the recognition of the right to conscientious objection to military service.” The resistance became more organized during World War I when in 1917 the Selective Service Act allowed for exemptions from combatant service on religious grounds. However, many objectors were still imprisoned, ostracized, or forced into non-combat roles under harsh conditions. Over 4,000 Conscientious Objectors were detained during this time and suffered abuse in military prisons. The American Civil Liberties Union was founded, in part, to defend the rights of Conscientious Objectors during WWI.

Image credit: https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/conscientious-objectors

World War II opened new doors into the institutionalization of alternatives for Conscientious Objectors in the United States. A National Service Board of Religious Objectors with representatives from Brethren, Friends, and Mennonite communities was formed to serve as advocates for Conscientious Objectors, and to help the Selective Service identify projects “of national importance” for members of the Civilian Public Service program. Through this new collaboration, approximately 12,000 men served in CPS camps, working in areas such as forestry, soil conservation, mental health institutions, and public health. While this spared many from the violent combat that intruded upon their moral principles and also fulfilled a domestic labor shortage, unfortunately, many Conscientious Objectors faced ridicule and were labeled unpatriotic.

CPS Unit # 63, New Jersey State Hospital, Marlboro, New Jersey. CPS worker serves patients at the mental hospital, circa 1945. digital Image, Photo # 672, Box 2, Folder 3. MCC Photographs, Civilian Public Service, 1941-1947. IX-13-2.2 Mennonite Church USA Archives- Goshen. Goshen, Indiana.

The next war against Vietnam catalyzed a broader resistance to armed combat. Many young men declared themselves Conscientious Objectors on moral or political grounds. This was a movement that expanded beyond religious objections to include ethical and philosophical opposition. Organizations like the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) played pivotal roles in counseling and legal support. Like in the past though, Conscientious Objectors were still vilified and publicly shamed for their peaceful alternative views on armed conflict. For instance, after asserting that participating in combat warfare was contrary to his spiritual convictions, boxer Muhammad Ali was “stripped of his heavyweight title, deprived of his passport, and widely vilified.” 

“Muhammad Ali points to a newspaper headline to show he’s not the only one protesting the Vietnam War, March 28, 1966.”
Image credit: Bettman/Getty Images

Since the end of the draft in 1973, conscientious objection has largely faded from public attention. However, Conscientious Objectors still exist within the US volunteer military. Service members can apply for discharge or reassignment if they develop a sincere objection to war after enlistment. The process is rigorous, requiring written statements, interviews, and corroborating evidence.

Currently, there is no official registry for Conscientious Objectors in the United States unless a military draft is reinstated. However, legal and advocacy groups recommend that individuals who believe they are COs document their beliefs in writing and gather supporting evidence in case of future conscription.

Here’s how to proactively prepare:

  1. Write a Personal Statement: Articulate your beliefs clearly, sincerely, and consistently. Explain why your convictions prevent you from participating in war. If you are a member of an established religious institution, seek support from your religious leader to help you articulate your convictions. If your resistance is based on convictions outside of an established religious institution, be prepared to cite relevant sources of inspiration and philosophy to qualify your statements.
  2. Gather Supporting Documentation: Letters from clergy, teachers, or mentors can corroborate your beliefs. Relevant reading, religious texts, or experiences should be cited. Create a paper trail of evidence. Write to your elected official to voice your views on military activity or how your tax money is spent. Participate in peace and diplomacy-related activities. Volunteer with organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Committees, Amnesty International, or other agencies that provide humanitarian aid. Donate to such peace-keeping and humanitarian aid organizations.
  3. If the Draft Returns, Notify Selective Service: If the draft is reinstated, individuals will be required to claim Conscientious Objector status when called for induction. Currently, two options are available for Conscientious Objectors. A person who is opposed to any war in all its forms will have non-combatant Alternative Options available for a role that makes a “meaningful contribution to the maintenance of national health, safety, and interest.”

For Active-Duty Service Members whose Views have Shifted: Submit an application through your chain of command, typically including a written request, interviews with a chaplain and psychologist, and a hearing before an investigating officer. Groups like the Center on Conscience and War (CCW) provide guidance and legal support for Conscientious Objectors who are part of the current armed services. 

Conscientious objectors encourage public discourse about the responsibilities of citizenship, the morality of violence, and the role of individual conscience in national policy. Our actions and convictions create channels for dialogue, empathy, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of civic duty. Our stance can prompt societal reflection on the ethics of war, foreign policy, and the sanctity of human life. Our activism has spurred reforms in conscientious objection policy and raised awareness about the moral complexity of war. Patriotism is the right to dissent. Allegiance to conscience is allegiance to maintaining the dignity of the human experience, over allegiance to any flag or manufactured nationalism. On the battlefield of institutional violence and a militarized culture, stand in peaceful resistance with the strength of a mountain. 

We Are in Orbit

The Magical and Mysterious Healing Power of Trance Music

On March 23, 2020, Paul Van Dyk, the benevolent philosopher king of electronic dance music, gathered with DJ producer Chris Bekker at Anomalie Berlin for a “music night.” This was a five hour set shared live over YouTube, and included the classic driving bass lines, euphoric melodies, and uplifting lyrics of trance music. Periodically, Van Dyk paused to ask for donations to help keep Berlin’s clubs afloat during the mandated COVID shutdown, or to share inspiring and affirmative messages of hope, resilience, and kindness in the face of fear and uncertainty. 19,539 people viewed “Music Night #1.”

Dancing to trance has no steps involved. No one has to learn any complicated body compositions or foot counts. You can dance alone, or in a group. You can wear heels, a tutu, blue jeans and t-shirt, or nothing at all. It is a -come as you are, come as you feel-type of experience. These “unchoreographed movements” encourage “self-discovery” when dancers are open to the flow of music in a supportive and welcoming space. Dancing is good physical fitness, but it is beneficial for brain health as well. In a 2003 study, researchers from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine explored how various types of movement impacted older people’s dementia risk.

Photo by Bloom Dance of the 2024 Seattle Ecstatic Dance Festival.

Of the 11 types of physical activity included in the study, only one -dancing- measurably lowered the risk of dementia. Dance, with its features of physical movement and social interaction, engages the brain in a multi-dimensional experience of expression.

After three more Sunday music night sets, Van Dyk relocated the live broadcast from an empty club to his private home in Berlin on April 12, 2020. His message evolved from “let’s keep Berlin’s clubs alive during this momentary lock down,” to “let’s look out for each other and keep our hearts alive during this global pandemic.” From this inspiration, Sunday Sessions were born.

Each session was live over YouTube. In the minutes before the music opened, comments flooded the channel. Messages of inspiration, support, encouragement, optimism, and magic poured in from all over the planet. Comments in Spanish, English, Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Thai, Italian, and many more, illustrated the rich and diverse global dance community. During a historical moment of fear and isolation, Van Dyk was using his influence to create a virtual space that felt welcoming and joyful.

Not my image. This is from a Google Search. I imagine it is owned by one of the logos present on the image.

Although all dance is healthy for the mind, body, and spirit, EDM in particular, or Electronic Dance Music, has a reputation for improving mood, for activating a flow-state, and for alleviating general feelings of malaise and anxiety. Its engaging, rhythmic musical patterns ease stress and create a calming effect, while the brain releases a hormone cocktail associated with healthy coping strategies and emotional resilience. According to EDM.com, an analysis of Spotify playlist tracks and respondent surveys (in a study designed to help independent healthcare practices), illustrated that one in ten respondents identified EDM as their “go-to” choice when feeling down. Additionally, EDM lovers are significantly more likely to call themselves happy or “mentally healthy.” In a deeper study through the Frontiers in Psychology, research was conducted to explore the harmonic structure of trance music to identify why listeners found so much “enjoyment” in it. As they discovered, the balance of complexity, repetition, and “melodic originality” of EDM fell within “peak pleasantness” of “enjoyment ratings” among participants.

This is all very scientific for what members of the EDM community live in our experience: the depth of the music creates space to connect with the depth of emotion, energy, and complexity within each of us, that may feel stifled or ignored in daily life. In a world that tends to “measure time in coffee spoons,” a pause to feel in flow, to be in the orbit of only space and sensation, is a liberation.

As his pandemic-era events evolved, Van Dyk eventually integrated an interactive option into his Sunday Sessions. A Zoom link was connected to the YouTube channel and viewers could join as a participant into the virtual dance party. Everyone who joined over Zoom was shared on a screen projected behind Van Dyk as he spun his magical music. At various times, producers selected one of the participants to be visible on the entire screen. We saw a multi-generational family dancing together in the darkness of their crowded kitchens somewhere in Asia; a group of young people sharing one cell phone watching together from a dusty street in their village, who burst into broad smiles, hands waving, when they noticed they were featured on the big screen; an American family seated on their couch while their toddler played at their feet; an older couple dancing together on a beach at dusk; a single man wearing headphones, giving the camera a thumbs up. Many people held signs, some in English, some in other languages. “Greetings from Canada!” “With love, from Vietnam!” “From Los Angeles to everyone else!” Some had flags, some toasted drinks, many danced. We were together in this beautiful reminder that the world is small and we are all connected.

Not my image. I got this from a Google Search. Notice the interactive screens!

The Sunday Sessions were at the same time every week, which was early afternoon in the US Eastern time zone. I typically listened while out on a walk. One day, I decided to join over Zoom, although I had some insecurity about half a million people from across the planet perhaps seeing me. But I turned on my camera anyway, and as the music whispered its opening melody, I lifted my dog (a white fluffy Maltipoo) out of my lap and moved her front legs back and forth to the rhythm of the sound. At that moment, Van Dyk smiled and bent out of the screen. He returned with his dog, a small dog with fluffy white fur, and he cradled it in his arms as he swayed with the baseline. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I want to believe that Van Dyk and I shared a moment of magic through our dogs. Sunday Session #56 on December 19, 2021, was the last virtual dance party he hosted. Van Dyk closed the space playing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” while again holding his beloved dog in his arms, and swayed and singing quietly, “imagine all the people, sharing all the world…”

In January 2025, I had the opportunity to attend Seattle’s longest running ecstatic dance session. About 50 people gathered at Dance Underground in Capitol Hill, where sessions have been held since 2001. We opened with a circle and the facilitator shared our group’s agreements, and then the DJ guided us through the peaks and valleys of the lilt and crescendo of upbeat euphoric trance music. The energy shifted with the tone of the music, the group dancing together at one moment, stomping and clapping in rhythm, to then spiral into a solitary and somber introspective mood. Ecstatic dance is an open and welcoming space, and my experience has been of feeling fully respected in the experience.

Photo by Bloom Dance of the 2024 Seattle Ecstatic Dance Festival.

Emotions were high at this particular session, being the day before the presidential inauguration in the US, and some members of the group were using the space to release fears and uncertainties, and to create hope and inclusion at a time of dangerous division and polarization. we circled at the end to close the space, many shared their experiences: “Today at dance, I felt free to accept whatever will come next.” “Today at dance, I was insecure at first, but then I realized that no one was watching me and I was able to let go.” “Today at dance, I was overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. Thanks for supporting me through it.” After the space resonated with silence to indicate our final end to the session, we dispersed out into the world and our lives, holding the experience we had created together as a guide for staying in the orbit of flow, magic, and resilience.

To find a dance community near you (or to start one), check out www.EcstaticDance.org.

If you are not familiar with trance music, here’s a list of representative songs to inspire your heart and spirit:

Co-Creating Our Journey: Synchronicity, Evolution, and Energetic Shifts

Kathleen used to say being an artist means never having to do anything you don’t want to do. We met in graduate school. She and her husband Will, a retired architect and strict Buddhist, were originally from Pasadena, and had relocated to the land of rugged coastline and Redwood Forests in far northern California, after they welcomed their first child onto Earth. Later, she also informally adopted me and invited me to call her my “Humboldt Mom.” Kathleen was a local sculpture artist and community activist; she had led a grassroot initiative to integrate quarterly tsunami preparedness drills into the emergency training practice at an elementary school north of Trinidad, California, one at a high risk for submersion or liquefaction. That project, which she launched as part of her Masters thesis, was completed only two years before she passed. 

Sometimes, synchronicities unfold that illuminate the profound truth of our interconnectedness and what we are collectively creating. Carl Jung is credited for categorizing and naming synchronistic experiences, referring to the “meaningful coincidences” or “acausal parallelism” that provide insight, direction, and guidance to the observer. Last week, I had thought about texting Peter to arrange for a discussion of workshop content that he is developing around “Yoga for the Common Good.” In April, Peter had facilitated a session through the Yoga Teacher Training certification at World Peace Yoga, and he had requested a meeting afterwards to hear my insights and feedback. I met with him for an hour and shared ideas based on my perspective and experiences. He had then requested a second meeting, but I was unable to hold more time. The second session of the workshop series was offered on May 19. Following this session, the thought crossed my mind to schedule another coffee chat with him for Wednesday, May 22, but that appointment never occurred. However, the energetic channels had been activated, and our discussion unfolded organically on a sidewalk in Clifton. We both happened to be walking along Ludlow Avenue on Wednesday, May 22, and had a few minutes to exchange ideas and knowledge about facilitating space to integrate yogic principles into collective decision-making processes. These synchronicities, or meaningful experiences, indicate to me that what I am creating in my life is aligned with the larger collective mind we share as humans. 

Changes are in progress for Nomad Star Travel, to align within a framework that feels the most authentic for what I desire to create on this planet. I had been feeling stuck within Nomad Star Travel. Travel as a concept felt limiting to me; travel conveys a time-bound departure from the ordinary to replace drudgery with escape. I am feeling the need to facilitate spaces that weave paradigm-shifting adventure into the daily moments, moments shimmering with meaningful coincidences and acausal parallelisms, because really, we are all traveling all the time, whether here or there, for four days or 106 years, alongside fleeting companions who are all following their own paths. This Earth could be one large multi-bunk hostel of transient beings twinkling in and out like meteors that burn streaks of fire across the atmosphere. 

When Kathleen told me that an artist never has to do anything they don’t want to do, I understood her to mean that we are creators of our lives, we are the magicians who alchemize our experience into the energetic qualities we desire. The intention is not to selfishly only do what we want to do, but to see the intrinsic value and purpose of whatever it is that we are doing, even if the experience is not necessarily pleasant or immediately rewarding. Viktor Frankl, a physician and psychologist who survived Nazi internment at Auschwitz, decided that the truth of his resilience grew from his ability to identify with a connection to purpose throughout his experience. This truth grew so strong within him that he abandoned plans to escape so that he could continue to be a peaceful and loving presence in a space of deep hatred. I read his memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” last January, and his ability to maintain faith in the meaning of his experience inspires me to collect moments of gratitude every day, recognizing with humility that my heart and mind have never been tested like his. What he endured and survived reveals the depth of darkness possible in the human heart. 

Recently, I was sharing my feelings of energetic stagnation around Nomad Star Travel to my friend Karen, who is a healing arts practitioner in northern Kentucky. She smiled, and suggested, “how about Nomad Star Journey?” I loved it. A journey has edges that are more blurry than ”travel” and implies a process rather than the destination. We are living our journey, and each outcome is illusory, blowing like sand into the great ocean when we grasp at the wind. So, Nomad Star Travel is evolving into Nomad Star Journey, and the services are also shifting to focus on personal transformation, intuitive-energetic body strengthening, and mindfulness through movement, pilgrimage, and yes, some travel. I’m still navigating the shape of this evolution, and the pieces are falling into place. In the meantime, to quote NorCal oracle Rob Brezny, “Ride hard. See deep. Speak true. Live free.”